Six Questions interview #55 : Jennifer Falkner

Jennifer Falkner (she/her) is an award-winning short story writer living in Ottawa, Canada, on the traditional unceded territory of the Anishinaabe people. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, in Canada and internationally. Her forthcoming novella (Susanna Hall, Her Book) will be published in 2022 by Fish Gotta Swim Editions.

Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?  

I was nineteen and didn’t know what to do with myself. I had some friends living here and, coming from Kingston, Ottawa seemed like a “manageable” city, small enough not to be intimidating, but still busy with plenty to do. I enrolled in the College of Humanities at Carleton, although having to read Aristotle in second year nearly broke me. I ended up switching to Greek and Roman Studies, and then an MA from the University of Ottawa after that. Hard to believe I’ve been here for just over twenty years.

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?  

Although I always had it my mind that I wanted to be a writer, and I submitted a few poems as part of my portfolio when applying to the College of Humanities program, I didn’t get really serious about writing until a little over ten years ago when I left school.

I can’t really say I’ve been part of the writing community here, though I’ve been peripherally aware of it. Most of my writing community I have found online in the friendships and writing circles that came out of various online writing classes. I regret not having pushed myself out of my shell more while I was at Carleton though. I knew of In/Words and various literary groups and events but was too shy to go.

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?

There’s such a relief in being in contact with other writers, isn’t there? In having the strange obsession/compulsion to make marks on paper be understood and celebrated. 

Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?

I think Ottawa’s size has a lot going for it. Not too large to be intimidating. Though I don’t think the literary community is as culturally diverse as perhaps it could be.  

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 don’t think they have, except in so far as some of my historical fiction has been inspired by either reading Classics in university or from local history (as long as local is broadly interpreted as southern Ontario). 

Q: What are you working on now?

Currently I’m looking for a home for a short story collection. Having just completed a novella, I’m trying to up the ante and write a novel. But this keeps getting sidetracked because of the affair I’m having with poetry at the moment.

Six Questions interview #54 : Sean Johnston

Sean Johnston lives with his family in Kelowna, BC. He teaches at Okanagan College, is currently at work on a new novel and recently finished a short fiction manuscript called Multiplicanda Ah Um.

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 22^nd 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.

Six Questions interview #53 : Missy Marston

Missy Marston’s first novel, The Love Monster, was the winner of the 2013 Ottawa Book Award, a finalist for the CBC Bookie Awards and for the Scotiabank Giller Prize Readers' Choice. Her second novel, Bad Ideas, is about daredevils and love. She lives in Ottawa with the artist, Peter Shmelzer, and the two small dogs with which they have replaced their grown children.

Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?

I moved to Ottawa when I was 18 to go to school and, except for a brief and super fun Student Work Abroad stint in the UK, I have been here ever since. Thirty-five years of joy and sorrow.

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?

I wrote as a little kid and I had a couple of kind teachers in my hometown that encouraged me. This led to some angsty teenage journaling. (I would write day after day, filling notebook after notebook. Then I would tear each notebook to pieces and shove them in the garbage.)

At Carleton I found writing friends. I remember Andrea Thompson and I sitting at the dining room table in her apartment on Bronson, typing up submissions to poetry magazines. We sent out stacks of them. My first reading was at an open-mic at Rasputin’s. My first published poem was in Arc magazine. I still have the check for ten dollars pinned to my bulletin board. Treasure.

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?

I guess being exposed to the variety of work being produced gave me a better idea of where my work fit and how I wanted to define it. I was still kind of a child when I moved here so this was the first time I was part of a community and making friends that weren’t my exact contemporaries (that weren’t in my grade!). So, I was able to benefit from other people’s experience and also I was able to picture my future as an independent adult which honestly had been impossible for me before.  

Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?

