Dominik Parisien is a disabled, bisexual French Canadian. He is the author of the poetry collection Side Effects May Include Strangers (McGill-Queen’s University Press) and his memoir is forthcoming from Penguin Canada. His writing has appeared in literary journals such as Maisonneuve, The Fiddlehead, PRISM International, The Literary Review of Canada, and others. Anthologies he’s edited or co-edited have won the Hugo Award, Shirley Jackson Award, and the British Fantasy Award. Dominik is a former editor at Plenitude Magazine, and he currently teaches nonfiction writing with CAMH’s Collaborative Learning College. He grew up near Ottawa and now lives in Hamilton, ON.
Q: How long were you in Ottawa, and what first brought you here? What took you away?
I grew up just east of Ottawa, in Rockland, by the Ottawa River. I was frequently in the city, and I studied at the University of Ottawa for both my BA and my MA in English literature. So, I was in or near Ottawa for some twenty-three years. I left the region for Montreal, and then Toronto and its surroundings first for love, and then for additional studies. I now live in Hamilton, ON, though I visit the region often.
Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?
While some kids loved reading at an early age, I hated it. It was an absolute struggle, and none of it made sense to me. Fortunately, a teacher friend of the family realized I was reading wrong, and the school had me take lessons with a very patient assistant. After that, I became obsessed, which eventually led me to want to write my own pieces. I wasn’t involved in any kind of community though—it was a very personal thing. Even in university I barely engaged with the local journals until the last year of my BA, where I started attending readings, and became a reader for the Ottawa Arts Review. Once that sense of community took hold, I looked for it a little more actively. By the time of my MA I was an editorial assistant for Weird Tales in the US, and I co-edited a small Ottawa-based anthology of dark fiction with my friend and former uOttawa professor Sean Moreland. I still wasn’t all that involved with in-person events though, that mostly came in Toronto. So, Ottawa was mainly my introduction to the writing community, an important first step.
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?
Working for journals and magazines brought the biggest shift in my writing. It was both humbling and invigorating to see the kind of work that was out there (what made it to readers and what didn’t, and why). It helped give me a sense of the literary landscape. Readings did the same and added the value of performance to that work and the power of voice, how those connect or don’t with what’s on the page. All of it helped me think of the different aspects of writing, of community, and what my place in all that might be. It made me intimately aware of audience in a way that solitary reading and writing never had. Compared to a lot of writers, I didn’t have much interest in seeing my work published for the longest time. I was more focused on editorial pursuits. It was connecting with other members of the disability community in particular that helped me shift more towards writing.
Q: What did you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What did Ottawa provide, or allow?
For me, Ottawa was a gateway to the world of writing, and the communities we can belong to. What I see there is much like what I see in other major Canadian cities—groups of writers coming together, sharing their ideas, their words. Unlike Toronto, I did see a confluence of French and English writing, which was very welcome to me as a native French speaker (I saw something similar in Montreal). That is something I miss, having that mixing of languages at events, though I do see it happening in other languages in Toronto and elsewhere and it brings me joy.
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?
The anthology I co-edited with Sean Moreland, Postscripts to Darkness, focused on Ottawa writers, so that’s one project intimately tied to Ottawa. Otherwise, my anthologies have been pretty international, which I do connect to Ottawa, and other metropolises where I’ve lived. I grew up in a small white town, and spending time in Ottawa introduced me to people and cultures and hadn’t encountered before, which had a pivotal role in my artistic pursuits and the way I see the world.
Q: What are you working on now?
I’m in the late stages of my memoir on disability and magical thinking, which is forthcoming from Penguin Canada, probably in 2026. In terms of poetry, I’m working on a second collection, this one focused on prose poetry. The book will have an Ottawa-region connection, since it liberally mixes French and English, exactly the way friends and family speak back home.
