Six Questions interview #139 : Myriam Legault-Beauregard

Myriam Legault-Beauregard (she/her) is, above everything else, a loving mother and translator. At night, when her two young children are asleep, she pursues her literary dreams. Her translations can be found in K1N, Le Sabord, Reunion and ellipse, and some of her original works have been published in PØST-, ellipse, flo., Unfortunately, and Bending Genres. While French is her first language, she also enjoys writing in English. She is currently enrolled in the French Studies PhD program at the University of Ottawa.

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

My family moved from Sept-Îles to Gatineau when I was four, so I grew up in the region. I decided to stick around to study, work and have kids because I really feel at home here.

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

I’m a very passionate reader since early childhood, and I’ve always been the one who busted the word limit at school when we had to write stories. I wrote my first “real” poem (in French) during my last year of high school, but I became serious about writing poetry while doing my master’s degree. It seemed like all the knowledge I was absorbing needed to be recycled into something creative. I was also translating poetry back then, so it probably had to do with that too!

In 2021, I agreed to translate some poems into French for VERSeFest, and thanks to that, I met some wonderful poets. This even led to a publication: Le Sabord (an amazing literary and visual arts journal based in Trois-Rivières) accepted my translation of Brecken Hancock’s essay “Brave in Bed” a few months later.

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

I’m still very new to this (and I don’t know why I never thought of getting acquainted with my neighbours before), but I think that getting to know the Ottawa poetry community better could lead to more translations and dialogue between the two sides of the river!

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

For many years, I have worked as a translator in downtown offices, and I must say I miss my daily walks near the river and the canal. The fact that water and nature are so close to heritage buildings, but also skyscrapers, has been an inspiration for my poems. The proximity of English and French also influence my style of writing.

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 getting more and more aware of what’s happening on the literary scene in Ottawa, and I find it all very exciting and inspiring. I hope I can contribute and become an active member of this community!

Q: What are you working on now? 

Mainly, I’m reading books and articles for my PhD, but I’m also trying to find some time to write a collection inspired by day-to-day office documents (official letters, memos, meeting minutes, etc.), with a poetic twist and childhood references!

Six Questions interview #138 : Jeremy Hanson-Finger

Jeremy Hanson-Finger was born in Victoria, BC, and currently lives in Ottawa, Ontario. A co-founder of the literary magazine Dragnet (2011-2013), his short fiction has appeared in Joyland, Monkeybicycle, and Feathertale, and his nonfiction in The Puritan and Arc.

In 2017 Invisible Publishing released his first novel, Death and the Intern, a mystery/black comedy set in the Ottawa Civic Hospital that was shortlisted for the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize in 2018.

He is now blogging about nuclear war and other end times–related topics on Medium at The Golden Age of Apocalypse.

You can find him on Twitter at @jrrrremy and email him at jhansonf at gmail dot com.

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

I moved to Ottawa in 2005 from Victoria to study Journalism at Carleton, but ended up changing to a double major in English and Communications after first year. I then moved to Toronto to work in publishing in 2010, but moved back to Ottawa in 2016 because I missed the easy access to the outdoors and the feel of the city, with all my friends being able to afford to live downtown within walking distance from each other, and because I was able to find an appealing job here outside of publishing.

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

I always enjoyed creative writing as a hobby from early childhood onward. My username on social media is “jrrrremy” because I wrote a “book” of short stories when I was around four years old called The Case of the Big Bam in which I spelled the word “were” as “wrrrr,” and after I showed my friend Luisa, she started calling me “Jrrrr.”

It wasn’t until I took a creative writing course in Grade 11 with local writer Terence Young (who is also the husband of another writer, Patricia Young) that I realized writing was something I wanted to take more seriously, and it was because of Terence’s class that I started reading modern poetry and literary fiction.

Before that I had mostly read science fiction or other genre fiction, which is still great, but Terence opened up a new world for me with his recommendations. I remember I did presentations on a book of poetry by David McFadden—I could never find it again, but I remember it had a poem about being on a plane and seeing the “terminator” line between day and night—and Bel Canto by Ann Patchett, and both of them absolutely blew me away.

