Amanda
Earl lives in Ottawa with her husband, Charles.
She’s the managing editor of Bywords.ca and
the fallen angel of AngelHousePress. Her most recent poetry chapbook is Lament: Doll (Ethel Magazine &
Micropress, USA, 2020). Her visual poetry is forthcoming in blood orange tarot, and appears most
recently in Train, a concrete poetry journal.
Amanda is the author of A World of Yes,
an erotic novel about a woman who misses an orgy during her thirty-fifth birthday
party (DevilHouse, 2015), Kiki, a
series of long poems that engage with the creative and ribald era of
Montparnasse between the wars (Chaudiere Books, 2014), and Coming Together Presents Amanda Earl, a collection of short and
filthy tales (Coming Together Books, 2014). More information is available at
AmandaEarl.com or connect with Amanda on Twitter @KikiFolle.
Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and
what first brought you here?
I have lived in Ottawa for thirty-three
years. I moved here in 1987 to do an Honours Bachelor of Arts in Translation at
the School of Translators and Interpreters at the University of Ottawa, and to
become a translator.
Q: How did you first get involved in writing,
and subsequently, the writing community here?
Writing has several different meanings
and connotations.
The physical act of writing: As soon as
I learned how to use a pencil, possibly even before I learned the alphabet, I
started to write shapes on a page, and these shapes were little stories, poems,
songs and journal-type entries about my day. I returned to writing shapes that
had no decipherable alphabet in my fifties when I began to explore asemic
writing.
In Grade 2 when we were taught cursive
and allowed to use pens, my teacher, Mrs. Snodden at H.W. Knight Public School
in Wilfred, Ontario did not like my penmanship. She told me I wrote as though
with my left hand even though I used my right, because I smeared the ink on the
page and got it all over the bottom of my baby finger. This is where I also
learned that I had poor handwriting. It was difficult to read and did not match
the letters on the blackboard. I was jealous of the other children who were
praised for their penmanship. Writing hurt my hand from the beginning. I have a
perpetual writer’s lump on the middle finger of my right hand. And yet I loved
the way it felt to cover the page with ink, to use my Doodle bug pen, supplied
by the teacher. I chewed the end. That was fun too. And of course, against the
rules. Also fun.
Writing as an act of creation: Previously to being able to write in a
language others could understand, I made up stories about my Red Rose tea
animals, Lego bricks and Barbie Dolls. I had an on-going Romeo and Juliet/soap
opera story going on with a cat and a dog from the Red Rose tea animals my
parents gave me. I had 201. They drank a lot of tea.
My father told a lot of stories when I
was growing up, and also recited poetry to me, and my mother read to me until
she grew tired of reading the same books to me over and over again and taught
me to read when I was four. My parents gave me an appreciation for stories, and
for reading, and perhaps my abilities to invent imaginative stories began
there.
Writing as a skill: At the University of
Waterloo where I completed a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts in French
Language and Literature before I came to Ottawa to do my translation degree, I
learned the rules of English grammar and rhetoric. This was after having failed
the English language proficiency entry exam because I wrote an illegible story
I invented on the spot in response to the exam question to address the quote,
“Marry in hate, repent at leisure.” I was about to be married. I wrote in
haste, but never repented. The consequence was that I had to take a remedial
English class. It was taught by a religious fundamentalist. The course was a
godsend. (no pun intended).
Writing as publishing: In my early
twenties, I read Robertson Davies’ “The Depford Trilogy.” I have always loved
reading, but these works truly captivated my imagination, my sense of humour
and whimsy in a way that made me want to write a novel for publication. I
adored Davies’ wit. To my memory, this had never been a wish of mine before. I
wanted to be a spinner of yarns like Robertson Davies. To this day, I am a poor
knitter.
I bought a lot of how to write books and
wrote stories but wasn’t satisfied with what I learned in the books or the work
I created. It wasn’t very good.
I wrote letters to the editor in
response to things I’d read in the Ottawa
Citizen, and many were published. I routinely entered their word game
contests. One contest was to come up with the literary names of pets. I came up
with “Lady Chatterley’s Lemur,” which resulted in publication and an Ottawa Citizen mug, the first prize I
ever received for my writing.
