Born in
Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city,
rob mclennan currently lives in
Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with
Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction,
he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa
Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and
2017. In March, 2016, he was inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. His
most recent poetry titles include
A halt,
which is empty (Mansfield Press, 2019),
Life
sentence, (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019) and
the book of smaller (University
of Calgary Press, 2022),
a title now available to pre-order. An editor and publisher,
he runs
above/ground press,
periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics and
Touch the Donkey.
He is editor of
my (small press) writing
day, and an editor/managing editor of
many
gendered mothers. In spring 2020, he won ‘best pandemic beard’ from Coach
House Books via Twitter, of which he is extremely proud (and mentions constantly).
He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University
of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at
robmclennan.blogspot.com
Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought
you here?
I was born at the Ottawa Grace (two blocks away from where I run
The Factory Reading Series), so I suppose here is where I emerged, although not
necessarily where I began. Adopted through Cornwall Children’s Aid at ten
months of age, I was raised on a dairy farm near Maxville, less than an hour’s
drive from where I was born, and from where I am now. After high school, I ended
up in Ottawa after I couldn’t get into Concordia University for the Creative Writing
Program back in 1989; I was accepted by Henry Beissel into the program, but I was
missing an OAC credit, so the university wouldn’t let me in. I told my parents I
was coming here to attend Carleton University, but I was really taking the
opportunity to follow my girlfriend. My experience with Carleton barely lasted
a few weeks. A little more than a year later, our daughter Kate was born.
Q: How
did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community
here?
I’m not entirely sure. I had been interested in “making,”
whether painting, drawing, short stories and poems from a younger age, spending
the bulk of my teenaged years engaged with all sorts of forms of creation. Around
grade ten, I entered a social group of folk interested in some of the same
things, which helped solidify some of my directions. Within a year, our English
teacher, Bob MacLeod, had even helped us start a ‘zine to showcase some of our
flailing attempts at poetry and short fiction, and he later mentored many of us
through the informally-held Writer’s Craft OAC (grade thirteen) course. We never
actually had to meet for classes, but instead, hand in thirty pages of material
by the end of the term (I think I handed in one hundred and thirty pages of
material). My eventual ex-wife was reading, almost exclusively, Canadian
literature at that point, so she introduced me to multiple books by Michael
Ondaatje, George Bowering, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Lawrence, Alice Munro, Timothy
Findley, Robertson Davies, etcetera. If you want to write, she told me, you
have to read. So I read.
I remember
my first interactions with Ottawa writers and writing circa 1990 came through Lowertown
Ottawa’s Orion Reading Series and The TREE Reading Series, back when the latter
was still held at the Glebe Community Centre. I remember meeting Karen Massey,
and being very aware that we seemed the only two in attendance below forty,
although who is to know if that was actually the case. I remember interacting
with Ottawa poets Mark Frutkin, Juan O’Neill and Christopher Levenson and even catching
a Steven Heighton feature, as well as attending some of the informal workshops
O’Neill was hosting. I remember attending some of John Metcalf’s readings in Hintonburg
through Magnum Books: I saw both John Newlove and Irving Layton read there in
1993. I remember thinking it funny that Layton read there, accidentally, on “International
Women’s Day,” a fact that seemed not entirely appropriate, given his considerations
of women. Newlove was launching his selected poems with The Porcupines’ Quill,
which I asked him to autograph. I handed him an envelope of chapbooks, naturally
(he responded a few weeks later with a thank-you postcard—“If I didn’t thank
you for the books, I do”—and a hardcover copy of The Cave).
I was
still hoping to find a creative writing class of some sort. I wasn’t interested
in taking a literature degree at Carleton for the sake of a writing class,
which I was told I couldn’t attend until I was in third year (this reinforced my
decision to leave Carleton). In basically what would have been my third year in
Ottawa, I did take the creative writing class offered by Mark Frutkin (replacing
Seymour Mayne during a sabbatical year) at the University of Ottawa; a class
that also included Joseph Dandurand, Rhonda Douglas and Anne Ecco. The class didn’t
necessarily help my writing improve per se, but it did prompt me to write more,
and more often. I was already spending a good amount of time buried in the on-campus
Canadian poetry shelves in the library.
I had
started producing chapbooks in 1992, and had begun above/ground press by July,
1993. At the first above/ground press launch on July 9th, I was
approached by the outgoing editor of The Carleton Arts Review to take
over the journal, and I ended up co-editing that for the next two years (first
with Warren Dean Fulton, and then with Kira Vermond). By June 1994, I was co-organizing
The TREE Reading Series alongside Catherine Jenkins and James Spyker, with my
first event hosting Christopher Dewdney, who informed us that Vancouver critic
Warren Tallman had died the day prior.
