Six Questions interview #187 : Dave Cooper

Dave Cooper [photo credit: Jeremie Deschenes] was born in Nova Scotia in 1967.

Dave began his career in the 90s, making underground comics for Seattle's Fantagraphics Books. His best work from that period was a 5-issue series called, Weasel. One story that was serialized in Weasel later became the psycho-erotic graphic novel Ripple- which sported an introduction by David Cronenberg.

After comics, Dave turned his attention to oil painting, putting on solo shows alternately at galleries in Los Angeles and New York City. He also had a large retrospective of his comicbook artwork in both Angouleme and Paris in 2002. Monographs of his paintings from that time included introductions by comedian David Cross, and filmmaker Guillermo del Toro.

Around 2008 Dave began focussing on the field of animation, ultimately getting two of his original kids tv shows greenlit- PIG GOAT BANANA CRICKET for Nickelodeon, and THE BAGEL AND BECKY SHOW for Teletoon/BBC. His short adult film, THE ABSENCE OF EDDY TABLE was released in the fall of 2016 to much acclaim.

In the summer of 2017 Dave returned to oil painting, embarking on personal explorations, commissions. He also completed his largest single commission for the Madrid museum Coleccion Solo- a 13' wide nod to Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights.  

When the pandemic hit, Dave spent a couple of years working as a visual development artist on feature film projects at Sony Pictures, and Dreamworks. During that same time he made time to continue expanding the scope of his personal work, experimenting with new, perverse worlds and characters on canvas and paper, writing animated and live-action screenplays, and on composing experimental music.

Since 2017 -concurrent with all those various projects- Dave has been gradually amassing a body of ambitious new work for his largest gallery show to date- 42 paintings for Galerie Daniel Maghen, in Paris, 2023.

In 2019, the French publisher Cernunnos released a 400-pg English/French retrospective of Dave's work, Pillowy, the art of dave cooper. Also in 2019, Dave joined the board of directors of Ottawa's cutting edge artist run centre Saw Gallery.

In 2022 Dave’s first live-action short film, Squash was accepted into prestigious film festivals- Finland’s Tampere Film Festival, and Italy’s Concorto Film Festival.

Dave maintains a healthy presence on instagram where he posts past work, new work, work-in-progress videos, and absolutely riveting bicycling and cooking snapshots. You can find him at @davecooper67. He also sells selected original works at davecooper.bigcartel.com

Dave lives in Ottawa Canada.

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

My family moved from Shelburne NS to Ottawa when I was 9 - 46 years ago. My dad was the town doctor, but got a job offer in the government’s bureau of medical devices.

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

I started writing purely as a way of giving me something to illustrate. I may never have had any interest otherwise. I’m primarily a visual artist, and for the first couple decades of my career, a comic book artist. I’ve never felt very connected to communities, I’m a pretty solitary person. I’ve been working on that over the years, but still feel more or less reclusive as an artist.

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

The very few times I’ve connected with other writers I feel like an imposter. Before the pandemic I was invited to a writers festival in Singapore to give a talk. I couldn't wait to get it over with and go see the city.

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

It’s just a homebase to me. I have my studio with all my tools. I enjoy biking in the woods nearby, that’s where most of my “writing” happens. I love visiting other cities on business, but this is where I want to be.

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 would say I’m pretty insular. If anything my work is more informed by my childhood in Nova Scotia. My visual language developed really early on. And my stories are often based on imprinting experiences from then too.

Q: What are you working on now?

I recently ended about a decade-long break from writing. I was totally disinterested. Suddenly it’s almost all I want to do. I’ve written pitches for a kid’s animated feature film, a pre-school kid’s tv show, an adult animated tv show, a screenplay for a live-action thriller, a surreal graphic novel, and I’m starting on the script for a short upsetting animated art film about elements of my childhood. It’s been thrilling to discover that my writing muscles were only dormant all that time. But my main thing is supposed to be making oil paintings for solo shows, group shows, and private buyers. I’m also very excited about making experimental music these days. And I love to cook and bake.