At some point in the nineties, I took a
creative writing class at Carleton University at night. It was taught by a man
who loved trains. His advice to write what you know didn’t really help me. I’d
been writing the imaginary contents of my weird brain for my whole life. None
of this was related to what I knew. This stopped me from writing fiction until
the early aughts, when I wrote erotic fiction and joined an international group
of erotica writers and readers. Apparently, what I knew about was sex. But
these days I subscribe to the adage, “write what you don’t know,” or rather,
“what you’d like to know.” Exploration is one of my goals as a writer, along
with whimsy and connection with fellow kindred misfits.
Writing as an act of community engagement:
The first reading I ever attended, and I don’t even know why I wanted to go,
was part of what was then the Ottawa Valley Book Festival in the nineties. The
event took place at Carleton University at Rooster’s, a campus pub. It was
hosted by Phil Jenkins, a well-known Ottawa character and writer, whose work I
had read in the Citizen. I didn’t
know anyone in the room, but apparently many of my later literary pals were
there. Jenkins launched the event as if it was a baseball game and threw a book,
the first pitch, into the crowd. I “caught” it. It was Robert Priest’s Scream Blue Living. He was one of the
readers at the event. This was the first contemporary poetry book I’d ever read,
and I loved it. But I didn’t start attending more literary events until the
aughts. Back then if you wanted me to read poetry, you had to throw it at me, I
guess.
In my mid thirties, I was going through
a difficult time in my life. I searched the internet for poems of solace, for
some reason. And somehow, the search yielded poetry by Mary Oliver, Lorna
Crozier, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. I related to their
work in a way that I hadn’t related to Shakespeare or Baudelaire or Rimbaud and
Verlaine from my high school and university education. We didn’t study any
poetry by women at all in secondary school or university. And we didn’t study
anything written any later than the fifties. The work of these women made me
realize that some of what I’d been writing all of those years might actually be
poetry. I applied to and succeeding in getting into a creative writing workshop
at the University of Ottawa taught by Seymour Mayne.
Professor Mayne, and a group of
University of Ottawa students that included Gwen Guth, along with Heather
Ferguson, a small press publisher and poet, worked on a monthly magazine called
Bywords. It was distributed all over
Ottawa, and I often picked it up from a pub or café. It included a calendar of
Ottawa literary events.
When I was in the advanced creative
writing workshop in 2001, Bywords
ceased publication. It had been in existence since the early nineties, run
entirely by volunteers. The Region of Ottawa-Carleton, as the City was then
called, didn’t renew Bywords’
funding. So the publication had to shut down.
Another project I learned about from
Seymour Mayne was Friday Circle, which published the chapbooks of students from
his creative writing workshop. I was fortunate to have a chapbook edited and published
by the press (Blood Orange, 2003).
Before taking that class, I didn’t know
anything about chapbooks. Once I found out about them, I wanted to make them.
My husband and I offered to sell Friday Circle chapbooks at the ottawa small
press book fair. This was probably in spring or fall of 2002. We made forty
dollars from sales and we were hooked on chapbooks.
Charles and I began Bywords.ca in 2003, which introduced us to Ottawa’s literary
community. We attended both the Tree and Sasquatch readings that took place in
the Royal Oak in Sandy Hill regularly, along with the Dusty Owl series, which
was at Swizzles on Queen Street when I started to attend. Charles took photos
of the readers and I read at open mics and eventually featured.
Kristy McKay, who I’d taken the
University of Ottawa creative writing classes with, and her partner, Trevor
Tchir, a musician, began a weekly Thursday-night open mic at Café Nostalgica at
the University of Ottawa in 2001 or 2002. Kristy wanted to make sure that
poetry was part of the open mic, so she encouraged her fellow classmates to
attend. It was an amazing open mic, with talented musicians and poets. Charles
and I were regulars. The Open Mic participants, with the help of Trevor, recorded
a CD called Thursday Night Heroes. I read a poem with drum back up by Phil LaFrenière,
from what would become Soul Jazz Orchestra. Some regular poets and spoken word
artists included Max Middle, Steve Sauvé, Kris Northey, Joshua Massey and
Kristy McKay, to name a few.
Charles and I would weave home by foot
or bus at one a.m. after having a few of bartender Lenny’s mumbo jumbo rumbos.
Many of the musicians I met there, such as Kevin Grant, John Gillies, Rozalind
MacPhail, Neil Gerster, and by association, Marie-Josée Houle, Mélissa Laveaux,
James Missen would become featured musicians at the Bywords Quarterly Journal
readings, which we held four times a year from 2003 to 2013, and the John
Newlove Poetry Award, which Bywords
has been hosting annually in the fall through the Ottawa International Writers
Festival since 2004.
