Sunday, October 31, 2021

Six Questions interview #96 : Sonia Tilson

I was born and educated in Swansea, South Wales, where (this was long ago) I had a classical education for which I am deeply thankful. In 1964 I married Alistair Tilson, a fellow Brit, who had recently become an English professor at Carleton, and immediately emigrated to Canada to live with him in Ottawa, where our two sons were born, and where I taught English at different levels, including university. After I retired I threw myself into the joys and rigours of learning to write fiction. My first book, The Monkey Puzzle Tree, published by Biblioasis Press in 2013, was short-listed for the 2012 Metcalf-Rooke Award and for the 2014 Ottawa Book Awards. My second book, The Disappearing Boy, was published in 2017 by Nimbus Publishing. Two short stories have been published in CAA’s magazine, Byline.

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

Marriage brought me to Ottawa where I have mostly lived since 1964

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

I’ve always been involved in writing, that of other people at first of course. Aggravated at always having to wait for the end of the stories my mother would read to me, I taught myself to read, and before long was reading those stories to my little brother, along with making up my own to entertain us both. Later, at school and at university I focused from the start on English Literature and Language, sporadically writing stories, and poems, but never dreaming of getting anything published. Dazzled as I was by the masterminds I studied, how should I presume? Also I had Kingsley Amis as a teacher at Swansea University, which didn’t help my lack of confidence. After university I took my passion for literature and language into my life’s work as an English teacher, mostly in Ottawa, at high school, community college and university levels. I still wrote a little, but teaching English, while enjoyable and satisfying, is hard, creatively draining work, especially when combined with raising two sons, running a pet-friendly household, and caring for my mother who by then had joined us.

My first encounter with a writing community happened after I retired, when I went to a memoir-writing course at Carleton given by the brilliant and disinhibiting Ivan Coyote. It was here that I finally realised that I could write.  The encouragement from Ivan and the class shifted me from “How should I presume?” to “Hey, I can do this!”. From there I was lucky enough to get into Mary Borsky’s inspiring short -story workshop where I met several already excellent writers, many of whom, like Mary herself, along with Deborah Anne Tunney, Frances Boyle, Jean van Loon and others, became long-time friends. In this group I gained the knowledge and confidence to write a collection of short stories which I was encouraged to submit to the Metcalf-Rooke Award. I did not get the award of course, but what I did get was a hand-written letter from John Metcalf himself, suggesting that the material in some of the stories should be made into a novel. This I did and submitted the result to him with the result that The Monkey Puzzle Tree was edited by him, and published in 2013 by Biblioasis. Having John as an editor was illuminating. He didn’t tell me what to write, of course, but he showed me more story-telling techniques and pushed me relentlessly to go deeper and give the whole thing, especially the ending, more oomph.

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

I found that group work is enormously helpful, especially to the beginner. I soon saw that it’s technique and practice and persistence that work, not fiddling around waiting for inspiration. Particularly helpful was the objective analysis we would apply to first-class stories along with our own, seeing what worked and how, and what failed and why. I also saw how important it is, to the beginner especially, to have the support and feedback of other writers. I realized that writers in training should not isolate themselves from other writers but should learn all they could from them.

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

I think Ottawa is an unusually literate city. Three universities, a community college, and the government contribute participants and audience. Also it’s relatively small, and the literary community is tightly connected (as I learned when, thanks to word-of-mouth recommendation, I was invited to discuss my first book at twenty book clubs scattered all over the city). The poetry community is also very active, with weekly virtual meetings and much publication. Then there is the Manx Pub, run by the poet David O’Meara, which provided a vibrant subterranean milieu for writers and musicians. There are writing festivals, literary competitions, poetry groups and dramatic societies; all cramped now by Covid, but sure to be back, stronger than ever.

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 used my school and collage teaching experience for the high school episode in The Monkey Puzzle Tree. The setting of the second-hand bookstore scenes in the book is based on an Ottawa store. The recurring park in the second half of the book is Windsor Park. Book clubs and other contacts showed me that the book resonated particularly deeply with Ottawa’s older citizens, perhaps because of the WW2 material but also because of the main story dealing with matters not talked about at that faraway time. The horsy material in The Disappearing Boy is based on our keeping horses when we lived in the country outside Ottawa. At Algonquin College I created and taught an elective introductory literature course. I’ve never forgotten those students, whose openness, intelligence, and hunger for a broader understanding and vision made that course the most satisfying experience of my teaching life.

What are you working on now?

