Wychwood, U of T, The Annex

Been in Toronto for most of a week, book-touring. Last night read at an IFOA event in Hamilton with my fellow Anansi authors Lynn Coady, Stephen Kellman and Patrick DeWitt.

It was an excellent event at an art gallery in Hamilton, an old steel-mill town, but on the ride home we were all so exhausted from hearing ourselves talk that there was not a word spoken in the van during the 45-minute ride across the monstrous Greater Toronto sprawl.
       BTW if any Torontonians are looking for signed first editions of The O'Briens, there are a few at Book City, on Bloor St., and at the Indigo store on Bay Street, downtown.
        I spent most of today on foot, hiking between various meetings, and enjoying the October light and some of Toronto's neighbourhoods and buildings. My favorite neighbourhood is Wychwood Park, a bit of countryside tucked away in the middle of west end Toronto. No trophy homes, though. And lots of trees. A Canadian hardwood forest in the middle of this enormous, noisy town.

I found lots of buildings from different eras around the University of Toronto that were impressive. The Leslie Dan Pharmacy Bldg., corner of University Ave. and College Street, certainly caught my eye. During the Seventies, when I was starting to analyze my responses to buildings, most new buildings, especially in Canada, were brutal. It was a terrible time for architecture, and for Canadian cities, which were being built in hideous, urine-colored concrete.
      I still feel exactly the same way about the architecture of that era--we can't tear it down fast enough, as far as I'm concerned--but there have certainly been lots of graceful new buildings since then, and it's always encouraging to see a powerful statement of the modernist aesthetic, especially when it's not an office tower.

 Also much liked this U of T building (below): the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research:

The best thing about Toronto are the neighborhoods and while I walked from a meeting at College and Bathurst to another in Rosedale, I kept to the quiet and shady streets of The Annex neighborhood, which are thriving but don't feel triumphalist, yet, though I realize even the homeliest house in this part of town is well over a million dollars. Mostly they are simple, not particularly well-built houses from the 1880s-1920s. Almost all red brick, of an Ontario clay quite different from Montreal red brick. So much red brick that when I spotted this little yellow house, I had to catch it.

Ontario Road

I'm on the book tour, which starts to seem endless. Airports and hotels. The only thing to do is to get in a car, get out of the city, find the country roads, and get lost. On Wednesday--no, Thursday--I headed out of Toronto, where I'm at the IFOA, for Belleville, Ontario, and a talk/reading the city's Public Library. Instead of zooming on the 401 freeway, I cut away at Port Granby/ Bond Head and followed a patchwork of little roads heading east along the northern shore of Lake Ontario. The road wound its way through rich alluvial farmland and tiny Ontario towns: a Loyalist/Irish Protestant landscape, "the Front" as it was known in Susannah Moodie's day. I kept coming across tiny brick schoolhouses---"separate (Catholic) schools" from the days when public education in Ontario (and Quebec) was denominational.

The road was...well, let me put it this way: it was not the 401 Freeway.

It woke me up to a part of Canada that freeway travel had obliterated from my consciousness. The "Eat Slow" movement suggests we also need a "Drive Slow" movement, when we're driving at all...preferably in a recycled vehicle at least 25 years old.
           It's all in the details. You don't see anything at 70 mph. People hate driving now, and road trips, because their experience out there is on freeways, interstates, nowheresville fastfood colonies. There is a whole country out there. It's gorgeous and strange. I met a stonemason working on the 19th church at Wesleyville, ON, and he let me inside the building to have a look. Nothing fancy, but I do love that plainspoken Ontario style of brickwork. And the robin's egg blue paint was clearly the right choice. And the little organ has been there for 100 years.

 I found my way into the town of Port Hope, and signed some copies of The O'Briens at Furby's Books. These Ontario towns look & feel so (Co. Tipperary) Irish to me. Settled as they were by Irish (Protestant & Catholic) in the 1830s

Not all brick either. Lots of stone foundations and stone buildings from the mid 1800s.

And the Loyalists were here, even earlier, and did their best to rebuild Georgian New England in Ontario.

Kubota and Queen

           I've been on the road (in the air, mostly) around Canada for most of the last two weeks, reading & talking on behalf of my new novel, THE O'BRIENS, which is out in Canada now (House of Anansi Press), and comes out in the U.S. in March 2012 (Pantheon Books).  At the moment I'm in a hotel in Toronto and having some trouble remembering where I've been in the last 10 days. Oh yeah....Calgary, Banff, and Edmonton; but I think I've already posted about those places.  Well, I flew back to Maine  for a couple of days R&R, but then flew out to Vancouver last weekend. The Vancouver Writers Festival on Granville Island was wonderful, as usual, and in the middle of it I took off for 24 hours to see old friends--Blake O'Brian and Jenny Lee and their family--at their farm--Orkney Farm--on Denman Island. The trip started with a ferry out of Horseshoe Bay in West Vancouver, heading for Departure Bay on Vancouver Island: a 1:40 hour trip from the mainland to VI, across the Strait:

leaving Horseshoe Bay

I landed on Vancouver Island and drove an hour up the island's east side to take another ferry to Denman Island

Spent Saturday walking and exploring the farm with Blake and Jenny (also did a talk/reading at the Denman Island Arts Center). Blake is very proud of his shiny new Kubota.

The best thing about book tours is getting off track, seeing old friends, and exploring astonishing parts of Canada, such as Denman Island. (Below) is a actually a view of Hornby I., from the beach at Denman. It was supposed to rain (this is British Columbia--the coastal rainforest, after all) but it didn't.

