Jacqueline Bourque [photo credit: Carole R. Haché LeBlanc] grew up along the ocean shores of New Brunswick. She spent the better part of her career in Ottawa working as a communicator in the public sector. Her poetry has been featured in a number of anthologies and journals, including The Fiddlehead, The Antigonish Review, Queen’s Quarterly, The Dalhousie Review, and I Found It at the Movies. In 2019, she released a chapbook titled The Dune as Bookmark, published by Anstruther Press. Her debut collection, Repointing the Bricks, was published in 2021 by Mansfield Press.
Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?
I came to Ottawa after graduating from Dalhousie University in 1973. My future boss, from Statistics Canada, travelled to Halifax to interview me over dinner. When dessert arrived, she offered me a job. After spending my childhood in Dieppe, a small New-Brunswick town, a job in Ottawa promised an exciting new life.
Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?
I wrote my first story on my mother’s Remington typewriter when I was nine. Though I kept writing, I eventually stopped when I took a job in a public sector organization. For over a decade, writing seemed no longer congruent with career demands. When trouble in my marriage started to brew, I was faced with an elemental unhappiness that propelled in another direction. In my case, across the hallway, in the middle of the night, into my yellow painted study, to write lines that pulled me out of my silence. I showed a few pieces to a friend. A few days later, she handed me a journal and said “Fill it with poems.” I did.
I later signed up for an Ottawa-Carleton School Board evening course in poetry. I wound my way through Brookfield High School’s corridors searching for my classroom. When I found it, our teacher had arranged the small vintage wooden desks in a circle. Her name was Stephanie Bolster. Within two years, she shepherded us into producing chapbooks which we launched at the National Archives. When Stephanie left Ottawa to teach at Concordia, I attended Barbara Myers’ workshops. Then Lise Rochefort invited me to join the Ruby Tuesdays, a group of writers who meet weekly.
Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?
For me, writing is a solitary experience, so my writing group keeps me connected to other writers, and with the Ottawa writing scene.
The poets in my writing group motivate and inspire me. For instance, I dislike submitting poems to journals. But at the beginning of the year, Frances Boyle sets out to chalk up one hundred rejections. By so doing, she submits at least a hundred times a year, and gets published in the process. Her perspective shifted my views of that process.
Doris Fiszer (also a member of the Ruby Tuesdays) and I meet regularly to study poetry. We select a reading every week, then discuss it on Sunday mornings. Amongst the books we’ve covered, one chapter at a time, are Western Wind, by David Mason and John Nims, What the Poets are Doing, edited by Rob Taylor, The Next Wave, edited by Jim Johnstone, and Adam Sol’s How a Poem Moves. These poetry chats broaden the scope of my writing and encourage me to find new angles and develop new techniques.
Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?
The Ottawa writing scene is inspired. We hold our own poetry festival, VERSEFEST. The Ottawa International Writers Festival recharges our imagination, and the Tree Reading Series, a monthly event, has existed since 1980. One of my favorite reading series before the pandemic was organized by David O’Meara and held at the Manx, a bar on Elgin Street.
Ottawa also offers a host of art galleries and theatres. I find that seeing art, attending a play, or watching a ballet opens the door to my creativity.
Nature helps me stay balanced and nourishes my writing. Within walking distance from downtown, there’s Lemieux Island, Dow’s Lake, the Arboretum, and Richmond Landing, to name only a few parks. One of my favorite walks is along the river in Parc de la rue Jacques Cartier. Gatineau Park provides green spaces interwoven with trails that wind through the forest.
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 believe you can write anywhere. Travelling, for instance, galvanizes me.
As for being a writer in Ottawa, attending events like VERSEFEST exposes me to new work, which in turn, consciously or subconsciously, influences my writing.
At each Ruby Tuesdays session, one of the members takes their turn to share a few poems they found remarkable. The poems serve as prompts for a free-writing exercise. Both the poems and the exercise lead my work into new directions.
When I’m in-between writing projects, I pack up pens, pencils, sketch pad and journal and head for the National Gallery. I sit in front of a sculpture or painting and draw or write. Frederick Varley’s portrait of Vera (1930) never ceases to stir me. I always return to my desk with fresh ideas.
Q: What are you working on now?
I recently completed fourteen sonnets inspired by Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the Twin Towers. At the time, I was reading Catherine Graham’s Her Red Hair Rises With the Wings of Insects, a book that Jean Van Loon (a member of the Ruby Tuesdays) recommended to me. Catherine begins that book with a series of sonnet-like poems. I thought the sonnet form might be the right container for these poems.
The Next Wave introduced me to Evan Jones. Evan’s prose poems fascinate me. He uses form adeptly and his introduction of mythology has a striking effect.
My grandmother recently appeared to me in a dream. As a child, I rarely heard her speak. Yet in my dream, she held the persona of Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada. I’ve since written twelve prose poems about her, portraying her, at times, as Leto, the Greek goddess of motherhood.