The Woodlot

12 or 20 Questions? Two can play at that game! But seriously, rob mclennan is a prolific Canadian writer and tireless community organizer who has been interviewing other writers for decades with his “12 or 20 questions” interview series, so I thought it high time rob got the same treatment. In this spirit, I came up with 12 questions of my own–some are silly, some are serious– and rob was a great sport about it all. Here is my “12 questions” interview with rob mclennan for National Poetry Month:

1. How do you manage to wear as many hats as you do: poet, fiction writer, editor, father, community cheerleader, critic, pamphleteer?

I’ve always been interested in attempting and attending multiple ideas and projects, so as long as I can maintain the juggling, it works out well enough. I certainly never see any of this activity in conflict. One can only feed into another.

I have in the past been accused of having a big head. Perhaps such allows the opportunity for simultaneous hats.

2. Why poetry after forty odd years of writing and 32 years of above/ground press? Has the answer changed from when you started?

Forty odd years: that suggests, one would suppose, that you consider my writing life to have begun when I was fourteen or fifteen, thereabouts. Maybe so. I was fortunate to have a supportive group of creative peers during those days, including a handful that kept producing work long after we graduated, from the late writer Clare Latremouille (1964-2022) to Franco-Ontarien playwright Louis Patrick Leroux and singer-songwriter Chris Page.

I learned around the age of thirty that I am best served by trusting my own judgement, however that might show itself, whether a piece is working or not. I’ve plenty of experience at this point, so if it feels like it is working, however unable I might be to explain the what or the why, I should trust it. Especially if it looks weird.

As far as above/ground press: honestly, I just have an enormous amount of fun making publications and throwing ideas out into the world. Should we make one of these? Should we make that? Shouldn’t [poet] have a new chapbook out? Or [poet] have a debut chapbook? I think that would be cool. There are always fun opportunities to produce items that are relatively inexpensive to produce, distribute and give out through the mail. The larger literary ecosystem, I think, requires the particular kind of fresh influx of writing and energy and interconnectedness and immediacy that chapbooks provide.

I always produce far more copies than I could ever distribute, with some sixty to eighty single-author titles per annum, beyond copies of the quarterly Touch the Donkey, and whatever else the press might see through. Thirty-two years! With the Covid-era appearance of the prose chapbook series and supplemental online journal, periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, I’m curious to see what might occur once the press turns forty, or even fifty. How long can I keep this going? And how long can I continue this in a way that is both exciting for me personally and engaging for readers, writers and the literary ecosystem at large?

3. Ottawa has been “ground zero” for your literary output from the beginning. What makes Ottawa such a great “literary” city?

Well, I remained in Ottawa in the early 1990s because of my daughter Kate. Had she not appeared in January 1991, I might have considered going elsewhere. I wanted to be where the activity was, so I became that activity. It was a deliberate choice I made to “make the city liveable for me,” as I called it, which included working reviews, organizing readings and the small press book fair, and working an amount of editing and publishing and photocopying and folding and stapling. There was always a lot of potential here (and tons of writers), but little in the way of infrastructure, whether media, funding, writing programs or publishing. Most of the 1990s saw writers leaving Ottawa for better/different employment, or writers who hadn’t local options for publishing simply drifted into the ether. A shift began to occur into the later 1990s, assisted by the writers festival appearing in 1997, as others began organizing and publishing and producing and supporting (with Arc Poetry Magazine being one of the rare through-lines across any and all of that activity). By the early aughts, it felt that Ottawa had a pretty solid foundation from which to expand, literary-wise.

Ottawa is interesting, being a major city that feels akin to a small town. Most of our employment falls into government class or high tech or tourism (or support for those, such as restaurants and hotels), which doesn’t really allow for much in the way of part-time employment, meaning artistic types tend to lose creative attention for the sake of security. With no publishing or media or writing programs, there’s little to be “gained” by being an Ottawa writer, so we tend to get along with each other, without camps or conflicts in the same kinds of ways as I’ve heard from other large centres. The beauty of our annual poetry festival, VERSeFest, exemplifies this as well, being a collaboration between most of the reading series and journals in town, attempting both English and French-language poets. We even have simultaneous poet laureates in both languages! And did you know Ottawa was the first Canadian city to host a municipal poet laureate back in 1983?

4. An early book of yours was the The Richard Brautigan Ahhhhhhhhhhh. Who is another poet, living or dead, Canadian or American, you admire who deserves to be celebrated in a book title of yours?

More recently, I’ve worked a handful of poems underneath the title “Book of Magazine Verse” (part of the book of sentences), which is an homage to Jack Spicer, as well as a chapbook-length work as elegy to the late Barry McKinnon. There are most likely other examples. I’m probably the only one still working the “Sex at 31” series, offering a poem every seven years, just like McKinnon and Brian Fawcett began back in the 1970s.

The overtness of that particular poetry title you mention, published by Talonbooks back in October 1999, was riffing off the title of an unpublished work by American writer Richard Brautigan, “The F. Scott Fitzgerald Ahhhhhhhhhhh,” which I thought was pretty entertaining. Circa 2001 or so I did start a fiction-in-progress, “A Short Fake Novel about Richard Brautigan,” riffing off a sequence of titles by Arthur Craven, Jack Spicer and Arthur Rimbaud, but I haven’t managed to get too far into it. The late poet Kevin Killian did encourage me to finish the project, which might be the only reason I’m still considering it.

