IMAGINING TORONTO
Intersections of Literature and Place in the Toronto Region

About the Imagining Toronto project

Updated 25 November 2007

The Imagining Toronto project began in late 2005 as an invitation from the Geography Department at York University to create a new undergraduate course on literature and place, now offered as GEOG 4280 3.0. By early 2006 the large volume of Toronto literature I was amassing in preparation to teach the course had begun to contrast rather starkly with claims that Toronto does not exist in the literary imagination. Despite such claims, and despite the near absense of scholarly interrogations of Toronto literature, this city has produced many hundreds of excellent literary works and many dozens of internationally regarded writers who illuminate Toronto's diversity and growth, and its nightmares, desires, and secrets, qualities of experience that tend to fade from formal records. A city's literature is a kind of map to its spatial and cultural labyrinths, a map that can mislead as much as it guides. As Michael Ondaatje writes in the iconic Toronto Novel, In the Skin of a Lion (McClelland & Stewart, 1987), "before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting."

And yet, if the great challenge of cartography is to fit the curved shape of the earth to the flat text of the map, then the great challenge of literature is to fit the fluid character of being to the static text of the page. There is always a tension between the place and its representation: the territory is always a step ahead of the story. And perhaps this tension is compounded in urban literature, which must reconcile the city's linear structures with its irregular topography and its inchoate cultures. As Toronto writer Dionne Brand comments in Thirsty (McClelland & Stewart, 2002), "nothing in a city is discrete. / A city is all interpolation. And so we build our textual map of Toronto through interpolation, through rouch charting of the points where the stories and the city overlap.

Since early 2006 I have been preparing a monograph called Imagining Toronto, my own effort to chart the city's literary terrain. This work has received generous support from the Toronto Arts Council and the Ontario Arts Council, and will be published as a book by Mansfield Press in the fall of 2008. A thematic analysis of Toronto literature, Imagining Toronto explores how writers navigate and negotiate culture, nature, sexuality, immigrant experiences, working life, suburbia, and other urban experiences. A full listing of published, forthcoming, and work in progress is available here. The work is complicated, in a pleasant way, by continual discoveries of works previously unknown to me that lead to new questions and more undiscovered works. I am especially interested in vintage Toronto literature, and have found novels dating to the 1880s, long forgotten forbears in Toronto's literary genealogy but which have a surprising connection to later works.

If you would like to know more about the Imagining Toronto project, please feel welcome to contact me at alharris@yorku.ca .

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Amy Lavender Harris teaches in the Department of Geography at York University. She is a contributing writer at Reading Toronto and a contributing editor with Spacing Magazine, where she writes a regular column on Toronto literature. Her work also appears in The State of the Arts: Living with Culture in Toronto (Coach House, 2006) and (with Peter Fruchter) GreenTOpia, an anthology of environmental writing (Coach House, 2007), Open Book magazine and Canada: A Literary Tour (LAC, forthcoming 2008). Amy speaks regularly to popular and scholarly audiences about Toronto literature and the imaginative qualities of cities, including at Salon Voltaire (2006), the Goethe Institute (2006), Juice Dialogues / Think Tank at OCAD (2006), the Toronto Festival of Architecture & Design (May 2007) Walk21 (October 2007) and Beyond Bureaucracy (November 2007). She is also working on a long story about urban scavenging.

Amy has an undergraduate degree in Geography and Literature (Queen's) and holds master's degrees in Urban and Regional Planning (Queen's) and Industrial Relations (University of Toronto). Until 2004 she was a PhD student in environmental philosophy. Amy has also been a union leader and negotiator, an urban planner, a civilian instructor, and a journalist. She lives in the Toronto Junction area.