Greetings, Crestwood students!
Slides from the presentation to Chris Jull’s “Reading Toronto” class at Crestwood Preparatory College, 5 February 2010 are available here.
Students interested in literature engaging with particular Toronto neighbourhoods will find a geographically sorted list of books here.
[Please note: this post has been recreated from back-up files. Regrettably, any comments posted to the original [...]
Toronto is a city wrapped in the rhythms of work. All night vehicle lights surge and recede along the urban expressways, as fluid as arteries and pulsating as if propelled by the city’s beating heart. At dawn packed buses wallow in the curb lane, moving like migrating manatees. An hour later the subway is stuffed [...]
In The Robber Bride, novelist Margaret Atwood refers to Toronto’s polyphonic gathering of voices as “music from elsewhere.” Walking up Spadina Avenue, a wide street vibrant with fruit venders, fish mongers, electronics importers and Sichuan restaurants, Atwood’s protagonist studies the diversity gathered around her and observes,
“She likes the mix on the street here, the mixed [...]
This week in the Imagining Toronto course we will explore Toronto’s literary cartographies. We will begin with the idea that the ravines are the repository of the city’s memory. Then we’ll move upward into Toronto’s streets and neighbourhoods as part of a discussion about the poetics of walking. Finally, we will step into to towers [...]
Years ago [can it really have been only two?] Library & Archives Canada commissioned me to write a short essay on Toronto literature for a new web exhibition called Canada: A Literary Tour intended to showcase LAC’s prodigious holdings of literary works, images, recordings and other materials representing Canadian cities and regions.
Yesterday, at long [...]
Whenever I visit Kensington Market — approximately weekly for both business and pleasure — I always make a point of stopping by This Ain’t the Rosedale Library. This Ain’t is a legendary independent Toronto bookstore that relocated to Kensington Market in 2008 after having been a fixture for three decades in the Queen East and [...]