Imagining Toronto

This coming Saturday, 6 June 2009, I will be coordinating a session called “Putting Print in its Place: The Importance of the Local in a World of Globalized Words” at Bookcamp Toronto.

Here’s the session description:

Is there still a place for the local in a globalized literary landscape? Whither small presses, independent booksellers, local reading series, community book fairs and books engaging imaginatively with local places? In a world dominated increasingly by Amazon, big box bookstores, multinational publishers and digital print, how do we maintain a place for local literature? This session will explore how Toronto functions as a hub of literary innovation whose continued success will depend on how well it makes room for the local.

Bookcamp Toronto is billed as “a conversation about the future of books, writing, publishing, and the book business in the digital age”  — critical questions at a time when text shambles toward its next rebirth in what begins to look like a  truly post Gutenberg era.

At the same time, digital media do not make text less relevant — they make it more important than ever. The challenge is to maintain some continuity in the meaning of words in environments where they may be endlessly replicated, commodified and removed from their origins. I’m concerned about what digital print does to local stories, situated cultures, indigenous languages, narrative traditions and oral histories. At its worst, digital print reduces text to a pastiche of blurred photocopies, a simulacrum of meanings whose connection to local places and local cultures has long since been forgotten and blown away.

In the session I’m hoping we can address some of the implications of these shifts, as well as explore ways of keeping print in its place.

The session will run from 3:15 to 3:55 pm on the third floor of the Faculty of Information (iSchool) at the University of Toronto, 140 St. George Street (beside Robarts Library).

The day will be packed with discussions about books, publishing and digital culture; click here for the full schedule.

I’ll be reading from Imagining Toronto at the Doors Open Toronto gala at the ROM tonight. The evening, hosted by CBC Radio One impresario Mary Ito, will also feature readings by Toronto authors Dionne Brand, Paul Quarrington and Barry Callaghan. This event is the official kick-off for Doors Open Toronto 2009 and is the culmination of three months of Lit City: Toronto Stories, Toronto Settings.

Admission to the ROM will be free throughout the evening  as well, so if you come for the readings and panel discussion about Toronto literature, be sure to stick around for Paul Quarrington’s band, Porkbelly Futures, and tour the ROM’s exhibits afterward.

The tenth annual Doors Open event coincides with Toronto’s 175th anniversary, and to celebrate, an unprecedented 175 Toronto buildings will be open to the public during the weekend, all free of charge. Dozens of prominent Toronto writers, including Lillian Allen, Pat Capponi, Barry Callaghan, Austin Clark, Anthony De Sa, Katherine Govier, Maggie Helwig, Maureen Jennings, Vincent Lam, Vivian Meyer, Andrew Moodie, Paul Quarrington, Robert Rotenberg, Russell Smith, Veronica Tennant and numerous others, will read from their work at locations across the city.

Lecture slides for the Imagining Toronto course (Week 9: Images of Suburbia):

GEOG 4280 lecture slides (Week 9: Images of Suburbia)

[Image source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Markham-suburbs.id.jpg.jpg]

A note about today’s class for students enrolled in the Imagining Toronto course at York University.

There will be no lecture slides for this week because — following today’s presentations — we’ll be engaging in a collective exercise tackling issues of diversity and tolerance in the multicultural city. Please bring your strongly held opinions!

Please note that the second reading response assignment is due in class today. Second Reading Response Paper guidelines (2009)

And for those of you still casting about for a research paper topic, I’ve put together an index of Toronto Literature by Subject (theme, genre, neighbourhood, etc.) to help you get started. Please note that this list is not complete and that the categories are not meant to be exclusive or authoritative.The list is also subject to considerable change, so please check back often.

Please click here to download the Research Paper Guidelines (2009)

Below are the lecture slides for Week 7 (Desire Lines: Narratives of Sexuality and Gender in Toronto Literature) in the Imagining Toronto course. These slides are intended for GEOG 4280 students only and may not be used otherwise without permission.

To access the slide set, please click on the following link:

Week 7 lecture slides (Desire Lines)

Early morning, the hour before dawn, and I sit down to write as I do each day after rising. The house is silent behind me, but beyond the window the city shifts on its foundations. Robins, trees moving in an invisible wind, the dark shapes of houses silhouetted against a glow at the edge of the horizon. It is spring now, and light returns to the hemisphere after the long season of darkness.

