, Ottawa 200
Manahil Bandukwala is the author of Heliotropia
(Brick Books 2024; shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Award, the Raymond Souster
Award, and the Ottawa Book Award, and winner of the Archibald Lampman Award)
and MONUMENT (Brick Books 2022). She was selected as a Writer’s
Trust of Canada Rising Star in 2023. See her work at manahilbandukwala.com.
You and I recently participated in a ‘poetry crawl’ around Centretown, organized and curated by Amanda Earl. What was your process of working Ottawa research for that particular project? What were you hoping to find?
I love poetry crawls (and all other kinds of walking tours too). As someone who only moved to Ottawa ten years ago, I’ve learned so much about Ottawa’s neighbourhoods through these types of walks, about the people who lived there and the spaces that were once community gathering points. Last year, I did Susan Johnston’s literary walking tour of Hintonburg, where I learned so much about the neighbourhood I now live in.
Susan’s tour really informed my approach to what I wanted to write, in terms of bringing to light small details that, when combined with the works of the others on the tour, show a rich fabric of Ottawa’s poetic past. What I liked about Amanda’s invitation was that there wasn’t an expectation to “find” something, but rather to go in whatever direction felt inspirational and meaningful to us as individuals.
When I learned that Priscila Uppal has been one of the few historic South Asian poets, I immediately knew what I wanted my research and writing to focus on. Uppal’s work has been influential for me in the past, and Amanda’s invitation opened up opportunities to dive deep into Uppal’s oeuvre. It was fun to read Uppal’s books with an eye for Ottawa in particular, which isn’t a way I’ve read a book of poetry before.
How did Uppal’s influence show itself? And what, specifically, about Uppal’s work do you find yourself responding to?
In the past, I’ve been taken by Uppal’s use of language, the diction and style of her writing, and how effortless her poetry feels when I read it. The four poems I wrote for the poetry crawl were all centos of entire books by Uppal, though I was attuned to references that resonated with things happening in my own life, or in the world around. Some of these books were published over twenty years ago, but references to Ottawa, to bombing in the Middle East, to quarantines and lockdowns, all felt relevant. The poems were all very specific to their time, but there’s also something to be said about their staying power and continued relevance today.
What brought about your interest in working the cento? What do you feel it brings to or provides for your work? Do you see the form in terms of homage, jumping off point or conversation?
Lately I’ve been feeling stuck with poetry—in part because my writing attention has been towards fiction for the past two years. Whenever I’m stuck in this way, I turn to form and constraint. Around the time of Amanda’s invitation, I’d read a few centos recently that really stuck with me, including in Margo LaPierre’s Ajar and Jody Chan’s Madness Belongs to the People. I loved the specific voice their centos evoked, how they used found lines from poems often unlike their own, and fused their own voice and style into them. I had already been wanting to try out the form for myself, and as I was reading and researching, it struck me that this was the perfect opportunity to try out the form.
Have your poems, or your approach to the poems, changed at all through the process of focusing on prose?
Although a lot of my prose has been speculative, my recent
poems have been a lot more grounded in realism! I think this is in part due to
writing a lot of speculative poetry in Monument and Heliotropia,
and now coming back to realism feels a bit full-circle. I feel like I’m in a
sandbox stage with poetry right now, and am just having fun seeing what emerges
without expectations to put together a chapbook or full-length manuscript.
I’m curious at the contemporary lean into speculative poetry, from Jason Christie and Lindsay Bradford (formerly Lindsay B-e) to Renée Sarojini Saklikar and Mahaila Smith. What appeals to you about working with the speculative, and how is your return to, as you say, being “grounded in realism” revealing itself?
The speculative has always felt full of possibilities, especially to those of us who have been sci-fi/fantasy fans our whole life. It opens up unexpected avenues, and what appealed to me was that, as the writer, the poem could go anywhere. I’m trying to bring that same approach into poems grounded in realism, to let them go where they want. I’m certainly open to them being speculative—that just hasn’t happened yet!
Is there a difference in the way you approach prose, compared the poem, or the poetry manuscript? Or is it simply a different shape of breath or line to the same potential list of concerns, questions and possibilities?
The writing outcome and the goals are different, but I do think my approach is ultimately very similar. I like starting in a notebook, letting ideas generate, and then shaping them from there. Prose is a much longer process, and I’ve had to learn to be okay with sitting for prose pieces for a longer period of time. At the end of the day, it’s all writing, it’s all using language and words to evoke, provoke, and play.
What prompted the focus on writing prose? Was it an extension of what you’d already been thinking across your work, or were you wishing to move into a different direction? Was there something you wished to explore that only prose, not poetry, might allow?
It was the latter—there were things I was trying to write through poetry that just weren’t coming out the way I wanted them too. A lot of Ottawa poets were working more and more on fiction around that time—Margo LaPierre, Conyer Clayton, Mahaila Smith, Frances Boyle—and in talking to them about writing craft and processes I was likewise compelled to try a new form of writing to see if the things I wanted to write about would come through better. And, they did!
Do you have a final shape in mind when working on a project, whether a poetry manuscript or fiction?
Sometimes I do, and I find those projects have, without a doubt, fizzled out. The projects that actually take form are the ones I let unravel naturally—and then I come back to them to finesse and polish. I think this probably has to do with the idea of the finished product that I build in my head, and then get frustrated early on when it’s not turning out the way I’ve built it up to be. I do think the partial projects have a role to play in building craft skills, and this is true for any artistic medium.
rob mclennan lives in Ottawa, where he accidentally co-owns a house across the street from where his parents were married, and spent more than twenty years running a reading series two blocks from where he was born. His latest poetry collection is edgeless (Caitlin Press, 2026). His prior collection, the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025), recently won the 2026 Archibald Lampman Award.