I love Ottawa. Almost everything important that has ever happened to me has happened to me here.  My kids were born and raised here. I found the love of my life here. I went to my first rock concert here (Fifth Dimension at the Ex when I was four). I wrote both my novels here and had launch parties in rooms full of beautiful friends. I don’t know what happens here that doesn’t happen anywhere else but I have loved living and working here.

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 not sure how much direct evidence there is of Ottawa in my work. I can tell you that every reading I have ever been to -- at the literary festival, VerseFest, Plan 99 at The Manx, open mic stuff at Tree or Sawdust – has energized me and made me happy to be alive. I have my “writing group”, whose activities mostly involve talking about books and drinking beer but when it matters, providing advice on works in progress. Writing a novel takes a long time. A person can lose hope or get lost. These friends have kept me on track. Eye on the prize.

Q: What are you working on now?

I am working on my third novel. It is pretty juicy. Full of the unthinkable and the unbelievable. Sometimes I hate it. Today I love it. As usual, it will take me forever.

Six Questions interview #52 : Joseph A. Dandurand

Joseph A. Dandurand is a member of Kwantlen First Nation located on the Fraser River about 20 minutes east of Vancouver. He resides there with his 3 children Danessa, Marlysse, and Jace. Joseph is the Director of the Kwantlen Cultural Center. Joseph received a Diploma in Performing Arts from Algonquin College and studied Theatre and Direction at the University of Ottawa. He has just completed his residency as the Storyteller in Residence at the Vancouver Public Library. He sits on a committee for the Canadian Museum of History and is tasked with consulting on the redesign of the new Children’s Museum. He has published 13 books of poetry and the latest are: I WANT by Leaf Press (2015) and HEAR AND FORETELL by BookLand Press (2015), The Rumour (2018) by BookLand Press in (2018), SH:LAM (the doctor), Mawenzi Press (2019), The Corrupted by Guernica Press (2020), his children’s play: Th’owixiya: the hungry Feast dish by Playwrights Press Canada (2019), his book of short stories and short plays for children: The Sasquatch, the fire, and the cedar basket will be published by Nightwood Press along with his poetry manuscript: Here we come (2020-21) He also is very busy Storytelling at many events and Schools.

Q: How long were you in Ottawa, and what first brought you here? What took you away? 

I was into Ottawa for about 20 years. My old man was in the air force and this was his last posting before he retired. Writing took me away. I was writer in Rez at the Museum of Civilization and then I was Playwright in Rez at Native Earth in Toronto. Then I got in my car 25 years ago and drove home to where I am now where my mom is from.

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here? 

I was studying theater at Ottawa U and wasn’t really devoted to it, so I kept writing and that seemed to open doors for me. I first joined up with other radical Native writers like Kateri Damm and Allen Deleary and Armand Ruffo and we were going to change the world…but we didn’t but I leaned a lot from them.

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? 

Again it was good to meet other writers and I kept at it and today I find myself and today I write every morning and there has been a shift and I believe now I have finally found my voice as a poet, a playwright, and a story teller.

Q: What did you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What did Ottawa provide, or allow? 

Not sure. I think I was surrounded by other writers who were on their way to be published so I took their direction and self-published my first book of poems: the upside-down raven. Ottawa provided me a safe place to write.

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 wrote plays and produced them at Saw video which was also a safe place for me, and I spent a lot of time there writing and also producing videos. The plays  I produced there gave me the opportunity to create a black box into worlds that I had created. The community of creative people around me gave me the chance to create what I had written for stage and it allowed me to move forward and move on to other projects.

Q: What are you working on now?

Right now I am 30 pages into a new manuscript of poetry. I am also teaching in schools and giving readings online to promote 2 new books of poetry: I will be corrupted, by Guernica, and The eastside of it all, by Nightwood Editions. My children’s play: Th’owx’iya the hungry feast dish, is to be translated into Portuguese.

