Ep. 2 - Otoniya Okot Bitek

KWF Podcast

Today we’re speaking with acclaimed poet Otoniya Okot Bitek, who will be appearing at the upcoming 2023 Kingston WritersFest in Event No. 22: The Black Experience in Kingston. Otoniya chats with co-host Tricia Knowles about failure, inspiration, identity, and what her mom once thought of her poetry.

Show Notes

• How does a writer’s identity affect their work, and their use of subjective vs. objective writing?
• “There is a more recent awareness that who writes matters.”
• How does the abstract of a scholarly paper affect its writing, and why does the methodology for academic work not always apply to creative work? Is there a crossover?
• The exciting potential of the blank page
• Writer’s block: how do we define it? How do we work through or around it? How should we reimagine it as something else going on, like writing percolating in the brain?
• Is writing a need or a structured practice?
• Otoniya’s analogy of overcoming writer’s block being similar to overcoming “builder’s block”: would it be a good idea to just hammer nails into wood?
• Can failure be a way of saying, “this is not the right time?
• How Otoniya once had her high school paper read aloud as an example of what not to do—and how she learned from the experience of shame.
• What did Otoniya’s mom once say about her poetry?

Book and Author References

Song and Dread by Otoniya Okot Bitek 100 Days by Otoniya Okot Bitek Joanne Arnott, Canadian author The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron

About Otoniya Okot Bitek

Otoniya Juliane Okot Bitek is an Acholi poet. Her collection 100 Days, a book of poetry that reflects on the meaning of memory two decades after the Rwanda genocide, was nominated for several prizes including the BC Book Prize, the Pat Lowther Award, the Alberta Book Awards and the Canadian Authors Award for Poetry. It won the IndieFab Book of the Year Award for poetry and the Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry. “What makes this collection such a pleasure to read,” says a Huffington Post review, “is that it’s laced with moments of such grace that you have to pause and re-read the lines again in order to reflect upon each phrase….a masterpiece of uncommon splendour and Juliane Okot Bitek is a virtuoso performing at the height of her powers.” Otoniya’s poem “Migration: Salt Stories” was shortlisted for the National Magazine Awards for Poetry, and “Gauntlet” was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize.  

Her work has been published widely in publications such as Event, The Capilano Review, Room, and Arc, and anthologized in Love Me True: Writers Reflect on the Ups, Downs, Ins & Outs of Marriage, and Transition: Writing Black Canadas, amongst others. Her newest poetry collection, Song and Dread, offers COVID meditations rife with the paradoxical forces of boredom and intensity. The poems remind us of community, connectedness, and the ways the strange can become normalized when there is no other option. Otoniya holds an MA in English, a BFA in Creative Writing, and a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies from UBC. She has been a Poetry Ambassador for the City of Vancouver, the Ellen and Warren Tallman Writer-in-Residence in the English Department at Simon Fraser University, and a Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellow. She is currently an assistant professor of Black Creativity, English, and Creative Writing at Queen’s University. 

Learn more about Otoniya.

Show Transcript

A complete transcript of this episode will be available soon.