Q: How long were you in Ottawa, and what first brought you here? What took you away?
A: I was in Ottawa for 4 ½ years in the early 90s to get a Bachelor of Journalism at Carleton University. I left for work, finding working briefly as a journalist in Alberta and then returning to surveying for highway construction as I had done since I was 16.
Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?
A: I was writing my whole life, sending horrible stories out to Asimov’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Omni, and other magazines that I was reading at the time. I didn’t have a community most of the time, but my family all read and I remember our trips into Saskatoon and hours spent in the Saskatoon Public Library downtown or Westgate Books on 22nd street in Saskatoon. I would read things I didn’t understand from the library (big books by Charles Olson or ee cummings for instance), and things I did from the science fiction and comics sections of Westgate books.
Aside from taking part in a writing group in Saskatoon that I wasn’t ready for, as a teen (a very nice group including Susan Andrews Grace, a friend of my mother’s, who was my introduction to the group – I am still embarrassed by the memories of the poems I shared there, and my inability to speak intelligently due to social anxiety and being in the very early stages of my thinking and development), I hadn’t been a part of any community of writers until I got to Ottawa. There I met many writers through classes with Tom Henighan and Christopher Levenson, and we would go out to open mics and readings and meet every so often to argue and share poetry. There is a long list of people who became friends that way, and people I didn’t become friends with but still admired, and admire still.
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?
A: The first time I found myself in a community of writers was in Ottawa during my time at Carleton, and the most important way it changed me was by giving me permission to be a writer. The J-School was the first part of that – arguing with peers about sentences changed me because here were people who cared about the same things as me. Then meeting Chris Pollard and Stu Konyer from Hostbox, and being in Hostbox did the same thing. Each subsequent group I met in Ottawa did the same for me. Roger Bird was important at Carleton. Jim Larwill was important. James Spyker was. Robert Hogg, who was kind and patient with my cynicism about contemporary poetry when it frustrated my expectations.
Subsequent communities of writing that I have been a part of have worked differently, but that’s because of the stage during which I lived in Ottawa. I was young and full of myself and I loved the arguments over poetics. I was still a bit like that when I lived in Fredericton and went to UNB, but there I discovered, mostly due to Ross Leckie, I think, the amazing variety of work that was available to me if I met it on its own terms. At times in the pub after class, I know Ross would be frustrated with my relentless questioning, but I kind of would have listened to him speak about any poet; his love of all kinds of writing was what I tried to learn.
Every move I made in my life was unplanned, really. I would work in construction, then save my money and go back to school in order to sit and talk about writing with other people who were there to do the same. At the University of South Dakota, where I went to spend a few years because the cost of living was cheap (I had been working in Vancouver at the time) and because I (honestly) wanted to live in a flat place again, I worked with Lee Ann Roripaugh, who was much like Ross the breadth of her poetic and artistic interests, and it was an amazing, supportive community too.
Now I am lucky again, here in the Okanagan, where writers like John Lent, Jake Kennedy, and Corinna Chong tell me who they’re reading, who they can’t read, why they love who they love, etc.
Q: What did you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What did Ottawa provide, or allow?
A: Ottawa for me will always be about a certain time in my life, so my idea of the writing community there is necessarily nostalgic. It is the 90s and I could do what I wanted to do for the first time in my life. I had little money, but I had good friends who cared about the written word.
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?
A: I wrote a number of poems about my life in Ottawa. I have found a lot of my work is still about the prairies but I have set a few stories in each place I’ve lived after I left it. I have written a couple of stories set in Ottawa, including “We Don’t Celebrate That” about a government writer allowed to return to Ottawa after being exiled for some years. He meets an old friend on the canal in winter and is thankful the cold weather and the winter clothing hides the marks of his embarrassment and torture.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I am working on short fiction
always, and a sequel to my first novel, All
This Town Remembers. It’s called Outside
Harris and it’s about the protagonist trying to change a tire on his truck
at night in the middle of winter. He is unprepared.