 

 

Six Questions interview #51 : Cameron Anstee

Cameron Anstee lives and writes in Ottawa ON where he runs Apt. 9 Press and holds a Ph.D. in Canadian Literature from the University of Ottawa. He is the author of one collection of poetry, Book of Annotations (Invisible Publishing, 2018) and the editor of The Collected Poems ofWilliam Hawkins (Chaudiere Books, 2015).

Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?

I grew up in Ottawa, as did my partner. Both of our families are here, and we’ve built a good life in the city.

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?

I began to write towards the end of high school. The house that I grew up in was full of books and reading was always a very normal part of my family life, but it took a few years longer to arrive at writing as something I wanted to work at. Growing up, I thought of myself as more athletic than artistic, but that part of my identity came apart after blowing my knee out for the second time tragically ending my soccer “career.” I spent more and more time reading, including finally reading through my Dad’s collection of Beat literature, and like many seventeen year olds before me, I was inspired to write poems. My partner was very kind about them, and encouraged me to keep going.

I studied English at Carleton University, where I was exposed to a wider spectrum of writing than I had known existed previously, and for the first time encountered a community of peers also writing poems (through In/Words). I was exceedingly lucky to work with the magazine for 2-3 years. That time taught me the basics of making chapbooks, of trying to engage with the literary community outside of our circle, and of the ways that the small press at its best is a holistic practice of writing, reading, publishing, editing, organizing, etc. As my time at Carleton came to an end, I started my own small operation (Apt. 9 Press) that has allowed me to move into Ottawa’s broader community, which then opened up avenues to other scenes in other cities.

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?

I’ve tried over the years to articulate the influence of that community on me—as a writer, as a person. It was absolute necessary to encounter those people at that moment. We were just young enough not to know how much we didn’t know, and to have seemingly endless hours to write and share and argue and staple chapbooks. Which is to say, it was a good time and place to make mistakes! I feel no desire to revisit the poems I wrote in those years, but I am so grateful that I wrote them all and had people around me who were reading and absorbing and writing so much, and that we had each other to argue with and make mistakes with and try to find solutions with. (An aside—I should note that for me anyway, it carried the same experience of impostor syndrome that academia did broadly. I may not have had a clear sense of how much I didn’t know, but our inexperience did cause me anxiety. I was grateful to have a community around me that offered a bit of shelter from that before stepping off campus.)

Those years established writing in my mind as a community practice, something that I went on to think about in my own approach to small press publishing in the decade-plus since I stepped aside from the magazine, and in my academic work (my dissertation focused on small press bookselling in Canada, and is available online if anyone out there is interested). It shifted writing from a solitary activity to being part of a larger community-oriented practice, and established a sense of obligation to others to be a careful and responsible community member. That has only been confirmed by Ottawa’s greater small press community, and by the best folks I’ve been lucky to encounter outside of Ottawa.

Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?

I think one of the benefits and frustrations of being in Ottawa is that we don’t currently have an established trade publisher of poetry. The mighty Chaudiere Books did exceptional work for a decade or so, but is sadly not producing new books any longer. Oberon made substantial contributions to poetry and writing in Canada, but was always more national in its focus and has, I believe, more or less closed operations. Buschek Books also closed shop in the last few years.

I think this has had a few impacts—our town has a lot of chapbook publishers! I think we could rival any city in Canada on the number of people folding and stitching books. And I love chapbooks! I think they are often the perfect length for poetry especially, and are more malleable in their forms. I think it also removes some of the less palatable elements of the literary scene—I find it to be a generally supportive and less (toxically) competitive small press scene. Without established trade presses, and without tenured creative writing positions, there is little to climb over each other trying to get ours hands on, so instead we all get together twice a year at the Jack Purcell community centre and trade chapbooks, and meet at the Carleton Tavern to listen to those chapbooks, and amazing people collaboratively organize our international poetry festival, VerseFest, and we have an established set of welcoming reading series. We also have the benefit of two universities, so there is a steady stream of young writers showing up with their new and vital ideas and questions.

