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JOURNAL ARCHIVES Winterset in St John's This week I went to St John's as a judge in a literary competition for “excellence in Newfoundland writing”. Richard Gwyn and Carol Bishop-Gwyn started the prize and festival of the same name in honour of his Richard's late wife, Sandra Fraser Gwyn, who died of cancer. Sandra was a journalist and historian who wrote for magazines and also books such as The Private Capital, a social history of Ottawa. She was the great doyenne of the Newfoundland cultural naissance of the last twenty years or so – from which came Codco, Mary Walsh, and lots of music, writing, film and television. We three judges – Bert Riggs, Robert Mellin and I – read 34 books published by Newfoundlanders this past year. We had 3 finalists but to pick a winner was going to be extremely tough. One was a book of fiction- An Audience of Chairs by Joan Clark; one a book of poems - The Space Between the Trees by Enos Watts- and the last nonfiction, The Woman Who Mapped Labrador by a trio consisting of Anne Hart, Roberta Buchanan and Bryan Greene. So, as we kept saying, it wasn't just apples and oranges, but apples and oranges and a sweater. St John's was gorgeous, with huge heaps of white snow, bright sun and blue sky. It was all dripping eaves, and people in shirtsleeves as locals pretended that winter was over.. One I walked up Signal Hill. I lay on a wooden bench in the historic site in the shelter of the stone Cabot Tower and watched a big bank of fog roll in from across the sea. It was spectacular. My cell phone rang—Toronto calling-- and I felt like Marconi, who received the first transatlantic wireless signal on that very spot in 1901. The prize was presented at Government House with Newfoundland luminaries present- Lieutenant Ed Roberts and his wife Eve, Arts Council President John Doyle, the painters Christopher Pratt and Mary Pratt on different sides of the room, writer Kevin Major, and “merchant prince” Miller Ayre who publishes the St. John's Telegraph. Joan Clark won for her beautiful novel, An Audience of Chairs. The others were incredibly gallant in their praise of her and she of them. A lot of us had fish and chips later. There is an amazing number of good books being written in Newfoundland , especially considering it only has 500,000 people. My fellow judge Robert Mellin has written a beautiful book about architecture and life in an outport on Fogo Island called Tilting. Next time I want to go there too. Katherine's trip to India to attend the World Book Fair in New Delhi You have to start with the traffic. On New Delhi 's elegant wide avenues-- designed by Lutyens and built by the British in the final decades of the Empire-- dark comes suddenly at seven o'clock . I cower in the back seat of a tiny car. The streetlights are so dim you could be in the Soviet block before perestroika. A cart with a load of cauliflower twelve heads high looms on my right. A little girl, from one of the shadowy families squatting by their roadside cow-dung cooking fires, taps on window, left. Cyclists, cattle, Audis, and trucks straddle the centre line while my driver honks without cease to get through. Downslope from the freeway the rental elephants are being dressed in festival gear. Behind them looms a huge new high science complex. Small, frail, green and yellow electric rickshaws with no lights come at you as abruptly as change has come to this country of 1.2 billion. Three centuries exist at the same time in India , but at Pragati Maidan, site of the 17th New Delhi World Book Fair, we're in the 21 st . The book market here is hot, unlike anywhere else you care to name. The Canada booth is deluged with publishers, printers, dealmakers, and the general public. Indians are book lovers. It's been a long time since I have seen anyone touch a book with such reverence and longing. These men, women and children may not be able to buy, or even read today, but they will soon. The country publishes 70,000 titles annually in an industry valued at 70,000 million rupees a year. 40% of those titles are in English, making this the 3 rd largest English language book market in the world (after the U.S and U.K. ) As I sit under my “Meet the Author” sign, one new publisher with his own bookshop offers to print and have the book in the stores in 15 days. Price to the consumer? 