Terence also had us read at a Victoria open mic and submit to The Claremont Review (the apparently now defunct Canadian literary magazine publishing young writers, not the very much funct right-wing American journal), which he had previously been heavily involved in, and that was where I had my first poems published in print.

Funnily enough, it turns out two writer friends who grew up in Ottawa, Ben Ladouceur and Catriona Wright, were also published as teens in some of the same issues as I was, along with friends from my high school class who went on to pursue creative writing as well: Andrew Battershill, his sister Claire, and film writer Dan Christensen.

I first got involved in the writing community in Ottawa through a poetry workshop with Armand Garnet Ruffo that I took in my second year at Carleton. Justin Million was in that class too, and he invited everyone to come to an In/Words open mic night at the Avant Garde Bar (In/Words being the creative writing community associated with Carleton’s English department), and that’s how I started meeting people and getting involved.

As well as attending the regular  In/Words writer’s circles, I later became the host of one of them, and Jeff Blackman invited me to be one of the co-editors of The Moose & Pussy, the literary erotica magazine he and his now-wife Kate Maxfield conceptualized.

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

Taking Armand’s workshop, attending and running the In/Words writer’s circles, working on The Moose & Pussy, and taking another fiction writing workshop with Ivan Coyote in my fourth year of undergrad set me up with a deep understanding of the editorial process that I further increased after I moved to Toronto, where I worked as an editorial assistant, production editor, and then freelance editor of nonfiction books for Wiley Canada (including some true crime, which was basically like editing fiction), as well as running the literary magazine Dragnet with Andrew Battershill.

As a result, I became very open to making sensible changes to my own work, knowing I could always return to material I liked that ended up getting cut another time in another project. Given that I was thankfully working with editors who shared my vision, Leigh Nash and Stuart Ross, I was able to see the reason for and accept the vast majority of the edits on my novel.

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

To be honest, I haven’t been entirely in the loop in the last few years for a variety of reasons, but I am ready to be more involved again now. The one thing I would say is that in Ottawa there’s much less of a focus on attending all the events and being seen and making yourself memorable to the right people than in Toronto.

Of course, meeting people is still important in any field, but here the community is small and not as tied into the publishing cycle and I guess what we now call “the discourse,” so you can meet people in your own way and at your own pace and it feels a lot more human.

In fact, here it’s totally fine that I disappeared for several years and people still remember me and want to see what I’m up to and hear what I have to say (thanks again, rob!).

Although this may not be everyone’s experience, and obviously this situation had more than one contributing factor, as soon as I left Toronto in December 2015 and stopped showing up at all the events, it felt like I immediately lost all the social capital I had built up over six years, and that nobody aside from the genuine personal friends I had made there was at all interested when my book Death and the Intern was published by Invisible in spring 2017.

Most memorably, a friend of a friend who told me in person that my book sounded fantastic, offered to review it for the major national publication they wrote for, and said I should reach out as soon as galleys were available, blew me off in about five words when I did about a year and a half later. Which evidently I am still sore about.

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?

Although I wrote it when I lived in Toronto, my novel is set in Ottawa, mostly at the Civic Hospital. I have for the most part set anything fictional I’ve written in the previous place I lived: Victoria when I lived in Ottawa, Ottawa when I lived in Toronto, and Toronto now that I live in Ottawa again.

I guess it’s just easier to see things with some distance when you are physically distant—although it means you get things wrong sometimes. I wandered around the Civic taking pictures on a trip back to Ottawa until someone in the anaesthesiologuy department (where the novel primarily takes place) called security, so I was pretty bang-on for details there, but I also said the fire hydrants in Ottawa were the wrong colour, which several people pointed out to me.

Q: What are you working on now?

In what seems to have started as a way to work through my feelings about the state of the world, about six months ago I began a blog about nuclear war and other end-of-the-world topics called The Golden Age of Apocalypse (the name comes from a great 2011 jazz fusion album by Thundercat).

