Bennett Malcolmson : 2026 VERSeFest interviews: Olivia Tapiero

 

 

 

 

Olivia Tapiero (1990) is a writer, translator and musician, born in Montreal. She has authored several books, including Les murs (2008), Phototaxis (2017/2021), Nothing at All (2021/2026), and Un carré de poussière (2025). Her work has been awarded the Robert-Cliche Prize and the Spirale Eva-le-Grand Prize, and has been shortlisted for awards such as the Lambda Literary Awards, the Grand Prix du livre de Montréal and the Governor General’s Literary Award. The editor-in-chief of the Quebec creative writing review Moebius, she regularly contributes to national and international publications. She has translated authors such as Anne Boyer, Roxane Gay and Billy-Ray Belcourt. Her performance and musical work, in collaboration with choreographer and composer Charlie Khalil Prince, has been presented at the Festival TransAmériques in 2025. She lives in Marseille.

Olivia Tapiero reads [virtually[ in Ottawa alongside Marie-Célie Agnant and Sanita Fejzić at the Riverbed Reading Series event on Tuesday, March 24, 2026 as part of VERSeFest 2026.

Is this what a black hole looks like from the inside? 

In astrophysics, it is said that when a body enters a black hole, it undergoes a process called spaghettification: an almost infinite horizontal stretching and vertical compression. This is due to the extremely strong tidal forces of black holes. Maybe this book is the reverse process: something emerging from a black hole, with a very dense shape, in fragments, following a spiral, mixing temporalities and spacialities. Or maybe every sentence is a semantic noodle.

In your text, Nothing at All, you bring to it visercal descriptions of numbness, pain, rape, menstrual blood (much of it literal viscera). You write, I give birth to myself. I repeat it in order to exist, to dissolve in a different way. This is the experience of externalizing the internal (internal to the body, internal to the structures that guide us), is this writing? 

I think that my work generally questions this delimitation between the internal and the external. Intuitively, I would say that it is more like an internalization of the “external”: how history, colonialism, gendered violence, but also nature, the elements, the land, are felt in the flesh. This can manifest itself as traumatic, fragmented memory, chronic pain, etc., but also a deep awareness of interconnection.

Sexual violence, like rape, is probably one of the strongest manifestations of a paradigm of violence penetrating the flesh the flesh, leaving an imprint on the body-mind. This is why it is often used as a weapon of war, as a tool of conquest and genocide. To conquer the land, one repeats different abjections and injuries on the bodies that inhabit that land, that embody it. We see this very clearly today with Palestine: the way people are mutilated, raped, amputated, traumatized by the ongoing Zionist aggression. This is how settler colonial violence writes itself inside indigenous bodies, as is also the case on Turtle Island, or, not so long ago, in Algeria, in the Congo, for example, during brutal colonization processes.

If we accept, momentarily, your definition of writing as externalizing the internal, we have to add that this process follows a long, sometimes satisfying and sometimes painful, but always profound, internalization of the external. It is a fermentation of the external in the internal, made external again, but with something shifting in the language, transforming it, so that subjection becomes something else, something that is powerful because it cannot fully be grasped.  

However, one could argue that these binaries of external/internal are themselves colonial, structured by an understanding of the individual/the body as something separate from the world. Writing for me is at the border, questioning the border. Much like language itself.

To follow from the above, the text uses cosmic language (i.e. black holes, creatures from the sea) and speaks to global experiences of colonization and increased visibility and influence of fascism and yet, it is very much anchored in the body. Can you speak to how in this text, one informs the other, the personal and the cosmic/global? 

The personal is global, the global is personal. The political is intimate, and vice-versa. It is just a question of scales, and scales can always move and shift depending on how you choose to look (and a lot of artistic endeavor is about this, how we choose to look). I like thinking of the “personal” as a biopsy, a sample of the general phenomenon. Look at a leaf through a microscope, it is cosmic. Look at the cosmos from far away, it is dust. Look at rape, it is political. Look at colonialism, it is personal. Look at History, made of so many histories, but also so many erasures, and look at how these erasures show up in different ways. I think that the astrophysical angle speaks to me because of the way “dark matter” structures space: this void that is not void, this mysterious space-time that both binds and separates things. This is how History works, this is how resistance works. Everything is haunted by what has been erased, I really do believe that. And we must protect this haunting, because it whispers a subterranean truth that fascism cannot erase.

