rob mclennan : author bio,

Electronic Poetry Center page : League of Canadian Poets (out-of-date) member page

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with the brilliant and utterly delightful poet and book conservator Christine McNair. The author of more than forty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the CAA/Most Promising Writer in Canada under 30 Award in 1999, the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. He has published books with Talonbooks, The Mercury Press, Black Moss Press, New Star Books, Insomniac Press, Broken Jaw Press, Stride, Salmon Publishing, University of Calgary Press, University of Alberta Press, Spuyten Duyvil and others, and his most recent titles include Snow day (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025), a river runs through it: a writing diary (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025), On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024) and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). Later this year sees the publication of the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press), his follow-up to the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022).

[photo credit: Matthew Holmes]

He also has well over one hundred chapbooks of poetry and fiction, including publications with words(on)pages, above/ground press, Apostrophe Press, Porkbelly Press, ShirtPocketPress, Gaspereau Press, Corrupt Press, little red leaves textile editions, AngelHousePress, Lipstick Press, Bywords, unarmed, Gorse Press, Laurel Reed Books, Dusty Owl Press, Pooka Press, Reference West, Grove Avenue Press and housepress, among others.

His current projects include: the poetry manuscripts “The Museum of Practical things,” “Fair bodies of unseen prose,” and “dream logic: poems from a Sunday prompt”; a further collection of short stories, “Very suddenly, all at once”; a further collection of shorter stories, “Little Arguments”; the creative non-fiction works “the genealogy book,” “the green notebook,” “Lecture for an Empty Room,” “reading in the margins: essays on prose writers” and “The Last Good Year,” and the novels “Don Quixote” (see his essay on such at Rain Taxi); and the novel-in-progress “wrong answers only,” excerpts of most of which have been appearing weekly via his enormously clever substack. He has also been working on a collaboration since 2011 with Christine McNair, some of which has appeared in two chapbooks, and discussed here, with further collaborative works composed with Gary Barwin, Julie Carr and Chris Johnson. He is currently the Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa's International Poetry Festival.

In a review of his wild horses (2010), Judith Fitzgerald wrote: “Arguably his generation’s finest practitioner, mclennan’s myriad strengths predominantly lie in his life-long quest to stay afloat in language’s slippery straits, its treacherous depths, its perilously heady spindrifts where polyphony’s the aim and compression’s the game.” In a review for Arc Poetry Magazine of red earth (2003), Harold Rhenisch wrote: “The concept of a poem which is really an anti-poem, a poem which exists on the edges, in fragments, parentheses, lacunae, jottings scribbled on the back of the hand or the inside of the skull, even notes chiseled into the brain stem with a dental pick, is liberating. These are poems caught up in a sensory whirl, which find stillness not in turning away from transience, but in turning to face it, unshaven and bleary-eyed as the road unwinds past like an NFB film flapping onto its reel […]. mclennan is better than the lot, a kind of Canadian Robert Creeley, presenting us with moments to move into, like museum dioramas, incomplete until we stand in them. In mclennan, a whole tradition that has been underground in Canada for almost half a century has found a new champion.”

In a review of the novel Missing Persons (2009), Canadian Literature offered it as “a welcome addition to the body of Canadian prairie fiction.” In Rain Taxi, writing on The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (2014), Brian Mihok wrote: “Throughout The Uncertainty Principle, the mystery of unknowing is a kind of knowledge in itself—knowledge that any truth can be taken away from us, that no truth has permanence. It's an unnerving and beautiful notion.” In Necessary Fiction, Sheldon Lee Compton wrote: “mclennan, already accomplished in several forms, may well have managed to redefine the flash, not to mention the micro-flash form, with The Uncertainty Principle.”

An editor and publisher, he founded and ran The Garneau Review, seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater. , and currently edits/publishes the print quarterly Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal] and periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, and is part of the (ottawa) small press almanac collective. He runs the very occasional ottawa poetry newsletter blog, as well as curating the “On Writing” series there. He has curated the “Tuesday poem” series over at the dusie blog since it began in early 2013 [you can sign up for the weekly email list for such here]. His “12 or 20 questions” series is well over a thousand interviews deep (so far) since 2007, including interviews with small publishers. His chapbook press, above/ground press, was founded in 1993 and recently surpassed eight hundred titles (see links to other online schemes here). He ran Chaudiere Books (with Christine McNair) (2006-2016) and edited numerous titles for the press, including titles by Andy Weaver, N.W. Lea, Monty Reid, Anne Le Dressay and the anthologies Decalogue: Ten Ottawa Poets (2006), Decalogue 2: Ten Ottawa Fiction Writers (2007), The Calgary Renaissance (w/ derek beaulieu) and Ground Rules: the best of the second decade of above/ground press 2003 – 2013 (2013).

He also edited Guthrie Clothing: The Poetry of Phil Hall, a Selected Collage, with an introduction by rob mclennan (WLU, 2015), a “New Canadian Writing” section of New American Writing (#31; 2013), the Canadian issue of Dusie (2010), dusie kollektiv #8 (2015), the Douglas Barbour feature in Jacket magazine (2009), an issue of Open Letter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory (2008), the George Bowering feature in Jacket magazine (2005), evergreen: six new poets (Black Moss Press, 2002), side/lines: a new canadian poetics (Insomniac Press, 2002), unarmed journal #33 (w/ jwcurry; 2002), the Canadian poetry section of Jacket magazine (2002) and YOU AND YOUR BRIGHT IDEAS: NEW MONTREAL WRITING (w/ Andy Brown, 2001). Through his Cauldron Books series for Broken Jaw, he edited a small handful of books as well, including the anthology Shadowy Technicians: New Ottawa Poets (2000), GROUNDSWELL: best of above/ground press, 1993-2003 (2003), William Hawkins’ Dancing Alone, Selected Poems 1960-1990 (2005), and this day full of promise: new & selected poems by michael dennis (2002).

Formerly “Interviews Editor” at Queen Mob’s Teahouse, and a regular contributor to the Ploughshares blog, he is currently an editor/managing editor of many gendered mothers. He was also a regular contributor to the Drunken Boat blog (a series that continues via Medium), and spent nearly a decade as a columnist for Open Book. In early 2015, he provided more than thirty commentaries (interviews and other critical pieces) on Canadian poetry for Jacket2, and in the 1990s, he was a regular columnist for The Ottawa X-Press, WORD (Toronto) and VERB (Vancouver). More recently, he has been working on an ongoing bibliography of Ottawa publishers and presses. Founder and curator of The Factory Reading Series (begun in January 1993), he co-founded the ottawa small press book fair in 1994, which he has run twice a year since. He has toured relentlessly across Canada, as well as parts of the United States and United Kingdom. He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and, since 2003, has been one of the most active book reviewers in the country, having regularly posted reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com

In March 2016, he was inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. He is the recipient of two Senior Canada Council grants, and his literary archives are held at the University of Calgary. He can be found here on Twitter, and has a Patreon page.

He is father of Kate (b. 1991), Rose (b. 2013) and Aoife (b. 2016).