I wrote one post about the overtly Christian ethics training provided to officers working with nuclear missiles in the US Air Force, which has historically had not only a large number of evangelical members and an institutional focus on converting new recruits to evangelicalism. In the post, I touched briefly on how believers in some strains of evangelicalism are not only looking forward to but actually want to hasten the apocalyptic events depicted in the Book of Revelation.

Looking into this topic more turned into a seven-post series on evangelical conceptions of the end times, and I ended up devoting the most time to exploring Christian media representations of the events of Revelation, focusing on the Left Behind and A Thief in the Night film series.

The posts kept getting longer each time and the series now totals 32,000 words, not counting the final post, which I’m still working on. Given that I already have so much material to work with, after taking a break and writing about some non-religious topics on the blog, I actually now want to try to pitch a book about the A Thief in the Night film series to ECW Press for their Pop Classicscollection.

One issue is that the alleged 50–300 million people who have seen the films in a religious context do not translate into an audience for a Pop Classics take; the books in the series are critical essays, not just extra information for “fans”.

So of the films’ viewers, I imagine only those who have left that faith might want to read a novella-length critical essay about something presented in Church as effectively a modern addendum to the New Testament.

That said, an infinitesimally tiny percentage of 50 million people is an absolute slam dunk when it comes to the prospective audience for a book by a Canadian indie publisher, so 🤷.

I’m also in an online community of writers of all kinds that some friends I met at Carleton who now primarily write film scripts, Steph Coffey and Illya Klymkiw, started earlier this year. A bunch of us took part in National Poetry Writing Month this year, during which time I wrote a few poems I liked for the first time in ages, and Jeff Blackman and Bardia Sinaee are starting a regular poetry open mic night here, so that’s added incentive to write at least one poem a month.

Members of our writing group have also committed to submitting to Taco Bell Quarterly during this reading period, which is a really good new literary magazine where you just have to shoehorn Taco Bell into your poem or story somehow and they’ll consider it, and Taco Bell is even totally fine with them existing. What a world.

Six Questions interview #137 : Sarah Feldman

Sarah Feldman’s first poetry collection, The Half-Life of Oracles, was published by Fitzhenry and Whiteside in Fall 2018, and received reviews from Jean Van Loon in Arc and from Ian People in The Manchester Review. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including Literary Review of Canada, Fiddlehead and Undercurrents: New Voices in Canadian Poetry.

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

I've lived in Ottawa for six years now. I came here to study ancient philosophy at the University of Ottawa – or, more specifically, to study ancient philosophy with Catherine Collobert. She's one of handful of Canadian experts on the philosophers who came before Plato. She's also one of the few academic philosophers in Canada who has engaged passionately with those philosophers as part of the larger "literary" tradition of their time – the world of oral poetry that they both belonged to, and reacted against.

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

I started writing in sixth grade, for the sole purpose of filling up notebooks. But my sixth grade teacher, Howard Isaacs, embarked on such a systematic and unrelenting program of praise that he not only turned me from a lazy, daydreaming student to an engaged, attentive one but also turned me into a writer, at least in the minimal practical sense: I've written daily, almost without exception, since I was eleven. It took the guidance of other writers along the way -- especially Jason Dickson and Jan Zwicky, and later Robyn Sarah -- to help me sort out what exactly I wanted to accomplish as a writer, and to figure out ways that I might try to accomplish it. 

This question actually made me squirm with shame. I've been given a lot by the Ottawa literary community, and the Canadian literary community in general, and this is a debt that I have yet to repay. First of all, I suppose that my relationship with poetry has always been relatively selfish and solitary. My book would never have found its way into print without the poets that I met along the way, but I've actually known very few poets – I've simply been exceptionally lucky in those few. Anyway, I don't think I realized that I was part of a specific, local community until I received so much unearned kindness from that community – for instance, from Jean Van Loon, who chose to review my book for Arc simply because it was by an unknown Ottawa poet. And the audiences! See, it took me a decade to find a publisher for The Half-Life of Oracles. For that reason, the emotional thrust of the poems can be a bit embarrassing for me – they reflect the perspective of a young woman, with a young woman's self-preoccupation (as opposed to my current poems, which are more in line with a middle-aged woman's self-preoccupation!) The warmth of the audiences at Tree Reading Series and Octopus Books, for instance, made the reading of these sometimes embarrassing poems possible for me (or at least it helped forestall my usual compromise when I'm reading something I've written that embarrasses me – which is to read so quickly and quietly that no one can actually make out what I'm saying.) 