This is something I tried to articulate in another interview I wrote in parallel to this one, so please forgive some repetition. I am consciously being much less active than I have been in previous years, reflecting in part my move out of academia into a job with more regular hours, but also in response to the work of the generation that has started to play a greater role in the last half-decade or so. All the great work from mags and presses and reading series led by folks that aren’t straight white men—Canthius and Coven and Riverbed Reading Series and Little Birds and Hussy and Battleaxe and shreeking violet and changes during the last years at In/Words, to name a few. They are posing and answering questions about art and writing and representation and reception and community that I didn’t know how to ask in 2006 when I took my first tentative steps. I love it all, and I’m so happy to buy the books and magazines and read the work and attend readings when I can. I am trying to take up less space than I used to occupy, which is easy given that there is no shortage of exceptional work being done and that it feels as though the community is in better hands than ever. I don’t think that shift is unique to Ottawa, but we’re lucky enough to have all the great folks mentioned above working from here. It is a lovely city and small press community to be part of.

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?

Absolutely. In terms of projects, the majority of the books from Apt. 9 Press are by Ottawa writers. I also edited The Collected Poems of Williams Hawkins during the last half-decade of Bill’s life, and that book was published by your Chaudiere Books. I’ve tried and failed to write a book of “Ottawa Poems” a number of times now, but will keep working at it.

In terms of how I approach my work, I look to writers here (and elsewhere of course) that show a clear and deep commitment to what they’re doing, while also recognizing that it is not the only thing they’re doing (both within the world of the small press and outside of it). I look to writers who model a slow and deliberate productivity, writing and publishing at a sustainable pace, for lack of a better term. Small press tends to get discussed as a marginal practice—that is, something happening from the margins of the broader literary and publishing world—and Ottawa is at the margins of even that marginal community! Whatever I’m doing, it is from a small corner of a small corner of a small corner! And more than that, it is a brief moment in time in a long history of small press writing and publishing. I try to be mindful of what has come before, and I try to tend to my small corner of it as carefully as I can, and Ottawa offers no shortage of good models for that approach. 

Q: What are you working on now?

I am wildly behind on a handful of Apt. 9 projects. I am trying to get across the finish line on a second poetry manuscript (a book of minimalist typewriter works) as well as a slim book of essays (on small press book making in Canada). I have one large editorial project underway, and then a handful of ideas for books and projects once all of that is done. Who knows if any of it will ever be finished, let alone published!  

Six Questions #50 : Warren Dean Fulton

Warren Dean Fulton lives in New Westminster, British Columbia. He is the father of 3 full grown children, now legally in all ways adults: Shakira, Brieghann & Truman. His baby boy, Truman, now towers over him at 6’6” & over 300 lbs.

Warren works in the film & tv industry and spends much of his earnings on storage lockers to house his rather enormous collection of poetry books, chapbooks, broadsides & ephemera.

He enjoys travelling, fine dining, watching squirrels, hummingbirds & clouds, & spending time with his partner Dana.

He has authored a dozen chapbooks over the last 27 yrs. & has abandoned more of his writing projects than anyone would care to admit.

Q: How long were you in Ottawa, and what first brought you here? What took you away?

I moved to Ottawa from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia where my career military dad had been stationed aboard the HMCS Ottawa, a destroyer style Canadian forces naval ship. He received a transfer to the Nation’s capital to work at the DND (Department of National Defence), and at the Upland’s airforce base in 1982, and once again my family relocated as we had done so many times before.

I began the grade eight school year, at Holy Cross elementary school, which as the previous year I was at Sir Robert Borden Jr. High School, seemed like a step backwards. After which I attended Immaculata High School at 211 Bronson Ave. Choosing the school for its uniform wearing semi private prep school look, the large ratio of females to males, and the fact it reminded me so much of the tv show “The Facts of Life”. At just under 6 feet tall, and at 115 lbs soaking wet, I was a awkward 4 eyed grade 9 nerd, who quickly became obsessed with Shakespeare, Romantic poets, Monty Python, SCTV & Saturday Night Live comedy sketches. I had dreams of acting, on stage or in films, and or being a writer, or spy.