My little daughter sighs in her bed, asleep again after a pre-dawn feeding. Like me she is an early riser, but I have learned that it is possible to buy more time to write if I settle her back into sleep instead of sitting up with her, as we did in the early months, listening to the city sleep or stir. When she wakes again, I will change and feed her and then we will tumble together on the chesterfield, exploring the shapes of ideas until Peter rises and takes over for the day. It is Wednesday, and because I have papers to grade and a lecture to prepare for this afternoon, Katherine will see me only in passing.

In recent months, especially since Katherine’s birth, people have often asked how I find time to write. The truth is that I do so very much as before. I write best in the hours before dawn when the silence of the house is broken only the wind pushing against it or by the smaller buffeting of a cat batting at my ankles. If the pace of my work has slowed, it is because I am no longer able to sustain the orgies of writing that would keep me at the computer until late in the morning or early afternoon, when I would emerge blinking and bleary-eyed to announce the completion of a piece, a page, or sometimes merely a paragraph.

Peter’s schedule is nearly opposite, which is why he has taken the late shift since Katherine’s birth, staying up until one or two in the morning to feed or comfort her while I sleep. This is one reason why neither of us goes out at night anymore, and should also explain why evening telephone calls sometimes receive a surly response. We are both tired. I am tired because the pressing need to finish this book sometimes makes writing more a marathon than a creative act. Peter is tired because he shoulders more than his share of the burden of care, and because his own intellectual projects strain to be written.

At the same time, we are both conscious of having an easier time than most parents of very young children. We have gone to great care to arrange our life so that we have the liberty to do as we choose. We live frugally (as this co-authored essay on urban scavenging should attest). We teach part-time in order to maximize our time with Katherine. We have supportive family, and a grandmother who spends time with Katherine on a daily basis. Although we are both novices at parenting, Katherine is undeniably an easy child. She cries infrequently, is wonderful on outings, and has a sweet and gentle disposition. It is true that she has never slept through the entire night, and that eight months of pumping breast milk have made me wonder if formula would have been so horrible after all, but the daily pleasures of watching Katherine discover the world make these challenges seem small.

There is a narrative, strangely persistent even in this era, that a woman must choose between parenthood and an engaged, intellectual life. I do not refer here primarily to the corporate world, where women who become parents are still shoved routinely into the “mommy track” if they are not heaved overboard entirely. Nor am I thinking of mothers in the academic world, who are still disproportionately likely to be denied tenured status and to withdraw from PhD work before completing it. I refer, instead, to the literary world, where — despite all evidence to the contrary — motherhood is narrated as an obstacle to creativity.

Around the time Katherine was born I read the essays in The Mother Reader (Seven Stories Press, 2001). One after another, writers as diverse as Doris Lessing, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich and Margaret Atwood wrote of their ambivalence about motherhood. Nearly every writer in the anthology documented the costs of motherhood: the challenge of finding time to write, the loss of social standing, the problem of absent fathers, physical and emotional exhaustion. Around the same time I read Naomi Wolf’s Misconceptions: Truth, Lies and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood (Doubleday, 2001). Wolf’s discussion of the machinery of western birth practices was disturbing, but not as much as her account of mothers who had once been writers, professionals, graduate students, shuffling invisibly around suburban playgrounds while their husbands pursued their own career paths without missing a step. Wolf wrote of these women’s self-effacement and their growing resentment. Mothers, it seemed, faced an uphill battle not only to be seen as writers but to be seen as people at all.

A few mothers do write of the ways motherhood and creativity are linked. In a review of Nigerian writer Buchi Emecheta’s book, Second Class Citizen, Alice Walker observes,

it is here that Adah [Emecheta's protagonist] makes the decision that seems to me impressive and important for all artists with children. She reasons that since her children will someday be adults, she will fulfill the ambition of her life not only for herself, but also for them. The ambition of her life is to write a novel, and on the first day she has her oldest child in a nursery and her youngest two down for their naps, she begins writing it. (from Walker’s essay in The Mother Reader)

Walker concludes her essay by suggesting that Emecheta’s work “causes a rethinking of traditional Western ideas about how art is produced,” particularly the way western culture “separates the duties of raising children from those of creative work.”

