Six Questions interview #220 : Susanne Fletcher

Susanne Fletcher lives in Ottawa's south end near four car dealerships and Sawmill Creek. Her fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have been published in Bywords, flo., The New Quarterly, Existere, The Antigonish Review and others. 

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

I am originally from Vancouver Island, but I’ve lived in Ottawa for 45 years. I arrived via St. John’s, Newfoundland where I studied English lit at Memorial University. I met my husband, Chris Carton, there and he is from Ottawa so this is where we settled.

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

In 2010 I was introduced to blogging by friends. Our plan was to write about our shared experiences as adoptive parents. I posted short personal stories about family life until one day, in the middle of a family conversation, my oldest daughter said, “Don’t say anything else because mom will blog about it.” I changed topics which lead to writing micro fiction and poetry. The blogging community was extremely supportive and encouraged me to reach for a broader audience through publication. I sent out my first personal non-fiction essay to a knitting magazine who accepted it. Foolishly I thought, “Well, that was easy.” The next publication came over two years later. Bless hubris.

Up to 2016, Chris was my only reader and editor. He suggested I find local writers to share feedback on our work. That’s when I happened upon Rick Taylor and his writing workshop. Through that workshop participation I met Sharon Hamilton, Janna Klostermann, Stanley Hanna, Tamara Miller, Alexis McIsaac, Su Mardelli, Ruth Kennedy, who keep in touch and share works in progress, support and cheer each other’s creative endeavours. Janna introduced me to the Tree Reading Series in 2019 and that was when I experienced Ottawa’s vibrant poetry community for the first time. I was planning to retire in March 2020 excited to tap into this new-to-me literary community. I retired as planned at the start of the unplanned pandemic. Zoom helped maintain contact with friends, but I found it a hard medium to develop new friends or participate in launches, readings, festivals. Gradually, as things opened, I’ve attended more live events.

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

Am I the only person who fell for the myth that writers are loners? Writing is solitary work and hard, but without the support of others who understand the process I would probably have crumpled my paper and thrown away my pens a long time ago. I love celebrating other writers victories because I have a good idea what it took for them to achieve them. Likewise, their support keeps me going.

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

Can’t answer this one. My only writing reference point is 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?

The most significant impact the Ottawa writing community has had on my work is the awareness of the depth of talent in Ottawa. That knowledge makes me work harder to learn the craft. It is aspirational. But I’ve learned that I can tap into the talent more directly by reaching out to local poetry editors to help me improve.

Q: What are you working on now?

I have completed a chapbook of 10 poems. This is my first collection. The next project is fuzzy but I’m exploring Ottawa’s wooded walking trails which generally leave me feeling whole and happy after a hike. I’d like to write something joyous and invigorating about these trails and what they offer. Or maybe something completely different will occur to me as I’m out walking, which often happens. 

 

 

Six Questions interview #219 : Colin Quin

Colin Quin: I’m an emerging indigenous poet located in tropical Ottawa. A Climbing Arborist by trade, I love the captivation, the slow-motion decision making of being at extraordinary heights. My coat of arms is a quill crossed with a chainsaw. Typically, I read and write by night or a free weekend, but primarily during my long winters off. A neanderthal poet, a silly hippie kid with a coat of many colors - I’m all that and more or less. Currently working my arborist business and a series of prose poems

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

At 18 I moved here because it was far enough away from Toronto that I’d be forced into independence. There was also the promise of adventure, heading into my first year of university. There’s a lot of quality big small cities in Canada, but this one is mine. I like the way it looks at night, and when I was very young, I loved wandering this city. So, from 18-24 I lived here, (spent 8 months in Montreal but my heart wasn’t in it) then moved back to Scarborough until I was 27, then moved back again to Ottawa. Ask the locals, they always say this city drags you back. I have an idea about cities, some places just work for you. Its one of those notions that’s easier to feel than explain. I just feel lucky in this city. My life seems to succeed here. But to answer your questions, around 11 years.