Q: How
did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if
at all?
I think
the community at the time I began attempting to engage was one that was in a
bit of a publishing lull. I didn’t know it at the time, but there had been
numerous journals and publishers throughout the 1980s, some of which had only shut
down five minutes before I landed (some just-prior-to-me might have included The Rideau Review, Ouroboros, Anthos Books, etcetera). When I wandered the stacks
of the University of Ottawa library, I saw multiple chapbooks and books and
journals, but didn’t see much at all around me publishing-wise. That could
easily have just been my lack of awareness as much as anything else; it would
be another year or two before I was aware of hole magazine or The Carleton
Arts Review. I mean, Bywords was around, but it wasn’t doing much I was
really interested in. Being aware of that lack prompted me to seek beyond the
city’s borders for reading material and opportunities, as well as prompting me
to start publishing on my own, which triggered the first above/ground press
publications. By fall 1993, I was co-coordinating editor of The Carleton
Arts Review at Carleton University (where I remained for two years), and by
the following June, I was co-director of The TREE Reading Series (a position I held
until January 1, 1999). James Spyker and I co-founded the ottawa small press book fair in fall 1994; I also started writing a book column for the weekly Ottawa
X-Press that same spring, which I did for another four and a half years.
Q: What
do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa
provide, or allow?
It’s a
good question, one I’m still wrapping my head around. Ottawa still has a
small-town mindset, and we don’t necessarily fall into the traps of battling
literary factions that other cities do. With the loss of literary trade
publishers Chaudiere Books, BuschekBooks and Oberon Press (the third of which didn’t
really exist “on the ground” for Ottawa writers, honestly), we’re a city without
a trade publisher for English-language poetry (unless there’s something out
there I’m unaware of), and exist within the only province without a provincial
writer’s guild. I’ve heard that Algonquin College and the University of Ottawa
have been developing creative writing programs, which is good to hear, but for
the longest time, we hadn’t much of anything save for the occasional class,
which left the bulk of the structural considerations of building a literary
community to those of us on the ground. I think this perceived lack of external
structures has allowed Ottawa writers a stronger sense of communal, and even
ongoing, activity, strengthened by groupings around events and publications
including Arc Poetry Magazine, the ottawa small press book fair, The TREE
Reading Series, VERSeFest, Canthius, In/Words magazine and press, The Peter F. Yacht Club and The Ottawa International Writers Festival. There
has long been a sense in Ottawa that we’re part of a community of writers, and
the support is tangible.
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 frustration at a perceived lack pushed me to both look
further afield for prompts, as well as dig deeper into Ottawa literature. I discovered
William Hawkins and Elizabeth Smart; I read those early collections by Seymour
Mayne. I reveled in those first three volumes by Elizabeth Hay. I began to
engage with Rob Manery, Louis Cabri and Max Middle. I met Ken Babstock and David
O’Meara (the latter of whom wouldn’t relocate here until the end of the 1990s)
during their reading at The Manx Pub in 1994. I spent time with Diana Brebner
and Michael Dennis, and even kept an occasional correspondence with John
Newlove. There was writing around that was sparking my interest, but the bulk
of my interactions were with local writers who didn’t entirely know what I was
attempting, but encouraged me to keep going. It wasn’t long before I was
looking further afield, and corresponding with poets Joe Blades, Stan Rogal,
Judith Fitzgerald, George Bowering, Ken Norris and others. I wanted to see what
was out there.
Q: What are you working on now?
I’m working on numerous projects, including cleaning up my pandemic-era
suite of lyric essays, “essays in the face of uncertainties” (thanks to the editorial
heft of Stuart Ross), as well as thinking about my post-mother non-fiction project,
“The Last Good Year,” which is slowly being worked over by a different editor. Most
of last fall and winter were engaged with writing short stories, but for the bulk
of 2021 I’ve been working on poems for “the book of sentences,” a collection
that might just round out a trilogy of continued projects, from the book of
smaller (University of Calgary Press, April 2022) through “Book of Magazine
Verse” (unpublished). I have been attempting to focus on the lyric sentence, and
have simultaneously shifted, I think, into a poetics of things, thinking and
being. Given the shift of conversation over the past decade or so, I’ve been increasingly
uncomfortable with occasionally being referred to as a “poet of place,” an idea
not only a bit outdated in my own work, but one that reeks of a particular kind
of colonial privilege: I was only allowed that through a history of removing
another from being allowed the same consideration, upon a land we had no
business on.
Oh, and I’ve been collaborating with Denver poet Julie Carr
for nearly a year now, engaged in a co-prompt, each of us taking turns writing
poems responding to the others’ most recent. We’re at ten poems each, finally. I
think we’re talking soon via Zoom about what might come next.
