Six Questions interview #191 : Rebecca Kempe

Rebecca Kempe is a writer, zinester, and multidisciplinary artist. Her work has been published in flo., The Ampersand Review, Sumac Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. Her plays, Each on Our Side and Signal Breakdown, were performed in the 2019 and 2021 editions of the Youth Infringement Festival, respectively. She is the author of There’s Nothing to See Here/Nothing Happens Here, a two-part zine which explores the stagnant (but at times welcome) stillness of the suburbs she grew up in through photography and prose. More of her work can be found at www.rkempe.ca and you can find her online as @arbeeko.

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

My parents moved to Ottawa when I was a very young child, and I’ve lived here pretty much ever since, other than a brief stint in Waterloo for school.

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

My parents encouraged my siblings and I to begin reading very early, and from there, writing must have been a natural transition. I don’t think it was a conscious decision, but I can tell you that I remember already thinking of myself as a writer in first grade. I was totally that cliché elementary school writer kid who devoured novels and read craft books and carried a notebook around. Pretty much all of my English teachers were supportive, but my Grade 3 English teacher was the first to actually believe in me, which still means a lot to me. I wish I could contact her just to say thank you.

I submitted a lot to the OPL writing contests until I aged out, and met a few people that way, but other than that, I find that I’m actually a lot more connected to the local visual arts community, and to some extent the theatre community as well, than the actual writing scene. One of my high school teachers encouraged us to submit plays to the Youth Infringement Festival. My first play was selected to go through the dramaturgy process, and had two other plays make it all the way to production, and those experiences were instrumental not just to my development as a playwright, but to my development and confidence as a writer in general. I learned so, so much from the dramaturgs I worked with, who were awesome mentors throughout the revision process, and in 2021, I got to work with the director, state manager, and actors more directly, which was insanely cool.

I’ve been dipping my toes into getting more involved in the broader writing community in Ottawa, mainly through my university but also through submitting to local literary magazines like flo. flo. is one of my favourite lit mags right now, actually. The community around it is amazing and the editorial team does a wonderful job curating beautiful issues. Hopefully I’ll get around to attending more in-person events, but life is chaotic, so we’ll see.

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

I don’t know that being in a community of writers has necessarily shifted my thinking on the craft of writing, but it has definitely made me feel less alone and helped me feel a sense of legitimacy (which can be hard to feel in the arts sometimes). Being around and collaborating with other writers is invaluable. It’s helped me figure out who I want to be, and I also get to meet really cool people and support them. It makes me feel like I’m contributing to something bigger than myself. This is especially true when meeting other people in theatre, I think. Sure, you can write a play, but you need actors, directors, stage managers, set designers, etc. to bring it to life, and so it becomes a broader, collective vision, which is my favourite thing about writing plays.

But really, writers are always such cool people who do cool things, and it’s fun to hang out with cool people.

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

Ottawa gives you space to experiment, I think. To be multifaceted. To just let your work do what it wants without trying to become a brand. I’ve always said that this is a city with an ongoing identity crisis. Yes, this is a government city, but only in some ways. There is also a lot of high-tech, we have many museums and cultural institutions, and a ton of students move here from across the country. We’re close enough to Gatineau that a lot of people flip flop between the two cities. We have a sizeable community of francophones, which isn’t super common in Ontario. Ottawa is a city that manages to feel like a city while also feeling small. It’s a place that’s hard to define, and I think that perspective bleeds into the way people make art here. I don’t feel like I only have to be a writer or only have to be an artist and I meet artists who have day jobs in completely different fields all the time. And the community here feels very chill and supportive.

I think something that’s kind of unique about Ottawa is that so much of what happens here arts-wise is community based and community funded. It feels a little bit underground in some ways, and so while it can be a lot harder to find people and start going to events at first, the community feels a lot more intimate, I guess? Once you start meeting people you start getting to know everyone, and you find out about the other events, and you start going to those as well, and before you know it you feel like you’ve found 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?