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

I was a pretty emotional kid. It came naturally, I didn’t have to be showed. My parents are readers. I’ve always lived under the impression of full bookshelves. Mom encouraged me to talk about my feelings, gave me a journal as well. It occurs to me that naturally emotional people think and feel in poetic terms. They naturally go about their lives poeticizing. Inevitably I was drawn to write poetry because that’s simply how the world occurs to me. My sister was very troubled, very angry. Writing probably began with my mother’s encouragement and the desire to understand my sister. Also, I just love reading books. I have not been an active participant in the writing community for a number of years. I had to walk away from it, but now I’m reengaged. My best friend Jean (who you interviewed) we’ve been each other’s writing community for years. But now I’m truly excited to begin participating in Ottawa’s writing scene. I recently met Margo LaPierre through Jake Byrne. About a decade ago Jake and I attended Sina Queyras’ 8-month poetry workshop. I hadn’t spoken to him in some time but we met after his last visit here to promote Daddy. He was kind enough to introduce me. I’m very grateful, I feel like I’m only just getting to know the community, but they’re welcoming.

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

I was the quasi-writer-loner for a long time. Maybe I thought I hadn’t earned enough of life to really write about it. Maybe I thought you had to live on the edge to learn how to be a writer. Between University I’d go tree-planting, hitch-hike around Canada and be the remorseless bum I always believed and artist should. So, I did without community, or I thought my community was in the bush or dive-bars. Even in Montreal, when I was in their creative writing program, I decided to be independent, maybe out of a sense of superiority, but mostly because I wanted to be alone with my thoughts. In Toronto I was getting a trade, but also going to readings. But that was a community I found very hard to break through to. I enjoy alone time, perhaps unhealthily. It took years for me to find a community of writers. I’ve really only found them now. My style and narrative content developed independent of a community, maybe Jean-Sebastian was my only community. Isolation from writers did more to inform my style. Ultimately, I think it was good that I wrote independently, it was probably good for my style, and it disciplined me to think individually and without accolades. Obversely, its very much my weakness, self-awareness is key.

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

The artistic community here is small, and if you reach out, easy to touch. As a Torontonian, I can say with vindication, that it is easier to talk to a stranger in this city. They say Ottawa is the city fun forgot. I find it easy to meet people in this city, of course, you have to put in the effort. The people who want to live in this city have less pretension than a Vancouverite, they’re probably not as well paid as a Torontonian, and let’s not even compare the sex life of a Montrealer to an Ottawan. But I have always found the people of this city dedicated and determined to live here, which means committed to crafting the community here. Let’s face it, this place is Canada’s well-kept secret, and maybe we just keep the boring mask on to keep the assholes out.

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?

At this moment I’m trying to dive into local poet’s work. I’ve read one of your books Some Breaths, read Margo LaPierre’s Washing off the Raccoon Eyes and am currently reading Amanda Earl’s Beast Body Epic. I’ve got a copy of Bardia Sinaee’s Intruder on the reading list and a while back got to have a beer with Jeff Blackman who publishes a zine called These Days, which he was kind enough to include me in. I just read a little chapbook from Cameron Anstee’s Apt 9 press by Ellen Chang Richardson called Concussion, Baby. I’ve been trying to attend the riverbed reading series when I can and generally immerse myself in this community. I’m interested in reading Conyer Clayton’s new work whenever it comes in the mail. It’s a long winter, and a long reading list. Margo was kind enough to introduce me to Amanda Earl who referred me for a reader/selection committee position at Bywords. So, I’m a part of that now and very excited to be in the team. I’m trying my best to really read the poetry written in Ottawa. Will have to see how it changes my approach to work.

I kind of answered the second question before answering the first, so here’s my attempt at answering the first question. I can trace the outlines of this city in the settings of my work. Most my imaginary landscapes originate here. In more autobiographical pieces, the poem is immediately set upon say, the canal or Elgin St. Most of the youthfully impressionistic work I’ve written takes place here in this city and I swear you can feel it when read. I think part of the pull in moving back to Ottawa was the deep impression it made on me, how I felt the most like a poet here than any other place I’ve lived. So, this city, or my idea of it, is always there doing its ghostwriting in the background of my writing. To answer your question, I think the city has changed the way I work by allowing me to believe I live in a place where art, passionate love, and wild nights happen.