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

A: I'm going to answer this question by a somewhat indirect route. One of the things that has happened to me in the four years since the publication of The Half-Life of Oracles is that I've realized that I have more poems in me. After some dismal years during which my daily writing practice was just a matter of going through the motions, I've found that there were new things that I wanted to bring together, new ways that I wanted to try bringing them together. I think that as long as The Half-Life of Oracles remained unpublished, I found it difficult to let go of it, to lay aside the need to revise the poems in that collection, along with the tendency to think of any new efforts in relation to them. In part, of course, the publication of the book made it seem a bit silly to edit the poems further (though I did not give up the habit immediately). But I also think that having people read those poems, and respond to them, both gave me the necessary distance from the poems, and also gave them back to me, new. Both of those things have, I suspect, been necessary in finding my footing again as a poet. I can accept that my relationship to poetry is always going to be fairly solitary – even by the standards of poets, I think I lean towards the less sociable end of the spectrum. And yet I think that most writers would agree that some kind of life goes out of your writing if you're really only writing for yourself. During the years when I was going through the motions of writing, I think that's what happened. I'd lost the sense that I had anything worth understanding and communicating in poetry. That's complicated, because it has to do with all sorts of things – for instance, my relationship to poetry, the kinds of things I'd used poetry to understand and communicate in the past and the kinds of things that I could imagine using it for in the future. But one major influence that the writing community has had on me is in giving me back a sense of engagement with poetry as communication (in the broadest sense of the term) and in changing that sense, giving it the increased flexibility that comes of being read deeply and insightfully by poets who are very different from me in style and preoccupations, and with whom I'd been brought into contact by the fact that we belonged to the same community. 

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? 

A: In part, I think my answer to this is the same as my answer to the previous question. But there are also some specific elements of the landscape itself that have found their way into my poems. When I lived on Vancouver Island, I would think through poems while watching the tides and the waves, so that the sea became woven into the thoughts/emotions/impressions that constellated into a poem. Here, something similar has happened with the Ottawa River (or at least the bit of it that I walk along most days); watching the formation of river ice on a day-to-day basis – all those textures and colours – that's been a new experience, and the river has probably influenced not only the imagery of my poems, but some of the rhythms.  

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

I've thought about what it is about the Ottawa writing community that could lead to the kind of generosity I've experienced here. I have theories, but I don't really have a lot to compare it against, so my theories should be taken with a pretty big grain of salt. I think maybe the Ottawa poetry community is exactly the right size. Literary communities always have to fight for survival, I guess, but maybe there are enough people in Ottawa who care about the literary community to foster the kind of welcoming, open, yet close-knit environment that is harder to sustain when the pool is too large or too small. 

Q: What are you working on now?

My current project is a collection of poems loosely structured around the concept of "katharsis". But this isn't the release from or neutralization of negative feelings implied by the familiar use of the term “catharsis.” The poems engage with the sense of “self as defilement” that I think is a frequent inheritance of individual history, but that is also part of our inheritance as human beings at this moment of ecological crisis. The poems move between, and often blur together, the sense of that defilement in its narrowly personal and its species-wide sense. They chart my ambivalence concerning the notion of a “view from nowhere”, especially as expressed in the early Greek philosophers’ ideas about the emptying out or “katharsis” (cleansing, purification) of self -- many of them focus on unresolved tensions between the desire to hold onto narrowly private feelings and needs and a desire to overcome the lineaments and limits of individual needs and values.