Ode to a (former) office,

or: how I learned to embrace the basement,

I think that the clearing is the wild ancestor of this room of one’s own. It precedes that room in the same way astonishment precedes, and provokes, poetry. Before we experience the need for a room devoted to the imagination, we experience the need for room itself, a place where the sky meets the earth. That is how we experience a clearing when walking through the forest, as a pool of light where the trees relent, a place that combines seclusion with openness.

Don McKay, Deactivated West 100

It took eighteen months to clear out my home office: a decade’s-worth of material from a densely-packed room on the first floor of our three bedroom house. Eighteen months, with nearly one hundred boxes of books and paper packaged and relocated, working to establish this new and condensed version in the back corner of our finished basement. Eighteen months, until the end of August 2025; now my writing space is nestled downstairs, just by the laundry room. Our young ladies needed their own rooms, so it was up to me to vacate. As they establish their individual bedrooms, I remain beyond downstairs couch and bookshelves and main television, as the back corner of this finished space is now mine, separated by a shelf or two, and another two more.

A space in which to think, as Don McKay suggests, from his Deactivated West 100 (Gaspereau Press, 2005). As he finds solace in the clearing, Virginia Woolf required a room, with a door that could close. For more than a quarter century, my writing activity sat in public spaces, requiring only a lack of interruption; preferring an array of movement to solitude. I had solitude enough growing up on the farm, so once I landed in Ottawa at nineteen, I experimented with Centretown and Lowertown coffeeshops, libraries, food courts, pubs. Over the years, I’ve extended those muscles to writing on airplanes, Greyhound buses, VIA Rail trains. Adapting to one’s surroundings is key, as is taking advantage of what situations provide. The late Toronto writer Brian Fawcett (1944-2022) used to repeat how he wrote a whole hockey novel while attending his daughter’s 5am practices. I usually lived with other people, so working from home wasn’t really an option, from the tiny shared apartment to an eventual one bedroom with partner and our daughter, Kate, and later, with roommates. Writing was only possible beyond those particular boundaries.

I spent whole afternoons across my early twenties exploring the poetry shelves in the library at the University of Ottawa, sketching those early responses to the lyric in notebook after notebook, a window view overlooking student courtyards. I sought whatever venue I could, attempting to sit with books, notebook, pen; and with people around, as long as I could hold to my thoughts. To think my way through writing. Across my early twenties, in the one-bedroom apartment I shared with then-partner and toddler, I ran a home daycare, keeping my writing time for the evenings. Three children (mine and two others) ten hours a day, five days a week. Once my partner was home to attend Kate, and my two daycare charges collected by their mothers, I would head out to a coffeeshop a half level above the intersection of Gladstone and Elgin Streets. From seven to midnight, writing three nights a week. While I was there, the waitress would put one pot of coffee on for me, and another for everyone else. That coffeeshop might be long gone, and that waitress no longer waitressing, but she and I still keep in touch.

Through those early attempts at writing, I soon realized that what I required most was routine. I needed that muscle, through which to work. One I pushed hard to develop across my twenties. By the time that particular coffeeshop closed, I was single, and living with roommates, having also begun what would become six years of daily writing in the corner table at a Dunkin’ Donuts at Bank and Gloucester Streets. From May 1994 through to June 2000, I sat at the same corner table, five hours a day, six days a week. I took Saturdays off to hang out with my daughter, usually involving lunch and a new movie in theatres, whether at the Rideau Centre, or World Exchange Plaza. After a while, all the staff at the donut shop knew me, the patrons as well. I had visitors come by, some from as far away as Regina, Niagara, Toronto. I had mail delivered, thanks to John Barton at Arc Poetry Magazine. Ken Rockburn recorded a television piece on me there for CBC Ottawa, back when he hosted Rockburn & Company. There’s a photo I have somewhere in my archive from those times, of me through that window, taken from the sidewalk by Robert McTavish for the Toronto Star. Those who wandered by for a visit included writers and visual artists and otherwise friends, including John Newlove, b stephen harding, John Metcalf, Dennis Tourbin, Robin Hannah, michael dennis, Victor Coleman, John Moffatt, John Boyle. My ex-wife came through fairly regularly, occasionally convincing me from my work for a mid-afternoon libation, when she needed her own break. I eventually spent most evenings at The Royal Oak, at Bank and Maclaren, sitting with reading and attempts at prose writing.

The late Kingston writer Steven Heighton (1961-2022) apparently spent a few years renting a room from which to write, separate from where he lived with partner, daughter and a roommate or two, but I’ve never had the capital for such a thing. Nor the interest, really, wishing to be out in the world and not squared away. Wishing to be in the mix of it. And for years, reading Ottawa daily newpapers left in public spaces, and donating my daily purchase of The Globe and Mail in kind.