Q: What are you working on now?

I’m working with my amazing editor Margo LaPierre to finish up my first full length manuscript called, The Ego of a Rose. Unfortunately, during the months between April to December I’m in work mode, running my Arborist business (Climbing Bear Tree Care) and exhaustively climbing gigantic (and small - I don’t discriminate) trees. Exhaustion leaves very little to the imagination, contemplatively spent, attempts at focus result in white noise. I get the weekends, but I’m also married and love spending time with my wife and friends. That leaves me a wide-open writer’s winter. My first book of poetry, The Ego of a Rose, is an examination of a consciousness in the pressure cooker of philosophy, love, poeticizing and reminiscence. Its a book for those who want a magic potion that will take them inside the mind of an artist, especially the artist as a young person. Though I do have another project in the works called In the Words that Burnt Blackholes in your Brain - A Metaphorical Manifesto. A collection of prose poems consisting of three parts: 1.) The Poet / 2.) Of Style or The Metaphorical Analytic / 3.) The Philosopher King. This book is about 35% written and has really kicked my ass in terms of research. The bones are there, hopefully by the end of winter it can all be there.

Six Questions interview #218 : Tamsyn Farr

Tamsyn Farr lives in Wakefield, Quebec on unceded Algonquin Anishinabeg territory. Her poetry placed second in Grain Magazine's 2022 Short Grain Poetry Contest and was longlisted for the Poetry Society's 2023 National Poetry Competition and the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize.

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

I was born in Ottawa, grew up in Chelsea before it was captured by Big Hot Tub, spent most of the aughts in Montreal, then found home in Wakefield in 2017. I can hardly believe my good luck.

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

I grew up in a house full of books and wrote a lot as a kid and teenager, but stumbled around wordlessly through most of my 20s. At some point in my early 30s, I came across Firefly Creative Writing in Toronto, and I owe so much to the tender-hearted communities of encouragement they so expertly nurture at their retreats and online workshops. I started writing again in those spaces after my son was born in 2016, partly just to prove to myself that I still existed.

I’m pretty solitary and not very brave and struggle to get out much between work and motherhood and chronic obliterating dread, but Wakefield is a place full of poetry with a wonderful community of writers. There are people regularly gathering to read poetry and to write together, and we have an annual writer’s festival, and we’re home to poets whose work I enjoy and admire like Pearl Pirie and Bruce Taylor among others, not to mention a Village Poet Emeritus, Phil Cohen, whose birthday inspires an annual local festival that involves dragons and (I think) his wearing a tea cozy on his head, and Brian Doyle, who wrote the local young adult classic Angel Square and gave a writing workshop to my class in elementary school and sells his poetry chapbooks at the General Store, charmingly advertised in the local paper without much description besides being located across from the jalapenos. At this point in my life, I mostly admire these presumably lovely people and their activities quietly, from a distance.

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

It’s a cozy feeling, knowing that there are others who share this interest in language and image, other workers at the condensery. I hope to spend more time hanging out in the break room with them as my son gets older. Bring donut offerings. Volunteer for the union. They seem like good company.

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

I love this region. I love all the rocks, all the big honking ancient boulders dropped around haphazardly by glaciers, and the Gatineau Hills that apparently were once Himalaya-height. I love all the moving water, and I love the cryogenic winters. I love the white pines and eastern hemlocks. I love that so many people across the region can enjoy arts and cultural offerings in both English and French. And this may be a controversial stereotype, but I love that Ottawa tends to go to bed on the early side. Ottawa allows you to be a creative person who is also a tired person with work in the morning.

Q: Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements here? How have the area and its community, if at all, changed the way you approached your work?

