Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?
I grew up in Ottawa! I immigrated here with my family when I was very young. We lived all over-- South Keys, Billings Bridge, Barrhaven, Kanata. I moved away for undergrad and then lived in California for almost a decade before moving back to Ottawa in January of this year.
Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?
I was really lucky to have grown up in Ottawa when there were so many writing opportunities for youth: I was a part of the Cappies program where I wrote some high school theater reviews, and even wrote a (terrible) play for the Youth Infringement Festival way back in the 2010s (terrible because of my writing, not because of the hardworking producers, stage managers, or actors). I took writing classes with the City of Ottawa. I even submitted a really terrible poem to Bywords as a teenager-- it was rightfully rejected, because it was so bad!
Even though I majored in English in my undergrad, I didn’t start seriously writing creative nonfiction or poetry until much later, after I finished my graduate degree in LA and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. There, I started doing more formal writing retreats like McCormack Writing Center (fka Tin House), and Kearny Street Workshop.
When I moved back to Ottawa earlier this year, I was pleasantly surprised to find a beautiful little writing community, with lots of small gathering spaces like the small press fair, the Ottawa Comic Arts Festival, Possible World’s Object // Project Art Book Fair, and Versefest. I got to have a wonderful little mentorship session with Cassidy McFadzean, who was Arc Poetry’s Writer in Residence. I’ve started getting to know so many amazing folks in the zine community, especially in the queer zine scene (shout out Trans History & Queer Zines and Ottawaisms) and those involved in the city (like Good Golly Zines).
Sadly I’m moving to Toronto later this year to start my PhD (not in writing) but I feel deeply rooted to this city and its people. I hope to continue building more relationships with the writing community. Moving back has showered me in constant, mostly pleasant surprises as I’ve realized how this city has changed, and how much I’ve changed: I’m finding many little writing pockets and communities that I either didn’t know about before, or simply did not exist. It’s a gift to find my hometown, with all of its frustrations and annoyances, continuing to grow.
Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?
I really reject the idea that writing is a solitary, individual activity: I write in community. That doesn’t necessarily mean physically writing beside another person at one table (though I love that too), rather that I like to respond and be in conversation to what others have written, what they’ve said, and think about how my work can contribute to movements. My poetry, comics, and my creative nonfiction are all rooted in liberation, organizing, and justice, and like Mariame Kaba says, “Everything worthwhile is done with other people”. It’s what Mahmoud Darwish implores us to do in his beautiful poem “Think of Others”.
Because the writing community is so intimate and small in Ottawa, folks truly have to take the initiative to start their own projects. The community here has taught me to be agile, nimble, and to just go ahead and do things! I was so inspired by the many critical and organizing conversations I’ve had since returning, and by Object // Project, I was inspired to be a part of “Critical ‘Ottawa’ Studies”, which is meant to be an ongoing research and organizing writing & art project thinking about this complicated city at large.
I also wasn’t out as a queer, nonbinary person when I last lived here, almost a decade ago. I was also just starting to critically examine what it meant to live here, occupy space as a racialized person. There is such a big, beautiful queer writing and zine community here, and to a smaller extent, a queer BIPOC writing community. It’s healing to return and find the folks and people I feel like a younger me really needed but didn’t know to ask for.
Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?
There’s a proximity and closeness with the Ottawa community that I feel here-- folks are close to each other. We’re not Toronto or Montreal, sure, but there are people here doing interesting, compelling work. Ottawa excels at putting on tons of community events: the small press fair, Object // Project Bookfair, Ottawa Comic Arts Festival, and on and on. There’s a feeling of intimacy that can feel suffocating, but there’s also a comfort in finding yourself in a smaller city like Ottawa.
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’m obsessed with Ottawa. The city haunts all my writing, often explicitly, but sometimes silently. By trade, I’m an urban planner: it’s a lens that informs everything I write and think about. I’m constantly thinking about the city, the land on which it was built, its histories, movements, and struggle. When I lived in California (both LA and the SF Bay Area), I worked and organized with people committed and building toward better futures in the communities and excavating histories where they were raised-- it made me homesick, and reflect on my own relationship to Ottawa as well. It really undergrids my two intentions for writing: the first, seeking to illuminate, analyze and invite discussion and learning; and the other, excavating parts of my own experiences growing up.
There’s a wonderful interview in Bomb between Ryan Lee Wong and Kyle Lucia Wu that I think about often. Ryan wrote Which Side Are You On?, a thoughtful book that blurs the line between oral history and fiction and features an Asian American protagonist thinking through his relationship with his parents (both Asian American organizers and activists) and his hometown of Los Angeles in the wake of Akai Gurley’s murder by a Chinese American police officer. Ryan pointed to an epitaph by Walter Benjamin in Mike Davis’ City of Quartz: “A native’s book about his city will always be related to memoirs; the writer has not spent his childhood there in vain.”
When I first returned, I wrote endless poems about the locations I was returning to but also encountering for the first time: a Barrhaven Wal-Mart where I first experienced a jolt of gender dysphoria in middle school; downtown nightclubs; federal boardrooms with Ministry staffers; protests outside City Hall; the edge of the urban boundary in Kanata. Ottawa is a strange, weird, and often hostile place: returning has made me reflect on the ways in which it’s changed, but also the hidden histories I wasn’t taught growing up. It’s a big theme in what I write about, but also, as all writing does, takes inspiration from my time growing up.
Q: What are you working on now?
I’ve got a few different projects on the go!
- A chapbook (or some longer project) on the thinking through Ottawa suburbs and colonization;
- A comic on immigration court observing in the SF Bay Area for Crucial Comix;
- A piece on surveillance technologies for Contrapuntal;
- Continuing to build out Critical “Ottawa” Studies (please check out the Instagram to see the call for submissions!); and
-
A poem coming out in Xenolithic Edges!