While in high school I gravitated towards the downtown punk and artsy crowds. A mall rat spending my time hanging out at art galleries, cafe wim, in bookstores, and at the university campuses of The U of O, and Carleton. Trying to figure out bohemian cool, rebellious outlets & doing crazy things for kicks. While writing out plays, poems, and song lyrics for make believe bands.

After high school, I found myself at Carleton University. My hair long past my shoulders, and I discovered several others into similar passions of poetry, pranks & living life for kicks. I graduated from university, having made many life long friends, and having connected with the local literary scene, forming some friendships that have been like family to me. rob mclennan being one of the most significant of those friends.

Shortly after graduating, and recognizing I had little in the way of employment offerings, as I’m not bilingual, and the ongoing depression from failed relationships, and the brutally cold winters. I packed up and mailed 25 plus boxes of books to my parents new home in Kamloops, and by the winter of 1996 I had got on a greyhound bus, phoned my friend rob from the bus depot on St. Catherine’s and left Ottawa behind.

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?

I had started writing comedy routines, space plays, jokes, and word play dialogue for radio plays for my brother & I to perform on a tape recorder I had been given. This was back in 1977-1980 (grades 3,4 & 5). I would draw and write elaborate comics and stories of space explorers, and adventures. I was into UFOs, aliens, Sasquatch, and the odd comic book superhero at the time. As well I had via Monty Python, Wayne & Shuster and the 2 Ronnies developed an interest in poetry, poets, and the playfulness of language.

By high school, I was writing odd little poems, teenage confessional, punk & beat inspired poems & songs. & further to that in my late teens & early 20’s discovered others doing likewise, and was attending poetry readings, studying poetry & poetics at Carleton, and buying poetry books like my life depended on it.

I became friends with poets in the Ottawa community, and poets in Toronto & Montreal, & with the early days of the internet, through sigs and newsgroups poets in the United States & the UK.

Ottawa poets of influence of those early days included; rob mclennan, Seymour Mayne, Robin Hannah, Gwendolyn Guth, John Newlove, John Barton, Nadine McInnis, Robert Craig, Ronnie R. Brown, Juan O’Neill, Dennis Tourbin, Michael Dennis, Patrick White, Catherine Jenkins, Robert Hogg, Dorothy Howard, Jeffrey Mackie & many others I came to know through their books & their public readings.  Equally as important were all the poets that gave readings in Ottawa, or those whose readings I attended in Montreal, Toronto, Kingston, Hamilton, & later in 1994 New York City.

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?

My thinking of writing took an abrupt swerve, as I came to know more & more writers, it became evident that although a solitary artistic pursuit, the sharing of it is very much a public communal activity. I realized how much I enjoyed assisting in the promotion of the poetry of others. How I loved hosting, publishing, billeting and simply chatting about poetry & life with other poets.

Ottawa represented for me a coming of age, and place of many firsts:
First public poetry reading.
First time hosting a poetry event.
First literary publication.
First poetry tour.
First poetry slam event.
First radio interview.
First television interview.
So many firsts. Also first sexual awakening. First major heartbreak. First significant rejection. First failures & successes.

With the move to Kamloops, I found myself gathering to me new poetry friends, and the start of a community around a group we dubbed The Kamloops Poets’ Factory. It had many new successes of its own. Including group poetry tours, publication, regular readings & being invited to do high school workshops, and bringing touring poets to Kamloops.

& then onto Vancouver in 2000, where I had already been spending a great deal of time those years before the solo move. The Vancouver literary scenes surrounding SFU, UBC, the literary magazines at Douglas College, the Kootenay School of writing, the downtown poets, those from TISH, Edgewise Electrolit Centre & the poetry slam scene all contributed to my ever developing gestalt poetics and ever expanding poetry addiction.