I made two zines last year that responded directly to my time living in suburban Ottawa. The first is called There’s Nothing to See Here; the second is called Nothing Happens Here. They’re both in a hybrid essay/photo zine format and they explore my relationship with living in the middle of some random suburb where there isn’t much to do, how it felt, why I came to terms with it, and my updated thoughts on living in a suburb. I think the experience of living in a community that’s (possibly) a little bland and (definitely) very far from the rest of the city is very common in Ottawa, a city that while being the largest in terms of physical area has little to show in terms of population density or working transportation or existence of a downtown core. Living in suburbia can feel like living in a bit of a limbo, and I think based on what I’ve heard from people who move here from other cities, I can extrapolate to say that living in Ottawa in general can feel like that as well. But the point I wanted to make is that there is always something to enjoy if you’re willing to put in the effort to find it, and it’s especially true here.

Q: What are you working on now?

I have various bits and pieces of things that I’m making progress with on and off. I’ve started writing a collection of essays about various aspects of art, such as exploring what gives art value, what it means to have an artistic voice, and looking at what makes certain types of art more popular than others. It’s probably going to end up in some kind of zine along with some paintings and/or collages – the format is still a work-in-progress. You can find updates on my zines on Instagram at @arbeeko.

I’ve also been submitting poetry, which is very new for me. I’ve always written poems but thought of myself as primarily an essayist, so putting poems out there is a step outside my comfort zone.

Really though, I’m mostly trying to survive being a student. It’s a miracle that I still find time to write these days. Major props to anyone with a consistent writing schedule, I have no idea how you do it.

Six Questions interview #190 : David Currie

David Currie is a writer in Ottawa.  He is the author of five chapbooks and no book books. His chapbooks include Bird Facts (Apt 9 Press, 2014), Mystery Waffles (In/Words Press 2014), Poems for the Mishka (Shrieking Violet Press 2015), The Planets that Block our Light (In/Words 2015), and Memento Mishka (Apt. 9, 2023) in collaboration with Jennifer Baker. His poems have appeared in magazines across Canada most recently in Plants, Animals, and Humans (Apartment 613, 2023). He currently works as a political organizer – a job which brings him to exotic locations across Canada most recently the resplendent former municipality of Kanata.

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

I was first brought to Ottawa by way of a cesarian section. I have lived here for most of the ensuing years with the exceptions of periods of failing to live in another city or attempts to escape the purgatory that our city occasionally feels like.

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

I’ve always written – from the time I could first speak I was playing with language. However, as with most things in my life shame prevented me from pursuing writing at Canterbury (I instead chose vocal music – an artform that is beautiful, if generally a little too self-serious).

I did however write my first and second plays in quick succession. They were well attended by my high school peers and not attended by my later friend Cameron Anstee who was unable to get a ticket due to the popularity of “Pants!”

A month later, I borrowed the complementary monogrammed Writer’s Festival pass of Agnies Grudniewicz and attended most of that year’s festival including a workshop (that I did pay for) by Trillium Award Winning Poet Stuart Ross. That workshop changed the way I thought about writing. The idea of exacting silliness began transforming my work.

In university, I continued writing plays and started stand up and, occasionally, poetry. By 2008, I was screenwriting for film and television.

I re-entered university that year as well and had the next transformative writing experience of my life: In/Words.

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

In/Words is something that has been discussed at length on this blog, and I have a feeling as those who passed through it become more well-known, what Trilliam Award Winner Bardia Sinaee has dubbed “The In/Words Extended Universe” will garner even more data server usage (ink).

In/Words, at its best, fostered a community of writers constantly collaborating, editing, and encouraging new work by its writers.  In/Words was at once a magazine, a press, a writers’ circle, and a reading series. It was a constellation of writers all orbiting around a single grounding space.  That space was a broom closet with a printer, a computer in hospice, and a bearskin rug.

At its worst, In/Words was a community inspired by opposition in the tradition of First Statement, Contact, and the Cerberus collective.  As the In/Words writers have joined the diaspora of Canadian Literature I know many of us have struggled to purge this oppositional impulse from our writing.  I know I have.

