Six Questions interview #35 : Nadine McInnis

Nadine McInnis is the author of six books of poetry, one book of literary criticism on the poetry of Dorothy Livesay and two books of short stories.  She is a two-time winner of the Ottawa Book Award, for The Litmus Body and for her most recent book, Delirium for Solo Harp, and has been short-listed for many literary awards through the years, including the Pat Lowther Award for Two Hemispheres, the Frank O’Hara International Short Fiction prize for Blood Secrets, the Danuta Gleed Award for Quicksilver, the Re-Lit Award,  National Silver Medal for Poetry from the Canadian Authors Association and the People’s Choice Award. 

Q: How long were you in Ottawa, and what first brought you here? What took you away?

Ottawa was home for most of my life.  My father was in the military when I was a child so we moved up and down the corridor of Belleville, Toronto and Ottawa through my childhood.  We settled in Ottawa for good when he left the military. I went to high school and university there, then left for northern Saskatchewan where I lived on Thunderchild Reserve for two years, then on a farm outside of Livelong for two years.  My Saskatchewan years were very formative for me as a poet, with my first book, Shaking the Dreamland Tree, being written there and published by Coteau Books.  I then returned to Ottawa to do a Masters and to write while my children were pre-schoolers.  I stayed for another thirty-some years, working, writing, and enjoying everything the city offers before moving to Chemainus, Vancouver Island in the summer of 2019.  My daughter was always drawn to the west, perhaps because she was born in Saskatchewan.  She seems settled in Vancouver and once she had a baby, I wanted to be closer. Plus my husband and I are big hikers and we can do that year round on the island. And I was parched for access to salt water.  My background is Nova Scotian, for many generations.  We also own a house on the island of Grand Manan in the Bay of Fundy so it was a bit of a toss-up whether we would settle more permanently east or west.  As I’ve gotten older I need to be near the ocean.

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

I started writing poetry, quite obsessively, when I was 16.  The 1970s were the era of great singer/songwriters so poetry seemed to be the current that drove the whole era.  My family was not literary oriented at all so high school teachers were important for providing books and even reading my adolescent musings.  When I was 19 I met Dorothy Livesay who was writer-in-residence at the University of Ottawa.  She asked me to come to Winnipeg to be her assistant.  My two summers with her in Winnipeg really consolidated my knowledge of Canadian poetry and the determination and grit it would take if I wanted to follow the same path.  I attended the Banff Centre for the Arts when I was 20, which further deepened my knowledge and practice.  It wasn’t until my return to Ottawa after Saskatchewan that I met other publishing writers in Ottawa.  I went to a Carleton University International Women’s Day poetry circle in 1986 where I met Susan McMaster and Ronnie Brown.  I think it was Susan who invited me into a workshop group where I met quite a few other poets.  That group included Sandra Nicholls, John Barton, Chris Levinson, Blaine Marchand, Stephanie Bolster later on.  Sandra is still a close friend.  John and I took on co-editing Arc magazine from Chris Levinson.  That’s a great way to read a wide variety of poetry from all over the country.  We also did quite a bit of solicitation for themed issues. 

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?

That first decade back in Ottawa were my most intense years of poetic growth and practice.  I would say that my cohort at the time were committed to emotional and realistic poetry rather than language-based or theoretical poetry.  I’m not sure I would have followed the latter path anyway, but the emotional core of poetry and the commitment to clarity and even to story within poetry reinforced what mattered most to me and probably were also significant in my development as a writer of short fiction.  Short fiction followed poetry by at least a decade with my first book, Quicksilver, published when I was in my forties. 

