Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?
I’ve been in Ottawa since February 2008 when I moved here for work. I grew up in Mississauga though I did live in Blackburn Hamlet from toddler age until mid kindergarten. I went to university and worked in the Annapolis Valley (NS) for several years before heading off for a graduate degree in the UK. After finishing my MA, I worked in the UK for a year or so before returning to Canada. Then I was in Toronto for about a year before I moving to Ottawa.
Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?
I’ve written since I was little, and I’ve considered myself a writer since I had some horrid little French poem about autumnal leaves published in my elementary school newsletter. I wrote throughout high school and published occasionally before starting at Acadia University where I completed an English BA with a creative writing thesis under Dr. Wanda Campbell. I feel fortunate to have experienced that program and to get a taste of my writing being taken seriously. I helped re-establish an arts magazine at Acadia. I worked in publishing for a while. I wrote and published my own work in various places until coming to Ottawa the year that I turned thirty. My first tentative steps into the writing community were joining the local CAA poetry circle before eventually taking workshops (with you and others) in town. I then followed the tide into all the many reading series and events dotted throughout the city.
Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?
I liked the writing community in Ottawa. It was large enough to have a diversity of writers and thought/taste without it being large enough to be fragmented or pretentious. When I arrived, there were so many reading series and I could go to all of them without feeling excluded. There was a welcome in the literary community here that I didn’t find in other places.
Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?
Ottawa allows for a certain amount of playfulness because there aren’t the same sorts of strictures you’d find in larger or smaller communities. I think the direct engagement with sound poetry across the mainstream poetic community through events over the past 15 or so years – whether you vibe with it or not – impacted the community’s capacity for play and experimentation. We’re in Ontario but we’re still slightly to the side as a smaller community in comparison to areas where most of the publishing companies sit in Canada and our government town status means we are sometimes considered sleepy. There’s a lot of freedom in not being observed too closely.
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?
Ottawa expanded my reading list exponentially. It opened my brain in ways that if I had stayed in other communities – just wouldn’t have happened. Or at least much more slowly. I’m much less risk averse here and less self conscious. I feel like there are so many people who come to Ottawa for work and school despite not having deep roots here. I’ve made some deep and meaningful friendships with other writers in Ottawa. I made some crucial literary friendships in Toronto and Nova Scotia as well (and I miss those folks) but in Ottawa it just seemed there was more ballast for the overall shape of the community. I feel more rooted here despite not having deep roots in the region.
Q: What are you working on now?
I’m working on a third book of poems. My mixed genre hybrid
memoir Toxemia came out in Fall 2024 with Book*hug but I’m working on a
third poetry-poetry book. I’m interested in exploring a dualistic structure.
For one portion, something relating to lunar orbits. For the other, herbal
remedies and folk medicine. The two topics would be joined thematically at the
centre, not unlike a dos-a-dos bookbinding. I’m not sure what the result will
be or the final destination but that’s what I’m circling.
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