I’m polishing some short stories and trying to work up a couple more in the hope of making a publishable collection.

 

Sunday, October 24, 2021

Six Questions interview #95 : Simon Turner

Simon Turner’s poetry [photo credit: Xu Media Productions] has been published by Plenitude Magazine, Train: a poetry journal, and bird, buried press, and is forthcoming in The Fiddlehead and Canthius’s “Whose Pleasure is it Anyway?” digital series. They participated in Arc Poetry Magazine’s 2020-21 poet-in-residence mentorship program and received Carleton University’s George Johnston Poetry Award for 2019. Simon lives in Ottawa, masquerading as a PhD student, and wrote four plays staged in Peterborough/Nogojiwanong either at or in collaboration with The Theatre On King. 

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

I moved to Ottawa three years ago to do my master’s degree at Carleton. But I actually grew up in the Ottawa Valley. So in some ways, I’ve always been pretty familiar with the city, even though I’m still getting my feet wet on what it’s actually like to live here. I mean, half my time in Ottawa since the move has been spent under pandemic conditions, which has been a very different way to get to know a place!

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

I don’t want this to come off as precocious or annoying, but I was sort of “writing” before I knew how to spell? I know I made some picture book with printer paper, scissors, staples, and pencil drawings when I was somewhere between ages 2 to 4, and literally just put scribbles for where the “text” should go. I couldn’t read, but I was determined to set down my story, I guess! I don’t remember the plot now, just that it was called The Thunderstorm at the End of the Universe and ended with some kind of world-wide utopia? That’s to say, I suppose I was always doomed to be this ridiculous.

To be honest, I can’t really say that I am involved in the Ottawa writing community. My first year here had a pretty narrow focus of just surviving my MA. I met some folks who are involved in the Ottawa scene: Dessa Bayrock, who runs post ghost press, and Deanna Young – at Carleton, actually. And there were the ex-Ottawa poets whom I met down in Peterborough/Nogojiwanong and raved to me about the scene when they found out I was moving here. Justin Million gave me my first real opportunities as a “professional” (whatever that means!) poet through Show and Tell Poetry Series and his and Elisha Rubacha’s bird, buried press. And I also consider Rob Winger a mentor; but then he’s too damn humble to take the compliment!

I’ve also been variously involved in community theatre for over a decade, and nowhere forged me as an artist as much as The Theatre On King (TTOK) back in Peterborough/Nogojiwanong. I talk so much about it, I think it’s why most people here think I’m from there. TTOK is how I met Justin among dozens of other incredible artists and arts supporters. I don’t know who I’d be without them.

But I only started seeking out Ottawa events in the gap year before starting my PhD, which of course lined up perfectly with the first waves of COVID-19. I’ve spent most of the pandemic doing distance workshopping with Morgan Tessier, whom I met in Rob’s fourth-year poetry class at Trent University. She’s helped my growth as a poet more than any other one single person, even if just from encouragement and having to keep up the writing habit. But with the pandemic, I haven’t really had the opportunity to feel landed in the poetry community here (or squandered my earlier opportunities – sorry, Rob W.!). I’d like to be, in time. For now, I usually reach out to Dessa or Helen Robertson whenever I feel like a baby poet just learning to walk and develop object permanence! Although I have to give a shout out to Manahil Bandukwala for being the first editor to be like “hey, I remember your stuff from submission to this other thing!” when she accepted a poem for Canthius’s “Whose Pleasure is it Anyway?” series. So, I’m slowly getting myself planted!

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

Oh geez, how do I even answer that? If we’re stretching the question to my years in the Ptbo/Nogo downtown arts scene and the family I still have from the community there, then the answer is infinite. I think everyone’s writing shifts by the people they’re in contact with. Isn’t that just an inevitability? And so when you’re a writer talking to other writers about their writing, and your own writing, of course it’ll have an impact – on our writing, on our perceptions of writing as a practice or as an art form, on ourselves as writers – on ourselves as people, who also happen to write.

I know one thing it’s taken me a ridiculously long time to claim is my status as a “poet” or an “author.” I struggle with these words. I feel they don’t belong to me. I balk at them. But I remember how in the second play I ever had staged, I wrote this joke for the playwright character about how she wasn’t a “playwright” because she’d only written the one thing – a “we’ll see if you keep this up” type of thing. And Kate Story (the show’s director) basically used this against me, to point out that I’m officially a playwright now (and I’ve had two more plays staged by TTOK since that). So that’s something, I guess: owning up to my own body of work and acknowledging that yeah, I am actually doing these things and they do have some impact on the definition of who I am. (Though I’ll still be avoiding saying “I’m a poet” when strangers ask what I “do” in small talk!) I used to try to go by the Stephen Fry verb-over-noun argument – “I’m not an actor, I act; I’m not a writer, I write” – but eventually you realize this is all pretentious semantics and no one cares about grammar anyway. 