For many years, we were regular
attendees of In/Words’ readings, which took place at the Avant Garde Bar, then
at the Clocktower Pub before fizzling out last year. I first heard the work of
folks like Ben Ladouceur, Jenna Jarvis, Jesslyn Delia Smith, Pete Gibbon, Matt
Jones, Chris Johnson, and Jeff Blackman there, all writers whose work I admire.
After taking Seymour’s workshops, I also
took one at Carleton University, taught by Armand Ruffo, then I took your
workshops, rob. It was through these workshops and readings that I made friends
with fellow writers, leading to a small poetry workshop group I was involved
in, loosely called Ampersand. It included Nicolas Lea, Marcus McCann, Sandra
Ridley, Roland Prevost, Pearl Pirie and me. While it only lasted a year or two,
it was an excellent group of like-minded poets. We published two chapbooks, Whack of Clouds and Pent Up through my small press, AngelHousePress. They’ve all gone
on to have books and chapbooks published. Alas both Marcus and Nick have left
Ottawa. I’m still hoping they’ll return.
Q: How did being in such a community of
writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?
While writing requires some solitude, I
learned that I also needed to the support and friendship of fellow writers,
whether it be to exchange needed knowledge and information about how to do
stuff: get published, find funding, find books and chapbooks similar to what I
was attempting in my own writing, etc, or just to carp to about various
annoyances, or simply just to spend time with like-minded people, intent on the
same goals.
I had a near-death health crisis in
2009, and many of the writers I’d met in Ottawa’s literary community were
amazingly generous and helpful during that time. I owe them a debt of
gratitude.
Writing, for me, isn’t just writing,
it’s engaging with the world, mentoring and being mentored, learning from and sharing
what I know with other fellow creative folk to give back to a community that
gave a great deal to me.
Q: What do you see happening here that
you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?
I have never been in any other literary
community, so I can’t say for sure, but I’ve been told by friends outside of
Ottawa that we have something special here. Some have talked about a spirit of
co-operation that seems to be missing in other literary communities, where
there’s more competition. I have no way of verifying that.
I think that Toronto, through the
wonderful Knife Fork Book, has been establishing a strong and supportive
community of writers, so that impresses me a lot. I wish we had KFB here in
Ottawa, if Kirby could somehow be cloned.
I don’t attend as many events as I used
to, but there’s lots for those who want to be involved; For a small city, we
have a lot going on, and that’s courtesy of some active and altruistic folks
who want to build community. Here are just a few examples of recent and
long-standing activities:
Little Birds Poetry, a workshop group
run by Ellen Chang-Richardson, a new resident of Ottawa, who also does
workshops in Toronto;
the sound poetry group run by jwcurry, which
has been going on for a long time with various participants;
Ruby Tuesdays, a women’s workshop group
that’s been around for years;
youth spoken word slams run by Urban
Legends, in addition to their twice-monthly spoken word program;
manuscript editing services run by
various poets;
The Tree Reading series hosts workshops,
open mics and featured readings in Hintonburg, and there are numerous open mics
across the city, such as the Barely Bruised Book Club open mic in Sandy Hill,
and Jamari Coffee House’s open mic in Hintonburg.
Local groups such as the Ottawa Independent
Writers, the Ottawa chapter of the Canadian Authors Association exist to help
writers improve their writing and get it published. There are genre
organizations such as the Ottawa Romance Writers Association and Capital Crime
Writers. There’s no end to the
possibilities of engaging with fellow writers, gaining society and help for
one’s work.
I’m theorizing here, but perhaps because
there are no literary book publishers in Ottawa now, and we don’t have access
to major funding opportunities, we must do a lot of stuff for ourselves.
VERSeFest, for example, is Canada’s only
bilingual poetry festival, I believe, and it had to start with seed money from
the organizers before getting funded through public assistance.
Take a look too at other arts
disciplines in Ottawa. The grassroots beginnings of the Ottawa Folk Festival,
or the SAW Gallery, which seems to be undergoing a renaissance.
If we want arts and culture to thrive in
the City of Ottawa, we have to be the driving forces and it’s an uphill battle
with a mayor who thinks allocating funding to a large sports arena equals
supporting the arts, and a residents who worry that any support of the arts
will lead to a serious increase in property taxes, even though something like a
one million dollar investment in the arts is equivalent to about one dollar of
property tax a month, and there have been numerous studies that have found
significant direct economic benefits to arts and culture.