Six Questions interview #186 : Fabienne Shepherd Stone

Fabienne Shepherd Stone is a white settler poet and acupuncturist whose writing explores themes of queerness, bodies, and belonging. Their debut collection of poetry, Second Growth, was published by Creekstone Press in 2014, and their poems are included in the anthology Make It True: Poetry From Cascadia (Leaf Press, 2015) and Canadian journals such as Prairie Fire and Briarpatch. Past work was published under the name Fabienne Calvert Filteau. Fabienne resides on the traditional territory of the Kwanlin Dün First Nation and the Ta’an Kwä’chän Council in Whitehorse, Yukon. Home to them is an ever-evolving question.

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

I moved to Ottawa with my parents as an almost-six-year-old in 1990, and moved away in 2003 when I graduated from high school. My parents worked as Canadian diplomats, and we moved to Ottawa from Seattle for many reasons, in part so I could start elementary as a five-year-old, in part for my parents’ careers. I left Ottawa in 2003 to go to university in British Columbia where I spent most of my adult life before moving to the Yukon four years ago.

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

I grew up in a household where books of all kinds were revered and where reading was a favourite pastime shared by my parents and many members of our extended family. Word play, telling stories, and talking about books and writers and ideas were love languages in my family, and in this environment I found a love of writing and reading poetry and fiction as a very young kid. Writing became a way to have a curious, rich engagement with my inner world, and a way to discover the ongoing interplay between this inner world and the outer one.

I was fortunate to participate in festivals and workshops for young writers. I had a marvelous English teacher, Bernice McInnis, in elementary school who encouraged me to write and submit to various contests, and this further broadened my writing community as a youth. I went on to attend Canterbury High School, a public arts high school, where I was a student in the writing program. At Canterbury, I made lifelong friends, and was immersed daily in a world of writers and writing. Michael Fitzpatrick, head of the literary department at the time, championed us all to find our voices, challenge those voices and perspectives, experiment with a variety of forms and genres, and pump out more material than felt possible most of the time.

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? 

Because I grew up immersed in writing community, I would say this shaped how I thought about writing more than shifting a pre-existing perspective. In some ways, writing life since the Ottawa days has been a sobering reality check. When I was fourteen, I won a national poetry contest and was awarded $500, more money than I’d seen in my life. Because successes like this happened early on for me, I thought that poetry was something I could do for money as an adult, and such successes would just keep rolling out. Ha! Newsflash. Not the case. Writing, which was central to my existence as a kid, has been sidelined at various points in my adult life as I negotiate with the necessities of capitalism and how to make a living in a way that allows room for writing be a part of my day-to-day life without requiring it to be something I rely on to pay the bills. For many years, I stepped away from writing to pursue another vocation. Since moving to the Yukon, I’ve been finding my way back into a writing practice and a writing community again.

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

As a young writer in Ottawa, there was extraordinary opportunity. Canterbury is one of the few publicly-funded schools of its kind in the country, and it allowed for an experience of high school that for me really fostered creativity, uniqueness, and artistic collaboration. We were allowed – and even encouraged – to be our gorgeous, awkward, introverted weirdo selves there. By the time I graduated, I had written stage plays, screenplays, poems, fiction, and non-fiction, and for five years was required to have a daily writing practice and produce a high volume of material. We had cheap passes to the NAC and GCTC and were required to review plays as part of the curriculum—what a dream! Life outside of high school was a challenging period for my family, and being able to anchor in creative practice and a community of like-minded kiddos really carried me through some rough times.

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? 

Like I shared above, the community shaped – more than changed – the way I approach my work. It laid the groundwork for my writing life, in many ways, and taught me a level of discipline needed to write, one I don’t know I would’ve otherwise learned. It built my critical lens and exposed me to so many different ways to engage my love of writing.  

Q: What are you working on now? 

A second collection of poems! I recently received a generous award from the Yukon government to work on the first draft of a manuscript this year. What a dream! It’ll be the first time in a decade that I’ll have regular weekly time specifically allotted to writing, and a deadline, and people I’m accountable to who believe in my work. My aim is to explore writing a character-driven manuscript of narrative poetry, in which each poem is a self-contained unit nested within a book that can be read from beginning to end as a narrative in verse.

 

Six Questions interview #185 : Stephanie Bolster

Stephanie Bolster’s fifth book of poetry, Long Exposure, is forthcoming with Palimpsest in 2025. Her first, White Stone: The Alice Poems, won the Governor General’s Award and the Gerald Lampert Award in 1998. Editor of The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008 and The Ishtar Gate: Last and Selected Poems by the late Ottawa poet Diana Brebner, and co-editor of Penned: Zoo Poems, she was born in Vancouver and grew up in Burnaby. She teaches creative writing at Concordia University and lives in Pointe-Claire, Quebec, located on the Mohawk (Kanien’kehá:ka) territory of Skaniatara:ti.