300 rupees ( approx $6 US). Behind me, printers are wooing Canadian publishers with promises of cheap labour and free shipping. Canadian publishers have been drawn by this huge potential for a decade, but the lure has been counterbalanced by problems- a complex and unreliable distribution system, copyright violations, unfamiliar business practises, and communications that suffer from distance, and power cuts. Also making things difficult is old thinking: the United Kingdom book trade has traditionally insisted on "Commonwealth" rights, while not exploiting the Indian rights or distribution. This happened in Canada twenty-five years ago when suddenly people understood that you could really sell well into the country only by separating Canadian rights. Now it's India 's turn. And Canada wants to be there. Publishers are trying to make this happen, with, at last, some help from Ottawa . David Davidar, previously at Penguin India , is now raising consciousness at Penguin Canada . In India , High Commissioner Lucie Edwards and her enthusiastic Public Affairs Officer Nadia Scipio del Campo understand the connection between authors, literature and "Public Diplomacy". Add to that the dynamic consultant Gaye Facer, late of the Canadian High Commission Literary Office in London , who has been living in New Delhi and pushing Canadian rights since 1997. They see published authors are seen as great "ambassadors" both for Canada , for the book and other trades, and for their books. This ambassador spent a good deal of the week in traffic, one way to see a country in the greatest state of turmoil I have ever witnessed. At the Maurya Sheraton, Roli Publishers are launching a book on Heritage Hotels of India ; Chivas Regal sponsored the bash. After he sorted out his cell phone, the Maharaja spoke movingly about the need for tourists to help him preserve the palace. “The British have irretrievably damaged the Indian's self esteem,” whispered one politically-aware publisher from Calcutta in my ear. “Every person in this room is upper class.” As Kamal, a brilliant, highly educated friend of a friend says, he's amused when people are surprised that he reads extensively in English. It's the only language he can read in. One minute it's the Raj: the next it's the Revolution. On campuses, there is a roiling wave of new self-knowledge. One man studies South India tribes who were never subdued by the British, discovering a lost oral literature. Graduate students are unanimously enraged at talk of the “boom”: farmers in the Punjab are burning themselves up because they can't pay back their agricultural loans, they say. I talk about Canadian writers “raising the dead” by rewriting history. One young woman wonders at the use of this. “If I think back to the traumas of our country” – she means Partition- “I just become more angry”. The class agrees that something like South Africa 's Truth and Reconciliation Commission should have happened here, decades ago. “ Canadians,” says Gaye Facer, “can engage in cultural exchange without cultural imperialism.” The reception at the beautiful residence of the Canadian High Commissioner was elegant and full of high-powered people. Canada made her presence felt at the Book Fair, putting rights deals in motion and creating new relationships. As for what's happening in India , everyone has an opinion. Kamal shows me his two favourite places. One is Akshardham, the huge, Disneyland-style Temple made of red sandstone, labouriously carved in the ancient way, paid for by followers of SwamiNarayan. “Hindus have nothing else to do with their money except give it to God,” he shrugs. The other is the waste land to which the British statues have been removed, where King George et alia stand like Ozymandias in the desert. The “babyboomers”- if you can set anyone apart by that phrase in India- says the high tech boom is passing them by. Others claim that only the Brahmin caste benefits from it. “They have had generations of training their minds”. But no one denies that some of India is becoming more prosperous by the minute. The rest takes more time. At construction sites women “head loaders” clamber in and out of trenches with dozens of bricks on their heads. In the newspaper, there's a picture of a flower vendor who lost the space to park his cart overnight, because it has become a bus stop. It's too late for him: he too has set himself alight. But not for others. I visit the “jugghi” (slum) next door to, and built out of garbage from, the American Embassy. It's a desirable jugghi, and the homeless who come to New Delhi vie to get into it. There's no running water but the kids, with help from the teachers at the American International School , have built a library. What We Talk About When We Talk About Books: People say that reading is a solitary activity. I have never thought of it that way. I suppose it is because my earliest experiences of reading were when my mother read to me as a child. I loved nursery rhymes, and stories, and especially Winnie the Pooh. I can still remember my mother laughing about how Eeyore fell down a