We have programs devoted to arts and
culture on community-based radio stations such as CKCU and CHUO. For years I
used to listen to Mitchell Caplan’s CHUO show on Wednesday afternoons, Click
Here. He invited many of us on as guests. I still miss his show. Friday Special
Blend on CKCU, when hosted by Susan Johnson, used to promote local literary
events and host many local writers. It’s a shame it’s no longer the case.
Literary Landscape at CKCU, originally
run by Jane Crosier, has been going on for many years, and always invites local
and out-of-town writers on the show, and the Third World Players increases
awareness of multicultural heritage by interviewing writers and artists with
roots in the Third World.
I think what Ottawa offers that differs
from other larger cities is independence. While there is some funding allocated
to the arts, there’s an impression that because we are the Nation’s Capital, the
existence of federal institutions such as the National Gallery of Canada and
the National Arts Centre somehow mean that we receive a lot of support, but
that support is not typically for local artists at all. This lack of funding
leads us to have to create our own programs and we struggle with that, but
somehow it happens.
Visionaries such as you, rob, are one of
the reasons why we have a literary community at all thanks to your promotion
and support of local writers to the larger literary community and the larger
literary community to Ottawa.
Max Middle, is another example. His A B
series brought many an international artist to Ottawa, including the Dutch avant-garde
artist Jaap Blonk, spoken word artists from Australia, and also local writers
such as John Lavery.
The Ottawa International Writers
Festival began in 1997 and consistently provides a home for visiting and local
writers to share their work to audiences in Ottawa. Out-of-town writers have
told me that they find the festival to be the most welcoming festival in
Canada.
Plan 99 run out of the Manx Pub by David
O’Meara has been bringing fiction writers and poets to the City since 1999, as
well as hosting local writers.
Jamaal Jackson Rogers, a former poet
laureate of Ottawa, has been a force in the spoken word community, extending to
the music community and focusing especially on young people to get them
interested in creativity as a way to improve their lives and spirits, and share
with others.
Danielle K.L. Grégorire came back to the
Ottawa-area and has started a revolution for performance, storytelling, comedy,
poetry with her Almonte venue, Curious and Kind.
In Our Tongues Reading and Arts Series, the
first in Ottawa dedicated to specifically to showcasing Black, Indigenous and
People of Colour (BIPoC) poets, writers, musicians and other artists, including
those across the gender spectrum began last year.
Local poet and short fiction writer Rhonda
Douglas started a series for short fiction last year. Readings take place in
the spring and fall.
For four years, the Sawdust Poetry
Series gave poets without a book the chance to feature through its poem-off
contest, something I’d never heard of before.
Small press publishers such as Apt. 9
Press, above/ground press, Coven Editions, postghost press, phafours press,
shreeking violet press, and & Co Collective are contributing greatly to
ensuring we have a thriving small press community. Ottawa-based magazines Arc Poetry
Magazine and Canthius serve a national as well as local readership and publish
writers from the local community as well as from across Canada.
Bookstores such as Octopus Books and
Perfect Books make a point of stocking books by Ottawa writers on their shelves
and hosting us at their stores for readings and signings.
There’s a group called Punch Up
Collective that shares anarchist and activist events taking place in Ottawa
through its newsletter, and many of these events are book launches.
Ottawa has a reputation as a provincial
backwater and bureaucratic capital whose sidewalks roll up at night. We are, in
fact, a thriving city with a great artistic and cultural scene with increasing
interest and support for diverse, anti-capitalist, resistance and feminist
activity.
I hope other cities and towns are as
fortunate to have writers who are as energetic, altruistic and willing to
devote time to making and maintaining a thriving cultural community.
My one complaint is the lack of reading
series taking place in accessible venues. Talented disabled writers and artists
aren’t featured at these events due to inaccessible venues. Potential audience
members are not able to attend events. I know it’s a challenge, but it should
be a high priority for event organizers.
Through Bywords.ca I created a guide to accessible literary, spoken word,
storytelling and nonfiction venues with the help of disabled creatives. The
problem is that a lot of these venues are unaffordable for literary organizers
who often have to pay for events out of their own pockets. But the literary community is missing out by
excluding disabled people, and I think it’s a tragedy that we need to rectify.
The guide began in 2018. So far it lists accessible venues in Centretown and a
few in Sandy Hill. I’m hoping to add venues in Hintonburg and Westboro this
year.