This is embarrassing, but despite having grown up at the edge of the Gatineau Park, I wasn’t very interested in the natural world before settling in Wakefield. As a young person, I was in love with and sickened by people and human institutions and histories and cities, and the environment as a concept seemed kind of beside the point. Now, having lived seven springs and summers in the same log house at the edge of the same woods, slowly noticing the wildflowers’ blooming order, having spent the early pandemic trying to identify birds by their songs and trees by their bark, I find I have access to more of the presence and attention that feel so essential for poetry. Being more rooted in place has also helped me tend to my own seasons of mood and energy and productivity with a bit more faith and equanimity, and to feel a bit less lonely as I slowly get to know my neighbours, human and otherwise.

I’ve also noticed myself feeling more attached to and protective of the winter. Whereas in the city, I mostly experienced the winter as a nuisance, here the snow seems to settle over us more, and there’s a softness and safety in that, along with grief and anxiety as I notice our winters becoming milder, starting later and ending earlier. Some of that has found its  way into my work.

Q: What are you working on now?

I’m not sure. I’ve collected about 50 pages of poetry and I’m not sure if any of it is good, or if it could ever be anything like a coherent collection, but for now I’m editing it and adding to it and trying to figure out what themes are emerging. I never took English lit after high school, but am taking a Modern and Contemporary Poetry class on Coursera right now that I’m loving. I think I’m mostly trying to figure out what my jobs are—as a writer, as a parent, as a community member, in all my different roles—at this time when my energy is limited and the work needed to make a world we can all live in together seems overwhelming.

Six Questions interview #217 : Stephanie Anne

My name is Stephanie Anne, and I’m an oddball extraordinaire. Specializing in domestic horror and post-apocalyptic science fiction, I have a love for all things strange and monstrous and hope you do too. After all, what’s not to love about things that go bump in the night?

My writing assistants are Minerva, Finn, and Bubs. Unfortunately, these free-spirited felines like to sleep on the job. That is, when they aren’t stepping on my keyboard and adding extra words to my books.

If you like disturbing horror stories and unsettling tales of science-fiction, you’re in for a treat.

Stay Spooky!

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

I’ve lived in Ottawa all my life! Most of my friends and family live here, so I have no plans to leave.

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

I started writing as a hobby when I was 7-years-old, and ever since then I’ve never stopped. I always dreamed of being published, but took my writing and publishing goals more seriously in 2020. That year, I was the first employee at the company I worked for to lose my job due to the pandemic, so I used that as an opportunity to write more and become self-published.

Since I began my publishing journey during the pandemic lockdowns, I first started trying out different online writing communities. However, it was through attending book signings, author events, art markets, and conventions like Can*Con that I really started to build a healthy network of author friends. This past year, I’ve been trying out more in-person events than ever before and I’ve met some really fabulous local authors as a result.

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

It’s been inspiring! Chatting with other authors and reading their work has given me ideas for how to move forward with my self-publishing on the business and marketing side of things. But it’s also pushed me to step up my game with my own writing. Fellow writers have told me what they want to see more of, and they’ve also shared areas of improvement. Their advice and support have been tremendous!

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

I think of Ottawa as a big small town. Everyone knows everyone else, to a certain extent. For example, I was recently told to check out the work of another local author and when I pulled up their socials it showed that we had mutual friends.

And this extended community is how I got into self-publishing! When I told my husband it was something I was thinking of, he put me in touch with people he had met through non-writing communities that happened to be self-published authors. One of the authors who helped me is married to a local artist, who gave me tips on which art markets to apply to. From attending those markets, I’ve met other artists and local authors who I am now proud to call friends. And we also happened to have mutual friends between ourselves!

It’s wild how many “small world” moments I come across because we’re all just one big extended friend group.

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 actually take a bit of an opposite approach. Although a number of my characters are inspired by friends, family, and the people I meet, I try to remove Ottawa from my work. Since I write mostly horror, and my goal is to make readers uncomfortable, I want each reader to feel like the horrors could happen to anyone, anywhere.

That being said, the LRT system has been a source of inspiration for one of my current WIPs. So even though I try to keep the location vague, I’m sure someone will spot the references to our transit system in my writing at some point.