hole that had been dug to catch a heffalump. He was so scared he was shouting, "Help help a horrible heffalump, hor hor a hellible horrilump" and so on. My mother beside herself, in tears of laughter. It was amazing to see what power little words on a page had. I sometimes think that I became a writer in order to to make my mother laugh. Now some of you may say, but Katherine, your books aren't exactly the laugh riot of the century. I have got caught up in a serious world-- I regret I didn't write a children's book when my kids were young. So for me reading was social, from the very start. It involved a couple of small girls in pajamas, a mother probably in a sweater set and pearls, high heels, and nylon stockings, perhaps a Dad hovering in the background. She read the words aloud, long after it was necessary. And we followed along, wriggling with anticipation or fear, arguing about whether we'd do another chapter, sometimes falling asleep to the wonderful sound of language. That is what I will talk about tonight: the social-- yet very intimate-- act of reading. Who still reads to a loved one in bed? Or reads themselves to sleep? We read on airplanes, trains, on the beach on holiday, in solitude, often. Then we form book groups to talk about what we've read. To "share"-- a much-abused word-- that experience. Books are about language and call for a response, in language. We don't just come together and nod-- yeah, great eh? Yeah I really liked it, naw I couldn't finish it. Have you ever noticed how we talk about movies? There is so much colour and action and fame flaunted all over the screen. It's as if the film has taken all the words away, allowing only assent or dissent. Most often we say, the book was better. Books are different. They are created not of images but of words. They call on us to respond in words. All over North America and England, groups of people meet to discuss books. The Book Club movement is now a significant one in publishing, and in social life. Books bring us back to language and language is a reflection of how we order the world. So to talk about books is to use our most sophisticated technology, i.e. our language, to attempt to understand our greatest puzzle, the world we live in.Short version of a recent publication: "Chasing Audubon" "Chasing Audubon" first appeared in Imperial Oil Review's Winter 2002 edition Audubon's prints trapped me. Extraordinarily beautiful, they leap out of their own time and seem to stand outside of ours as well. And they come with a heroic story: a story of one man, an outsider, a renegade even, pursued by the bailiff, who followed the birds to their nests in the wilderness, watched and copied them, hired an engraver and self-published an epoch-making work, aided only by his wife and sons. But the story is not without its dark side. To depict the detail accurately without the benefit of binoculars or camera, Audubon regularly drew dead birds, which he or members of his crew killed for the purpose. Reading Audubon's journal in the Toronto Reference Library's Baldwin Room, I found the entries covering his "Labrador" journey (the area his visited is now part of Quebec) of June, July and August 1833 disappointingly sparse. There is a reason. Audubon was a man of secrets and lies, and in preparing the journals for publication, an overzealous granddaughter had "edited" the entries and destroyed most of the originals to protect his reputation. Nonetheless, it was clear the journey chastened the famous hunter and ornithologist. But here was a fact that few seemed to have noted: on this journey into storm and peril, Audubon was not alone. On June 22, 1833, while anchored at American Harbour, or little Natashquan, Que., Audubon's schooner encountered another sailing vessel, one captained by Henry Wolsey Bayfield of the Royal Navy. The Gulnare was charged with surveying the north shore of the lower St. Lawrence and producing charts that would make the passage safe for navigation. I met Captain (later Admiral) Bayfield, as Audubon did, by chance. I'd wondered about him, mind you, the man after whom a number of places in Eastern Canada are named, the man who surveyed the Great Lakes in small boats with only one assistant. You only have to pilot a boat through a rock-studded channel in the Georgian Bay archipelago to want to shake the hand of those intrepid Royal Navy surveyors who made the first charts. As luck would have it, Bayfield, too wrote journals. And I came upon this entry: "...Mr. Audubon onboard, the Naturalist ... and we found him a very superior person indeed." This is how novels happen. I had the proverbial chill up the spine. Bayfield. Audubon. Two men with missions, fogbound by chance, days from anywhere, making