My involvement with In/Words begat my participation in the small press fair, which begat Versefest.  The broader community of writers in Ottawa are warm, welcoming, and feature many incredibly talented people.

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

I don’t know if I can say that anything that happens here doesn’t happen anywhere else.  I will say that the incredible level of bureaucratic bumbling Ottawa has to offer creates a wonderful ironic backdrop to write in front of.  Whether it be the O-Train with its constant decommissioning due to predictable issues, the wrong Jack Purcell monument, the pin people, the haunted dog park at the edge of Lowertown, or the wonderful dead bird sculpture which likely got somebody fired – if you’re looking for it, you can find wonderful writing fodder.

However, Ottawa is also exceedingly beautiful with its nature spaces and river pathways. Gatineau Hills aside, this city has the arboretum and the experimental farm, the greenbelt, and three downtown waterways, not to mention the myriad of botanical gardens.  There are so many opportunities to surround yourself in natural beauty that it’s easy to forget how absolutely ridiculous having 4 levels of government who do not communicate with each other and fail to accomplish anything successfully is.

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’m always trying to write about Ottawa or In/Words or lampoon my time working on Parliament Hill.  However, usually I run out of steam before figuring out what I’m writing.

Right now, I am trying to write a tryptic exploring my traumatic bipolar disorder diagnosis, the community that I loved a decade ago and my efforts to reach out to it now, and then finally the current apocalypse we are currently living through and being inconvenienced by.  The end question of the whole project is "who would you want to spend the end of the world with?"  For me, it’s the people of In/Words.

It’s a tall order and could be impossible.

Q: What are you working on now?

Apart from the above project stuck on a raft, for the past four years my main focus has been finishing a novel.  I always need two projects to flip between to avoid losing writing momentum but “Gary Hughes” is the big one.

Gary Hughes is a novel about groundhogs, specifically one groundhog named Gary Hughes.  In the book, all groundhogs have a biological ability to time travel but humans have never noticed because they don’t do anything we would recognize as interesting.  The novel explores their time travel exploits and the ripples across time they create and how those ripples are resolved.  The Groundhogs are anthropomorphized as little as possible.  I’m hoping to be finished by the end of 2023 and publish it sometime before the world ends.

 

Six Questions interview #189 : Madeleine Stratford

Madeleine Stratford is a poet, a literary translator and an associate professor at the Université du Québec en Outaouais. Her first poetry book, Des mots dans la neige (éditions anagrammes, 2009) was awarded the 2009 Orpheus Poetry Prize in France. Her French translation of Ce qu’il faut dire a des fissures by Uruguayan poet Tatiana Oroño (Paris, L’Oreille du Loup, 2012) was awarded the 2013 John Glassco Prize for Literary Translation by the Literary Translators’ Association of Canada, and also received a commendation from the jury of the 2012 Nelly Sachs Translation Prize in France. Three of her translations were shortlisted for the Governor General award (2016, 2019, and 2021), and one for the Young Readers Kirkus Prize (2017). Her recent work includes Swallowed by Réjean Ducharme (Véhicule Press, 2020) and Chasseurs de rêves by Cherie Dimaline (Boréal, 2023).

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

I am originally from the Eastern Townships, but I have travelled quite a lot. After living in Germany, Spain, Montreal, and Quebec City, I first moved to Gatineau for work in September 2009. I had my eye set on Ottawa from the start, though, and eventually bought my first house here in 2018. I have been a happy Vanier dweller ever since!

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

I have been writing since as long as I can remember, but I guess I started getting truly involved while in CEGEP, when I became editor of our student literary journal Chimère. I then went on to write quite a lot of poetry while I was doing my BA and my MA, and some of my poems got published in book form in France in 2009.

