Q:
How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?
I moved
to Ottawa in 1980 to attend Carleton University. In the mid-80s, I attended
poetry readings at Quaker House in the Glebe. I left Ottawa in 1992 to work in
humanitarian aid for various United Nations (UN) agencies and retired in 2015
in New York, where I enrolled in an MFA program at Manhattanville University in
2019 to focus on nonfiction and poetry writing. When the COVID-19 pandemic
broke out, I returned to Ottawa and completed my MFA via Zoom. I graduated in
2021 and have worked since then to further improve my poems and get more of my
poems published.
Q:
How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing
community here?
I have
been fascinated with writing short stories and poems since I was a teenager,
when teachers encouraged me to keep writing. At one point, however, while at
Carleton U, an English professor, Michael Thompson, read some of my poems and
told me I needed to work on them more if I ever hoped to get any published. I
felt frustrated and stopped trying to write. Years later, in 2017, while in a
Barnes & Noble bookstore, I picked out a book on the art of poetry writing
and discovered that someone had already written on the book flap, “Keep
writing,” dated it to my birthday, and signed it with the name Michael. I took
it as a sign to keep writing.
Q:
How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing,
if at all?
Most of
my poetry has been published in the U.S., but living in Ottawa, I regularly submit
to Canadian poetry magazines. Arc published one of my poems in 2022, and
Canthius magazine published two of my poems in 2024. I have stayed aware of
poetry activities in Ottawa. Last year, I joined the League of Canadian Poets
and hope to become more involved.
Q:
Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements here? How have
the city and its community, if at all, changed the way you approach your work?
None of
my projects has responded directly to Ottawa.
Q:
What are you working on now?
Currently,
I am a member of a poetry manuscript writing group that zooms from New York and
is run by my former poetry professor at Manhattanville U, Jennifer Franklin who
is a successful New York poet. I have just completed a poetry manuscript and
want to have it published in Canada. However, it seems I need to add more poems
to my manuscript. In the U.S. publishers expect a poetry manuscript to be 46-54
pages, here in Canada the manuscript is expected to be longer, 60-120 pages.
I am
also working on a new collection of poems about people who have passed through
my life, sometimes under strange synchronistic circumstances, and left a
long-lasting impression.