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 someone who loves walking and writing
in cafés, and Ottawa is a great city to walk in with numerous cafes in my
favourite area of town, downtown (Centretown/Chinatown). In 2016 In/Words published
a chapbook of mine called firstwalks of
the year, inspired by Hélène Cixous’s “firstdays of the year.” The work was
published in the form of a map with art by Jesse Aylsworth, with editing by
Sanita Fejzić and Jenny Greenburg.
I do a lot of writing in public places,
and I often find inspiration by wandering outside, whether in the urban core or
by the river or at the Arboretum of the Experimental Farm. I also like to ride
public transit and the LRT. I go to the Ottawa Public Library or a gallery or
museum. To be creative, I need space, time, motion, light, nature and culture.
Ottawa is a city that offers all of these benefits, and I am grateful for that.
If you consider publishing to be a
project, then Bywords.ca is a response to my engagements in Ottawa. Its goals
are to publish and promote current and former Ottawa students, residents and workers,
and to make sure that no one in the Ottawa area misses a literary, spoken word,
storytelling or nonfiction event because they didn’t hear about it.
I love living here and I have been
fortunate to have been supported by the literary community. Bywords.ca, which I run with the help of
my husband, Charles, a twelve member selection committee and a steering
committee, not to mention all the event organizers who send me info about their
events for the calendars, the publishers, the poets who send us their work, is
my way of giving back to the City. We’ve been fortunate to receive funding from
the City since our inception in 2003.
I try to submit chapbook manuscripts and
poems as much as I can to local publishers, to support their efforts. All of my
attempts at writing work that I want to share have occurred in Ottawa, so I
guess nothing really has changed about the way I approach my work in terms of
the city and the literary community, except my age and experience, and my
increasing priority of supporting feminist and diverse groups as much as I can.
I’ve been writing in Ottawa for twenty
years now. I make myself available to anyone who wants to know about what
Ottawa has to offer in terms of readings and support for writers. Through
Bywords I’ve written guides to help out-of-town writers and publishers find out
about potential reading opportunities, and local writers find out about
creative writing workshops and editing services. If I can provide information
useful to writers and it’s not available anywhere else, I’ll make it happen.
I also think that social media has made
it possible to find community that is not just based on geographic proximity.
Through my own writing and AngelHousePress, I try to connect with fellow
feminists and marginalized writers from all over the world, and promote and
publish them as much as I can without any financial means to do so.
Some might say that spending so much
time on community outreach can take away from writing time, and that could be
true for others, but I have the privilege of having a lot of time to devote to
both my own writing and to community outreach. I have many more manuscripts
drafted than there are publishers who are interested in publishing my work. I
don’t see outreach and writing as separate. I think my engagement makes my
writing stronger and more informed. I am constantly writing. In the end,
everything I do is about love.
Q: What are you working on now?
I’m continuing to work on the Vispo
Bible, a life’s work to translate the Bible into visual poetry. I began in 2015
and have completed six books in the Old Testament and six in the New Testament.
I probably won’t finish in my lifetime.
I’ve been rewriting a poetry manuscript,
“Sessions from the Dreamhouse Aria,” drafted twelve years ago, as an
experimental hybrid work (prose novella, creative nonfiction/memoir). I
recently learned I’m receiving funding for the project through the Ontario Arts
Council’s Recommender Grant (OAC RG).
I’ve been doing a massive edit of a long
poem manuscript, “Beast Body Epic,” that I began in 2013 about my health
crisis. I was fortunate last year to receive funding for the project from the
City of Ottawa and have just learned that I’ve also gotten support from the OAG
RG.
As Edwina Alien Po’, I am currently
rewriting “The Raven” as “The Mansplainer.” I don’t know where such a thing
could be published.
The characters from my
novel-not-in-progress, “the Nightmare Dolls’ Imperfect Reunion” are a tad ticked
off with me because I don’t feel like I am currently capable of writing their
stories. The novel is about women, ageing, health and invisibility, friendships,
domestic abuse, incest, punk rock, Mississauga in the 70s, tarot readings,
Toronto Island and probably other stuff I haven’t thought up yet. It’s kind of
intimidating, to be honest. Hence the reason I am not working on it.
With the world being 100 minutes from
midnight, I’m trying to reduce anxiety by becoming a Senior Raven at Carleton
University. This means that I am taking fitness classes such as aquafit, tai
chi and a stretch and strength class with other people over 55. I’ve begun a
poetry manuscript, tentatively titled, “motion and light” that engages with the
experiences.
