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.
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