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

Ottawa has a varied and active literary community recognized across the country, both English-language and French-language.  It’s a centre for the country and also off to the side, which I think suits writers very well.  Even the landscape of Ottawa is a kind of borderland, with the Gatineau Hills thrusting Canadian Shield onto the valley flats where Ottawa is built.  The three rivers couldn’t be more different in character.  The community is like that too… many different threads, but private enough that writers can weave their own styles.  I like that Ottawa isn’t the centre of publishing and even that it has a reputation for being boring.  It’s not a show-offy kind of place.  Deals may not be made there, but that leaves certain kinds of writers quite free.  It’s also small enough that one person can make a difference.  You’re a good example of that, rob.  Your commitment to small-press publishing and profiling Ottawa writers has enriched the city for many years.

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?

Ottawa’s temperament probably suits my writing quite well.  I don’t like to be in the spotlight and the emotion in my writing underpins everything but isn’t a shout-out-loud kind of energy.  I like layers, of language, of metaphor, of psychological truth.  I like conflicts between the unconscious and the conscious, between the body and the mind.  I like how nothing can be resolved but recognition of those layers brings richness to life.  I also used the landscape of Ottawa extensively in my writing.  Rivers figure in both my poetry and fiction. And I do miss the literary community in Ottawa. I was in and out of different writing groups through the years, both in poetry and fiction.  Now that I’m retired from teaching at Algonquin College, I would have been able to really enjoy all the readings and festivals there, but one gains and loses all through life. 

Q: What are you working on now?

Retiring and moving are great disruptors I must say.  I’m working on both poems and short stories at the moment but it’s hard to say that they are coalescing around particular themes. I seem to be writing poems about trees, which I guess is appropriate to Vancouver Island.  The stories, strangely, are all set in the west so far and are about young people and how difficult it is to find your way these days.  They are both rural and urban in setting, which is also appropriate.  Usually writing lags by years before new landscapes enter but I’m already in BC in the stories. 

Six Questions interview #34 : Mary Lee Bragg

Mary Lee Bragg spent her childhood in rural southern Alberta and was educated in Calgary. She now lives in Ottawa, where she had a career in the public service focussing on official languages. Her award-winning poetry and short fiction have appeared in literary magazines and ezines in Canada, the United States and Cuba. She has published the novel Shooting Angels and the poetry chapbooks How Women Work and Winter Music. Her first poetry collection, The Landscape That Isn’t There, was  published in 2019.

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

I’ve lived in Ottawa since 1981. I moved here with my family to take a job with the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages, and ended up working there for 20 years. I had worked in regional offices of what was then the Department of Secretary of State, but regional jobs tend to involve a lot of travel, and promotional opportunities are limited. I had a young family and a lot of ambition, so Ottawa looked like a good place to work and live. The work was good, but after almost 40 years here, I have to say the living is even better.

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

I’ve always been an avid reader, and interested in writing.  The first poem I wrote, when I was in Grade Two, rhymes the words “snow” and “blow”, “white” and “night”. That was the first of a many poems about the weather. I met my husband, Colin Morton, while we were working on the university poetry magazine at the University of Calgary in the 1960s.  Both of us hung around with W. O. Mitchell, who was the writer in residence at the time. I started keeping a journal around then, and have kept it up ever since.

For the first few years after we moved to Ottawa, I was very focused on my career. Colin got acquainted with other poets through the Tree reading series and Christopher Levenson’s poetry writing group. I met Susan McMaster, Blaine Marchand, John Barton and other writers through him. Colin and Susan McMaster, with her brother Andrew McClure, formed a performance poetry group called First Draft. I attended many of their performances, chanted in a few choruses and wrote a few bits which they performed once.

I read a lot of fiction, so that’s what I opted to write.  In the mid-Eighties, I started taking fiction writing courses through the University of Ottawa, and did in-residence workshops with Diane Schoemperlen at the Kingston School of Writing, and with Frances Itani at Bridgewater. Those classes spun off into workshops with members like Nadine McInnis and Sandra Nicholls. In the early 90s, one of my short stories won a prize from the Ottawa Citizen, after which I almost immediately switched to writing novels. During the 1990s, I wrote three novels, including Shooting Angels, which was published in 2004.