Q: What are you working on now?

My main focus for the next couple of months is the edits for my two upcoming novels: The Tunnel and Modern Hauntings.

The Tunnel is a bleak cosmic horror story about a group of teenagers who get lost in an abandoned LRT– I mean, subway tunnel. And Modern Hauntings is a gruesome ghost story inspired by paranormal investigation TV shows.

I’m also finishing up draft 1 of my novella GOATS. It’s a trippy folk horror story all about grief and revenge, so writing it has been both mentally and emotionally exhausting. Because of that, it’s taken a lot longer to finish than I initially thought, but I’m happy with how the story has developed so far.

 

Six Questions interview #216 : A.L. MacDonald

A.L. MacDonald is a mechanical engineer who writes from Ottawa, Ontario where he lives with his wife and two children. He has work featured in an anthology Beyond Human: Tales of the New Us by Lower Decks Press, and microfiction featured in two Serious Flash Fiction Anthologies published by Ben Warden. His debut novel is the self-published science fiction tale Orbiting Fortunes. In his spare time he is found in his workshop creating mad inventions or puttering about on his ebike, imagining that he is an intergalactic courier.

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

Let's see…adding everything up, I've been in Ottawa since 1991 when my father was posted here. Or, as I like to put it, I got here about the same time as the Sens did. There have been intermissions for some of high school, university and then a few years of work out of town so my total “boots-on-the-ground” time is only 22 years.

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

It's a mess. I've fumbled around with writing since middle school, filling desk drawers with stories that were only read by people who were not quick enough to escape. Through my twenties and thirties I submitted numerous rejected short stories to various literary magazines. I only made the jump to getting my work “out there” when a good friend of mine, local author MK Schultz, self-published with iUniverse and then KDP. I was determined to do the same. I got onto Twitter to connect with other authors, and met a few at events here in town like the Ottawa International Writers Festival, and the Orleans Comic Book and Novelty Show, and the Horror Author Event in Stittsville.

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

The number one reaction is a sense of deep panic. There is so much happening! I need to get moving! I need to get into events! I need to write more! I need to write stuff that is GOOD! I need to connect with readers! There is so much to do all at once and it feels like a large convoy passing by that I want to jump on to. At the same time, what I have seen and the authors I've talked to have shown me how possible it is, and that has been very encouraging.

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

There is a lot of support here. So many book shops are willing to host author events and are even proud to make “local author” displays. There are festivals that draw in authors from quite a ways away, like the ones I mentioned, and there is also the Ottawa Small Press Book Fair. Just goes to show that not only is there a vibrant writing community here, but it is large enough to have an entire spectrum from far-and-wide markets to local small presses.

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?

This community is where I met a number of my beta readers and my cover designer. I will always consider Ottawa as the place I “started”.

Q: What are you working on now?

Two things - well, three. Yeah, I'll just go over the three big ones. I am revising my second science fiction book, which will absolutely have a title at some point, I am compiling a book of my best 250-character micro fiction stories that I deleted from X before they could be stolen for training Grok, and I am unsuccessfully pushing off outlining my next novel.

 

Six Questions interview #215 : Jean-Sebastien Grenier

Jean-Sebastien Grenier is a furniture maker by trade and a poet by passion. When he's not too busy making wigs out wood curls, you might find him doused in moonlight while ballroom dancing with lobsters over the ocean floor. He's been published before in Ottawa Arts Review, Pace Magazine, Tint Journal, Havik, Bywords, and will be in Arc Magazine's 2025 Spring issue as an honourable mention for the 2024 Diana Brebner Award. He thanks you for being you.

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

Just shy of two decades into my life, Ottawa was never more than a family visit. The Ottawa area had me, so as to get closer to the question: Hawkesbury (where I was born), Carp, Casselman, these places are where my extended family have always been.

Pardon me, but we’re going on a bit of detour. Hold on.