For me, and particularly in regards to colonization, the text does the work of demythologizing. You write, Exociticism compresses me to make me readable, desirable. It also constructs mythology around the self – which is a powerful thing, especially as it exists in the text, so outside of cliché. Do you find power in this building and breaking myths? Again you write, if I name it I risk its destruction. Is there power in naming it?

Naming is not always identifying. Writing is not always naming. I can be a way to not name, but rather to make felt, in order to protect something. Like Glissant says, the right to opacity. Mythology is interesting: like literature, and particularly poetry, it often speaks of something besides itself. This slippage is powerful. Because if something is just named, without the language making it felt, making it embodied through its music, its composition, its particularities, then that something can be cut out, bought, and sold, recuperated, corrupted. This is the challenge artists face: how to give something without simply communicating it, so that it can be passed on with truth and integrity.

A couple of years ago I bought a zine by Isabella Roman that read: I want to think of each other the way I think of the ocean. A place I visit to feel small. Since then I have built a running list definition of good small and bad small. I was thinking about this while reading Nothing at All (a good small experience). If I were to give you these concepts (good small and bad small), could you redefine them as understood in Nothing at All? As redefined by you? 

I would reframe this as: the illusion of separation (what you call bad small) and the truth of interconnectedness (what you call good small). The illusion of separation, which violence seeks to reinforce, is always linked to suffering. The truth of interconnectedness is not always joyous, it comes with grief and responsibility, but it carries a fragile beauty that is worth defending.

I know you are a translator so hopefully you can pull back the curtain on what often feels like a mystery to me. Your works (Phototaxis and Nothing at All, both translated by Kit Schluter) have both been translated to English, how does the relationship to the text change? How does it feel from this side, the side of the author? What is gained and what is lost? And what is the relationship to the translator for you? 

I am very lucky to be translated by Kit Schluter, who is a brilliant translator, writer and visual artist. He really gets the music and rhythm of my work, and I feel like his translations not only match my writing, they elevate it. It is a blessing to rediscover some passages after he translates them - like something both foreign and familiar. Of course, since I speak English, I can give my input from time to time, but it's important for me to leave quite a bit of freedom to the person translating - translation is a creative act, and this creation is founded on a profound understanding of the source text. As a translator myself, I understand the research and responsibility, the ethics even, that comes with carrying a text towards another language. There is​ some loss, and some unexpected gains, it's part of the magic and the mystery. Maybe loss and gain is not the way to think about it : more like a metamorphosis, a shifting. It's also very interesting to see how the "same" text can resonate differently in another language, another context. For example, in Phototaxis, the francophone readership did not find the book humorous -  the dark humour "only translates", as Kit and I said in a previous interview. I am looking forward to seeing how this will play out with Nothing at All. Also, the temporal décalage between source text and translation can shift the weight of things - Rien du tout names, in 2021, how fascism arrives "with a red cap on its head", it sits down because we give it a place. This resonates more heavily in 2026.

This stems from your answer just now and how I see the works are marketed – memoir, prose, poetry. I will ask to reinforce and follow from the above comments, is genre something you're conscious of as you're working? Is that mixing of memoir, poetry, essay, etc. about working around and with confined genres? Or is it less conscious, and it is how you collect and make your work?

The marketing of genre is, for me, often an obstacle to the truth of the text in terms of the preconceptions/expectations it can put in a reader's mind. I do not consciously think of genre-bending when I write, of course not. I just write, and it ends up not quite fitting in market categories. It's just how I've been working, especially since Rien du tout (for me, Phototaxis was more of a novel carrying its own death, exploding into something more poetic, but there are already some theatrical monologues in it). For me, what counts is the truth of the text, of its music, its intuitions, its internal logic and composition. The question of categories is business, so none of my business. I do, however, appreciate how texts can make these categories expand, and maybe one day they will be as obsolete as nation-states.

How does it feel to have your newest text, Un carré de poussière, nominated for Le Prix des libraires du Québec, and what did that recognition mean to you in terms of visibility and connection within the literary community?