As David W. McFadden once offered, books come from books, and I’ve never been one to hold back on where my influences lay. I used to be accused of name-dropping, but one shouldn’t be afraid of naming the giants one stands upon the shoulders of. I see myself as building upon their works, and simply wish to cite my sources.

I am currently working a book-length poetry project that responds to a particular Laynie Browne poetry title, which itself responds to a particular Rosmarie Waldrop poetry title. I’m amused by the meta elements of such a project, and am curious to see how my poems-in-response might provide a bit of a structural or tonal break or difference from other corners of my writing.

Philadelphia poet Laynie Browne has been, by the way, working a sequence of book-length poetry projects for some time, each of which responds to a different and particular poetry title by an American poet, including Waldrop, Alice Notley, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, etcetera. I interviewed Browne not long ago for periodicities on the whats and the whys of such projects, as I was interested to hear her thoughts on working response-books at all, let alone so many.

5. I grew up in small villages, and the only thing about small town life for me that has stuck is my love of trucks. You grew up on a small farm. What about that early upbringing has informed your life now?

A sense of community, and the interconnectedness of those who work within it. We all require to help each other, in those ways that we can.

An appreciation for what clouds look like, and the scent of fresh cut grass. I can also smell when the rain is coming (and feel that change of air pressure that accompanies), which I’ve realized from others might be an unusual set of skills. I had presumed for the longest time that everyone could sense those.

6. I’ve seen your writing desk which is a swelling ocean of ever-changing poetry collections, and small chapbooks. But what poetry books still hold a special place of significance for you, and that you revisit often?

I’ve a handful of books by my desk I tend to revisit fairly regularly, including titles by Barry McKinnon, Etel Adnan, John Newlove, Rosmarie Waldrop, Robert Kroetsch, Susan Howe, Pattie McCarthy, Eric Baus, Benjamin Niespodziany, Elizabeth Robinson, Valzhyna Mort, Norma Cole, Guy Birchard, Margaret Christakos, Rachel Zucker, Sawako Nakayasu, Joshua Beckman, Caroline Knox, Dennis Cooley, Sarah Mangold, Julie Carr, Laynie Browne, etcetera. The list is ongoing. My shelves might not be enough.

7. What is the secret font you write in?

Not really a secret: Garamond. I hate Times New Roman.

8. Richard Hugo says all poets have triggering subjects? What are yours? What images or archetypes “seep” into your writing?

Not entirely sure. I can go on at length when asked certain questions about upbringing, parentage, parenting, Ottawa history, the War of 1812. Anything I seem to have strong opinions about, I suppose.

I also tend not to call myself a poet, per se, preferring the term “writer” as more of an all-encompassing umbrella across my fiction, non-fiction, reviews, poetry, etcetera, so perhaps I might be immune from this particular definition.

9. Are you more of a “I sang in my chains like the sea” guy, or “I romp with joy in the bookish dark” gentleman?

Neither, really. Although I prefer not to hold to any fixed point. I have no chains, but I sing. Is the dark bookish? I think mine is unaffected by lighting. My romp is available for both joy and irritation, as required.

10. Where does “The Great Voice” come from?

I’m not a doctor, but most likely The Great Diaphragm, I’d wager.

11. Sometimes when a poem isn’t going well, a poet adds a “swerve” which might be something absurd, or a strange fact, or a line in German. What are your “swerves” to get unstuck when your writing hits a roadblock.

Curious. When I think a poem isn’t progressing (or gets jammed) I tend to set it temporarily aside and work on something else instead, or print the poem out and sit with it at café or pub with pen at the ready. Either way, the answer eventually reveals itself the more I prod at the page. Usually where I get stalled is with rhythm, when I realize that another beat or two needs to land in the middle of a line, or between lines. A poem must have proper flow. Rhythm, baby. Also: Christine and I have had discussions on the work of German-born American poet Rosmarie Waldrop, and she’s pointed out (as someone who took German language classes when younger) that much of the unusual sentence-structure of Waldrop’s poems have their origins in German—utilizing English language over German sentence and phrase constructions—which makes for what appear to us Anglos as unusual patters and patterns.

When you suggest “swerve,” it suggests to me the idea of attempting to break one’s own expected way of thinking, reminiscent of how I use the word “collision” as the point at which two unsuspecting thoughts or images or phrases might interact, allowing something unexpected to emerge from that contact. One of the purposes and processes of art is to explore the unexpected, especially from the perspective of the artist.

These days, my poems tend to start at the beginning, but then work from the inside outward, pushing at the boundaries of the poem until the flesh of it reveals itself. I am perpetually working to trouble or “baffle” (as George Bowering called it) my own linearities to reveal new possibilities.

12. The last question on the Poetry Examination is: “small dandelion moons” + “four year old barefeet running in crabgrass” = X.  Please solve for X.

X = scrambling to collect toys and other nonsense off the back lawn before the lawn guys arrive to mow.

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include the poetry collection Snow day (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025), A river runs through it: a writing diary , collaborating with Julie Carr (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025), On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024) and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). This fall, University of Calgary Press will be publishing his poetry collection the book of sentences, a follow-up to the book of smaller (2022). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics and Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal]. He is editor of my (small press) writing day, and an editor/managing editor of many gendered mothers. The current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.