My writing life took a turn after I retired from the public service in 2006.  I was fully prepared to sit down and write another novel, but somehow the ideas and the words just didn’t flow.  Some time in this period, I wrote an email to Susan McMaster in which I talk about where we are in our lives, and compare us to peonies.  She replied that with a few line breaks and some tweaks, that email would make a beautiful poem. I worked on it, and the email turned into the poem “Peony Moment”, which appears in the chapbook How Women Work. I looked again at my journal, and my contributions to online discussion lists, and realized that short forms have a lot to offer, and that I was already working in them.

I joined Barbara Myers’s poetry group and took a workshop with Miller Adams. There I got better acquainted with Frances Boyle and Lise Rochefort, and joined the group they had started, the Ruby Tuesdays. 

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

I’ve been working with the Rubies’ since 2012, and have found it a great way to actually finish the short bits that I write. Not only finish, as in polish, but submit for publication, and collect into a book. The Rubies have provided a great incentive and structure to take the work to the next level. A lot of that comes from watching other people struggle with their material, and talking about the process. Working within a group where there is consistent feedback about my own work and an opportunity to see other people’s work in process, I’ve gotten to appreciate how poetry connects us to one another.

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

I don’t have a good idea of what’s happening anywhere else, except in Victoria, where we spent the last two winters.  I think Ottawa has an advantage in its size: the community is large enough to be diverse, but not so large that it’s divided and factional.  I hear writers in Ottawa express a strong sense of responsibility toward the literary community, in comments like “Whose turn is it to run Tree?”

Ottawa also provides writers with opportunities to make a living writing. Not necessarily creative writing, but there’s a lot to be said for learning to string coherent sentences together, even if it is in deathless prose like Language of Work in the National Capital Region.  (Which remains my most-read publication, ever.)

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 novel Shooting Angels is set in Ottawa on the eve of the 1995 referendum in Quebec. I put all the Ottawa things in it: Parliament Hill, skating on the canal, going to the cottage in black fly season.

Two years ago, I had congestive heart failure and had open-heart surgery at the Ottawa Heart Institute. In the lead-up to surgery, I was locked down as tightly as we all were at the beginning of the Covid pandemic. No stores, no restaurants, no movies, stay away from children, no stress, no alcohol, caffeine, smoking, etc. I couldn’t attend meetings of the Rubies, but wrote a series of poems about the experience, which I shared with them online.  That suite of poems is now the centre of my collection, The Landscape That Isn’t There. Writing those poems, and sharing them with the Rubies and with Colin, Susan and Blaine helped me keep calm and focused during a very difficult time.

I don’t know whether Ottawa has influenced my approach to my work. I’m not sure I’d be writing if I weren’t in an environment full of writers.  I’m quite sure I wouldn’t be publishing if I weren’t in a group like the Rubies.

Q: What are you working on now?

I have realized that retirement is not the time for me to take on a long project, like a novel.  I needed to switch gears and write poetry in this phase of my life at least partly because you can finish a poem fairly quickly. The novel tends to be structured and planned: you start out with a clear idea of where you want to end and proceed to go there. Poetry is more open-ended and invites you to engage in what’s going on around you now. Writing poetry allows me to find out what I REALLY want to write about.

The short answer to this question is: poems.

Six Questions interview #33 : Colin Morton

Ottawa poet Colin Morton has published over a dozen books and chapbooks ranging from visual and sound poetry to historical narratives. His other work includes stories and reviews, a novel (Oceans Apart) and an animated film (Primiti Too Taa). www.colinmorton.net.

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

A: I lived in Ottawa briefly after graduation, in 1973-74, but landed here for good at the end of 1981.

 

I had recently finished a novel for my M.A. thesis in Edmonton, and followed my wife, Mary Lee Bragg, as the federal civil service moved her from Edmonton to Vancouver and finally to Ottawa. I was writing another novel and kept at it until offered a job as editor at the Department of Labour. After substitute teaching in Vancouver high schools, this looked like  un bon boss pi un job steady, so I stayed in it for a decade, till 1993. I offered to work from home, but they weren’t ready for that yet, so I quit and went freelance.

