August Chun is a queer, Han Chinese writer, organizer, and
researcher based on unceded Ohlone land (Bay Area, California) and unceded
Algonquin land (Eastern Ontario, Canada). Their writing has been supported by Periplus,
Kearny Street Workshop, McCormack Writing Center, Sundress Academy for the
Arts, and Abode. They have been published in Seventh Wave, Prism,
and SOLRAD, and have work forthcoming in Crucial Comix and Xenolithic
Edges.
Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?
I grew up in Ottawa! I immigrated here with my family when I was very
young. We lived all over-- South Keys, Billings Bridge, Barrhaven, Kanata. I
moved away for undergrad and then lived in California for almost a decade
before moving back to Ottawa in January of this year.
Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the
writing community here?
I was really lucky to have grown up in Ottawa when there were so many
writing opportunities for youth: I was a part of the Cappies program where I
wrote some high school theater reviews, and even wrote a (terrible) play for
the Youth Infringement Festival way back in the 2010s (terrible because of my
writing, not because of the hardworking producers, stage managers, or actors).
I took writing classes with the City of Ottawa. I even submitted a really
terrible poem to Bywords as a teenager-- it was rightfully rejected, because it
was so bad!
Even though I majored in English in my undergrad, I didn’t start
seriously writing creative nonfiction or poetry until much later, after I
finished my graduate degree in LA and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area.
There, I started doing more formal writing retreats like McCormack Writing
Center (fka Tin House), and Kearny Street Workshop.
When I moved back to Ottawa earlier this year, I was pleasantly
surprised to find a beautiful little writing community, with lots of small
gathering spaces like the small press fair, the Ottawa Comic Arts Festival,
Possible World’s Object // Project Art Book Fair, and Versefest. I got to have
a wonderful little mentorship session with Cassidy McFadzean, who was Arc
Poetry’s Writer in Residence. I’ve started getting to know so many amazing
folks in the zine community, especially in the queer zine scene (shout out
Trans History & Queer Zines and Ottawaisms) and those involved in the city
(like Good Golly Zines).
Sadly I’m moving to Toronto later this year to start my PhD (not in
writing) but I feel deeply rooted to this city and its people. I hope to
continue building more relationships with the writing community. Moving back
has showered me in constant, mostly pleasant surprises as I’ve realized how
this city has changed, and how much I’ve changed: I’m finding many little
writing pockets and communities that I either didn’t know about before, or
simply did not exist. It’s a gift to find my hometown, with all of its
frustrations and annoyances, continuing to grow.
Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking
about writing, if at all?
I really reject the idea that writing is a solitary, individual
activity: I write in community. That doesn’t necessarily mean physically
writing beside another person at one table (though I love that too), rather
that I like to respond and be in conversation to what others have written, what
they’ve said, and think about how my work can contribute to movements. My
poetry, comics, and my creative nonfiction are all rooted in liberation,
organizing, and justice, and like Mariame Kaba says, “Everything worthwhile is
done with other people”. It’s what Mahmoud Darwish implores us to do in his
beautiful poem “Think of Others”.
Because the writing community is so intimate and small in Ottawa,
folks truly have to take the initiative to start their own projects. The
community here has taught me to be agile, nimble, and to just go ahead and do
things! I was so inspired by the many critical and organizing conversations
I’ve had since returning, and by Object // Project, I was inspired to be a part
of “Critical ‘Ottawa’ Studies”, which is meant to be an ongoing research
and organizing writing & art project thinking about this complicated city
at large.
I also wasn’t out as a queer, nonbinary person when I last lived here,
almost a decade ago. I was also just starting to critically examine what it
meant to live here, occupy space as a racialized person. There is such a big,
beautiful queer writing and zine community here, and to a smaller extent, a
queer BIPOC writing community. It’s healing to return and find the folks and
people I feel like a younger me really needed but didn’t know to ask for.
Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else?
What does Ottawa provide, or allow?
There’s a proximity and closeness with the Ottawa community that I
feel here-- folks are close to each other. We’re not Toronto or Montreal, sure,
but there are people here doing interesting, compelling work. Ottawa excels at
putting on tons of community events: the small press fair, Object // Project
Bookfair, Ottawa Comic Arts Festival, and on and on. There’s a feeling of
intimacy that can feel suffocating, but there’s also a comfort in finding
yourself in a smaller city like Ottawa.
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 obsessed with Ottawa. The city haunts all my writing, often
explicitly, but sometimes silently. By trade, I’m an urban planner: it’s a lens
that informs everything I write and think about. I’m constantly thinking about
the city, the land on which it was built, its histories, movements, and
struggle. When I lived in California (both LA and the SF Bay Area), I worked
and organized with people committed and building toward better futures in the
communities and excavating histories where they were raised-- it made me
homesick, and reflect on my own relationship to Ottawa as well. It really
undergrids my two intentions for writing: the first, seeking to illuminate,
analyze and invite discussion and learning; and the other, excavating parts of
my own experiences growing up.
There’s a wonderful interview in Bomb between Ryan Lee Wong and Kyle
Lucia Wu that I think about often. Ryan wrote Which Side Are You On?, a
thoughtful book that blurs the line between oral history and fiction and
features an Asian American protagonist thinking through his relationship with
his parents (both Asian American organizers and activists) and his hometown of
Los Angeles in the wake of Akai Gurley’s murder by a Chinese American police
officer. Ryan pointed to an epitaph by Walter Benjamin in Mike Davis’ City of
Quartz: “A native’s book about his city will always be related to memoirs; the
writer has not spent his childhood there in vain.”
When I first returned, I wrote endless poems about the locations I was
returning to but also encountering for the first time: a Barrhaven Wal-Mart
where I first experienced a jolt of gender dysphoria in middle school; downtown
nightclubs; federal boardrooms with Ministry staffers; protests outside City
Hall; the edge of the urban boundary in Kanata. Ottawa is a strange, weird, and
often hostile place: returning has made me reflect on the ways in which it’s
changed, but also the hidden histories I wasn’t taught growing up. It’s a big
theme in what I write about, but also, as all writing does, takes inspiration
from my time growing up.
Q: What are you working on now?
I’ve got a few different projects on the go!
-
A chapbook (or some longer project) on the
thinking through Ottawa suburbs and colonization;
-
A comic on immigration court observing in the SF
Bay Area for Crucial Comix;
-
A piece on surveillance technologies for
Contrapuntal;
-
Continuing to build out Critical “Ottawa” Studies
(please check out the Instagram to see the call for submissions!); and
-
A poem coming out in Xenolithic Edges!
