87357960

I am in Ottawa this weekend doing a little business. At the moment I am sitting in a cafe, drinking coffee and waiting for my friend to pick me up and take me to a place where we are going to play music.

I lived here between 1991 and 1994, during three incredibly rich years of learning. At the time I was working for a national Aboriginal organization, the National Association of Friendship Centres, but I was also doing a lot of reading and writing, and was a little active in the Ottawa literary scene as an associate editor of ARC magazine for a couple of issues.

That was a vibrant time in my life, as it occupied the years between leaving university and settling down to start a family. My journals from the time reflect a mind trying to come to grips with literary conventions, ideas for poems, chunks of text for an experimental novel I was writing and thoughts on organization, process and music.

One of the things I remember about Ottawa, and it was confirmed for me on this trip again, was the lively cafe and pub culture. There are pubs everywhere, little neighbourhood watering holes and places for people to gather and talk. And cafe talk is absoutely unique here, not simply because it is peppered with government jargon and Ottawa insider gossip. It is unique especially because it is largely bilingual. It is very common when eavesdropping on Ottawa conversation to hear people speaking French to one another until they come to a word that makes more sense in English, at which point the conversation switches seamlessly into English. If they come to a hplace where a French word is more a propos, alors ils reviennent au Fran�ais encore. Il m’a toujours stup�fi�…