Montreal was a blip of my early upbringing to seven. Sometime then, my mother got a flair for a New York kind of work. I’m not sure what happened with my father, I don’t remember saying goodbye.

We landed in New Jersey, eventually in Georgia, and then Illinois, and then after that in California. I lived in many different cities in these many different states.

Nineteen-years-old, and living by an American-idolized beachside, I found myself living alone, in a broken relationship, working two jobs, and rationing meals to save money for what?

“Hey...” I thought to myself...“I don’t have to do this alone.”

So I broke all of it off to be with my grandparents in rural Ontario, worked a job at Canadian Tire for a year, and locked myself into Thompson Residence at University of Ottawa. Yes, Ottawa was the common denominator of distance between all my relatives. My mom eventually moved to Ottawa too which was a good step forward for us, but that’s a different story.

Doesn’t stop there.

Five years later, degree earned with no appeal to a job through it, I found myself jaded, exhausted...yearning for an exaggerated kind of move. I chose Vietnam. For some reason I decided to fall in love with a visual arts gal as soon as I made these plans, and I was lucky that she was brave enough to ask me to join.

We’re married now, thank you.

And yes, we’re almost there. We went from Vietnam to Thailand to Malaysia in a full year. Good ol’ Canadian nostalgia hailed us back and we landed with my mother-in-law near Cape Breton. That was a good year, but boredom settled in fast. We bee-lined it to British Columbia via drive and that was a great year. Although we missed family all the while. Maybe community is a better word for it?

Or, simply put, we were ready to build a home. Ottawa had always been home. Our latest stint here has endured since 2020. Ottawa’s been good to us. Always has. I think we're here to stay.

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

It was a highschool fling between music and the girls I found beautiful.

When I was fifteen, six of my friends all pitched in together to buy me a guitar. A red Epiphone Dot. I learned it quick, and I got good enough for,  maybe, most others to enjoy it. I started writing love songs soon as I could. Knowing myself now, that was inevitable.

I wrote the songs, impressed the pretty girls and had good times. Time passed and the music faded, so did many romances...but the words kept getting made. Maybe the music embedded itself in the poems and so the guitar was no longer needed?

I didn’t have a proper “writing” community until university...

My best friend, Colin Quin, and I, we first met as roommates in Thompson Residence at University of Ottawa. It was a casual sentence at first as we got to know each other, “Oh I write poetry too.” Doesn’t matter who said it first. It passed by in those first few days and there were too many people to meet and too many thoughts to break our brains with. I remember we used to study together in adjacent cubicles...but separately because we had different classes. We made a habit of studying well until 2am every night. Getting back to our dorm, The Twilight Zone was what we fell asleep to most often. But somewhere in between the repetition of that tradition, we started sharing little poems we were writing. We started staying up until 4am over wine and poetry... I can’t remember how it started. We were so hot headed at the time that we even got competitive about it...poetry, philosophy...what we were learning. It was the making of a great start to a long friendship if you ask me.

He’s been my community in Ottawa. Yeah, we took that creative writing course that one time in third year with Seymour Mayne.

Colin’s always been better at staying in touch with the writing community. He goes out and meets folk of the form. Likely, most open mics he’s committed to, he invites me because he wants support. Most likely, I read because if he’s doing it, I’d like to be a brother along side him doing it. His extrovertedness brings the best poet out me.

Thirteen years have passed now. We still look over each others’ work. We still mull through it together. I’m grateful to have a brother in life and these written words.

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

I’ll segue into an anecdote because I don’t know how else to answer this question.

I recall once, Colin was enthralled with Hagelian metaphysics. I can’t recall the philosophical principles as he relayed them exactly, but I do recall the image his telling impressed on me...imagine you’re a child lying on your back looking up through a glass tabletop. Now imagine you notice a caterpillar is journeying across. You’re looking up at its belly. You notice the head first, then the next node of its body, then the next and the next. Accord. It doesn’t stop. Each node of the caterpillar’s stomach is tattooed with a face. Each subsequent face is the same, but not quite the same face. It’s a face in motion. So the caterpillar patters along and you’ve gotten a glimpse at animation. Your ability to reflect alone lets you know that it was actually a glimpse in being reality and into its scaffolding. Add in the spice of time and you realize even the scaffolding is shapeshifting into another arrangement. Before you know it you’re curious enough to start look for jazz dancing skeletons. Let it go now, it’s too late. Maybe that’s what metaphysics are? I’m mixing my interpretation with his at this point...

