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!

Six Questions interview #48 : David Groulx

David Groulx was born in Northern Ontario. Now calls Vanier home. His poetry has appeared in over 200 publications. His latest book, From Turtle Island to Gaza was nominated for the Archibald Lampman award in 2019.

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

On and off I've been living in or around Ottawa far longer than either I or the city expected me to. I initially moved here for work. Northern Ontario has been being emptied of people for the last thirty years because of it, or the lack of it. When I moved here, the Gilmour was still going. My first time in Ottawa was the first time I saw someone getting mugged.

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

I didn't really 'get involved' I was so struggling to find what I wanted to say, the way I wanted to say it. that mostly I stayed away from other writers. Although I do recall attending a reading at Tree of which you I think were just taking the reins, I think Pearl Pirie was there too, memory becomes a Trickster.

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

I think some writers have a media induced image of ourselves as either living in communities of bohemian bliss or wretchedly alone in the mountains caves of Greece neither of these scenarios are vaguely true. Writers know talking to other writers is pretty boring.

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

What is happening for me, here in Ottawa is that some old ideas I've had about self-publishing have been reignited. The freedom of letting go of expectation. Publishing or what I call the business side of poetry is becoming less and less appealing to me. I find it less distracting and the art probably has a better chance of breathing.

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've done some work here in the city such as grant and award juries and the like. Mostly my work is in some form of modest isolation when it comes to  an actual community. I don't come out of my cave too often, especially these days.

Q: What are you working on now?

These days I'm editing a poetry manuscript, but mostly I'm working on a shorter piece called, Under the Black Sun, it's about disturbing issue of male suicide, its prevalence and more disturbing fact that we as a society mostly ignore. It is a challenge to write about. I have also found a character that disappeared 25 years ago, she's back and wants to do a monologue from a sidewalk in Montreal, so there's that.

 

Six Questions interview #47 : Tim Mook Sang

Tim Mook Sang has studied and worked across Canada. He currently lives in Ottawa, where he works in education. His writings have been published in a variety of magazines and journals, mostly in Canada. When not working, he enjoys spending time with his family and doing crafts.

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

I was born in Ottawa in 1984. I moved to Prince George and Montreal for a couple of spells, but I always found my way back here. I have really settled in this time and do not see myself leaving anytime soon.

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

I always wanted to get into writing – to be a writer – but never knew what that meant. It was in my fourth year of undergrad at UNBC that I took a couple of writing courses with Rob Budde, and from then on I started to take it more seriously and made efforts to become involved in a writing community and to seek publication. When I moved back to Ottawa, I sought out groups and publications here and tried to reach out whenever I could.

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

It is important to not write in a bubble. You need people to share and workshop your writings with or else you might as well just keep a diary, so being in a community seems like a necessity. I remember when I was writing on my own – with nobody looking at what I was producing before it was submitted – I would not realize a poem was terrible until the feeling of regret or embarrassment I would have immediately after dropping the submission into the mailbox. Knowing I could not reach in and get the envelope back, I would just have to wait several months until the person on the other end opened it, cringed and sent back the rejection letter.

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

Ottawa has both a vibrant and accessible writing community. When I lived in Montreal, I had a group of people who I worked with, but they were mostly musicians or other types of artists and, while we were working together, they were not necessarily involved in the production of my writing. Being able to be part of publications like ottawater and Bywords and their associated events is not something that I had going on before moving back to Ottawa. The scene here encouraged me to find more partners to be active in my writing process. Even completing these interview questions makes me realize I have not written much outside of work-related emails and policy documents.

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?

One project that responded directly to my engagements here was the opportunity I had from bird, buried press to publish a chapbook, A Functional History, in 2017. I know they are not based in Ottawa, but I think that if I was not here I would not have connected with them, and I also attending some events they held in Ottawa afterwards.

Q: What are you working on now?

I regret to say that I am working on nothing. In May 2020 my wife and I were blessed with our second child, but that means we had two under two, and combined with taking on being the principal of a high school during a pandemic, I have not been able to find the time and energy. Things come in waves, though, and the tide is turning. Lately, I have started jotting down notes and sketching out new poems.

Six Questions interview #46 : Jennifer Baker

Jennifer Baker lives and works in Ottawa. Her first chapbook, Abject Lessons, was published in 2014 by above/ground press and her creative writing and reviews have appeared in various literary publications including Dusie, Ottawater, The Bull Calf, and The Journal of Canadian Poetry and Canadian Literature. Her article, ““Resituating Kroetsch: Accident and the Provisional Georgic in Robert Kroetsch’s ‘The Ledger,’” was recently published in Kroetsch:Novelist-Essayist-Poet (2020). 

