Six Questions interview #211 : Vincent Tinguely

Vincent Tinguely is a writer based in Winnipeg. His work has appeared in Four Minutes to Midnight  no. 10, Canadian Poetry no. 64, and the Poetry-Quebec website, edited by Endre Farkas. His fiction has been anthologized in The Art of Trespassing (Invisible Press), the conundrum reader (conundrum press) and Stories from Blood & Aphorisms vol. 2 (Gutter Press). He is the co-author (with Victoria Stanton) of Impure— Reinventing the word (conundrum press), a nonfiction book about the Montreal spoken word poetry scene. He is a recent graduate of the Masters in Cultural Studies program at the University of Winnipeg, with a focus on texts and culture.

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

I was brought to Ottawa in the summer of 1972 by the inexorable logic of the Canadian Armed Forces. My Dad was transferred regularly, every two or three years, during the entirety of my childhood and teen years, and Ottawa was just one stop along the way. We moved to CFB Ottawa (North), also known as CFB Rockcliffe. I have only recently learned that the entire base where I lived and had so many foundational experiences has been decomissioned and torn down, and a completely new housing development has sprung up in its place.

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

I had already begun to conceive of myself as a writer, tapping out science fiction and fantasy stories on my Dad's trusty manual Smith-Corona portable typewriter, as a grade V kid in Kingston. Because I lived in Ottawa only in my early teen years (I attended grade VIII at Viscount Alexander Public School on the base, and grade IX at Sir Wilfrid Laurier High School), it hadn't yet occurred to me to get involved in a writing community. I was delighted to hone my writing skills by taking a typing course in grade IX, for which I received an award (see photo). It was during this typing class, when I'd be bored after completing an assignment at lightning speed, that I would indulge my nascent writing skills with puerile freeform texts designed to amuse my equally puerile classmates. Such as:

we explained that it is impossible to we explained that it si
we explained we explained that if you don't pay up we explained we ecplained that it would be dangerous get get your get your
[all typos verbatim]
  and
There was a mad man named Card
Who was as interesting as a pile of lard.
When he attempted to teach,
A lesson to a peach,
They threw him in a cell, which was barred.

Well ... you get the picture. (Mr. Card actually taught us Physics in grade IX.) I should note that two of my puerile classmates from that year became lifelong friends and frequent correspondents, back when people communicated by writing letters and 'posting' them to one another. I consider this another key component of my early development as a writer. I'd visit these friends in Ottawa regularly (I was living just up the river in CFB Petawawa at the time), and we'd haunt the used bookstores up and down Bank Street to add to our collections of H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, Anne McCaffery and Andre Norton. This tradition continues every time I visit Ottawa to this day – more recent finds included Anaïs Nin's unexpurgated diary Fire, Diane di Prima's collected poetry, and one of Gary Snyder's New Directions books.

So, my relationship with the Ottawa writing community as such came much later, and was largely through yourself, mr. rob mclennan; for instance, when I was in town for the launch of Impure in Ottawa in 2002, I was put up for the night in the extremely dusty and book-haunted environs of mr. mclennan's apartment at the time. rob also published one of my poems as an above ground press broadside (no. 169) back in 2003. And the good people at Library and Archives Canada included me in their 'virtual exhibition' of 2009, Artists' Books: Bound in Art, featuring some of my many self-published zines.

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?

In Montreal, I became part of a constellation of writers and other artists performing, self-publishing and even touring their poetry and creative writing projects. This scene soon connected to similar enthusiasts in other cities, which led me to visits and publications in far-flung locales such as Winnipeg, London, Toronto, Vancouver and, yes, Ottawa! It was always fun to meet writers from other local scenes to see what they were producing, and what sort of ideas they had that we could adopt in our own practices.

Q: What are you working on now?

I'm working on an endless project of 'auto-docu-fiction' covering the years 1982-1986. I'm currently about halfway through, and hope to finish by the time I'm 70 (I just turned 65 this year). It involves a lot of research into my own archive, as well as whatever I can find online or close at hand. Among other things, the texts explore my early formation as a writer, from the point where I decided that was what I wanted to do, to the time when I had my first publications in literary magazines. It's an extremely dense writing process, and some of the most satisfying work I've ever done.

Six Questions interview #210 : Ian FitzGerald

Ian FitzGerald’s professional background in advertising led to teaching at Alberta University of the Arts in Calgary, Alberta. He has trifled with poetry since teenage and is getting dangerously close to thinking he should take it seriously, maybe. He is quite keen on poetry and hopes one day that will be requited.

His poem “Decibels” was published in We Are One – Poems from the Pandemic, 2020; “Sounding” in Subterrranean Blue Poetry Volume X, Issue IV, 2021; “Through a Certain Mirror,” Framed & Familiar: 101 Portraits (Wet Ink Books 2022); “Ear Drums,” FreeFall Magazine, Fall 2022; “Depth” and “The Stiffer the Bristle, the Better the Brush (off),” FreeFall Magazine, Fall 2023 as well as two ‘slogan poems’ accepted for publication in Journal of Customer Behaviour, Westburn Publishing, U.K. in 2022/2023.

His chapbook Each Mouthful Dripping… recently appeared from above/ground press.

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

Moved to Ottawa to attend Carleton and stayed there two and a half years.  I left and moved to Banff to be a ski bum for a winter after the CRTC revoked CKCU-FM’s advertising license ( I was selling ads for the station at the time).