Q: What did you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What did Ottawa provide, or allow?

What I witnessed in Ottawa was a healthy level of encouragement along with a dose of “ok, so show us what you’ve got. Why should people pay attention?”

Ottawa writers always seemed to turn out for one another, many doing the circuit of launches, reading series, bookstore purchases, and socializing.

I felt the Ottawa literary community, more than any other, always opened its arms to welcome the novice, to listen to what these new voices had to offer. And when I returned to visit Ottawa, I was always amazed by the new voices that developed there; Sandra Ridley, Amanda Earl, Christine McNair, Max Middle, Cameron Anstee, & many more. As well as how the ones I knew from decades earlier had grown, changed, Pearl Pirie being one that completely floored me with her changes.

Ottawa always seemed to allow, to provide unspoken permission. It is the reason there was a reading series in an ice cream shop, poetry busking in the byward market, a reading series at a pub at the end of the universe. Ottawa’s unspoken rule of just go for it, is why lit mags like HostBox, the Skinny, Bywords, GraffitiFish, Missing Jacket, STANZAS, Touch the Donkey, MPD, In/Words, & so many others came into existence, as well as so many small presses.

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?

My earliest chapbooks. My first published poems go back to the 1980’s & 1990’s in Ottawa, and my departure from the Nation’s capital.

In the years & years since leaving, images, concepts, memories from Ottawa, from my youth creep in and occupy my current writing.

I approach each writing venture much like I’m just starting out again. In part as I have had many false starts, many times I’ve thrown in the towel and tossed out pages of notes, pieces of poems torn up and trashed through frustration with myself, always strong with the self doubt, with the inner critic shouting “forget it. No one cares what you think. What you write. You think you’re clever? Even writers of considerable talent hardly anyone gives two shits about. Why do you think people will care?”

& every now & again I say, who cares? Doesn’t matter. & I still write things. Much of which will never make it beyond nightstand words, phrases scribbled down, first drafts in tiny notebooks, or some directly scribed onto iPhone notes.

Q: What are you working on now?

I’m working on a few things. A series of memoir type writings. Keeping it small. Attempting to write 14 sections, 14 entries each, as reels of viewmaster memories. to be potentially published as 14 different chapbooks (perhaps with photos)
- Viewmaster Memoirs -,
dealing with childhood, friends, loves, family, school, travels, significant moments, employment, & various significant people I’ve met who have made a lasting impression on me.

Another is going over and revisiting, rewriting plays and screenplays I wrote treatments or basic outlines and scenes for years & years ago.

And then there are the various books of poetry wallowing in self pity from their abandonment. I will locate them, dust them off, give them a hug, apologize for my mistreatment of them, and encourage them to venture out into the world. Perhaps they may experience further rejection, but I’ll work on them, give them some love, attention, and encouragement to try again. They need to know, I’ll not give up on them. That I shall strive to do better, be better for their sake.

Six Questions interview #49 : Jean Van Loon

Jean Van Loon’s first poetry collection Building on River (Cormorant Books, 2018) was a finalist for the Ottawa Book Prize. Her stories, poems, and reviews have appeared in literary magazines in the US and Canada and in Journey Prize Stories.  Recent work is forthcoming in Event and Queen’s Quarterly. Facebook @Jean Van Loon; Twitter@ JeanVanloon.

Q. How long have you been in Ottawa, and what brought you here?

You could say World War Two brought me here. My father, his PhD newly minted by McGill, took a job at NRC during wartime, when his thesis supervisor was named head of the council. Here he met my Ottawa-born mother. That’s how I happened, and here is where I have stayed except for a short stint in Kingston Ontario, practically a suburb.

Having grown up in a city routinely derided as grey and funless, I delight in seeing rob mclennan’s insistence on debunking those myths. For years I just said, “I don’t know any better; I like it here.”