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

I’ve lived in Ottawa for exactly a decade, now, which feels hard to believe! I came here to do my PhD at the University of Ottawa and stayed because it wasn’t Exeter.

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

It feels like I’ve always been writing. I started with long, rambling stories about Dusty and Dirty, my childhood cat and her stray best friend, who held seances in our garage to call up William “Tiger” Dunlop’s ghost dog to have adventures. (Dunlop was one of the founding settler-colonizers of Goderich, Ontario with the Canada Company, and an ambiguously shaded recurring character). Like any angsty kid who went through a goth phase, I graduated from writing rhyming poems that pleased adults into writing lyric poems about my many feelings. I wrote both prose and poetry well into my 20s, but my writing was mostly influenced by fiction writers like Alice Munro. I was searching for ways to express the latent observations I had about rural southwestern Ontario once I’d left it for the big city of London (Ontario). Poetry felt too lofty—it was the craft of people who grew up near art galleries and went to fancy wine-tasting parties and went home to houses built with studies. It wasn’t until the latter half of my undergraduate degree that I started thinking seriously about poetics as a tradition I wanted to be involved in.

It’s a little embarrassing to admit now that we know each other, but I read Phil Hall for the first time in the fourth year of my Undergraduate degree at Western, and it was the first time I had heard a voice from rural Ontario in poetics that I connected with. I included Why I Haven’t Written in my Master’s thesis at Concordia, but at that time I was far too shy to join Concordia’s writing community to further develop my own craft (for better or worse). I happened to come to the University of Ottawa, where he happened to be writer-in-residence, and I wrote some poems for the first time in years, and remembered for the first time the feeling of taking my foot off the break and letting myself say something. Phil’s kindness brought me to the Ottawa writing community, though I think my involvement is best described as brief and periodic. I have always had a hard time deciding where I want to belong, or maybe I just have a hard time belonging. I’ve been thinking of all the ways in which I feel community is both a vital and necessary thing and of all the ways in which for me it has always felt like a fraught set of impossible restrictions, responsibilities, embarrassments, and personal failures rather than a supportive refuge. I haven’t worked all of that out for myself yet, but I do feel lots of affection for many people involved in the Ottawa literary scene.

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

Ottawa’s writing community is the first community in which I felt welcomed and the one that demystified the world of small press publishing which, until rob published Abject Lessons and I met more people, had seemed a secret society to me. I learned a lot from my short time with Arc as their Reviews Editor, and all the people who tirelessly work to keep small presses, magazines, and events afloat here. My academic ideas of tradition and influence have shifted more intimately to affinities and affections.

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

Ottawa feels smaller, but relative to its size, it feels less dominated by academic departments than writing communities in, I guess, what you might call the coterie cities like Toronto and Montreal. I think that’s a good thing. You can also know “the community” here and still discover lots of other places where poetics and lively literary and literary-adjacent events happen. Despite my decade here, I feel like before the pandemic I was only starting to discover the depth and breadth of creative and collaborative activity in this city.

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 haven’t written anything that’s engaged directly with the writing community here, but the city itself has started creeping into my poems. Most recently, Jeff Blackman published a short poem in his pandemic ‘zine These Days about my and David Currie’s lofty observations of the guy who lives full-time on on Cummings Island, a tiny island in the Rideau river across from our balcony.

Q: What are you working on now?

I’m reading toward some side-projects that have partially materialized: I have been lucky enough to have been trusted with some important family artefacts, like my great-great grandmother’s diaries from the 1920s and 30s, and the Ontario School readers passed through the community to my grandfather when he attended a one-room elementary school, with marginalia written and doodled by bored relatives as schoolchildren. So I’ve been working on some found poems that centre those histories and pieces, but I have a feeling once I put them beside some of my other poems, they will all pull me toward the same place. It takes me a long time to digest anything. I’m someone you might describe has “having bit off more than she could chew.”

Very slowly, though, I think I’m turning to a manuscript project. I’ve noticed a thread developing in the poems I’ve written about the mechanics of abuse (of ourselves, others, nonhuman life), responsibility, and compassionate accountability. I’m slowly following that thread from the abuse I endured as a teenager through to exploring the dynamics of abuse in settler-Canadian histories and stories and ontologies, and the mysteries of my family’s settler history and the responsibilities that come from that history. I don’t know. I feel like I’m on the cusp of being able to express it all, but I also wrote a 400ish page dissertation roughly around this topic and feel like I haven’t figured it out how to express it. What can you do but keep trying?