I’d originally approached that same Royal Oak a few years earlier, after seeing a poem by Ottawa poet michael dennis from his poems for jessica-flynn (1986) that referenced him there, sitting with a pint of Toby and working on poems. That’s what poets do, I thought. Eventually, retired civil servant and Ottawa poet Alan John Barrett began coming through also, although he always thought my writing in public was juvenile, performative. Ottawa poet Robin Hannah was a regular, also. During those days, infamous former Ottawa art gallery director, art history lecturer, writer and bookseller Richard Simmins (1924-1999), father of British Columbia poet Zoe Landale, would also sit in the corner by the window, writing his daily postcards. One hopes those postcards sit safe in an archive, the rumour being they could only be read after he passed. His, the best seat in the house, a vantage across the bar, the pub and through the window and down Bank Street. I eventually claimed it, a seat I held onto for years.

Routine, routine. Who was it that said: we fight laziness and lies in our search for the truth. By the time I lived with roommates in Chinatown, beginning in late 1995, I would leave our shared house with briefcase filled to the brim, and make my way east to that Dunkin’ Donuts at Bank and Gloucester Streets (a Tim Hortons is currently there). A corner seat, for the best view of the space, out the bay window. To be able to see anyone coming. I always aimed for around 10am, and it got so that other patrons would vacate my seat if they saw me. Oh, don’t worry, I can move. At least once if not twice a year, some random stranger, a government worker, I’d wager, came through to assuage their curiosity, directing me with the pointed “What is it you do in here?” And I would hand over an above/ground press “poem” handout, ever at the ready. Earlier attempts to work at home were impossible; my roommates somehow thinking I was there for a chat, and not buried in thinking about poems. A space in which to think.

In September 2012, Christine and I relocated from our two-bedroom, third-storey walk-up on McLeod Street [view of office with Lemonade, May 2012, above] to this three-bedroom house on Alta Vista, which made the commute to Bank and Somerset far more difficult, even impossible, once the young ladies arrived. As we unpacked into master bedroom, bedroom for our imminent newborn, and the third for my office. I’d already held a home office for two years on McLeod, set at the back of the apartment, adapting to living with internet for the first time, amid stretches of coffeeshop mornings, with occasional afternoons writing at the pub before back to my machine, and another draft of what I’d been working on. Since moving to our 1950s suburbs, we garnered a second child, Aoife, born nearly two and a half years after Rose. A decade further, they required more space. And so, I would move.

By the time we moved onto Alta Vista, I’d been fourteen years of mornings at a Second Cup at Bank and Somerset Streets. Again, my daily corner space. Occasional visits from Ottawa poets Grant Wilkins, Amanda Earl, Sandra Ridley, Michelle Desbarats. The other corner window occupied by Onondaga photographer Jeff Thomas, sketching out notes of his own. His son, Bear (one of the founders of A Tribe Called Red and The Halluci Nation) would arrive to collect him. Always a wave, a hello. All the time, myself with morning coffee, notebook; working drafts of poms, prose. Working reviews. The occasional line of ants from underneath the window.

[Rose (who is now twelve) in my original Alta Vista home office]

A room of one’s own. The corner vantage out across the intersection, nearly as good a view as what I once caught through The Royal Oak, or the Dunkin’ Donuts. Remembering the day the Scotiabank kitty-corner from my donut shop view was robbed, as the staff held a ‘yard sale’ of items on the sidewalk, a week or two later. I was curious to know if these two events were related.

Does the writing change through this shift from predominantly in public to set at my desk? Does the writing similarly change, having evolved to a current process of tapping at laptop instead of a twentysomething stretch of forty, fifty, sixty longhand drafts? Notebook and manuscript pages are still toted beyond the house, but never laptop, chained to the confines of home. I sketch notes from the window corner at RedBird, as the young ladies either ukulele or piano lessons, or from community centre bleachers during Aoife’s ringette. Cold hand wrapped around pen, scribbling notes to keep warm. As the children have dentist, medical appointments. Twenty minutes here, there. The muscle of daily writing and thinking developed enough that for most days, at least, it isn’t a push to sit at the desk and begin, although there are afternoons I still require the occasional refresh, if household allows, with notebook and pen and a stack of reading and manuscripts, attempting an afternoon hour or two at a particular nearby sportsbar. To clear out my head.

My mother hadn’t a room of her own, not even a bedroom, sharing with her sister until she was twenty-seven, when she married my father. It wasn’t until she was around the age I am now, her ongoing health issues finally preventing her from making it up the farmhouse stairs to the master bedroom, set into a side-room on the main floor. A room finally hers, alone. As everyone else headed out for their day, the house hers as well. And here too, as our young ladies head off to school, Christine off to work, and the house, once more, becomes mine. Occasional scamper of kittens overhead, across hardwood.

[rob and Rose in home office, Alta Vista]