The Book 
Imagining Toronto (Mansfield Press, fall 2010) is available at most bookstores and online through Mansfield Press, Amazon or Chapters.
Imagining Toronto was shortlisted for the 2010 Gabrielle Roy Prize in Canadian literary criticism and won the Award of Merit, the highest honour given to a book at the 2011 Heritage Toronto Awards.
Upcoming Events
25-26 February 2012: "Going Native: Reclaiming Aboriginal Identity in Toronto Literature," “Landscapes of Difference, Espaces de Difference, Raume der Differenz” conference (Session: The Politcs of Place: Urban Sites of Contestation), Canadian Studies Association in German-speaking countries (GKS). Grainau, Germany.
Thursday 15 March 2012: Guest lecture, "The Imagined City," ARC 120, Contemporary Architecture. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, University of Toronto; Isabel Bader Theatre, 9:45-11:00 am.
Wednesday 4 April 2012: "Representing Toronto: Mapping the Role of the Artist in the Contemporary City. Panel discussion. Presented by Koffler Gallery in partnership with Diaspora Dialogues. 80 Spadina Ave., Suite 503; 7:00 pm.
Sunday 22 April 2012: Reading from Acts of Salvage at the Draft Reading Series. Details TBA.
Thursday 3 May 2012: "Literary Bodies." Panel discussion as part of Bodies in the City, a symposium of the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto.
Thursday 17 May 2012: "Imagining Toronto the Wild" at the Toronto Botanical Garden. Inaugural lecture of the TBG's new HortiCULTURE salon series.
Recent Events
Tuesday 18 October 2011, 7:00-8:30 pm: Will the Real Cabbagetown Please Stand Up?: Regent Park, St. Jamestown and Cabbagetown in the Literary Imagination. Parliament Branch (269 Gerrard St. E.)
Saturday 1 October 2011, 2:00-3:30 pm: The Masseys and the Masses: Social and Spatial Ascendency in Rosedale and Forest Hill. Forest Hill Branch (700 Eglinton Ave. W.)
Tuesday 27 September 2011, 7:00-8:30 pm: From Streetcar Suburb to Multicultural Community: Riverdale in the Literary Imagination. Riverdale Branch, Toronto Public Library (370 Broadview Ave.)
Click here for past events.
|
May 17, 2012, at 9:40 am
 I’ll be the inaugural speaker at the Toronto Botanical Garden‘s HortiCULTURE Salon Series tonight, 17 May 2012 from 7:00 to 8:30 pm.
My talk, titled “Imagining Toronto the Wild,” will explore Toronto’s culture-nature nexus. Here’s the official description:
“Crack open the concrete city and you’ll encounter landscapes shaped by ravines and buried watercourses, their contours home to creatures much more interesting than humans. Join Imagining Toronto author Amy Lavender Harris on a literary voyage into Toronto the wild.”
Some of the questions tonight’s talk will pose include: How (and where) do culture and nature intersect in the imagined city? Are raccoons our urban avatars? What underlies our ambivalence about feral cats? How serious a threat are raccoons, bears, opossums another the other ‘invaders’ who’ve made their way (back) into the city? And finally, what do imaginative representations of urban animals tell us about wildlife, ourselves and the urban spaces we share?
Recommended Reading / Viewing
Armstrong, Kelley, 2001. Bitten. Toronto: Random House Canada. [novel, set partly in Toronto, about a pack of urban werewolves.]
Cat City. Justine Pimlott/ Red Queen Productions. 2009. Documentary about feral cat populations in Toronto. [Trailer, via Youtube.]
Grady, Wayne. 1995. Toronto the Wild: Field Notes of an Urban Naturalist. Toronto : Macfarlane Walter & Ross.
Harris, Amy Lavender, 2010. Imagining Toronto. Toronto: Mansfield Press. [see especially "Ravine City," "Toronto the Wild" and "The Liminal City"]
Kuitenbrouwer, Kathryn, 2012. “Corpse.” In The Walrus. January 2012: 50-57. [short story about teeanged boys who hunt a deer in Toronto's High Park.]
MacEwen, Gwendolyn, 1985. “The Demon of Thursday.” In Noman’s Land. Toronto: Coach House. [a tragic short story about buffalo who escape from the High Park Zoo.]
Raccoon Nation. The Nature of Things with David Suzuki. 2011. Documentary about urban raccoons.
Seton, Ernest Thompson, 1989. Wild Animals I Have Known. New York: Grosset & Dunlap. See, for example, “Redruff, the Story of the Don Valley Partridge.”
York, Alyssa, 2010. Fauna. Toronto: Random House of Canada. (author’s website; Globe & Mail review)
Media Reportage of Urban Wildlife
Urban feral cat population booming (Toronto Star, 23 November 2008)
Beach coyote ‘brazen,’ dog owner warns(Toronto Star, 24 February 2009)
Fur flies over Bluffers Park cat colony(Toronto Star, 19 June 2009)
Coyote fears grow in GTA (Toronto Star, 11 November 2009)
Cats now housebound in Oakville–or owners face fine (Toronto Star, 17 January 2011).
Coyotes dining on Bluffers feral cats (Toronto Star, 8 February 2011)
‘They’re destroying my garden’ says man charged with attacking raccoons (Toronto Star, 1 June 2011)
March 30, 2012, at 3:56 am
 Just a quick update to let people know I’ll be contributing to an upcoming panel discussion called “Representing Toronto: Mapping the Role of the Artist in the City” at the Koffler Gallery Off-site (80 Spadina Avenue, Suite 503) on this coming Monday 2 April 2012.