parallel, but opposed journeys, one seeking wildernes, the other paving the path for civilization. I was doubly hooked. All at once, thrilled and daunted, I stared three years of hard labour in the face. And I knew I had to take their journey. "My Favourite Place" first appeared in The Globe and Mail’s travel section We drove to Sunshine Village, near Banff as a family when I was nine; I still dream of that drive. Sleepy and stupid, at six thirty in the morning, I dress in layers - long underwear, ski pants, parka, turtleneck, shirt, and sweater. With toque, socks, mitts and goggles, I pile into the back seat of the car. Dad is at the wheel and we have a thermos of Mum’s hot chocolate. We head west into velvety black pierced by the steadily growing snake of headlights. As the sun rises behind us, the peaks materialize ahead, black and green, snaggle-toothed, snow-burdened. They close in as we tunnel into the Bow Valley and now we are in their midst, and climbing. We ride the Brewster bus up the road from the parking lot with its steep hairpin turns and have to get out and push while our skis rattled ominously in their outside racks. The banks of snow around Snowflake Cottage were over my head. It was such fun to reach the top of Strawberry T-bar just as the sun’s cold brilliance caught the planes of the upper slopes and made them flash. To head down the Dell, making the first tracks across last night’s pristine snow. Later I would discover Georgian Bay, the stoney farmland north on Highway 69, what poet Al Purdy called "my grandfather’s country’ which was indeed my grandfather’s country. But it was at Sunshine that I first stood gloriously on pieces of wood with leather polestraps on my wrists, ready to thread among high branches of spruce and larch made short by an twelve-foot base. Sun and wind defined the day. Weather was known as "conditions" and an entire nomenclature based on traversing that cold flashing surface. There was corn, and powder; there were basins, slaloms, schuss’es, moguls, and brutal icy drop-offs for the unaware. There was Dad’s geometry: Place your skis perpendicular to the fall line! He’d call as I tried to stand up. On Wa Wa T-bar there was a poem, each line on a sign about ten meters from the next:Careless SkiersDragging PolesPunch the Lift lineFull of Holes.And on the Great Divide Chairlift, a sign welcomed you to British Columbia, then, thirty yards on, welcomed you back to Alberta. For years I skied at Sunshine with my family, froze my toes, my fingers and nose, got stuck halfway down, fell off the lift. When I was buried to my waist in powder, the ski patrol’s eerie rescue toboggan slid silently past, some unfortunate fellow traveler swaddled and tied to its boards. A dangerous beauty this, and the fireside tales were full of what nearly happened.But the mountain has its gentle face. Last year in July I hiked with friends to Sunshine’s alpine meadow and saw the landscape I’d glossed over. It’s hard to recognize the terrain without snow. The meadow is fragile: you have to stay on the gravel paths. There are two lakes above Strawberry lift. Mount Assiniboine, Canada’s Matterhorn, rears its head in the distance. No more than a few hundred years ago Indian tribes from the west coast and the prairies met here to trade. A hike around the top of the Paris Basin leads through a tangle of shallow brooks and mossy hummocks, and an array of tiny alpine flowers that could break your heart. The rare glacier lily is only one of the thumb-sized that blooms and fades within six weeks. My country is not only the snow, then, but meltwater and colour. This is the lure, the secret warmth, the light to the darkness, the untold story, the undiscovered, lyric tenderness of a landscape I have never fully known and never put behind me. Kobudo Between December 2001 and March 2002 Katherine was busy preparing for her black belt or "shodan" grading in kobudo. This involves writing an essay on what martial arts training has meant to her. Here is an excerpt: People don’t know what I have been doing here at the dojo. Can I explain it to them? That instead of going to cocktail parties I have been hitting sticks together with half dozen or so other people all of us dressed in long blue pleated skirts called hakama. That in pursuit of independence, I have been practicing obedience. I am defining my territory. It is what writers do, and people do too. When I took up martial arts, I quickly chose kobudo, in which we use weapons, over "open hands" karate. Perhaps this choice was predetermined by the fact that I am a writer: And perhaps being a writer was my way of fighting an often cruel world. "So get yourself a furious weapon," wrote my mentor and dear friend, Elizabeth