I am very moved to be a finalist for the Prix des libraires. I wrote an entre-genre work, mixing essay, poetry, and visual interventions (erasure poetry). To have this work recognized in the poetry section feels validating, and also gives me hope, knowing that the definition of poetry is expanding to include strange monsters. Poetry is less and less a « genre », and it is the quality of poetics, of interrogating language, that is valued here. My book was  also awarded the Prix Spirale Eva-le-Grand, which recognized essays. To have this work celebrated as a thinking poem is moving, and encourages me to keep ignoring market categories of genre. I am also glad that this nomination gives visibility to Les éditions de la rue Dorion, a small, independent press that does important work, and that aligns with my ethics and politics. 

So, I like to read through the New York Times' By the Book, but I don't often read American authors so I have little relationship to the texts or the authors. I always wanted a personal canon of By the Book, for what I'm reading. So... 

Where do you like to read? 

I like to read in my bed. Or, generally, lying down. Sometimes, I’ll put a chair by the kitchen window, and I’ll read there. But I enjoy feeling boneless when I read, like some invertebrate, gelatinous creature absorbing it all.

Do you dog-ear your books?

Yes. Top and bottom corner, depending on where the passage of interest is. The books I read do not get out intact. I’ll underline, scribble in the margins, dog-ear a lot.

What are you reading now? What is on your "nightstand"? 

I often read many books at the same time. Right now, I’m reading long-form big boys, because I am recovering from a hit-and-run which left me pretty wounded (the brain is fine, the rest is a question of patience and mechanics).

I therefore have a lot of time and stillness in front of me. So for now the fiction is: War and War by László Krasznahorkai, Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar.  The essays are Imperialism by Hannah Arendt, and Blackshirts & Reds by Michael Parenti (I feel like it’s very important, right now, to educate ourselves about the workings of imperial and state-violence.)

 

 

 

 

Bennett Malcolmson is a photographer, zine maker, and occasional writer. His photographic work has been presented at Amberhill Gallery and in an offsite exhibition with the Art Gallery of Sudbury. He has also exhibited in group shows, including with La Galerie du Nouvel-Ontario and Play Smelter, presented by The COVERT Collective. He lives in Ottawa, Ontario, with his partner Chloé and their three cats.

Against "the civilization of cliché" : Leslie Kaplan, interviewed by David Buuck

conducted over email, Sep-Oct 2025

 

 

 

Leslie Kaplan is a French poet, playwright, and novelist. From the beginning of her career, Kaplan has been an important writer of the French left. She has published over twenty books in several genres, many of which have been translated into German, Swedish, Spanish, Danish, Norwegian, and now, English. Her first book, L’exces l’usine (1982), gained the attention of writers such as Marguerite Duras and Maurice Blanchot, and became an important book for the ’68 generation. In 2018, Commune Editions published Excess—The Factory, translated by Julie Carr and Jennifer Pap. Other books in English translation include Miss Nobody Knows (Tripwire Editions, 2025, trans Pap), The Book of Skies (Pamenar, 2024, trans Carr & Pap) and Disorder: a fable (AK Press, 2020, trans Pap). The Criminal (trans Carr & Pap) is forthcoming from Nightboat Books in 2027.

David Buuck: How old were you when you moved to France, and how did you make your way into the workers movement in the 60s and—subsequently—the radical writers’ community in Paris?

Leslie Kaplan: I came to Paris when I was 2 years old, on a ship called La Desirade, with my mother. My father had studied French literature at the University of Chicago; he had not been able to get a degree in English and American literature (there was an implicit numerus clausus for Jews). He spoke French very well and before Pearl Harbor and the US getting into WWII, he’d participated in a radio program in New York aimed towards France—Radio France libre—with André Breton and others. Then he was sent to Algiers, where the Gaullists had taken over, and he followed the US army to Paris, where he decided to stay, eventually entering the Foreign Service. I was sent to a French school, did all my studies in French, and when my parents left France, I insisted on staying in Paris where I wanted to study philosophy and history. This was in 1959-1960; I was 16, the war was still going on in Algeria, and my older fellow students were activists against the war and for Algerian Independence. At the University there were a lot of Marxist-Leninists influenced by the philosopher Louis Althusser, who were trying to find strategies toward Revolution. The group I was interested in elaborated the “establishment” strategy; we thought Russia had abandoned Marxism, and we were enthusiastic about what we imagined was happening in China, the Great Cultural Revolution, the idea of an alliance between intellectuals and workers (knowing nothing of what was really going on in China). I started to work in a factory in January 68, first in Paris, then in Lyon, and in May the factory was occupied…

DB: My understanding is that you didn’t begin writing about your experiences in and around what we in the west still call “May 68” until some years later. Was this a conscious choice or more that writing had not yet become your vocation, or primary memory-practice, if you will? If writing is something that “came later,” how did that turn come about?