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

Yikes, see – I’m not the best person to ask! I can only repeat what others have told me: that the Ottawa scene is incredibly welcoming and open, that it’s not competitive (or at least not beyond friendly competition), that it’s thriving and active and really a hotspot for poetry. I can’t say I’ve seen anything to contradict that!

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? 

Something that I haven’t quite said is that I don’t see the different forms I write in as entirely separable. So, I’m a PhD student now. I write research papers. I also write poetry and plays. I’ve worked a bit as a reporter, and written theatre reviews, publicity copy, and prose fiction. I don’t know how to disconnect my growth as a writer in any of these fields other than to note when I’ve been more focused on which type of writing. So yeah, the poetry I’ve written since moving to Ottawa has – in its own ways – responded to my life here and my work as a grad student. Because I’m not the type of writer who can defend myself against that not happening. So I’ve written poetry to express ideas that aren’t reworkable for academic audiences, or are about me getting to know my nook of the city (one thing the pandemic’s furnished: a real neighbourhood-centric pedestrian culture!), or are just poems I could not have written without being here, doing what I’ve done, and meeting the people I’ve met over the past three years. Maybe that’s a non-answer, or simply an impractical answer, but I try to take my writing as something that morphs organically: I find it hard to chart exact origins or affective conclusions. I just respond.

I guess one thing I’d say I’ve taken from the “community,” given Ottawa spat out Justin Million, is that Justin (though not only him) has really emphasized for me the importance of holding arts work as work. That doesn’t mean it can’t be someone’s hobby, or only getting paid matters. I mean heck, it’s not like even getting paid as a poet is getting “paid” versus the hours spent on drafts and edits and workshops and submissions! But just because $20 for a poem isn’t going to put food in my cupboards doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter.

We can all gripe about how unfortunate it is that capitalism means monetary value is connected to cultural value, but too bad – it is, for the time being, and until people who aren’t in the arts get over seeing the arts along a binary of high luxury commodity or the product of the starved genius rubbing two pennies together to start a fire, we all need to be vocal about taking artists seriously as cultural workers, and paying them accordingly. I’m sure I’m preaching to the crowd, here, but it’s shocking to step outside that arts-bubble for a while and remember that most people really don’t get it. Being a grad student, I’ve had moments of real cognitive dissonance when I’ve had to wonder wait, do these scholars I’m reading or other students I’m talking to not get that they’re writers as much as the literary authors they’re talking about? Or: Does this professor just not have friends who write literature? Did these scholars on literary authorship never think to ask an actual practicing author what they had to say about this? It’s bizarre, to me, and counterintuitive. But I guess that’s some of academia’s own perpetuation of the mythic prestige of the creative writer! Everyone wants to disclaim, “oh, but I don’t do what you do!” (they mean creative writing), but then I don’t write like them either! Does that automatically make what we do all that much different? Maybe yes, but also no.

Q: What are you working on now? 

Well, I think I may be starting to assemble what might become my first chapbook? Yeah, lots of disclaimers there – don’t hold me to it! A friend pointed out that a couple works-in-progress poems I’d shared were thematically similar, and I then got to thinking there are some others from the past year that could fit together with those, too. Since then, I’ve written three new poems that are kind of broadly tying together with the others, so…. We’ll see if that goes anywhere! I’m not used to writing poems with a particular idea for a series in mind and them actually turning out well, as opposed to cheaper knockoffs of the one good poem I tried to springboard the suite off of. But, there’s no growth without experimentation! Beyond that, I’ve been haphazardly working on a new script, and trying to remind myself that I really ought to be studying….

Sunday, October 17, 2021

Six Questions interview #94 : Marnie Pomeroy

My biography is condensed in this recent poem, Epitaph:

Born to bear witness, first in paint, then rhyme.
Lived thrall to fears and pleasures. Failed my prime.
Loved much, and sparked with some beyond all time.

I sum life’s motley up: Rich CruelSublime.

I wrote my first poem at age six, then kept going, intoxicated with adjectives before understanding how Less Is More. Writing poems has kept me company these very many years, alongside an art career that ended earlier.