Smart. "A pen is a furious weapon." I am fascinated by the checks and balances of these other weapons – bo, ulesi, tomfa, ia, sei. As a divorcing mother of two teenagers, I took up martial arts so that for at least two hours a day my mind would be taken up with something other than the fear and grief that gripped most of my waking hours and a great deal of my nights. The movements were so complicated that I had to concentrate every second: right foot, left arm, forward, backward, turn. If I didn’t concentrate I hit myself or somebody else. I came out of the dojo smiling, refreshed and a little bit stronger every week. Perhaps I took up martial arts to stop my body from growing old. Perhaps I took up the training thinking that I might regain my youth and agility. I have learned that I can’t recapture my youth although, in fact I may be stronger now than I was as a ballet dancer of eighteen. I am not as quick to learn or as graceful. But I have found something better. I understand my limits. I know what I can do, and I try every week to do a little more. And my ability to focus is now fierce. I enjoy working with others in a bare room in the middle of a day, alone but with others in a mostly wordless camaraderie, memorizing kata and trying to perfect the movements, making space for each other, assisting. My day job is to wrestle with words; it is a curious "alone" kind of power one wields over language, which can too easily become helplessness. Then the book I have written is set out on the market, to be judged by critics, its fate determined by the number of orders placed by an anonymous buyer at Chapters. It might win prizes or it might go into huge piles on remainder tables. It might even do both. The odds are high against great success, which is not so tragic; I am one of the fortunate ones whose books are in print and who can continue publishing. But the point I want to make is that the possible setbacks are out of one’s control entirely, that the forces are invisible, you can’t meet them face-to-face. You can only wait and wince when you get a bad review, or be happy when your book gets on a shortlist. Everyone who comes into the dojo has his own story and most of them are more interesting than mine. These stories become, after the first rei, pretty well meaningless. We’re all just there training diligently (a favourite Japanese word, diligent). For my part I am glad to have an opponent I can actually struggle with, as opposed to an amorphous one. At the dojo I wrestle with mass, my own, and others’. A pen is a furious weapon. Indeed it is. And so is a tongue. There is the violence contained in words, cruel words used in anger and as tools of power. There is the violence against oneself of remaining in the position of victim, of crouching beneath verbal blows or flailing without method in a poor attempt to defend oneself. I have seen both. But no pen however craftily wielded can inveigh against a physical assault. I am not laying claim to a miracle cure but it is a fact that now that I have weapons, the words addressed to me and the words I address to others are gentler. Canadian Literature in the New Millenium: This is a quote from Kay, writing his fictional medieval empire.
What stories will last?*literature where the local issues are encoded so that it can be read without specific references, without names , as Russian literature was under the Stalin regimes. But what is the suppression here and now? It is neither Big Brother or Orwell's vision of 1984, but the tyranny of the marketplace where goblins are 'global'/ 'commercial'/ '"blockbuster'.And the failure of memory. How is a literature kept alive? Another cautionary tale from the classroom. I teach writing to journalism students at Ryerson. We were studying a Time Magazine column which contained a reference to Rip van Winkle. I am now alert to a certain silence and avoidance which happens when a text opens consideration of previous texts. Who knows about Rip van Winkle? Several hands out of twenty-five students. He was some guy who fell asleep for a long time, said these students. I wondered aloud if the American folk tale which was recounted in Washington Irving's Sketch Book (1819) had dropped out of children's storytimes. Apparently. And how did the ones know who did know? The Flintstones did an episode on it. It's a pity this tale is disappearing from our lexicon. It is an American myth, if you like. Rip van Winkle went for a walk in the Catskills, took a drink of ale from certain quaint personages he met dressed in old Flemish style and went to sleep. He awoke to find his gun rusted, and his dog vanished. When he got home his house was deserted and his friends all gone. He had slept for 20 years. Interestingly --from the point of view of this topic --he had been a subject of King George 11 of England when he went for his walk but when he arrived home he was a citizen of the United States. Let's hope this does not happen to us if we're caught napping. Is vigilance the price of our varied, melodious, sometimes futuristic, sometimes nostalgic Canadian literature? Perhaps. To be constantly in search of it and constantly reminding ourselves of the specifics of our history, geography, and human composition. Prediction: If Rip is forgotten, or revived as a Flintstone episode the myths remain- the classics will remain. The ancients are as close as that which is newly old, they're all "old" - or last millenium÷ there will be a return to myths÷ a placement of our stories among myths as well. How do you like your Canadian literature? Which strand do you call your own? A prairie dustbowl story by Sinclair Ross? The growth has been an explosion in twenty years . When I started to publish the best one could do was name the trio of Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, and Marian Engel. In fact a reviews of one of my early novels began, "She's not from a small town and her name doesn't begin with M." Barbara Gowdy on elephants, necrophilia and gender confusion? A Bombay based novel by Rohinton Mistry? The medievally-inspired fantasy of Guy Gavriel Kay? William Gibson's cyberpunk? We now have many what's called "internationally renowned" writers and books. It's a word I dislike heartily, "internationally renowned". Much like the odious label "world class" which people love to put on Toronto, it smacks of terrific insecurity. Is the city only great if someone from another country says so? Same with the book? Literature has intrinsic value. It ought to have that to us, without reassurance by another culture that this is good. Who Has Seen the Wind did not win an Ocsar. Robertson Davies wrote for nearly thirty years before he was discovered in the United States: was he less good then, because he was not "internationally renowned"? Seventy year old Timothy Findley was called "a new face" in the Chicago Tribune with the publication of Pilgrim. We should know better than to judge ourselves by foreign standards. Specifically Canadian themes and especially settings don't travel well. The "internationally renowned" works of Cdn literature may no longer need protection but works of significance and setting known best to Canadians often do. Alice Munro's gothic realist tales of southwest Ontario are the exception here. I've been reading some Canadian fantasy these past week. We have a tradition of science fiction÷the recent death of A. E. van Vogt. Judith Merrill and Spider Robinson, Rob Sawyer, Nebula award winner in 1996 and may win today. They have been little known because for so long we defined as Cdn that which reflected our landscape and our country. But these writers are Canadian and their writing is as Canadian as The English Patient which after all is not set in this country. I talked with Rob Sawyer about Cdn lit in the millenium. He had some predictions which didn't differ all that much from my own in fact. He started with ideas about the marketplace. I didn't realize science fiction people were so practical but of course they are, it makes sense, they're always looking at systems and how they work. Prediction One: sometime in the coming century people will stop buying books altogether and begin to download them from the internet. This will dispense with borders altogether: our reading public will not be defined by the sale of rights or the availability of actual copies of books in the stores, but on the interests of a larger community of English readers around the glove, from Hong Kong to New Zealand to South Africa to Ireland. Such special treatment as Cdn books get in Canada will not, thinks Rob, be extended to internet. I think that's debatable. But in exchange those readers who want the book will be able to get it, from India. But if it did- the safety nets for publishers would disappear. But the costs of publishing with out books would be much lower. The influence of cultural bodies will disappear, "No gatekeepers" I disagree; there will always be gatekeepers of a type, whether in on-line review services or whatever. Let's call this an equal trade-off. Too early to pronounce a death or indeed a renaissance. What else will happen? Prediction Two: Some authors will downplay the Canadian-ness of their work. This will backfire on them. (I think some are already doing this.) Well, most writers will continue writing out of the circumstances of their lives and history, in other words, they will be fascinated by the question of whether the country will survive. As an experience