LK: I had no intention of becoming a writer. The “after 68” period was very difficult for me. I was active in various groups, mostly feminist, did some translations, went through psychoanalysis, worked part time at the clinic at La Borde, and decided to go back to the University and become a therapist. Then, all of a sudden, it was ten years after, and I felt the necessity to write about what had happened, so it wouldn’t just disappear. The publishing of the book called “L’établi” (translated as “The assembly line,” I think) by Robert Linhart, who had been in the sixties a leader of the Marxist-leninist students, also encouraged me to write, even if I chose to do so in a different way. The fact is, writing” L’Excès-l’usine” made me discover that writing was what I wanted to do.

DB: How did you manage the gap in years from 68 and its aftermath, your years at the clinic, and sitting down to write numerous books about those times without resorting to nostalgia or conventional memoir? Do you think your particular “style” is related to this temporal aporia of stunted revolution and defeat, or would you instead attribute your formal and poetic inclinations to other influences (literary, French, philosophical, etc.)?

LK: I have never considered nostalgia, or despair as such, an interesting point of view. Too flat, linear. I’m more interested in contradiction, everything can be divided in contraries, Up and Down, etc. Not “in my beginning is my end.” Rather, “Each man is defeated. A man if he is a man is not defeated.” (adding “a woman” each time of course…) In literature as in philosophy. This could have to do with a form of Marxism, but also maybe Jewish humor, or just temperament…

DB: You write both poetry and prose, though in many ways the distinction seems false, as all of your works (at least those translated into English) share a focus on stripped-down language while also including narrative, even if moving between past and present, the events being narrated or remembered seemingly all in the ‘present’ of the writing. How do you choose between poetry and prose narrative, if it’s even an important distinction to you?

LK:  I don’t choose, I think what I try to write about always comes in a certain form, and it’s always “depuis maintenant,” “from now,” as you say. There is a scene, something is happening, and then there is always the question: “And now, what?”

DB: The first three books that Jennifer Pap and Julie Carr have translated into English (Excess—the Factory, The Book of Skies, Miss Nobody Knows) spend much of their focus in or around the ‘factory’—as both material and psycho-social formation. Evens as the characters of the books seem to drift through the spaces of “after ’68,” it’s as if the shadow of the factory hovers over the lives of women who’d at least had a momentary glimpse of some kind of freedom and autonomy, new social relations, etc. How do you think your books address the loss of those moments of promise? How does gender play a role in the particular experience of women factory workers, both during and after the occupations?

LK: The occupations were very important for the women factory workers, even if there was an immense feeling of loss when the movement stopped, because of the simple facts of occupying the whole factory, not just being stuck at their place, talking to the men, defying the hierarchy…I think living through an experience like that in any case leaves something positive, and gives energy for change. The book Miss Nobody Knows writes about that too, I hope! Gender is more explicitly addressed in my three plays, “All my life I have been a woman,” “Louise, she is crazy,” and “Move the sky.”

DB: Oh, tell me about the plays? When were they written and staged, and how would you describe them?

LK: My book Excess has often been staged, from the beginning. And in 1994 a young student Marcial Di Fonso Bo (an Argentine who had come to Paris because of the dictatorship in Argentina) put it on with fellow students at the école d’art dramatique in Rennes, a remarkable show. Marcial is now a well-known actor and director of Le Quai, a theatre in Angers (a national theatre = receiving money from the state, though, like all, less and less). A few years after, two young actresses Frédérique Loliée and Élise Vigier, who were fellow students of Marcial and I had met in Rennes, who had now careers of their own (they are great!) came to see me and asked me to write for them a play were the women would be "neither queens nor whores". Which I did, first, in 2008, Toute ma vie j’ai été une femme, All my life I have been a woman, starting with that sentence, and going on from there, a lot about women and consumer society. Then in 2011 came Louise, elle est folle, Louise, she is crazy, about treason, language, craziness and so-called normality, and in 2013 Déplace le ciel, Move the sky, about…love … All these plays have been published by POL, and put on many times (Louise…was even in programs for the baccalauréat, the finishing exam for high school). The plays have been put on in many theaters in France (even once in Italy, Frédérique Loliée has also a career in Italy). AND they have been put on in Denver, in 2016, in French with over titles, Jennifer Pap invited Frédérique, Élise and myself at the University. I also wrote a play called Le Monde et son contraire, The world and its contrary, for a great actor, Marc Bertin, who I had seen playing Kafka (the play is « around » Kafka, the relation of an actor to Kafka), it was put on in 2021 (published by POL in a volume called L’Aplatissement de la Terre, The Flattening of the Earth). I love writing for the theatre!