Walker’s essay resonates with me because I read it while writing an essay called “The Word Made Flesh” published (under the title, “Pregnant with Meaning”) in the summer 2008 issue of Spacing Magazine. It was the last piece I wrote before Katherine’s unexpectedly early birth, and hardly surprisingly, the essay discussed representations of motherhood in Toronto literature, including Katrina Onstad’s How Happy to Be (McClelland & Stewart, 2006), Patricia Peason’s Playing House (Random House, 2003), and Margaret Atwood’s story “Giving Birth” (originally published in Dancing Girls; M&S, 1977).

The purpose of my essay was to argue that birth changes the very character of the urban experience. I concluded,

As these narratives suggest, few things are more powerful or vulnerable than the pregnant body and the life it carries, except perhaps a city in the throes of its own creation. Like a city, the pregnant body is an affront to autonomy and selfhood and a challenge to mortality. Both rend the landscape and leave it almost unrecognisable: buildings heaving themselves out of the soil as dishevelled and loud as newborns. As the poet Gwendolyn MacEwen writes in A Breakfast for Barbarians, pregnancy simultaneously accelerates and inverts the order of creation we are familiar with:

this city I live in I built with bones
and mortared with marrow;

I planned it in my spare time
and its hydro is charged from a blood niagara
and I built this city backwards and
the people evolved out of the buildings
and the subway uterus ejected them -

For i was the I interior
the thing with a gold belt and delicate ears
with no knees or elbows
was working from the inside out.

Like the act of city-building, the process of birth has become increasingly mechanized,  clinking with steel instruments and pulsing with electronic devices. Both, however, have their roots in the soil: silicon fused into glass in the same way that carbon presses itself into the diamond of an eye ; red clay moulded into brick like the firm flesh of the newborn. The trick is to remember these organic origins and to find our way back to them.

But I was not speaking only of “the city in the throes of its own creation.” I was also referring to acts of creativity and intellectual engagement. Because in all truth I do not see that there is a great difference between the creative act of thinking and writing and the equally creative act of biological reproduction. Moreover, I do not believe that one can even be sustained without the other. How can a world persist where we reduce ourselves — or others — to mere bodies or mere minds? And I do not find satisfactory the claim that it is acceptable for some people to be engaged in the world while others perform the bodily service of bearing children (i.e., the old “Man does / Woman is” claim articulated but hardly invented by poet Robert Graves).

It is not that I think every person should become a parent, or would claim that childbearing enhances one’s creative capacities (although I do think such an argument could easily be made given that childbirth, perhaps even more than other life-changing experiences, broadens one’s sense of meaning as well as being). It is that being a parent — a mother, especially — should not be narrated as an alternative to having an engaged, creative life, as if one must choose one or the other or be crippled by both.

I wanted to have a child for the same reasons I write: because I can, because doing so is the source of great personal joy, because there are things I hope to contribute to the universe of discourse. And it is not that becoming or being a parent has been easy, any easier than it is to write. But in the end, gestating a book has been eerily similar to gestating a new life. It is arduous, exhausting, perilous and uncertain. But in the early hours, when the sun arcs toward the horizon, writing becomes an act of creation that mimics the birth of the universe itself. And it is at these moments that I am reminded most vividly of the birth of our little daughter, whose full name means “pure light.”

The slide set for the Imagining Toronto course, week 6 (Possibilities of Dwelling: Representations of Poverty and Homelessness in Toronto Literature) may be downloaded here:

GEOG 4280 Week 6 lecture slides

The guidelines for the second reading response assignment may be downloaded here:

GEOG 4280 Second Reading Response Assignment Guidelines (2009)

Please note that these materials are intended for the use of GEOG 4280 students. They will be moved to the Course section of this website shortly.

I was asked recently to contribute a list of important but underappreciated literary works set in Toronto for inclusion in a forthcoming book. After some vacillation, this morning I sent off the following list:

1. Gwendolyn MacEwen’s Noman’s Land (Coach House, 1985).
2. Austin Clarke’s The Meeting Point (Macmillan, 1967)
3. Phyllis Brett Young’s The Torontonians (Longmans, 1960; reissued by McGill-Queen’s in 2007)
4. Morley Callaghan’s Strange Fugitive (Scribners, 1928)
5. John Charles Dent’s The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales (Rose, 1888)

