I watched a National Film Board documentary about P.K. Page’s life and literary career while I was the writer-in-residence at the Al & Eurithe Purdy A-frame. I was watching it for research. In the documentary Page talks to the interviewer about getting her poems accepted by the influential Chicago-based magazine, Poetry. She says that she’d wanted poems in that magazine for years, but once it happened it didn’t seem like a big thing. In the documentary Page then references Groucho Marx, mixing up the phrase somewhat, saying, “Why should I join an exclusive club that lets in people like me?” There was the 1954 Governor General’s Literary Award winner, for everyone to stream for free on the NFB website, laughing at herself, self-deprecating and undermining the selectness of her achievement.
My time at the A-frame can be pretty accurately summed up by that scene in that documentary. There I was, by some measures a “successful writer” who was sitting in the cottage of a Canadian literary icon by the means of a prestigious residency program, selected by a jury of my peers for this honour, and I was still grappling with self-doubt. It’s a funny thing to also view the figures of CanLit’s past, like Page, as humans and not just the geniuses behind their best literary compositions. It’s a little odd, even, to view them as capable of feeling like imposters or frauds or hacks. (Aside: on the topic of poets being self conscious, while I was at the residency I read a bunch of Al’s correspondences published in Yours, Al: The Collected Letters of Al Purdy and my favourite line was from one of Al’s letters to the American poet Charles Bukowski, in a moment when Al was, I guess, getting a bit too emotional or sentimental for his liking and needed to alleviate the seriousness of his tone by saying: “Anyway, talking about feeling as above, bothers me. I’m so fuckin self conscious I doubt the motives for shitting.”) There is a little yellow Moleskine journal in the A-frame where each writer-in-residence can put down a few sentences or paragraphs about their time in the space. That document also clarified for me that everyone who had been in Purdy’s cottage hadn’t just been creating non-stop, penning perfect poem after perfect poem. It did take me getting there to realize that this kind of output wasn’t expected of me over my 4-week residency. When I was first informed that my application to the residency was accepted I was overjoyed, then came the anxiety mixed with excitement, and once I’d arrived I felt simultaneously like I belonged and never should have stepped foot in there. I felt like I shouldn’t’ve joined the club that would have someone like me.
Going back to the beginning, let me review how I got the A-frame residency. As I mentioned, there was an application process. Like most writing residencies, the application consists of a professional curriculum vitae, a plan for the residency (i.e. a project that will be worked on and/or completed at the residency), a writing sample, and an optional letter of reference. The Al & Eurithe Purdy A-frame residency is somewhat unique because the application also includes a “community-based project” that the writer-in-residence will complete during their stay in Prince Edward County, where Al & Eurithe’s A-frame is located. Suggested community projects are writing workshops or public readings; the first writer-in-residence at the A-frame, Katherine Leyton, filmed various strangers around the County reading a poem by Al Purdy for her community-project. This was the source of my initial spat of self-doubt. What could I, a 30-something Ottawa-based writer without a full-length collection and a smattering of poems in nationally-distributed literary magazines, offer to a community around 200 kilometers away from where some writers actually know my name and (perhaps, hopefully) care about what I’m doing? I pitched printing linocut poster poems or broadsides as my project. I’m no artist, but the assessors of my application probably didn’t know that. And I thought it would be unique. If you can’t be ambitious when writing an application for a grant or to a writing residency, when can you? In October 2024 I sent in my application package, six printed copies mailed to BC and an email I finally hit “send” on at 11am on a Friday.
I missed the phone call from Jean Baird, board member of the A-frame Association, when she was trying to notify me that I’d be selected as a writer-in-residence at the Al & Eurithe Purdy A-frame. I was in the shower. What are the chances that she would call during the five minutes I was washing! She sent me an email asking for a good time to connect after I didn’t pick up, which I saw while toweling off, and I called her right back. I might have even still been wearing a towel. The phone call was brief, I think, although it sent me soaring. Whatever was said doesn’t really matter—perhaps some generous comments on my application from Jean, definitely multiple utterances of thanks from me—though I’m sure Jean could hear my grin on the other side of the phone. It was January 2025 and, not that Jean could possible know this, it was just 12 days before my 35th birthday. I would be notified later that I would be the last writer-in-residence for 2025, living in the A-frame for four weeks from mid-October to mid-November. At the beginning of the year, the residency couldn’t come soon enough, although I knew there were still obstacles to navigate.