DB: So, since the plays have not been translated into English (yet?), another question about making work for the stage: what if any formal considerations emerge for you when writing for theater? Are you more likely to hand over a text to directors/actors and let them make dramaturgical/etc choices? How (if at all) are the works in relation to a)French theatrical traditions and/or b)the political considerations of your prose and poetry books? 

LK: What I like in writing for the theatre has definitively to do with form: using dialogue (including dialogue with oneself…) and condensation. It has to do with poetry because of the necessity of going to the essential (otherwise, it’s boring). And I write for actors, actresses, I know, I can imagine them on stage. After of course the play can be put on by others, but in the beginning, that’s how it is. I don’t put the play on myself, I couldn’t, I hand it over. Before meeting Marcial, Fred and Élise, etc., I didn’t have much relation to the theatre, I had more a passion for films. (I helped the cinema review Trafic, founded by Serge Daney, be published by POL). I think, I hope, my plays contain the same political options as the rest of my work, for example in Louise…written in 2011, there is a long passage against the politics of Nicolas Sarkozy, then president, his anti « foreigners » politics… In more general terms, for me theater is a way of awakening, against what I’ve called “the civilization of cliché.”

DB: and what do you mean by "the civilization of cliché"?

LK: Well, the "civilization of cliché" is the aggressive simplification of everything, and it concerns first of all language, words have become products of the market, the model is : you buy/you don’t buy. When the play Louise, elle est folle was published I wrote a very short essay that was included in the book, called Renversement, contre une civilisation du cliché, la ligne Copi-Buñuel-Beckett (“Turning around, against the civilisation of cliché, the Copi-Buñuel-Beckett line”). The Copi-Buñuel-Beckett line was published alongside the play Louise is crazy. In the play, the question is: what is "crazy,” what is “normal”— is it normal to do (like Louise in the play) what society considers “normal,” that is, basically: to buy and buy and buy? or is it crazy? And the answer is of course, No, it’s not normal… And: let’s turn things upside down. I give examples of “turning things upside down:" children’s blocks, Chaplin in the film The Dictator where he pilots a plane upside down, or… the beginning of the French Revolution, with the famous words of Sieyès, known by every french pupil: What is the Third State? Everything / What has it been up until now in politics? Nothing / What does it want? To become something… Or again a quote from Robert Antelme in L’espèce humaine (The Human Species), his book on the concentration camp of Buchenwald: “You believe that what you want to do is to be able to kill the SS. But if you think a little, you see that you are wrong. It’s not so simple. What you want, is to begin by putting his head downwards, and his feet in the air. And laugh and laugh. What you want to do to the gods.” And after I give examples from Copi (a great cartoonist), Buñuel, Beckett…All this is to illustrate what I call the Civilization of cliché, made of so-called “obvious” ideas, that are all meant to show that things are as they are, and can’t be different. Turning things upside down means: the contrary is possible, you can think the contrary, what is normal is not necessarily normal, what is crazy is not necessarily crazy.

DB: And what are you working on these days?

LK: On a book called les enfants — The Children. It’s difficult to talk about à book that’s beginning! But it’s certainly connected to my previous work…

 

 

 

 

 

David Buuck lives in Oakland, CA, from where he edits the journal and small press Tripwire (tripwirejournal.com). Books include Noise in the Face of (Roof Books 2016), SITE CITE CITY (Futurepoem, 2015) and An Army of Lovers, co-written with Juliana Spahr (City Lights, 2013), along with the chapbook The Riotous Outside (Commune Editions, 2018). He is the Academic Director of the Clemente Course in the Humanities at Oakland Adult Career Education and teaches at San Quentin's Prison University Program.

rob mclennan : 2025 VERSeFest interviews: Em Dial

  

 

 

 

Em Dial (she/they) is a writer born and raised in the Bay Area of California, currently living in Toronto, Ontario. They are a Kundiman Fellow and recipient of the 2020 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award and 2019 Mary C. Mohr Poetry Award. The author of In the Key of Decay (Palimpsest Press, 2024), her work can also be found in the Literary Review of Canada, Arc Poetry Magazine, the Permanent Record Anthology from Nightboat Books, and elsewhere. 