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

How I first got involved in writing is a long story for another time. Writing post-apocalyptic novels was a popular summer vacation pastime when I was in my teens, as I’m sure it is today. After a virtual encounter with a Yorkville hippie in 1965, I was converted to poetry.

When I arrived in Ottawa in 1981, I had finished a long apprenticeship and just published my first book of poetry, In Transit, with Thistledown Press. As I had done when I moved to Vancouver (at Mona Fertig’s Literary Storefront), I went out to poetry readings and introduced myself to the local writers. An early opportunity was a Tree reading where the featured reader was Christopher Levenson, whose first collection had been also been called In Transit. Chris invited me to join his monthly critique group, where I met many of the writers who have become my lifelong friends. Among them were Blaine Marchand (who also worked at Place du Portage, where we shared ambulatory lunches for years) and Susan McMaster (who when in Edmonton had founded the magazine my wife Mary Lee worked on, Branching Out). Soon, Susan invited me to collaborate in some of the word/music projects of the multi-media group First Draft, projects that led to musical and theatrical performances across the country.

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

I was young. Everything influenced my thinking about writing. The Ottawa writing community was welcoming, and it provided me opportunities to realize ideas I had been having about sound and visual poetry. I first began creating concrete poems in Ottawa back in 1973, and a chapbook of them, Printed Matter, was published by Monty Reid (then still in Alberta) in 1982. But only when I began working with First Draft did I get to explore the possibilities for performance and collaborative creation. Performance art was catching on in Ottawa in the 80s (with Dennis Tourbin and Paul Cuillard, among others), and First Draft’s work fit in well at venues like SAW Gallery and Gallery 101. It was through First Draft, via the CBC, that I got to collaborate with Ed Ackerman on the animated film Primiti Too Taa,  which is still showing at festivals 30 years later.

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

As I’ve said, Ottawa was a welcoming community when I arrived, and I think that is still true for poets moving here now. Cliques and rivalries aren’t as prevalent here as in larger centres where, perhaps, the stakes seem higher. Yet there’s a lot of activity, compared to other small cities, distinct groups with their own aesthetic directions. Maybe this isn’t unique to Ottawa – how could it be? But with people (in normal times) moving here from all over, at a moment in their lives when they are ready to start anew, try new things, poetry is bound to result. There’s a community of young poets in Ottawa. I’m not close to it, but I sense, and hope, that they are encouraging each other to take risks and aesthetic leaps in their work. That’s the way it was for me.

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 was impressed with many of the young poets I met in the 80s – John Barton, Nadine McInnis, Sandra Nicholls – many of them, like me, newcomers to Ottawa. I probably should have known, when my micropress Ouroboros published them in the anthology Capital Poets, that I’d be stepping on a few toes and hurting feelings. The book is still a good read, but it elicited angry letters to the editor and complaints, some valid, from those left out. I simply wanted to publish poems I liked and didn’t think I had a responsibility to make my anthology a comprehensive roundup of Ottawa’s poets. To their credit, my critics responded vigorously by publishing their own Ottawa anthologies. The best of these, Symbiosis, edited by Luciano Diaz, along with its sequel Symbiosis in Prose, showcased the diversity of Ottawa’s writing scene.

Q: What are you working on now?

I’m writing short poems, sometimes gnomic or ironic, sometimes vernacular and loose. I keep reminding myself to “relax into it.” I don’t have a project, don’t put expectations on myself. Often I begin with a phrase or a line and see where the next line or phrase takes me. I’m led by sound and syntax as much as meaning. I’m told it’s my voice and it’s recognizable. I’m writing sentences. Sentences and lines. Together and in counterpoint.

I do have a manuscript of new poems, and I’m trying to imagine a Selected.