The discussion, whose participants will include literary me, theatre director Jacob Zimmer, architect-turned-artist Flavio Trevisan and urbanist John Lorinc, is motivated by Trevisan’s remarkable Museum of the Represented City, a “museum of the present” that uses maps and other urban artifacts to suggest alternate ways of navigating the city’s cultural and cartographic history.
Here’s the official event description:
How does a city form its character and unique personality? To become a livable reality, a city needs to be imagined and grow as a representation in the minds of its inhabitants. Beyond the buildings, the roads, and the landmarks, artists have a critical role in shaping the idea and identity of the city. Through their artistic practice they indirectly give form to the real physical and cultural landscape.
This panel discussion among creative urban thinkers and civically-minded creators examines the essential role of art in the city’s continuous evolution. Moderated by journalist/author John Lorinc (Spacing, The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, Atlantic Cities) and featuring Amy Lavender Harris (author of Imagining Toronto), Jacob Zimmer (Director/Performer/Collaborator at Small Wooden Shoe theatre company), and artist Flavio Trevisan.
Exhibition tours will start at 6:00 pm and the panel discussion will begin at 7:00. This event, presented by the Koffler Centre of the Arts in partnership with Diaspora Dialogues, is free and open to the public. All are welcome to attend.
March 21, 2012, at 12:46 pm
March 14, 2012, at 6:12 am
This week in the Imagining Toronto course we’ll discuss representations of suburbia, beginning with stereotypical notions of suburbs as middle-class bastions of white-flight and going on to discuss how suburbs have shaped (and been shaped by) shifting experiences of gender, race and class.
Literary works discussed will include Phyllis Brett Young’s The Torontonians (1960; 2007), Hugh Garner’s Death in Don Mills (1975), M.G. Vassanji’s No New Land (1991), Rabindranath Maharaj’s Homer in Flight (1997), David Chariandy’s Soucouyant (2007) and V.V. Ganeshananthan’s Love Marriage (2008), among other works.
Lecture slides for today’s class are accessible here: 2011-2012 Week 11 slides Geog 4280 City Limits
Additional links:
Link: “Welcome to the Suburbs” (1950s film; Youtube)
Link: “Sin in the Suburbs” (film, 1964; via Youtube)
Link: “Subdivisions” by Rush (via Youtube)
Link: “Suburbia” by the Pet Shop Boys (via Youtube)
Link: “Lovers in a Dangerous Time” by the Barenaked Ladies (via Youtube)
Link: “Jesus of Suburbia” by Green Day (via Youtube)
Link: “Rockin’ the Suburbs” by Ben Folds (via Youtube)
Link: “The Suburbs” by Arcade Fire (via Youtube)
Link: “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” by Arcade Fire (via Youtube)
Link: “Shaikhing Up the Hood: Suburban Placemaking in Scarborough” (Aslam Shaikh, via Youtube)
Link: “The Microcosm of Markham” (The Agenda with Steve Paikin, via Youtube)
Link: The Leona Drive Project
Link: Vertical Poverty: Rexdale (United Way, Poverty by Postal Code 2)
March 7, 2012, at 9:02 am
February 8, 2012, at 1:12 pm
While politicians and ideologues declare multiculturalism at an end, people in Toronto go about our everyday lives, thrown together by collisions of culture, conflict and circumstance. This week in the Imagining Toronto course we’ll explore lived experiences of multiculturalism, considering whether the language of tolerance — as a minimum standard for civility in an era of cultural conflict — helps us in our efforts to live together or figure out whether we can do so at all.
Today’s class will concentrate on the conversations across culture invoked by Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For (2005), Rabindranath Maharaj’s The Amazing Absorbing Boy (2010) and Farzana Doctor’s Six Metres of Pavement (2011).
Slides for today’s class are available here: 2011-2012 Week 6 slides GEOG 4280 Myth of the Multicultural City Part II
February 1, 2012, at 1:40 pm
January 25, 2012, at 1:46 pm
January 18, 2012, at 9:21 am
This week in the Imagining Toronto course we’ll explore some of the ways culture and nature intersect in the imagined city. We’ll look in particular at the ravines, the lakeshore and Toronto islands; we’ll also consider the complicated relationship city-dwellers have with the wildlife — raccoons, pigeons, coyotes — living in our midst.
Literary texts we’ll consider will include Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion (1987), Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces (1996) and Alyssa York’s Fauna (2010).
Slides for today’s class are available here: 2011-2012 Week 3 slides GEOG 4280 Toronto the Wild
January 11, 2012, at 12:00 pm
The Imagining Toronto course begins with the premise that literary texts — novels, stories, poems, memoirs and plays — tell us as much about place (and in particular urban space) as other tools more conventionally used in geographical research, such as mapping and demographic analyses and policy tools. It argues, further, that literary texts tell us things about places that we are unable to discover or unwilling to acknowledge in the normal course of our lives and work.
In the iconic Toronto novel In the Skin of a Lion (McClelland & Stewart, 1987) Michael Ondaatje writes,
Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales are a kind of charting.
Similarly, essayist Jonathan Raban remarks in his remarkable book Soft City (1974; 1988) that
The city as we imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps, in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.
Ondaatje remind us that the cities we live in are made not merely of brick and mortar — or bureaucracy and money — but are equally the invention of our memories and imaginations. We realize that our cities unfold not only in the building but in the telling of them.
Slides for today’s class are accessible here: 2011-2012 Week 2 slides GEOG 4280 The City as Text
|
|