Q. How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?

For too many years I did no literary writing. From school days, I had loved it — descriptions, stories and occasional lousy poems. Writing was central throughout my paid employment. But what with full time work — in later years all-consuming — two kids, a dog and 2-3 cats, a house and a cottage, time for literary writing was scarce. In my last year of work, I yearned for something creative to do. Tipped by a friend, I signed up for a short story workshop at Carleton, led by Tom Henighan. It lasted only three months, but by the end I was hooked and I haven’t unhooked since. When I retired, I knew something I wanted to spend my time on.

Years later, to recharge my stale imagination, I attended a poetry workshop led by Stephen Brockwell. It seemed to neophyte me that a who’s who of Ottawa poetry had signed up, so many that Stephen had to run two sessions. That workshop hooked me on poetry. It also provided me with my first exposure to public readings, two of which were arranged as part of the workshop, and the pleasure of seeing and hearing other poets.

When I was invited to join the longstanding Ruby Tuesdays poetry group, I found an intimate community of writers as committed to writing and meeting as I was. I have concentrated on poetry for almost ten years now.

Q. How did being in a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?

It gave me stimulation and emotional support, without which I probably would have given up. I would certainly not have learned as well or as fast. In Ruby Tuesdays, I have watched us all grow in our art, as we prompt each other to read more widely, try new forms, take advantage of short-term workshops, and find new outlets for publication.

I am grateful for the many Ottawans who have organized reading series in this city. We lost some series over the past few years, but encouragingly, new ones are popping up to engage a new range of performers and audiences. Tree, the granddaddy and still, I hope, thriving, offered me exposure to unfamiliar poets and their work as well as workshops to hone skills. My first reading at an open mic was at Tree, and I read many times to try out poems while they were fresh. It’s frightening how flaws emerge as I’m reading before an audience!

The Sawdust Reading series (thank you Jennifer Pederson, Natalie Hanna and Liam Burke), during its rich and regrettably short life, offered the unique notion of a “poem-off” competition, with judging from the previous invited reader. A lucky win at that (thank you David O’Meara) gave me my chance to present poems from my first manuscript in a way that let them work together. The reading led directly to publication of three poems in Arc (thank you Rhonda Douglas) and ultimately to publication of Building on River (thank you Cormorant.)

And of course, VERSfest offers a rich annual buffet of readings by poets from here, across the country, and abroad, with readings in both French and English.

Ottawa benefits from being home to literary publications – bywords.ca, Arc, and more recently Canthius. These offer opportunities to learn about the publication process by volunteering, as well as outlets for poetic work. In addition, bywords.ca, through its rolling literary calendar, offers us all the chance to know what’s going on.

We are very lucky to have these institutional resources, each the result of sustained volunteer effort.

Q. What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide or allow?

I am poorly equipped to talk of what distinguishes Ottawa. But I understand from talking to non-Ottawa poets, that the VERSfest model, of local literary institutions sharing in the creation of each season, may be unique. It is a good way to ensure inclusion of work that reflects varying literary tastes.

As a lifer in Ottawa, I benefit from knowing what lies behind or beneath what I see as I pass down a street — what used to be there, who used to live there. So many places steeped in memory and history.

I also benefit from our rich cultural scene, both local and national. I recall once dragging myself, tired and drained, to hear the National Arts Centre orchestra. As the music enfolded me, I could feel my energy and creativity replenishing.

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?

My first book drew inspiration from the city’s early days, when lumber built the private economy as Ottawa was becoming a national capital. Historic sites around the city and remains of historical structures along the Ottawa River sparked my imagination, and I unearthed vague memories of my mother talking about J. R. Booth. A desire to bring that era to life triggered poems, and details I learned of Booth’s life provided a narrative arc.

Q. What are you working on now?

A manuscript tentatively titled Nuclear Family (begun before my first one was accepted for publication) is now entering the serious edit phase. This one is a poetic memoir of growing up at the beginning of the nuclear age with a father whose work fed into the Manhattan Project. There are spies in it!