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

I lived in Ottawa for four years, from 1996 through 2000. I moved there because my husband (then partner), Patrick Leroux, was running a theatre company there, Theatre la Catapulte. We'd met at Banff in 1994, done the long-distance thing for nearly a year with him in Ottawa and me in Vancouver, and then spent a year together in Quebec City while he worked on a family history project. Ottawa was the first city after my original home of Burnaby, BC, that began feel like home.

In 2000, I was hired into a tenure-track position teaching creative writing at Concordia in Montreal. I thought I'd return to Ottawa more often than circumstances ended up permitting. I made good friends there.

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

I'll spare you the "I've always written" story, though it's true, as it always is for anyone who tells it. I'd just finished my MFA in creative writing at UBC when I went to Banff, and I didn't even really look for a writing community in Quebec as I assumed there was no such anglo community there (I later met the poet Aurian Haller, who was living there then, and wished we'd connected). Ottawa was the first place where I deliberately sought to integrate myself into a community of writers. You won't be surprised to hear that knowing you was tremendously helpful. (To contextualize readers: because you and Patrick had gone to high school together, on the English and French sides of the same school, you were the first poet I met on my first visit to Ottawa in March 1995. Was it called the Bohemian Café, where we met? One of many long-gone market hangouts.) Especially during my first two years in Ottawa, I think I managed to get to most of the readings you'd organized, and you welcomed me enthusiastically, connecting me with many writers who, like you, became dear friends.

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?

I remember being grateful for the fact that Ottawa's comparatively small size made it easy to meet people. In Vancouver, my community had come readymade, though UBC's BFA and MFA programs, although even there, finding friends hadn't come easily due to me being a typical introvert. But by the time I'd moved to Ottawa, I'd travelled on my own, matured a bit, And I was lonely -- I really wanted to meet other writers.

Other than Diana Brebner, who became an important mentor and friend for me, I'm not sure that the writers I came to know affected the nature of my work, though the presence of the National Gallery was a major influence. I also spent a fair bit of time with the arts writer Douglas Ord, who made me take think about ekphrastic writing more seriously from a research perspective. I’d always felt like an imposter, not having studied Art History, but he gave me the confidence to go into the National Gallery archives and look at their files on Jean Paul Lemieux.

In Montreal, through my teaching at Concordia I’ve been able to play a small role in shaping a community, but due to the demands of the job, and the fact that I have two kids and a very busy husband, I feel like my presence in the community is more as a teacher/mentor than as a writer. That said, I’m heading into sabbatical as I write this, and over the next year I'm hoping to get out to readings more. Certainly I have many friends in Montreal who are writers -- nearly all of my friends are writers! Again, though, if my writing's been shaped by place, it's been through art collections; Long Exposure, my long poem slated for publication in fall 2025, began with a visit to Montreal's Musee d'art contemporain in 2009 (!) to see an exhibition of work by Robert Polidori -- with (the then-and-again-now Ottawa-based writer) Anita Lahey, in fact.

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

Warmth and openness. Things may have changed in the past twenty-plus years, but when I arrived in Ottawa, I felt as though writers of all ages, stages, temperaments, and aesthetics went to the same events and supported each other. I was always impressed that established writers like John Barton -- who after all had a museum day job and the time-draining responsibility of co-editing Arc with Rita Donovan -- was a regular at the TREE readings, and read his work at the open mic that always ended the night. There were no cliques. And visual artists were involved, too, like David Cation. Ottawa's grown since -- everywhere's grown since -- but there was an inclusiveness that felt generous and affirming. I got to know Toronto a bit during that time and although it was a more exciting place to be, I always felt that if I lived there, I'd have had to choose my circle.

Again, I can't overestimate how important the presence of the National Gallery in particular, and museums in general, was to my experience of living in Ottawa. During my first two years there, I went to the National Gallery once a week to wander, look, and write. During the latter two years, I worked there on contract, as an editorial assistant for the members' magazine Vernissage, where I had the pleasure of working with the poet Susan McMaster. Later, as I was leaving, John Barton and Anita Lahey came on board. It was a rewarding way to make a living and I'm eternally grateful to Susan for inviting me into that opportunity. I sometimes wonder whether, had the Concordia job not come along, I’d still be there.