When I first started to write poetry, I felt I could be creatively deviant and subversive: I could write everything in lower-case, decide to leave out punctuation marks and put words all over the page – or not. I first wrote in French, obviously, but also wrote a little in German, and quite a lot in Spanish at some point. A few of the poems included in my first poetry book, Des mots dans la neige (anagrammes, 2009) were actually first written in Spanish (while I lived in Spain), and then translated (or rather rewritten) into French.

Curiously, English was not a language in which I felt comfortable writing poems. For me, it had always been an academic language, in which I wrote article, essays, but not poetry. It just did not feel right. Then, one day, a publisher in Syracuse I was working with asked me to translate a selection of my own poems into English. English suddenly became a poetic language for me. I wrote a few texts in English over the past few years, some of which can be found online.

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

Until now, I have published mainly translations, but have also taken part in quite a few public readings here, including at VerseFest. My peers have consistently motivated me to go on writing. It is thanks to them that I have not given it up poetry!

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

I find people here are particularly receptive to bilingual or multilingual poetry. I enjoy how different languages and cultures are welcome to interact and grow together, particularly in Ottawa.

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?

Living in Ottawa has made me want to write more poetry in French, my first language. It is important to me that French continues to thrive, here in Ontario. I am in touch with quite a few Francophone poets here. I want to be part of that community and strengthen its different networks, both through my translations and my own writing.

Q: What are you working on now?

I am currently working on a book project funded by the Ontario Arts Council. Now that I have spent over a decade learning to write “like” other people as a literary translator, I feel it is time to rediscover my own voice and find out how it has evolved. I am going back to my roots, writing in French. It is both exhilarating and daunting to write “as myself.” The book is slowly coming together. I am curious to see what comes out of it!

Six Questions interview #188 : Sara Power

Sara Power [photo credit: Claire Power] is a storyteller from Labrador and a former artillery officer in the Canadian Forces. In 2022, she was a finalist for the RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award and a nominee for a National Magazine Award. Her short fiction won The Malahat Review’s 2022 Open Season Award and Riddle Fence’s Fiction Award, and placed second in the Toronto Star Short Story Contest. Her debut collection of short fiction, Art of Camouflage, is forthcoming with Freehand Books in 2024. Sara is represented by Samantha Haywood at Transatlantic Agency.

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

I've had a connection to Ottawa for years. I spent weekends here while I was an officer cadet at the Royal Military College (RMC) in Kingston. My family was in Labrador, so I'd usually spend Thanksgiving and other long weekends with friends who took pity on me and welcomed me into their homes. My first posting after RMC was at the 2nd Royal Canadian Horse Artillery (2RCHA) in Petawawa, and I often came into Ottawa for time off. My Commanding Officer at the time made it very clear that he didn't want his officers fraternizing with the troops on the weekends and encouraged us to get out of town.

I'm no longer in the Canadian Forces, but my husband is, and he is currently based in Ottawa. My three kids and Nathan and I have been here for four years now.
 
Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?

I've been writing stories for years, and have always kept a journal. I submitted my first short story (Art of Camouflage), to Brick Literary on my 40th birthday in 2016. It was rejected, but the reader from Brick asked to meet and discuss the structure of the piece (Thank you Evan J!). The story evolved with Evan's help, and was an honourable mention in The New Quarterly's fiction contest. TNQ published the story in Issue 46, and I was able to meet and work with editor Pamela Mulloy. It was this experience that drew me into the idea that I could be a professional writer. Pamela treated my work with such incisiveness and respect. It was a formative concept for me at the time, to treat the stories with this quality of care, both at the sentence level, and the overall structuring of clarity and authenticity.

As for the Ottawa writing community, my initial encounter was in 2017 during a reading of Best Canadian Short Stories at the Manx. Paige Cooper was reading, and David Huebert, and Lisa Alward, and I was beside myself to hear these writers read their stories. It was my first time at the Manx and the place was its packed and cavernous self. When I entered and searched for a place to sit or stand, a woman tugged on my coat and said, You look like a writer, would you like to join us? Can you even imagine my happiness? The woman was none other than Frances Boyle! That night, Frances introduced me to David O'Meara and a handful of other wonderful Ottawa writers. I felt welcome in a room full of strangers, and then the readings...it was a very special introduction to the Ottawa Writing community. I'll never forget it.