I was born in New York City and have lived there several times, but grew up in the country near Millbrook, New York. After some years spent in the U.S. and Europe, I came to Canada. In Ladysmith, Quebec, I co-founded The Ladysmith Press; its publications included three early books of my poems. Then I settled in Ottawa, and for some years gave shows of my paintings and took portrait commissions, while always writing. (Once I went to a Poetry Slam to see what it was like, and was the only adult there — regretfully too shy to speak to anyone!) Now, at my age I am best off at home in a very quiet life, trying to finish all projects.

From my painting days in Ottawa, I still have two good art friends. Of writer friends still alive (some I’ve never met in person), most live in other countries and are e-mailed.

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

A: The need of a nice place to settle in brought me to Ladysmith in 1967, and then to Ottawa in 1977.

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

A: I’ve always written poems, probably as a reaction to reading them. I knew writers before coming to Ottawa, but none in Ottawa, where I fell in with painters and gallery owners in my art phase.

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

A: Influences came from reading, then they may have somewhat included the work of the writers I got to know when I was young. 

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

A: Ottawa's rivers, lakes, ponds, parks, general greenery, and gardens provide a natural world that I need in every way. And now I have dear friends, met here.

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?

A: Ottawa, with its green spaces and familiarity, has become home — the great base for work. 

Q: What are you working on now? 

A: I'm just finishing up organizing the production of a book of poems by the artist, Chan Ky-Yut, who has given art shows all over the world. Based in Ottawa, he also held meditation and tai chi classes, and was my teacher. This is a limited edition and not for sale, but there will be an online version available.

I’m also in the middle of organizing my own poems for a limited book collection and an online version.

Recently, my publisher was Greenwich Exchange in London, England. Besides The Flaming and Blue Moon, both books of poems, they also published my three student guides to Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, and Christina Rossetti. A Practical Guide to Writing Poetry (published by The Serenus Press), my only other book of prose, is out of print.


Sunday, October 10, 2021

Six Questions interview #93 : Grant Wilkins

Grant Wilkins is a printer, papermaker and occasional poet from Ottawa. His writing has appeared in the pages of ARC Poetry Magazine, The Ottawa Press Gang Concrete Poetry Anthology, Train: a poetry journal and BafterC magazine amongst other places, and he recently published Literary Type with the fine folks at nOIR:Z. 2020 was a good year for Grant, as his sequence “Roman Alphabet: Readings and Translations” won Exile’s Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Competition, and his poem “In Which Gwendolyn MacEwen Translates Émile Nelligan: II” was shortlisted for Arc Poetry Magazine’s Poem of the Year prize. Grant has degrees in History & Classical Civilization and in English, and he likes ink, metal, paper, letters, sounds and words, and combinations thereof.

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

I was actually born in Ottawa. I did move away when I was very young, but eventually returned in my mid-teens and have been here ever since. This presents itself rather oddly, with me being a city boy who’s lived in Ottawa for 40+ years, but who still misses the mountains, the ocean and the trees of Haida Gwaii.

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

It’s funny. I’d been interested in the idea of writing ever since I was young – but that mostly just manifested itself as my reading about writing and thinking about writing until the mid/late 1980s, when I finally began to actually do some prose writing. A few years later some friends and I started a writer’s group. It was a monthly-ish, meet at a pub and compare notes and stories sort of thing – as much social as anything else. We didn’t have any sense that there was a local literary community to be part of out there – we were just kind of writing for ourselves, more or less in a void.

Eventually we put together a little journal – a zine (though we wouldn’t have known what that word was at the time) called MPD. Shortly thereafter we stumbled upon the local literary world by way of our introduction to you and Warren Dean Fulton. The whole thing came as something of a revelation, and I know that some of us – myself included – jumped right in. I’m pretty sure that our MPD group had a table at your first small press book fair, and in spite of not being a poetry writer, I began going to readings – TREE, Bard, Warren’s Vanilla and Vogon series, and your Poetry 101 series, amongst others. 

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

Weirdly – or so it seems in hindsight – the first thing it did was get me to stop writing. Between MPD and the discovery of the small press scene I quickly became far more interested in the production and publishing side of things… and so I let my own writing drop, and focused first on MPD, and then on The Canadian Journal of Contemporary Literary Stuff – a magazine I did with Tamara Fairchild [see my 2017 interview with him on such here] – and then Murderous Signs, a litzine I put out after “Stuff” folded. It was only with Murderous Signs [see my 2015 interview with him on such here] that I began writing again – first just editorial content for the issues, and then towards the end of the zine’s run I began experimenting with poetry and process.