I also appreciated the arts funding at the civic level. It was great to live in a city where all levels of government supported culture.

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?

Patrick's parents bought a cottage north of Ottawa midway through my time there, and some of the poems in Pavilion responded to that site, and to our little row house in Vanier. But -- sorry to be a broken record here -- it was the museums that were most central to the poetry. The idea of writing ekphrastically through visiting museums is one I took with me through my travels in Europe in the early 2000s. Patrick was studying in Paris, my job at Concordia was then relatively undemanding outside of the academic term, and I didn't have kids yet, so I was free to wander in the Louvre, the Mauritshuis, the Tate Britain, as I had at the National Gallery in Ottawa. The Met, the AGO . . . I knew cities through their art museums.

I always feel a special bond with the many Ottawa writers who come through Concordia's program, and I still keep in touch with my Ottawa friends, even if I rarely have the chance to visit. It was really the city in which I came of age as a writer: my first two books were published while I lived there, I was able to support myself through grants and school visits for a while, and I won the Governor General's Award while living there, the latter of which briefly enabled me to move in entirely different circles that I'd previously barely known existed. It was an exciting place to be at that time. I was invited to have lunch (in the company of many others, of course) with a Belgian prince at Rideau Hall! And then I went home to my little street in Vanier, near McArthur Lanes (where we never actually went bowling, despite having great intentions) and the Loblaws on Vanier Parkway. The city was small enough to permit a relatively easy, if sometimes unsettling, movement between levels of wealth/status -- things just felt possible.

Q: What are you working on now?

I've been working for over a decade on a project called Long Exposure, which as I mentioned began with photographs by Robert Polidori, taken in post-disaster sites like New Orleans and Chernobyl. It will be out with Palimpsest in 2025, so I'll be working on edits for that. I'm also about to begin a new project centred on the BC Sugar Refinery, which dates from 1890 and is the oldest surviving industrial building in Vancouver. I don't know how to write this book, or even research it, but that’s part of the process. And I want to do more work on writing for, and pulling together, a book of essays on various subjects, with coincidence as their common thread. With the prospect of a year away from teaching, I feel time opening up before me. As a teacher, I'm always actively engaged with the making of poetry; now I'm looking forward to making my own again.

Six Questions interview #184 : Amelinda Bérubé

Amelinda Bérubé writes about ghosts and monsters and other things that go bump in the night. She is the author of three spooky novels for young adults: The Dark Beneath the Ice (2018), Bram Stoker Award finalist Here There Are Monsters (2019), and The Ones Who Come Back Hungry (forthcoming in 2024). In her other lives, Amelinda is a mother of two and a passionate gardener. She lives in Ottawa in a perpetual whirlwind of unfinished craft projects, cat hair, and dog toys. 

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

My family moved to the Ottawa area when I was 13; we lived halfway between Carp and Almonte in a little exurban subdivision that backed onto conservation wetlands. I’ve been here ever since—30 years now, holy crap—except for a few years spent in Montreal for grad school. 

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

Writing books has been my ambition since about the age of five, and thanks to very supportive parents, I got to go to a lot of classes and workshops as a teenager. As an adult, though, it took me a long time to find a writing community here beyond a couple of dear friends. Twitter turned out to be an amazing way to get connected; that’s how I found out about the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI), Can*Con, and the Ottawa Writer’s Circle, all of which have introduced me to some great people. 

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

It’s brought home how energizing and helpful it can be to spend time with other writers; across genres and audiences, people are really generous with their experience and insight.

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

I’ve found that Ottawa’s happy medium between big city and small town makes it easy to build community. It’s both big enough and small enough that you can find your people. 

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 Dark Beneath the Ice and The Ones Who Come Back Hungry are set in west-end Ottawa, and I used my teenaged home and its swampy woods as the stage for Here There Are Monsters. I love bringing out the spookiness in everyday places; it makes me pay attention to and appreciate them on a whole new level.

Q: What are you working on now?

