Six Questions interview #243 : Jenna Timmons-Oikawa

Jenna Timmons-Oikawa lives on the traditional, unceded territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation in Ottawa, Ontario. She is the winner of the 2026 CBC Nonfiction Prize. Her work also appears or is forthcoming in The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, PRISM International, yolk, and was selected 1^st runner up in The Temz Review’s inaugural “London” Literary Prizes. She is so grateful to anyone who reads and engages with her work!

Jenna lives with her loving husband Grant, and their mischievous dog, Morty, and strives for a calm and gentle life.

Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here? 

As a former child of the Canadian military, my family was posted here for the second time when I was about to start grade eight. I stayed in Ottawa until I finished high school then moved away to study creative writing in Montreal. After completing my BA, I continued moving for some time before I returned to Ottawa while finishing my diploma in child and youth counselling. I had reached a point in my life where it was important for me to be near my family, and that is what originally brought me back to the city.

I have been here about eleven years now and have my own small family with my amazing husband Grant, and our little dog Morty.  

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?

I have been writing my whole life. I entered my first short story contest when I was in grade two, writing a Halloween story about three little ghosts. I beat out some of the grade fours and after that, I was hooked!

I was so fortunate to, many years ago, attend Canterbury High School in their literary arts program, and I credit Mr. Fitz (Michael FitzPatrick), a beloved teacher for many, for giving me the gift of the foundations of my writing practice. Upon graduating high school, I went on to complete a BA in creative writing at Concordia University and was able to study under the incomparable Stephanie Bolster.

After finishing university, I didn’t really know what to do. I didn’t know how to be a writer, not in the professional sense, and felt lost. I floated around for a while, not really writing, and decided I needed a new direction in my life. I went back to school to get a diploma in child and youth counselling. At that point I had almost stopped writing entirely. Then I did stop. For around a decade I barely wrote anything, and dedicated myself to working with youth in the mental health field.

After a life changing injury, a lot of therapy, and support of my husband, I returned to writing last year and it has opened life back up to me.

I’m very fortunate that my husband is an artist. He is the partner at PLOTNONPLOT Architecture, and he inspires me with the beauty that he creates. He was my first and only reader of many of my pieces before I began to attend a small writing group, which we loving call our “writers support group”. They are some of the kindest people you could ever meet.

I don’t feel that I am part of the Ottawa writing community yet, though I would like to be. Due to my struggles with PTSD, there are a lot of locations that I am limited in going to, and often events in Ottawa take place in these areas. I would love to see Ottawa have more virtual/hybrid events, as that would be more accessible for someone like me and I’m sure, others with disabilities as well.  

I am hoping that I will be able to be more involved in the community in the future as Ottawa has such a vibrant writing scene!

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?

My writing group has opened me up to reading genres I don’t usually read; speculative fiction in particular.

I don’t think that my thinking about writing has shifted, but being in the group has given me a bimonthly deadline, and this has helped keep me motivated to keep writing, even on those days/weeks where I feel like I can’t put a single word on the page. 

Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?

            I’m not too sure to be honest!

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 approached your work?

            I feel that having been a child of the Canadian military, that I can morph into and shed cities very easily, and that my work is more affected by memories, intimate relationships, and experiences that have occurred over multiple places. I feel my work speaks more broadly, rather than being rooted in specific city. 

            That being said, Ottawa has changed the way I approach my work because I began to write creative nonfiction to make sense of my injury that occurred here, and the

subsequent health care I received. Creative nonfiction was a genre I had never written in, and I used the form as a means of processing. The first piece of creative nonfiction I ever attempted has just been published in issue 308 of The Fiddlehead, Disability: The Revolution and is entitled “Ketamine Therapy”.

I often think of the Anne Carson’s quote that “art is not therapy”, and though I understand the sentiment, I would have to be on the side that disagrees. Writing has been a catharsis, and beautiful therapy for me. I’m just so honoured that people are reading and responding to my stories.  

Q: What are you working on now?

I’m working on my first hybrid collection of poetry, focusing on themes of identity, and reclamation, based off my creative nonfiction piece “Wawa Indian” which just recently won the 2026 CBC Nonfiction Prize! It is what I plan to be working on while in residency in Banff! 

Six Questions interview #242 : Barâa Arar

Barâa Arar is a writer and editor, based in Toronto. Her creative and critical writing has appeared in The Markaz Review, This Magazine, Canthius, Room, Rowayat, Ex-Puritan, and Muslim American Writers at Home. She was selected as a mentee by Zilla Jones for the Writer’s Union BIPOC Writers Connect 2025 and is currently working on her debut novel thanks to grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Toronto Arts Council. You can find her at baraaarar.com

Q: How long were you in Ottawa, and what first brought you here? What took you away?

I arrived in Ottawa in 1998 from Montréal, at 10 months old, with my parents. If my mother is to be believed, I was a big baby. We settled in Bayshore, a community in Ottawa’s west-end, where many other Muslim immigrants lived.

Other than one year in Kamloops, British Columbia, I lived in Ottawa until I moved to Toronto in August 2019. At first, graduate school brought me to Toronto, and though I must admit the city was not my first choice, I’ve grown to love its chaos and characters. Here, life happens all at once.

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?

I started writing in high school and was introduced to spoken word poetry shortly after. I felt a deep sense of fulfillment when I first recited my poetry to an audience and I saw people nodding. I loved that sense of connection and mutual recognition and kept reaching for it. 

I started competing at the Urban Legends Poetry Collective, hosted at Carleton University, and in 2014, I made the national team. We competed at the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word in Victoria, British Columbia. In university, I started experimenting with personal essays and creative non-fiction to make sense of my experiences as a Muslim woman and a daughter of immigrants.

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all? Have there been subsequent shifts due to where you have lived since?

Everything.

I loved reading but before my exposure to spoken word poetry in Ottawa, I never thought of writing as a craft or an art, and certainly not as one that I can engage with seriously. The spoken word community empowered me. I felt that what I had to say was worth saying.

I owe much of my confidence to Ottawa poets and friends JustJamaal ThePoet, Apollo the Child, and King Kimbit, just to name a few. Their generosity, kindness, and mentorship taught me about building a literary community and dedicating yourself to art.

Q: What did you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What did Ottawa provide, or allow?

I used to think that Ottawa’s (relative) smallness was entirely a bad thing. I struggled with the lack of anonymity in the city.

What I didn’t appreciate until I moved away was how Ottawa fostered my artistic practice. I benefited from access to established writers, word-of-mouth promotion, and community support. I struggled, at first, to find that when I moved to Toronto, especially during the pandemic lockdowns.

Q: Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements here? How had the city and its community, if at all, changed the way you approached your work?

My short story, “The Beach at 27,” is set at Westboro Beach. The characters were my way to think through what Ottawa meant to me as my hometown, how the ‘smallness’ can be suffocating and how it can be supportive. The story is not autobiographical but it came to me once I had more insight into that personal question.

On a craft level, even as a fiction writer, I still write like a poet. I want the sentence to be beautiful. Plot is a second thought for me.

Q: What are you working on now?

My latest short story came out last week. It’s about a Muslim man who returns to his hometown and must negotiate his relationship with faith, community, and a woman from his past. You can read it here: “The Dentist’s Son.”

I am currently revising my debut novel. By winter, I hope it will be with early readers. Next, I hope to start a new project, a short story cycle set in Ottawa, exploring the effects of 9/11 on the personal lives of Muslim women and girls.