         Trees are large, out there.
         From Vancouver I flew to Ottawa for the Writers' Festival, and a talk reading at the Ottawa Public Library, and an early morning walk around Parliament Hill in bright October sunshine.

I ended up sitting in the morning sunshine, jet-lagged and dazed, at the foot of the Victoria Regina bronze on Parliament Hill; another grateful subject of Her Majesty.

This afternoon I flew to Toronto, where I'm reading at the International Festival of Authors this Saturday Oct 29 at noon. There's an IFOA interview, here. I read/talk at lunch at the Womens Art Association tomorrow, October 26; that's not open to the public, but an IFOA event at Hamilton 7pm Sunday October 30th, is; so is an event at the Belleville (ON) Public Library at 6pm on October 27th.

1959 Cadillac Fleetwood Sixty Special

Our south Saskatchewan correspondent, Alex Emond, noticed the 1959 Fleetwood Sixty Special in Herbert, Sask. last week. Fifties exhuberance at its best, or worst. I think the perfect car for cruising the Great Plains, where parking is not a problem.

Oh and it's for sale, too.

Weather's Good There in the Fall

Four strong winds that blow lonely, etc. Thanks to Ian Tyson for the song, and Neil Young for the versions he's delivered over the years. I'm on the road in Alberta, Canada. Last night at WriterFest, the book festival in Calgary, I was lucky enough to read to an SRO crowd of booklovers at the Vertigo Theatre, on a powerful list with Wayne Johnston, Elizabeth Hay, Johanna Skibsrud and Anita Rau Badami.  We were introduced by Calgary's brilliant mayor, Naheed Nenshi, a reader/politician...really and truly. He says so, anyway. And I believe.
            Did an another event at Audrey's Books in Edmonton tonight.
           But what I've really been doing is driving a lot, and getting out and walking whenever I can.... wishing to reconnect with this powerful Alberta landscape that meant so much to me as a young man. Something about October out here: when I worked on a wheat farm October meant the harvest was nearly over and we could think about where we were going to head for to spend the money we'd been saving up all the summer.
      Aspens sharp yellow and shivering in the October winds, all along the foothills...I'm trying to write this post in 10 minutes before going off to dinner and the bookstore reading, so I think I'll just put up a couple of photographs from this week, and write more about context, along with some personal history, when I have a little more time.

          Strands of my own personal connections to Alberta: When I was 18 I came out west on my own steam and found a job as a hand on a cattle ranch in the Rocky Mountain foothills. I ended up going back for another season, and learned there most of what I know about horses and cattle, hayfarming and fence mending and small town beer parlours. I also learned just what I could and couldn't do on my own. The photo above was taken near Caroline, Alberta a couple miles from the GH Ranch, where I worked. Fall roundup was happening. I remember how tough it was  working cattle in those aspen groves: not exactly the wide open range. But the forest is good cattle browse, and our cows were certainly free-range, and organic as hell.
             Another Alberta connect for me: I put in time on a crew building and rebuilding hiking trails in the Rockies. This week I hiked from lake Louise to Lake Agnes on a trail we rebuilt in the mid-eighties. I remember hiking up that trail with Toby Clark, both of us toting Swedish rock drills on our shoulder.
            No rock drills, mattocks, and helicopters this time. No grizzlies, either. This photo is moi, up at Lake Agnes.

Below: Lake Louise was looking like, well, like Lake Louise. i.e., like nowhere else.

Driving west on the Trans Canada, that first glimpse of Castle Mountain is always a thrill:

Today the wind was blowing maybe 20 knots NW, (ref. Ian Tyson: those winds sure can blow cold/ way out there). Classic Alberta autumn, and the sky was mostly clear. Down south the aspens were still blazing yellow but closer to Edmonton things were starting to look bare. I stopped at Rocky Mountain House, and walked the bank of the North Saskatchewan River, and through the site of the 19th century Hudson's Bay Co. (and Northwest Company) fur trading posts. I think the No. Saskatchewan may be the most beautiful river on the continent.
       Back in in southern Alberta, on the Stoney Reserve:

  Looking forward to heading back to Banff tomorrow: dinner with old friends, then another event at WordFest in Calgary on Saturday.

round ranginess of earth

This poem, from David Rivard's fifth book, Otherwise Elsewhere, sums up how I start to feel ( as a green midge/ or/ as a pine tree) on book tours. 

In Quebec, while driving home to Maine, after reading in Montreal.

NOTE TO MYSELF

Having survived self-

esteem (both low & high), like

surfacing

out of a to-do

list for civil war

in the heart—

Having

been a back-stabber (when said

back was my own) or

lucky Darwinian

holder of

the Ace of Spades,

in my mind—

Getting to see myself

as a green midge

or

as a pine tree looming like

a fetching samurai

at the edge

of a meadow—I get a little

tired--& strangely

everywhere I go

seems one

step closer to wherever I

 thought

I was when I left

for wherever

I wanted to be.

Given the round

ranginess of earth, always

thinking of myself—

that’s it for me, tho. Enough. No

more, thank you. No, really.

There is a there, there.

from Places and Novels, a piece I wrote for the blog, Canadian Bookshelf:
I need to seed a book in a place. In my mind I plant the idea of the book in one very specific patch of ground and hope it will grow from there. Until I know where that patch of ground is, I'm lost and the story, the book, that I'm trying to write does not come into focus. I can’t grasp it. I have no traction on a story until I have a place...

The place I'm focused on now. Anyone recognize it?