I’ll be wrapping up edits on The Ones Who Come Back Hungry over the next couple months; it’s another spooky YA, inspired by the 18^th century “vampire panics” of New England, which involved some odd and sometimes gruesome burial practices. (Vampire burials have apparently been documented within a couple hours of Ottawa!) After that, I’m back to drafting a project about an unfortunate intersection of friend group drama and ill-advised time travel.

 

Six Questions interview #183 : Frances Peck

Frances Peck worked as an editor, ghostwriter, and educator before returning to her first love, writing fiction. Her debut novel, The Broken Places, a literary page-turner about an earthquake rocking Vancouver, was named a Globe and Mail best book of 2022 and was shortlisted for the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. Her new novel, Uncontrolled Flight, comes out September 1. Frances lived in Ottawa for nearly two decades before moving to North Vancouver.

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

Ottawa was home for 19 years. I arrived from Nova Scotia in 1986 to do an MA in English at the University of Ottawa. Ostensibly it was university that drew me to the city, but really it was a man. My boyfriend at the time was headed for Carleton. I decided to move with him.

What took me away from Ottawa (specifically Chelsea)? Another man. In late 2004, I went to Vancouver to teach a report-writing workshop. The first person to arrive was the man who’s now my husband. We were struck by this thunderbolt of love that you could never write about, it’s such a cliché. Three months later we were looking for a place together.

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

I wrote nonstop as a kid, sporadically as a teen, and earnestly as an undergrad, when I took a couple of creative writing courses. It took two rejections—two! that’s how naïve and fragile I was—to squelch my dream of becoming a writer. By the time I hit Ottawa, writing felt like an embarrassing youthful indulgence that was best left behind, like smoking or being in love with Peter Frampton.

Following my MA, and brief stints as a telemarketer and a real estate agent, I went back to writing. Except to my mind it was not “real” writing; it was “professional” writing—producing copy for government departments, nonprofits, businesses, etc.. In that respect, Ottawa was an ideal place to be. I made a good living from freelancing.

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?

When you suggested this Q&A, I thought, “Why me? I was never part of the Ottawa writing community.” But that’s not entirely true. To prepare, I looked at the most recent interviews on your blog. Three of the seven writers on the first page were people I’d intersected with. John Moss and Gerald Lynch taught at U of O when I was there. I went to a couple of readings organized by Gerald Lynch because a fellow student, poet Nadine McInnis, was in the lineup. The third writer is Michelle Sinclair, whom I’ve gotten to know a little from afar. We both had debut novels last year and have chatted about the experience.

For a while after university, I hung around the fringes of the writing community. I have vivid memories of seeing two of my favourite Canadian authors in Ottawa. One was Timothy Findley, whom I approached with a bag of books to be signed. That’s how little I knew about etiquette at literary events! The other was David Adams Richards, then writer-in-residence at U of O. I slipped in to a reading by Guy Vanderhaeghe, who had just begun when I realized David Adams Richards was in the audience, two seats away. Guy Vanderhaeghe is not part of my vivid memories because I couldn’t focus on anything except Richards. He was my idol then. (What? You can write lyrical, heart-rending stories about blue-collar Maritime life?)

Why did it take me decades, plus a move west, to return to “real” writing? I think that has less to do with place than with stage of life. When midlife arrived, it hit me—if I don’t give it another try now, I never will.

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

I’m astounded at how distanced I became from Ottawa’s literary scene once I started earning a living from words. I quit going to readings. I didn’t hang out with creative writers. My creative outlet became music. I learned to play bass after a fashion and was in a basement band with my then-boyfriend (the drummer) and a couple of guitarist friends. 

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?

There was this period after I got back into creative writing when I lamented the Ottawa years. All that time I’d spent writing for pay instead of love—was it all a giant waste? If I’d kept at it, would my first novel have come out when I was 27 instead of 57?

Fortunately the self-pity party was short-lived. I now know those years were an apprenticeship. They taught me to produce, to not be precious about my words, to trust that a crappy draft will improve. And they built my network. For my first novel, the second-biggest launch was in Ottawa. So many friends, colleagues, and clients came out to celebrate.

Q: What are you working on now?

My second novel, Uncontrolled Flight, comes out September 1. My publisher is hoping to do an Ottawa launch again, so keep an eye out. I’m chipping away at novel #3. Like the first two, it bears little resemblance to my own life—though it does feature a female bassist.