A former psychotherapist, Marjorie is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Ottawa.
Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?
I was actually born in Ottawa, and lived here until I was eighteen. Then I moved to Montreal to go to McGill University and ended up staying there for another eighteen years until I was thirty-six. At that point, in 2013, I moved back to Ottawa for a job as a professor at the University of Ottawa and I’ve been here ever since.
I now consider myself to be living in the “Ottawa-Gatineau region”, because in 2020, at the very beginning of the pandemic, my partner and I moved to the Québec side, close to Cantley. We wanted to be closer to outdoor activities and to be in a quiet environment.
Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?
I’m a self-taught poet who never had any formal writing training. But I’ve always loved to write, and for many years I imagined that I would write a novel. Then, about six years ago, while going through a tumultuous time in my life, I wrote a poem. And that first poem just opened something in me. I fell in love with the minimalism of poetry, the idea that you can convey an emotion or an atmosphere without necessarily describing all the details of the story. After that, I began writing more, and experimenting with different styles, and gradually the idea of a full collection took shape.
When I first started writing poems, I happened to attend an academic conference at which there were many folks from the literary world. Serendipitously, I ended up meeting the wonderful poet and academic Tanis MacDonald, with whom I remained in contact and who generously accepted to write an endorsement for my recent collection. It was Tanis who led me to the brilliant and prolific Ottawa-based poet Sandra Ridley. I was extremely fortunate that Sandra agreed to mentor me. She gave me invaluable feedback on my collection, and guidance about the literary world of which I knew nothing about. She also suggested I get in touch with Amanda Earl, which led me to join the selection committee of Bywords.
Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?
I think there are a lot of different ways of being part of a literary community. In a traditional sense, community is formed by attending events, launches, networking opportunities, etc. Being an introvert, as well as having a full-time academic career that consumes a lot of my time, this is a conception of community that doesn’t fully speak to me. Although I don’t attend a lot of events (in fact, when I launched my collection (Un)spoken, it was the first time I had done a public poetry reading!), I try to conceptualize community as expanding beyond the idea of being publicly visible. For example, being on the Bywords selection committee for the past few years has helped me to feel part of a literary community, as did publishing my book. I also feel connected to other writers simply by reading their work. I can certainly say that reading the work of many brilliant Ottawa writers has inspired me.
Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?
Way back in the late 1990s, in between my bachelor’s degree and my master’s degree, I came back to Ottawa for a few months and got a job at Octopus Books. The amazing Lisa Greaves (who’s still running Octopus!) was my boss, and this experience gave me a first exposure to the vibrancy of the Ottawa literary scene, even back then. And this vibrancy has continued. It’s fabulous to see independent stores like Octopus Books (now an Ottawa institution!) and the Spaniel’s Tale Bookstore (where I held my launch) working to promote local authors and hosting numerous events. And when I look at the event listings on the Bywords website, I’m always astounded to see the sheer number of poetry events for a relatively small city. We’re very lucky to live in a city in which there is a poetry infrastructure, like the Tree Reading series, Bywords, Chaudiere Books, ARC magazine, etc. I think we’re also lucky to live in a region that is also (at least partly) bilingual. I live and work partly in French, and promoting French is very important to me. In fact, I worked with a translator on a French-language version of (Un)spoken (an amazingly fun and creative process!) but ultimately it was the English-language version that was published.
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?
There are certainly a lot of Ottawa references in my work. In addition to Montreal and Paris (where I spent a lot of time between 2007 – 2017), Ottawa definitely contributes to the sense of place in my poems. For example, there is a poem in (Un)spoken called “Confessions at Billings Bridge Mall”, a place linked to certain childhood memories. There are also references to other Ottawa landmarks or streets. I like writing that is anchored in its environment; I think it offers an additional layer of interest, grounding, and understanding. In fact, in some of my previous academic research, I worked on the question of space and place and what places mean to people. Places are very much related to emotion and affect; they can be grounded in trauma just as they can be grounded in healing, or everything in between. This is very much the case in my poetry.
Q: What are you working on now?
I am currently working on a second collection, called Tentacles. Part poetic memoire and part victim-impact statement, Tentacles explores the long-term ramifications of trauma. It explores relational abuses of power, sexuality and sexual orientation, and daily survival strategies in the face of the heterosexist and rape-culture ideology that surrounds us.
