By Alexandra Charles
Poets, musicians, and art lovers gather at Swizzles Bar and Grill on Queen Street on the third Sunday of every month to listen, be heard and exchange ideas during the Dusty Owl Reading Series.
This poetry collective showcases the talent of Ottawa’s literary community. Each month, there is a featured reader followed by an open-mike segment, when audience members can be in the spotlight and share their poetry, stories or songs.
Jacqueline Lawrence, a Jamaican-born poet who now calls Ottawa home, was the featured poet of the October poetry reading, attended by 50 people.
“I love Ottawa and I’m best able to write here,” she says. “It’s a place where my heart is very comfortable. That inspires me.”
“And of course, we’re in fall rhapsody and you can’t beat that,” she adds. “It just cuddles you in a way that I haven’t found in other cities.”
Lawrence says poetry readings like Dusty Owl expose the talent of the city’s poets and help put Ottawa on the map.
“Ottawa’s literary community has a casual and relaxed setting,” says Lawrence. “I find it’s organic and experimental. There’s a subtle electricity here.”
For the past decade, the Dusty Owl Reading Series has provided a vehicle for the artistic community in Ottawa, says Steve Zytveld, the founder of the poetry collective.
“It gives people a chance to try out new material,” Zytveld says. “They can bounce writing and musical projects that they’re working on off of an audience.”
The first poetry reading Zytveld organized was held at Café Wim on Sussex Drive when he was the president of Carleton University’s English literature society in 1994.
Today, Zytveld continues to run the reading series at Swizzles Bar and Grill and now works alongside his wife, Catherine MacDonald-Zytveld, who is a multi-media artist and photographer.
Zytveld met his wife 15 years ago when they were both students at Carleton University.
Since then, the two have been deeply involved with the literary community in Ottawa.
They expanded Dusty Owl to include a small press, which publishes a quarterly literary magazine and a bi-annual zine. Recently, Dusty Owl published a novella called “Tattoo This Madness In” by the author Daniel Allen Cox.
Zytveld says the Dusty Owl small press and reading series will continue to display Ottawa’s literary talent as long as there is an audience interested in poetry and prose.
On Nov. 19, the reading series will feature George Elliot Clarke, a professor of Canadian literature at the University of Toronto, at Swizzles Bar and Grill, from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.
The series will feature Jeff Cotrill, a fiction writer and spoken-word performer based in Toronto, on Dec. 3.
During the open-mike segment of the October reading, a Grade 11 student from Philemon Wright high school in Gatineau, who goes by the alias Aiyana Centauri for artistic purposes, read a poem.
Centauri says she’s inspired to write poetry by observing the way people treat each other.
“Poetry is a way to vent built up issues,” she says. “I tend to express my anger and disappointment through poetry.”
Lawrence says she finds comfort through poetry.
“It’s like soul food for me,” she says. “I love poetry because we can take complex realities and write them in so few words to create an image that we can communicate with other people.”
“I might be in Ottawa but I can read someone’s work from Iran or Britain,” she adds. “I’m not in their reality but I can still understand their human story.”
Zytveld says reading poetry can fight ignorance about many issues.
“I tend to believe that if people read more they’d be a little more contemplative about ideas rather than simply acting on a sort of half-baked impulse,” says Zytveld. “It would give us a chance to understand the world a little bit better.”
Admission to the poetry readings is free. Zytveld says Dusty Owl does not receive any government funding and is able to carry on through donations.
“We pass the hat at each reading,” he says. “We ask people to throw in a few shekels voluntarily.”
Zytveld says donations help maintain the Dusty Owl website, pay for poster printing needed to advertise events, and fund the featured reader.