Here’s what the A-frame writer-in-residence is offered: a stipend of $750 per week, a temporary library card for the library at Queen’s University in Kingston, and the entirety of Al and Eurithe’s A-frame cottage for four weeks. (I believe some residencies were longer in the past, and even in 2025 there is a Steven Heighton Fellowship that includes a six-week residency.) Here’s what the writer-in-residence is still expected to do after being offered a residency: submit a grant proposal to the Canada Council for the Arts (CCA) for matched funding for the residency and travel expenses. Writing a grant application is and isn’t an onerous task. It’s not much more work than the residency application, but cultural funding agencies require a budget detailing what every penny of funding will be spent on. Everyone I talked to, including the folks at the A-frame Association, insisted that I should ask for the full amount possible from the CCA. Everyone I talked to assured me that, even if I didn’t receive what I’d asked for, the CCA would offer the travel funding for the residency, considering this was an exclusive opportunity offered through a juried application process. Most of my time working on that grant application I spent finetuning my budget, concerned that this would be the thing that would make or break my application, but I’ll likely never know if that was the deciding factor.
Of course I wasn’t offered anything by the CCA. Nada. Zilch. “It did not score highly enough compared to others” is the extent of the explanation in the results email. I would learn this result of my grant application just about a month before I was to head to the A-frame. When I first opened the email with the results of my application, I thought for a moment, “This is another jury of my peers telling me that I don’t actually deserve this residency, that my writing isn’t worthy of even a miniscule investment of a couple thousand dollars to help make this opportunity possible.” With only the $3000 stipend from the A-frame Association and an expectation to take the 4-week residency off from my various jobs, I had to pivot last minute to ensure that I didn’t have to pay out of pocket for a month-long car rental, and that I wouldn’t have to resort to subsiding on white rice at the A-frame. Luckily, my parents have two cars and the ability to spare one for four weeks. That did mean, however, that the first day of my residency was going to consist of approximately 8 hours of travel: getting my uncle to drive me from Ottawa to Barrie, getting my parents’ car there, then driving from Barrie to Ameliasburgh. When I first stepped into that cottage at around 8PM on a rainy Sunday in October, I knew the whole ordeal was worth it.
The space that Al Purdy lived and worked in for almost 50 years, where he wrote the Governor General's Award-winning The Cariboo Horses and many other books, where numerous other CanLit icons visited and drank and wrote and laughed—it’s a magical space. I wrote a poem that first night that I got there—three poems, actually, although there at least two of them will remain pages in a notebook and nothing more—and I set a goal for myself to write at least one poem every day during my residency. I set a number of goals or rules for myself: reading for at least one hour every morning, exercising at least once a day, baking something once a week. I didn’t achieve that last goal, and the only thing I “baked” myself was pancakes for breakfast. The rules were essentially effective, though, and paired with the newness of the cottage and the break from my usual day-to-day responsibilities (apart from cooking and doing dishes) I found myself quite productive, especially in those first few days. It was a novelty to wake up and have nothing to do except read and write and think about poetry. Nevertheless, after the first week I began to question my work, both the new poems I was writing at the A-frame and more generally. I reached out to my group chat to kvetch about not feeling successful. The first week at the A-frame was novel but it eventually sunk in that bar was set incredibly high, that people who had written and created art in this space were successful and talented and the same expectation would be held up against my work now. I started to question the intentions behind my writing, whether they were justifiable or if they even existed at all. I was reminded by my lovely and patient friends that the only person who is setting the bar for myself is myself. The morning after I sought reassurances from my group chat I wrote a sort of Ars Poetica that was really a series of questions to myself and no one in particular, a two-page anxiety-induced rant about how I feared that my poetry didn’t matter, and an uncertain guide to how I could make my poetry somewhat matter to a certain audience or even a wider audience, if I could pull it off.
It’s still too soon after leaving the A-frame to know if my newfound purpose is actually leading to any sort of meaningful change in my writing. It’s too soon to know if any of the writing I did at the A-frame is any good. (I haven’t really looked at any of it since I left.) I am certain, though, that I’ll never not feel self conscious in the literary world, like I’m taking up space that would be better filled by someone else. But, like P.K. Page and Al Purdy and a million other writers seem to always be advocating this, the goal is to stick to it and to keep working on the craft and to fake confidence if necessary. Nobody wants to read a self conscious poet, but goddammit that’s what they’re gonna get if they ever pick up my book.
Chris Johnson (he/him) was born in Scarborough, Ontario, and currently lives on unceded, unsurrendered territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation (Ottawa). He is the managing editor for Arc Poetry Magazine and editorial assistant at Nightwood Editions. In Fall 2025, Chris was a writer-in-residence at the Al & Eurithe Purdy A-frame. His latest chapbook is 320 lines of poetry (counting blank lines) (Anstruther Press, 2023).