in the mingling of many cultures, Canada is a qualified success, an ongoing experiment. I think you can make a case for a national anxiety on this subject which pervades all of our art. Far from being a negative it is a positive attribute. It frequently is encoded, and in novels, poetry ,drama not remotely political, appears. I will explain. Science fiction-- a genre at which we excel, although we don't really know it--. (I'm quoting Rob Sawyer here) a major preoccupation is the notion that empires crumble and fade, and borders are always malleable. Canadians in particular says Sawyer keep returning to what he calls the first contact scenario. An alien culture coming together with a human culture, or two vast federations utterly unknown to each other. Says Sawyer, of his fellow Canaidan science fiction writers, "We return to meeting of the native Canadians and the Europeans as if it has never happened, as if we could make it work." What else will Canadians write about for their audience of compatriots and English readers around the globe? New issues. New forms of human life. People without memory of the 20th century. Utterly changed This is where the nostalgia of fiction has to be abandoned. Where the "borders" between genres may in fact begin to move. (Not to mention the borders between genders). Families - a favourite of novels. What happens to the marriage plot -- from Middlemarch to Romeo and Juliet, from Midsummer Night's Dream to The Good House --when reproduction is no longer practised within marriages and even perhaps within the human body? When do literary novelists start to deal with cloning as an issue? When does the disease plot become the story of endless life? (Timothy Findley has scooped us on this one with Pilgrim I think). The vision quest depart from Thunder bird Rock in Georgian Bay leap to the moons of Jupiter? Doris Lessing has a dark vision and has moved into other worlds to express it with The Fifth Child, The Four Gated City. I think we can expect more fiction of that variety. And from these new dilemmas, new journeys. New archetypes as well, I suppose. Does this mean that the mythology of the past two thousand years, twenty-five hundred years, has become antiquated? Strangely not. More relevant after all. Heracles was in his time a space traveler, as was Odysseus. In this context perhaps of all our mythic figures it is Cassandra who captivates me as we enter the blank slate of the ought oughts. The young priestess of Apollo who foresaw her city's doom in the Trojan War. The seer who was under a curse that she would see the future but would not be believed. She fascinated me so much that I cast her as a rebel girl in my new novel, The Truth Teller. She is one of those teenagers you see squatting on a corner at Yonge and College with turquoise hair and tattoos, hacking a dang, as they say with her squeegee pals. She sees herself as junk, in old world terms; only in the society of her friends does she have value. Only her street wisdom , her fractured tongue, her passionate loyalty to the members of her own tribe, can keep her alive as the century folds its tents. And I do believe that as long as I see Cassandra on the streets of Toronto, and project her onto that field of zeros we have entered, then others too will do so. We all have the thirst to understand not only where we have been but where we are going. This is why we have a literature and why we will continue to have one. Excerpt from Brunswick Avenue Revisited, National Post, Saturday Oct 22, 2005 Street of Writers, Street of Dreams Once, Brunswick Avenue was my world. I lived there seven years, at three different addresses, in the 1970's. Coming from Edmonton as a grad student in English at York University I sublet a professors' house in Don Mills. Soon I got smart and moved into a 3rd floor apartment at 398 Brunswick. I had heard that "Famous" writers lived on the street -- Marian and Howard Engel, Sylvia Fraser, Dennis Lee. But for literary chat I settled for James, the guy downstairs, a would-be playwright who feared that learning grammar would spoil his style. I leaned against the gable window and watched for the postman. In pre-email days postmen were key. They brought the news of whether you got the grant, or had a story accepted by Grain magazine. I could also see, next door, Myrtle the landlady's backyard rabbits, destined for dinner. Myrtle owned all the houses around. She became a character in one of my stories. She also appeared in deep disguise in one of Judith Thompson's plays. Judith lived upstairs in Myrtle's house . A few years later I crossed the street to the third floor of 409, which had a rounded window like a porthole. Next door at 411 was Karen Mulhallen, diva of