Anyways, Colin’s philosophical rants seemed to inspire these kind of images more often than not for me.

I do agree now, every poem operates by its own metaphysics.

Every poet ought know the rules of their individual poems and individual poems deserve the love of their own rules.

More relatable perhaps:

I’ve been impressed me with the idea that if a poem is unfocused, try to write your thesis in a single haiku. Focus. That’s belaboured from The Beats. Sylvia Plath’s tersets also work well.

If you don’t know where else to go with a poem and it’s not quite there, write it in philosophical form. And then transcribe it back. And so on and so forth.

None of all this was expressed in specific words or any one conversation. It’s been conversation amongst us across time. as odd and personal as poetry. That’s community...something shared.

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

I haven’t explored poetry in elsewhere circles, despite my repertoire of lived places...except that one time I tried to start an open mic in Antigonish (quick hiatus via covid). What I can say is, particularly in Ottawa, I’ve never had any obstacle of opportunity if I felt like reading, or learning others’ work. Ottawa is ripe for poets. It’s always been a town that loves art, and poetry is a certain part of its pendulum swing...however subtle.

Note: I’m still waiting for someone to frame their poetry in such a way that it has the same stopping power that visual art has always had.

After all, Ottawa does love its galleries.

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?

Yeah. There’s one piece, “A Young Man’s Ottawa Zeitgeist”, it’s a micro-epic poem celebrating the camaraderie Colin, Marty, and I held as we hopped bar to bar while we tried to keep ourselves from falling apart. We twenty-year-olds were going through some kind of frenetic, second puberty. We just wanted to be something more, but couldn’t. If anyone cares, it was published by a California college magazine called Havik. If anyone wants to read it, just email me and I’ll send it to you, JGrenier91@gmail.com

What inspired the poem was Marty’s break-up. That girl cheated on him. To share a little love in his hard time, I wrote a chapbook for him alone and that poem mentioned above was sandwiched between five other poems. Handmade. The cover featured an 8-bit like digitized picture of him. Camping bag filled out like its designer meant it to be, he held his thumb out to an Saskatchewan highway while we were both hitchhiking from his cousin’s place to Williams Lake, British Columbia for a treeplanting season.  

Making that book for him showed me how much I liked making books as a craft in itself...almost as much as making poems.

Q: What are you working on now?

Figuring out new ways to make my wife laugh in the day to day.

But seriously, my next book is getting close to portraying an imagistic pantheon of my specific fears. I’d like to capture what it is about simple observation that can turn old demons into god-like alters. Good omens. It’ll start with the journey of climbing a mountain to meet the tree my father hung himself from. I’ll meet my fears along the way, and they’ll try to infect my fondest memories, they’ll get uglier with each step. But there’s redemption at the end. Rilke’s Duino Elegies is a huge influence there.

Those fears have been...especially in a wintery still. The first draft is done, which is good, but I look forward to ripening it into something sweeter than it is.

Before getting onto that, I owe it to myself to finish teaching myself how to bind a book from scratch. A folio is a noun fallen out of favour. I’m finding I love the choice of colour for a stitch alone. My first book is close to its last draft, and it’ll be a family copy made for me alone. Hardwood cover etched via laser. Navy blue book cloth for the inner lining. I’m thinking auburn for the stitch. Maybe. Once I’ve got it down, I’ll bind Colin a copy of his book as a nice surprise.