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

Feeling supported and encouraged by a group of talented and professional writers elevated my sense of possibility with writing. It shifted my thinking about rejection, how a writer can manage to thrive in the face of rejection. How the two things (success and rejection) can happen at the same time, even with the same piece of writing.

I submitted a poem to Arc Poetry, which was rejected, but I was invited to participate in the Arc's Poet in Residence Mentorship Program with David O'Meara. At the time, I had only met David briefly at the Manx, but I wasn't familiar with his work. I had no idea what I was in for. It was such a stroke of luck to work closely with someone as talented and generous as David for the better part of a year. He encouraged me to seek alternatives for certain words, to think about what a poem is trying to achieve, to allow different poems to do different things. His mentorship gave me a new confidence to try different things, to be less precious, and less purple ahah! It was around the same time that I was spending more time with Frances Boyle, who was promoting the one hundred rejections a year idea. Honestly, it was a tremendous nourishment for a new writer. David told me about the Banff Centre and I decided, why not apply! I had applied to the MFA program at UBC and been rejected. I applied again and guess what?!

Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?
 
I noticed that the artist community in Ottawa is insecure about its reputation as a government town. Its artists have to work around the scaffolding and tone of stability which can lead to complacency and poison for creatives. I'm not a student, I don't live downtown, and I have three teenagers. My experience has been that a few extra steps are needed to discover the colourful and vibrant happenings in Ottawa. Unlike St. John's, for example, where the music and culture is in the air and the water, it feels a little hidden behind concrete and tempered glass in Ottawa. Once these discoveries are made though, it can be difficult to pick and choose between numerous literary events happening at the same time. Between VerseFest,  Ottawa Writers Fest, Riverbed Reading Series, Tree Reading series, 241 Poetry, GCTC, IFFO, SAW Gallery and Arts Court, Art House Cafe, Perfect Books and of course, The Manx, there is an abundance of artistic discourse and innovation in Ottawa. The community is active and intimate and welcoming. For me, it's become a matter of showing up.   
     
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 wrote a story that plays with the idea that people and spaces can be larger and more complex than they initially appear. It takes place in Ottawa, delves into the mid-century architecture of James Strutt. The Manx makes an appearance. I couldn't help myself! It's a fun pyramid-shaped story and I'm really proud of it. As for my approach to the work, as I mentioned in an earlier question, the sense of being a part of a community definitely nourishes my writerly self. I've met other writers who inspire and motivate me, and have two friends in particular who meet with me on a weekly basis to write together. We set a timer, write at intervals, drink coffee and talk about writing.   

Q: What are you working on now?

My first collection of stories, titled, Art of Camouflage, is in its final stages of edits (comma trauma), and will be published by Freehand in 2024. I'm currently immersed in creating the world of my novel which takes place at the military college in Kingston in the '90s. It's my first novel, so I'm trying to let go of the compressed writing style that I have learned to love with the short story form. I've been reading and rereading Sally Rooney and Emma Cline and Rebecca Makkai and Ann Enright, studying the way they pace themselves, allowing narratives to unfold and blossom.

One of my stories was selected to be in this year's Best Canadian Stories, so I've been working with an editor at Biblioasis to polish the final draft for a Fall/23 publication. And finally, I'm preparing myself mentally for the Writers at Woody Point festival in Newfoundland in August. I attended this festival in 2017 as a brand new writer, and was positively enchanted by the writers and musicians and overall radiance of this festival. This year, Sarah Polley will be there, so I have been busy womanifesting that we will meet, walk by the sea, and share stories. She will connect deeply with one or numerous of my stories and say, Wow, Sara, that sounds very compelling; I'd like to adapt this story for the screen. What do you think? What say you? The two of us will stare into each other's souls for a long moment, then shift our gaze to the horizon where a pod of humpback whales will be swimming gracefully, just below the surface.