We’re visiting authors in their hometowns and learning about some of their favourite spots all October long.
Find more Homegrown picks here.
Teresa McWhirter, Capper (Anvil Press)
East Vancouver, BC
All Lit Up: How has your community influenced your writing?
Teresa McWhirter: This photo was taken in an alley in the downtown east side of Vancouver. The vibrant underground culture thrives in my city, and it is the setting for most of my books. Everything is inspiring to me: graffiti, dive bars, street musicians, hidden gems, the music, the food, beaches with mountain views, the art, neon lights, and hole in the wall spots for locals and intrepid visitors. But mostly, it is the humanity of this city that has informed my work. Addiction, grief, tragedy, violence, is interspersed with resilience and hope, inspiration and strength and humour. Stories unfold around you on the city streets every day, all one has to do is pay attention.
Click here to learn more about Capper.
Bronwyn Fairchild, Skygull Calamity (Annick Press)
Bridgewater, NS
in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia
All Lit Up: What do you love about the arts and culture community where you live?
Bronwyn Fairchild: I deeply admire the resiliency of artists here, the ways artists are showing up for our communities, and are using their work to support the things they believe in. I think a lot of people would be surprised to learn just how much creative work we have happening, even though in many ways we lack the resources that Halifax and larger places have. The arts scene exists much more quietly but is embedded into the fibre of living here.
On any given day you might wander by a farmers’ market (we have many!) and find people selling prints, or paintings, their latest novel, their ceramics, their photographs, their handmade clothes, or their folk art, and hear a local musician performing. You might drive down a country road and spot a small business’s hand painted sign or find an artist’s studio with their hours listed as “by chance.” You might stop by a library only to
discover it’s housed in a beautiful heritage building. You might find a bookshop packed with work by local authors, or a small gallery with hidden gems, an antique market, or a little free library. You could stumble upon an art opening or a café with books and art for sale. On any community bulletin board, you might find posters advertising book launches, concerts, workshops, or a poetry group.
I feel so lucky to get to live in a place where there’s both so much creativity, and so much access to nature. There are beautiful hikes, trails that wind through towns and connect places along the coast, and of course there are some truly spectacular beaches. My favourite spaces are the ones that combine art and nature like the story book trails, parks with public art, and spaces that local artists have brought to life like the concrete sculpture garden and art maze that are both close to where I live.
Click here to learn more about Skygull Calamity.
Gary Barwin, The Comedian’s Book of the Dead
(Book*hug Press)
Hamilton, ON
All Lit Up: How has living in your hometown or community influenced your writing?
Gary Barwin: I write everywhere in Hamilton. I love wandering in the woods and conservation areas both in the day and in the night where I think about writing. Or drift in reverie or worry. And I find myself writing in coffeeshops, in waiting rooms, in libraries, in forests. And especially at home or in my backyard where I can hear the birds, squirrels and traffic of Hamilton.
I like the sense of looking out at the world from this specific place with which I have a long-standing relationship. I’ve lived in Hamilton for 35 years, raised my children here. Done lots of things in lots of places. Watched the city remain the same. Watched the city change. So out of all the spacetime that ever was (or will be) I find myself in this particular location considering our lives, history, the rest of the universe. And I like that Hamilton continues to define itself. There isn’t a simple answer to what is Hamilton. That we feel just to the side of things. That feels very productive to me. I also love what my old letter carrier proclaimed once to all in our local Tim Horton’s; “Hamilton is the most worst place I’ve ever lived in and I’ve lived here all my life.”
I think Hamilton has a particular small town feeling despite being a big city. And the literary community is unusual in its mutual support and enthusiasm. I help organize LitLive Reading Series and we’re always struck by how often our authors speak about how warm and inviting they find Hamilton’s literary community. We’re big enough to have diversity and variety, but small enough to feel connected. Also, the sense of being an other, an alternative to the big centrality of our neighbour Toronto (and the bigger other of the US and the rest of the world) adds energy and connection.
About the photo: I’m standing beside an open suitcase, one part of Be:longings, a work of public art that I created with Tor Lukasik-Foss and Simon Frank that considers migration and permanently installed just in front of the Aviary in Churchill Park near where I live.
Click here to learn more about The Comedian’s Book of the Dead.
Will Ferguson, Officer Shimada and the Disappearing Girl
(Goose Lane Editions)
Calgary, AB
All Lit Up: What’s a favourite spot to visit where you live?