If I ought be honest: the bulk of my attention in juggling life has me on making up a business plan. I’ve been more a multi-disciplinary artist than a writer in the proper sense of the word. I draw when I feel, good or not, I play music, good or not, I make things period. After all of it, my chosen trade is an ideal fusion of art and technique...for me anyways. It feels like a good fusion between art and acceptable technical execution. If I’m working to expand into a business where I can personally midwife others’ visions for pieces of furniture that mean something in their lives...then things are good. Furniture (especially chairs) has always been the negative space holding up all our human endeavours. That’s as easy to see as a painting. I wish poems were as easy to see in plain space.

Despite all these tangents, I guess I’m writing this because I end up writing even when I’ve given up on it. It’s just my head resting on a familiar pillow. I’m just glad I end up making a pillow when I’m tired enough... poem or not. Thanks for reading.

Six Questions interview #214 : Rafia Mahli

Rafia Mahli was born in Ottawa in 1974, and spent her formative years in the city. A first-generation child of immigrants to Canada, she’s been published in Ottawa Magazine, and guerilla magazine. You can find her work at www.rafiamahli.com

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

I was born and raised in Ottawa. I’ve lived in Ottawa my whole life, except for stints away for learning and travel. I studied art in Halifax, graduating in ’96, and worked as a sculpture apprentice in the US. My parents are immigrants from the Middle East, and it’s a long and involved story as to how I got here. One I’m working on telling, actually.

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

I was drawn to writing as a child. I used to stare at my dad’s books, fascinated at the thought of what was inside of them, before I could read. I was a crazy reader throughout my youth, and then I got into writing letters, when people still did that sort of thing. I think there’s something to Malcolm Gladwell’s idea of 10,000 hours of practice as bestowing mastery in a discipline. I did the math, and I easily surpassed that number in terms of hours of writing letters. I solemnly believe that writing letters is what helped me to develop my own voice from a young age. It started with talking to my friends on a page, so in a way, I’ve always seen the reader as a friend.

I took part in a local writer’s conference when I was a little kid, maybe 9 or 10, writing a story for it. I’m sure the story was awful—can’t remember what the prompt was, but it was painful to write—but that was my first sense that this was something real that people did, a life path.

I spent most of my adult life pursuing other artistic paths: fine art, sculpture, graphic design. But a shift into technical writing for employment was the spur that got me back into a writing practice, something that seemed to kick into gear during the pandemic.

Writing is an outlet, and a way to locate myself at any point or place in time. Something about poetry feels connected to a very natural bubbling up of emotions, reflections, ideas; to the power of individual words and the cadence of language, and this has come back to me recently in a very definite way.

Writing feels like something I’ve worked at developing, and something that is innate, that’s always just been there.

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

I’ve really yet to connect to the community, aside from attending talks or bumping into people in social contexts and knowing they’re involved in the broader writing community here. It’s been a more ambient interaction than a deliberate one. But I hope for that to shift.

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

I think what Ottawa provides to me is a fertile home. Creative people need variety, we thrive on it, but then we need to be able to retreat and just go do our work. There is a sense of being shielded from a spotlight that you might feel in other places, so you can just focus on expressing what you need to express. I feel very protective of this city and critical of it; I’m not blind to its faults, but I’m also very aware of the benefits of living here, and I feel a sort of defensive need to guard those things, because they’re hard to find in other cities. I think having the safety of that shield helps you to be more risk taking, to do things without the worry of anyone watching you 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?

It’s difficult not to be somehow of the place you’re from, especially if that place has been the dominant context of your life. A lot of what I find myself mining now comes from my upbringing, and my adolescence growing up in this city. I hated it, and was desperate to get away, and then a few years later I was happy to be here again, and to feel like I understood it. I was of the place and it was of me, too. But I’m also not of it, being a first-gen immigrant, but it’s a safe place from which to unpack and understand that kind of dislocation, which I’m feeling a lot more of these days.

Q: What are you working on now?

There are a lot of poems coming out of me from that reexamining of my upbringing in this city. I’m working on stories and a book about my family that I’m starting to plot and work on; it’s an absolutely crazy story that needs to be told. And I’m starting to post things to a personal website, essays and creative non-fiction, I pretty much want to be doing it all.