Descant magazine, who entertained as she sat wrapped in bubbles in her claw foot tub. When Karen moved on I inherited her second floor apartment, with its two sun porches and a fireplace. Brunswick already had cred as the street of writers. Morley Callaghan had lived there in the thirties, a fact I recently gleaned from Greg Gatenby's Toronto A Literary Guide, and decades before that, Ernest Jones, biographer of Freud. In my time, the seventies, the neighbours were photographers and filmmakers. Leigh Field was a medical student who macramé hangings from my dog's hair. My upstairs neighbours were Paul Kennedy - later to become host of CBC's Ideas, and his wife writer Patricia Bradbury. We barbecued and sang folk songs in a gravel square behind the house. We drank beer at the Mug and spent long nights in the smoke-filled Blue Cellar. We shopped at The Elizabeth Delicatessen & Meat Market or had weiner schnitzel at Hungarian restaurants like the Tarogato. We read the first chapters of new books at Book City standing at the display tables. ....
Toronto Life, December 2004 First the obvious: weed the garden, paint the hall, remove the teenager's bong from its hiding place in the fuse box, clean out the furnace room. But in Toronto there is a next step. Baking bread doesn't cut it anymore. You've got to have a fluffer when selling your house. It is a form of voodoo for the urban sceptic...
Think of it out there, the prairie as it always was. The high ridge of it, splitting rivers northward from southward, spinning horizontal in the west wind from the foot of the mountains. A carpet on the land, yawning into the stars. The familiar words for this are wide, rolling, open. but try unsparing. Try stripped. Try ancient. Think of the wind as blown by that also familiar old man with cracking cheeks. His warm Chinook blasts erase the snowfall, exposing the grass. The cattle eat alfresco all winter. The cows are stubborn, sway-uddered, calf-nudged. They graze head down, or lift their wide eyed faces and stare, chewing, chewing, confident with a knowledge that escaped us. The bulls keep jumping one another. There is wildlife too: deer, antelope, called pronghorn, coyotes, gophers. And the people: Sam, a cowboy. Ralph, a rancher. Ralph Jr, his father. Sandra an artist. Tim, another artist. Various and sundry, a dozen more artists and writers. I myself. It's nearly summer. It's morning and the horses see him come to the barn, and wander in from the field. I ask why the horses are loose, won't they run away? No, says Sam, not a used horse. It's not like if he was wild. Like all things that have been domesticated they prefer to come back. We drive in the truck. The roads cross the ranch. I jump out when we stop, to open and close gates that are nothing but a couple of four by vours standing on end, held together by wire. They throw no shadow. Each gate is a little different, a test. Slide it or lift it. Hook the strap on the nail or fold it over itself. There's a story about the guy who carefully opened each one, let the truck through, closed it again, solemnly latching himself on the same side he started from, and then jumped over the fence to catch up to the truck. Cattle make their way over the grass naturally, says Sam. We've put fences up. Wildlife don't pay any attention to fences, just jump over them or under them, but with cattle we've got to lead them to the gates and get them through. Counterclockwise is how to cows go around, once around every year. 2,000 of them, and they'll all have calves. A hundred fields, a couple of hundred miles of fences and 402 gates. The names tell what the fields ar for, occasionally for whose field it was, sometimes the size. "Thin Camp" with thick grass to feed the thin cows in winter. North and South Bull Field. There's Meadow Camp and the Mothering-up field, and West Whiteface field. That's good pigment, says Ralph, when a calf with an Edward Munch face, perfectly white, with chestnut goggle, stares us down. At Calf Camp meadow larks sit on top of the corral posts. Two cowboys live here for six weeks to check on the calves dawn to dusk. It's too far to ride the horses to work. They've come in the trailer behind. Sam goes to get them out. Sam says he always had horses. Got one from the King Ranch. Now you can breed 'em with anyone. You can get semen from anywhere in 48 hours. He says semen like "say-men." He approaches horses gingerly though they're his. You can have a horse for a number of years, but I don't know anybody who knows what an animal is thinking, he says. It's first impressions, all the time. So you don't believe in the Horse Whisperer? Guess not, he says. It's a good title, is all.
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