news
Imagining Toronto’s Literary Sense of Place
A strong sense of place is a familiar enough characteristic of Canadian literature. Yet, it’s still common to think of Toronto as, in the words of Bert Archer, “a city that exists in no one’s imagination.” Contrasting this notion are a couple of interesting dissections of Toronto’s literary landscape in the latest edition of Open Book Toronto’s online magazine.
First, poet Stephen Cain explores the Annex’s deep literary connections. For generations, the neighbourhood has been home to and inspiration for countless poets and authors. He expands on Greg Gatenby’s Toronto: A City Becoming (1999) to include more avant-garde writers and new writers who’ve emerged since that book’s publication. Cain creates a walking tour of Bloor Street West from Matt Cohen Park and bpNichol Lane in the east to the Victory Cafe and Ulster Laundromat in the west. In addition to these still-standing landmarks, he conducts some literary archeaology to include the bookstores, pubs, cafés and eateries that sustained an earlier generation of writers but now only exist as settings in books or poems. He brings to life a time when writers subsisted “almost exclusively on goulash and schnitzel” in the many long-disappeared restaurants opened by Hungarian émigrés in the wake of the 1956 revolution. He points out the more recent generational shift that’s occurred along the stretch. Where the older generation took residence at Dooney’s, younger writers have congregated at Future Bakery. It’s a collection of fascinating tidbits to give texture to your next visit to Bloor West.
Offering a different perspective in the second article, columnist and author James Grainger recounts the difficulties of capturing a sense of place for North York. He writes: “North York may occupy an impressive chunk of the map of Toronto, but it had failed to colonize a comparable space in the consciousness of the city.” Cut off from Toronto proper by the 401 but connected to downtown by subway, North York is neither its own city, nor a purely suburban appendage. In an age when the common culture of television and pop music has loosened the civic bonds of local references and region-specific slang, Grainger found North York difficult to write about in his own short stories. His solution was to let the culture of North York stand in for the physical place. He focused on the coming of age of his friends and enemies as a microcosm of the city, where “their lived experience of North York would be largely defined by a temporal, geographic and social disconnect from a traditional understanding of physical place and community.” Using examples from his own stories, Grainger provides insight into the writer’s process of imbuing fictional characters and worlds with a strong sense of time and place.
Photo by b-real.