Em Dial reads in Ottawa on Tuesday, March 25 as part of VERSeFest 2025.

rob mclennan: I’d first caught a glimpse of your work through the anthology Permanent Record: Poetics Towardsthe Archive (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2025). How did you get involved in that project?

Em Dial: It’s such an honor to be included in this anthology that’s full of writers I admire. I received the call for submissions through a mailing list for Asian diasporic writers, and the project seemed so fitting for some poems I had been working on at the time that were about the legacy of Quadroon Balls in the Antebellum American South. As someone who is entering the world of archival and documentary poetics, I really admire Naima Yael Tokunow’s editorial vision for this collection. 

rm: How does this particular piece fit with the other work you’ve been doing, such as the poems in In the Key of Decay? Structurally, the poem feels quite different from the work in that collection.

ED: The pieces in Permanent Record feel like clicking the magnification on a microscope up by a lens. Where In the Key of Decay is grasping at these big ideas of race, science, and gender and trying to spread them out on the page for examination, my more recent work is more constrained, trying to take a very specific idea and draw out the boundaries around it to better understand it.

rm: Part of what struck about the poems in your debut was the range of formal exploration throughout the collection. Was there a concern at any point about how to make the collection cohere through such variety? And what prompted you to attempt so many directions?

ED: Part of the range is due to the fact that this collection is a compilation of years of work. Over those years I grew more confident as a writer and willing to stray from traditional forms. I think the other reason for the diversity in forms is my intention to make this work one of attempting, of trying, of failing to find an answer. If I were to plod along in couplets for 80 pages, I think I would have felt too direct in my approach to poetic inquiry. In arranging the final manuscript, I did have some anxiety about the formal incoherence, but ultimately it felt like it built towards the intention of the collection and became one of my favorite things about the book. 

rm: I wouldn’t say an incoherence, but certainly an exploration that opens the possibilities of the coherence of In the Key of Decay. Has your sense of the poem, or the manuscript, shifted since the assemblage of this debut collection? Are you still exploring multiple directions through form?

ED: My sense of both has been constantly bouncing around since starting my MFA program last fall. In In the Key of Decay, I thought of both the poem and the manuscript as a whole as an opportunity for charting and sense-making. I think recently I’ve been learning about and utilizing the poem as more of an agent of chaos, of both making and unmaking. What this means for me formally is still to be determined, but I’ve been taking more interest in received forms and the opportunity of letting form come to you rather than seeking it out.

rm: Did you have any difficulty translating more performative elements of your work for the sake of working a printed book? There are moments within the collection I can feel and even hear the performance come through. Were you concerned about how a piece that might work well in performance might sit on the page?

ED: That was a huge concern for some of the pieces in the collection that I had initially written for slam stages. But rethinking how to communicate some of the same energy visually was one of my favorite aspects of developing the book. It felt like working on a sudoku or some other kind of puzzle, trying to fit pieces into their proper spot in relation to one another. I think much of my more recent work has tended toward quiet and reservation, so it was a fun challenge to revisit older work and think about how to preserve their louder integrity. 

rm: I’m fascinated in how your work articulates the complications and collisions of culture, borders, family and history, from external forces to the internal. How easy or difficult was it for you to open these conversations, some of which fall into the deeply personal, through the form of poetry?

ED: It has felt like poetry is the only way. I think I have felt and witnessed these collisions at global and personal scales for all of my adult life, and became deeply obsessed and troubled by them. Poetry became the only lens that allowed me to zoom from the large to the small and back, and similarly from the individual to the universal. I can be quite reserved in day to day life, but strangely, I seldom feel hesitant to implicate the details of my own life in the context of the issues I discuss. It feels like the only way.

 

 

 

 

 

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. His latest title is Snow day (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025). 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). 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.