With the response to Decalogue: ten Ottawa poets (2006), Chaudiere decided to follow up with Decalogue 2: ten Ottawa fiction writers. Because we are the capital city, Ottawa as a whole is often accused of having no identity of its own; instead, some of our strength comes from our transient nature, interacting with ideas larger and more multiple than a single base. Edited by rob mclennan and including a contribution from the editor, this collection features the work of Emily Falvey, Matthew Firth, Gabriela Golliger, Alison Gresik, John-James Ford, Clare Latremouille, John Lavery, Nadine McInnis and Ian Roy.
The ten authors that make up this collection highlight both the range of style and the strength of writing happening around the current City of Ottawa, ranging from roughneck prose to lyric exploration to a more straightforward kind of narrative storytelling. Rather than giving you a list of authors you’ve already heard of, this collection focuses on the works of authors you might not have heard of yet, some of whom have only recently come up on the national radar.
Born in Ottawa in 1970 at the late lamented Grace Hospital on Wellington Street near Parkdale Avenue, rob mclennan currently lives in directly between Ottawa’s Chinatown and Little Italy neighbourhoods, and was called “Centretown’s poet laureate” by David Gladstone in The Centretown Buzz in the mid-1990s. The author of twelve previous trade poetry collections in Canada and England, he has published poetry, fiction, interviews, reviews and columns in over two hundred publications in fourteen countries and in four languages, and done reading tours in five countries on two continents. The editor/publisher of above/ground press and the long poem magazine STANZAS (both founded in 1993), the online critical journal Poetics.ca (with Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell) and the Ottawa poetry annual ottawater (ottawater.com), he edits the ongoing Cauldron Books series through Broken Jaw Press, edited the anthologies evergreen: six new poets (Black Moss Press), side/lines: a new canadian poetics (Insomniac Press), GROUNDSWELL: the best of above/ground press, 1993-2003 (Broken Jaw Press) and Decalogue: ten Ottawa poets (Chaudiere Books), and runs the semi-annual ottawa small press book fair, which he co-founded in 1994, currently under the umbrella of the small press action network – ottawa (span-o), which he also runs. His online home is www.robmclennan.blogspot.com.