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

Having only lived in Ottawa through the course of my writing and writing-adjacent life, it’s hard for me to say. I’ve had some experience and communication with the literary worlds in Montreal and Toronto over the years – though much less so in recent years – and the general impression I’ve gotten is that Ottawa is the right size. We’re big enough to have a fairly robust literary community (at least in non-pandemic times), without being so big that the community fragments and spirals off into a bunch of cliques and camps that don’t talk to each other based on genre, form, philosophy and/or personality.

The Ottawa literary world has also been blessed with a fair bit of ongoing community continuity too, which I suspect is far more important than most people realize. You (as above/ground, and through your various other literary projects, especially the small press fair) have been a presence here since I got into things. The Ottawa International Writers Festival has been going since 1997. Versefest is now 11 years old. The TREE reading series is probably older than any of the folks currently running it. Amanda Earl has been running the Bywords literary calendar since… I’m not sure when. All of these things are important, and all of them give some structure and support to the literary community, and make it easier for new writers and new projects to find their audiences and find their feet.

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 think the single most important engagement I ever had was when visual artist Michèle Provost asked me to join the contingent of writers she was commissioning to respond to her “Abstracts/Resumes” work, which showed at the Ottawa Art Gallery in early 2010. I’d been doing some writing and experimenting on my own for a while at that point, but not with the intention of it really going anywhere… so this pushed me into writing something that was definitely going to end up in front of an audience – and an audience of people I knew, too.

It was a push I needed. There were a couple of more projects like that immediately following – most notably Michèle’s “Roman Feuilleton” exhibition, out of which I did quite a lot of writing, and with some success. All of this served to confirm in my mind that “process poetry” was a general form that I could make work, and left me with the confidence to just keep doing what I wanted to do, the way I wanted to do it.

The other local element that often shows up in my work is hometown literary hero Archibald Lampman’s poetry, which I’ve continued to mine as source material for various projects.

Q: What are you working on now? 

Unfortunately, I tend to work very slowly, to be easily distracted, and to have a bunch of different projects and ideas on the go and at various stages of incompletion at any given time…which isn’t always a great combination. At the moment I have a couple of Archibald Lampman-related projects going as my main focus, as well as two bodies of collected text that I’d like to do something with. I’m also involved in a collaborative art/poetry project that has the potential to go somewhere really interesting.

Sunday, October 03, 2021

Six Questions interview #92 : Natalie Morrill

Natalie Morrill's first novel, The Ghost Keeper (2018), was recognized with the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Fiction and the HarperCollins Canada/UBC Prize for Best New Fiction. Her poetry and fiction have been published in Canadian literary journals and included in The Journey Prize Stories anthology. She is the former Writer-in-residence for the Northern Initiative for Social Action (NISA), and edits fiction for the journal Dappled Things. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. She lives in Ottawa, Canada, and teaches in the Professional Writing program at Algonquin College.

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

I went to high school in Ottawa! Then I left for about a decade, and then I moved back. I've been back for five years now. So many of my favourite people are here; Ottawa feels like home.

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

I've always been "involved in writing," I think. I'm not sure I was aware there was such a thing as "writing community" till I got to university in Kingston; after that I looked for it wherever I was, especially in Vancouver and Sudbury. It's been wonderful to find writer-types here in Ottawa now that I'm back. I think Chris Turnbull was the first Ottawa writer who connected me to folks. Really grateful for that.

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

It's probably cliche to say this, but it's inspiring. I'm somebody who can procrastinate endlessly and/or just live in my head. Seeing other people "doing the thing" makes me want to get stuff done and not just think about it. Besides that, there's an element of support and accountability. It makes me think about why art (& writing in particular) matters in a community & what its responsibilities might be, if that makes sense. Other writers challenge & humble me, but they're also usually very kindred spirits in one way or another.

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

Readers, to be frank. People here are incredibly literate. Obviously I include writers in that number (we generally have to read as part of the job description), but gosh there are a lot of people who like to read and talk about literary works (or go to plays, or films, or whatever) in this town.

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 have a lot of really smart & compassionate friends here, who seem to have accumulated in this place because of jobs or family or education or any number of other commitments. Knowing they'll engage & challenge my work, & that I'll be seeing a lot of them after they do so, makes me think really deeply about the things I'm trying to do. I trust them to demand that I be honest & say things that are worth their while.

Q: What are you working on now?

Another book! (Another novel, another work of historical fiction; totally different time period & subject matter from the last one. Music is involved.) Hope my publisher likes it.