I included a short synopsis of each work and an explanation of its significance to Toronto’s literary heritage. Of all the works I could have included in the list, the most important struck me as Gwendolyn MacEwen’s Noman’s Land. Gwendolyn MacEwen was widely known as Canada’s ‘mythopoeic’ poet (a label she made fun of in Noman’s Land, writing that “you could be lame, paralyzed, blind. You could be a leper, or a mythopeic poet.”) And yet, Noman’s Land is mythopoeic: it was the first literary work to represent Toronto as a city with mythical possibilities. Its eponymous protagonist emerges lost and amnesic from the Ontario wilderness and hitchhikes to Toronto to search for his identity. Arriving in a city without a memory, he undertakes to construct a mythology of Toronto by revisiting familiar places and events in the city’s history. He rummages for bargains at Honest Ed’s, takes part in the Caribana parade, climbs inside the Henry Moore sculpture anchoring Nathan Philips Square, and recreates Marilyn Bell’s famous swim across Lake Ontario. Noman realizes that identity is something we must recognise or invent within ourselves, a vital task for a city, too.

It seems to me that Noman’s efforts to mythologize the city are even more urgently needed today. It is sad, then, that MacEwen has so nearly vanished from the literary landscape, a symptom, perhaps, of this city’s propensity for forgetting its literary heritage. A year or two ago I wrote an essay for Open Book Magazine called “Six Cures for Literary Amnesia.” The essay quoted literary scholar Germain Warkentin describing Toronto as ” a city in a state of near amnesia, seeking desperately for its own memory.” Warkentin’s thesis is difficult to argue with. In the early days of the Imagining Toronto project, I browsed through the history of the Toronto Book Awards, and was dismayed to find that so few of the books remained in print even a few years after their publication. Perhaps this is true of books published anywhere, but what was worse is that nobody seemed even to remember them.

A central purpose of the Imagining Toronto project is to trace Toronto’s literary genealogy, unravelling the long and interwoven heritage of writers engaging with this city. There is no better place to start than with Gwendolyn MacEwen’s work, especially Noman’s Land. Fortunately, although the book itself is long out of print, Coach House Books continues to make Noman’s Land available in its Online Book Archive. Please go and have a look.

[The above image, a drawing by Carl Schaefer, is from the online edition of Noman's Land.]

We arrive, together and mostly in one piece, at the Imagining Toronto website after a week of work and some weeping, time spent configuring and reconfiguring the new interface. My web host, while reliable from a technical point of view, discourages subscribers from tweaking our hosting accounts by relentlessly upselling urgent-sounding-but-not-really-necessary upgrades, directing users toward automated installers, and by hiding configuration options behind a wall of impenetrable menus and obscure terminology. Fortunately, dogged persistence is sufficient to overcome most such forms of electronic gatekeeping, and the new website — powered by the excellent Atahualpa Wordpress theme –  is functional at last. Please let me know if you encounter any functional glitches — or any additional content you’d like to see here. In the coming weeks I’ll be integrating the Imagining Toronto Library and other materials (particularly documents associated with the Imagining Toronto course) into the new site; for the moment the Library is accessible here and the course website remains available here.

Having reconfigured the tempate and user interface, I will also do my best to post to the blog integrated here more regularly. Sadly, despite having maintained a private journal since I was nine, despite feeling utterly compelled to write at all hours of the day and night, and even despite enjoying the good fortune to research and write for a living, I am a terrible, neglectful blogger. Perhaps this is because blogs, by their nature, inhabit an inchoate space between the birth of ideas and their passage into the universe of discourse. They become thresholds where ideas are dropped like muddy shoes, half-forgotten until it is time to put them on again — but by then too often they seem grimy and ill-suited to the new occasion.

At the same time, I am a great gatherer of literary detritus, hoarding images and ideas and bits of text until space opens up for them in a writing project. And I have found that these artefacts — scribbled on bits of paper, typed into half-drafted chapters, earmarked in books, torn out of newspapers and journals and retained for future reference — almost always do become useful at some point. Accordingly, I will try to allow some to spill out here.

More broadly, the blog here will also serve as a portal for announcements about the Imagining Toronto book, forthcoming later this year. I’ll have plenty to say on this particular subject as plans, especially those currently in the works, unfold.

In the meantime, please feel free to browse, comment, suggest links and point out glitches and omissions. As always, I may be reached by email at alharris [at] yorku [dot] ca.

Ah, test posts; how we love to hate them.