Will Ferguson: My wife and I raised our two boys on a quiet, idyllic street in Garrison Woods, a residential area tucked away in central Calgary. When our youngest moved out, we downsized, classic empty-nesters, into
Calgary’s “village within a city:” Kensington. In any community, I ask myself, “What is the hub, the heart
of it?” It could be a community centre, a hockey arena, a library, even a rough bar or a sad mall. But
whatever it is tells you a great deal about the character of a place. In Kensington, the heart of the
community is a bookstore and an indie cinema: Pages Books and the Plaza, respectively. A walkable
street, a walkable neighborhood, with the skyline of the city lit up at night right across the river. We miss
Garrison Woods, but are happy to have landed in the eclectic community that is Kensington.
Click here to learn more about Officer Shimada and the Disappearing Girl.
Jean Marc Ah-Sen, Slodethland ’66
(Great Plains Press)
Toronto, ON
All Lit Up: How living in your community influenced your writing?
Jean Marc Ah-Sen: In my opinion, the Toronto writing community is very transactional. This makes authentic connection and literary friendship an impossible task sometimes—everyone is really just networking, angling for recognition, or playing some non-rule-abiding game of employment leap-frog.
I think this mentality only gets worse when the arts are underfunded, when literary culture is consolidated around bourgeois social mores, and when accountants have editorial in an abacus-shaped headlock.
All this to say that I think a lot of writers now feel so alienated by publishing and their “peers” that they feel the need to write honestly, stridently, without blinders on, etc, in a way that perhaps they have never felt before. What a gift to have this realization in your lifetime…!
I definitely felt this was my guiding principle when I co-wrote Slodethland ’66 with my friend André Babyn. Writing books is not an act of people-pleasing: it’s about unburdening your soul, about being sick on the side of the street, and having the nerve to walk away.
Click here to learn more about Slodethland ’66.
André Babyn, Slodethland ’66 (Great Plains Press)
Montreal, QC
All Lit Up: How has living in your hometown or community influenced your writing?
André Babyn: Slodethland ’66, the part I was responsible for, was written across four provinces. I am
not normally a man who likes to travel unless I am coming home again, and these journeys were not quite of that kind. In one province, I woke up at the same time early every morning—to the minute, in the smallest hours—convinced a long-dead woman was trying to rouse me in the centuries-old carriage house that had become my temporary home. In another, I slept in a garish blue room the colour of electricity after a bad night out, with black mould on the ceiling and a landlord who I frequently discovered sitting in perfect darkness at a desktop computer nearly as old as the daughter he’d sent to college after his wife left him. In a third, in the city I’d thought of most recently as my home, I slept on the top floor of a boarding house run by eclectic Gen Xers who told me the virus I’d contracted on New Years was just a myth, or in an apartment with rooms that went nowhere and pipes that leaked over the bed. Outside that second apartment I bumped into an acquaintance on the street and heard her exclaim into her cell phone that she had just seen me, like she’d been stung by a bee but was taking it gracefully. In short I was dazed, in an echo of the sort of reversal Dani experiences at the end of part one of Slodethland ’66.
Hochelaga, in the fourth province, was where I landed. This neighbourhood is, if you don’t know it, in Montréal. The day after I arrived the city turned to glass, ice frozen over in a storm that grounded power lines, which I watched spark and tear from my window and in the Instagram stories of a handful of friends. I parked in an illegal space in front of a stump betraying evidence of recent arboreal euthanasia, and the next morning drove out wary of traffic coming the other way because a storm-downed tree blocked the entrance to the one way street. I felt a little like a hunted animal, except no one was looking for me.
Some of that confusion made its way into the book. My goal was to make everything straight again, but sometimes when you look at your reflection it is doubled in a way that makes you doubt there is anything there at all. In a park by the railroad tracks I found a sort of caribou constructed out of driftwood, standing lonely on the fenceline, and I found myself wandering out there frequently, pleased by the questions it did not seem to answer. I do not live in Hochelaga any longer, and the caribou is no longer there, but all of that is in Slodethland ’66 more than any other place I was or care to remember from the time we began to work on the book, and so, for this exercise, I returned there with the printed copy in hand.
Click here to learn more about Slodethland ’66.
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Thanks for joining us on a literary tour of our authors’ hometowns this fall. Books can be purchased on All Lit Up, or from your local indie bookstore (try our Shop Local button located on every book listing to find copies at your local indie).
Click here for more Homegrown picks.