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

I started writing radio ads when CKCU got its FM license in 1975 – for various record albums, head shops, jeans stores etc.  I had dabbled with poetry in high school and continued it as a sideline while in Ottawa.  At CKCU, there was a tremendous group of talented individuals, many from journalism, and I got involved in writing and broadcasting during that 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?

There was a bit of a ‘no holds barred’ approach to the creative radio ads we made.  We were constrained by regulation insofar as claims the advertising could make and that discipline encouraged innovative thinking and writing.  I came to understand how to make ‘theatre of the mind’ using words (and production).  Since, living and working in advertising in Montreal and Calgary my poetry was often neglected for years at a time; I kept up some connection with workshopping groups and so on.  It was really the pandemic that re-energized me as a poet.    

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

My time in Ottawa was heavily focused on CKCU-FM.  At the time, as the only youth-oriented FM radio station in the city, it attracted a great many talented individuals.  There was a music focus of course and I was exposed to a lot of music that I hadn’t known before and that opened my eyes (and ears) to culture that was outside of the mainstream. 

 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?

Because I started writing professionally in radio, I feel like it’s never left me.  I worked in TV and ad agencies and touched many different media types.  But radio is really a writer’s medium (as is direct mail which I also gravitated towards) and even now, teaching in a graphic design program that emphasizes visuals, I love radio’s ability to use words, to create a picture in the listener’s mind ¾ like good poetry does!

Q: What are you working on now?

Currently, I am creating a full-length book of poems that stem from known advertising slogans.  The book will have a lot of visual content to augment the poetry ¾ to offer a visual representation of the product associated with the slogan, the words in the slogan or the era or scenario that the slogan suggests (see the chapbook Each Mouthful Dripping… from above/ground).  I am also working with artists to make short animations as part of my performative readings of these poems.  My day job is teaching advertising, brand design and writing at Alberta University of the Arts in Calgary.

Six Questions interview #209 : Christine McNair

Christine McNair [photo credit: J.Sparks photography] is the author of Charm (winner of the 2018 Archibald Lampman Award) and Conflict (finalist for the City of Ottawa Book Award, the Archibald Lampman Award, and the ReLit Award for Poetry). Her chapbook pleasantries and other misdemeanours was shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook Award. Her work has appeared in sundry literary journals and anthologies. Her third book, a nonfiction hybrid genre poetic memoir, Toxemia (Book*hug) was published in fall 2024, and launches as part of an event on October 1st through the Ottawa International Writers Festival.

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

I’ve been in Ottawa since February 2008 when I moved here for work. I grew up in Mississauga though I did live in Blackburn Hamlet from toddler age until mid kindergarten. I went to university and worked in the Annapolis Valley (NS) for several years before heading off for a graduate degree in the UK. After finishing my MA, I worked in the UK for a year or so before returning to Canada. Then I was in Toronto for about a year before I moving to Ottawa.

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

I’ve written since I was little, and I’ve considered myself a writer since I had some horrid little French poem about autumnal leaves published in my elementary school newsletter. I wrote throughout high school and published occasionally before starting at Acadia University where I completed an English BA with a creative writing thesis under Dr. Wanda Campbell. I feel fortunate to have experienced that program and to get a taste of my writing being taken seriously. I helped re-establish an arts magazine at Acadia. I worked in publishing for a while. I wrote and published my own work in various places until coming to Ottawa the year that I turned thirty. My first tentative steps into the writing community were joining the local CAA poetry circle before eventually taking workshops (with you and others) in town. I then followed the tide into all the many reading series and events dotted throughout the city.

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

I liked the writing community in Ottawa. It was large enough to have a diversity of writers and thought/taste without it being large enough to be fragmented or pretentious. When I arrived, there were so many reading series and I could go to all of them without feeling excluded. There was a welcome in the literary community here that I didn’t find in other places.

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

Ottawa allows for a certain amount of playfulness because there aren’t the same sorts of strictures you’d find in larger or smaller communities. I think the direct engagement with sound poetry across the mainstream poetic community through events over the past 15 or so years – whether you vibe with it or not – impacted the community’s capacity for play and experimentation. We’re in Ontario but we’re still slightly to the side as a smaller community in comparison to areas where most of the publishing companies sit in Canada and our government town status means we are sometimes considered sleepy. There’s a lot of freedom in not being observed too closely.

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?

Ottawa expanded my reading list exponentially. It opened my brain in ways that if I had stayed in other communities – just wouldn’t have happened. Or at least much more slowly. I’m much less risk averse here and less self conscious. I feel like there are so many people who come to Ottawa for work and school despite not having deep roots here. I’ve made some deep and meaningful friendships with other writers in Ottawa. I made some crucial literary friendships in Toronto and Nova Scotia as well (and I miss those folks) but in Ottawa it just seemed there was more ballast for the overall shape of the community. I feel more rooted here despite not having deep roots in the region.

Q: What are you working on now?

I’m working on a third book of poems. My mixed genre hybrid memoir Toxemia came out in Fall 2024 with Book*hug but I’m working on a third poetry-poetry book. I’m interested in exploring a dualistic structure. For one portion, something relating to lunar orbits. For the other, herbal remedies and folk medicine. The two topics would be joined thematically at the centre, not unlike a dos-a-dos bookbinding. I’m not sure what the result will be or the final destination but that’s what I’m circling.