Q: How long were you in Ottawa, and what first brought you here? What took you away?
I was born in Ottawa in 1976, left when I was one and a half years old and then returned for high school (Go Lisgar Lords!). My father was a diplomat so we lived in Nairobi and Vienna before returning. I then left after high school to attend Queen’s University.
Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?
My father adored the classics so I was introduced to Shakespeare, Jane Austen and poets like William Blake, William Wordsworth and John Clare early on. I also have a dog-eared copy of Robert Louis’ Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verse that I will always cherish. We used to attend his favourite Shakespeare productions of The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Stratford or Toronto. Literature was prevalent in our household. When I attended Lisgar, I was encouraged to write and enter writing competitions.
I was not involved with the writing community after I moved, because I returned to poetry in my late thirties and was living in other countries at the time. I regret that I wasn’t able to forge those bonds while I was in Ottawa, because the writing community seems incredibly supportive of its poets.
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?
The nature of my partner’s vocation has changed how I define my writing community. I have moved a lot in the last decade. It has shifted from my belief that physical presence is essential to realizing that much can be accomplished remotely if you have the passion for your craft. When I was pregnant with my third child, I was living in London, England and I pursued a diploma in Poetry & Lyric Discourse with SFU’s The Writer’s Studio. I woke up at 2:30am twice a week to attend the poetry workshops and it lit a fire that has remained with me.
Q: What did you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What did Ottawa provide, or allow?
I can only speak to what Ottawa meant to me when I was in high school, but I recall my writing endeavours with such fondness, because I was open to the world and how to write about it in a way that seemed natural then, but it took me many years to get back to that mindframe. I had a scarcity mindset for so long about what I could achieve with poetry and forgot that it’s in the pleasure of creating poetry that one “achieves”. My memories of writing in Ottawa fill me with a hopefulness.
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?
I would say that my projects respond indirectly to my engagements in Ottawa. It helps me recall a time, where life made sense. I spent the most amount of time growing up in Ottawa and I try and draw on those memories to help me navigate my own feelings about belonging, identity and family.
Q: What are you working on now?
I am circulating an abridged version of a chapbook I wrote about my experiences living in Côte d’Ivoire. I am also working on my first book of poems that grapples with losses, both large and small, that I have experienced in the last year and a half.
