Elsewhere

As a child I was always scheming to leave home. I read constantly (the first escape), and fantasized frequently about living elsewhere. The where didn’t matter, only the else (else, from the Old English elles: other, otherwise, different).

I even begged to be sent to boarding school, imagining a long journey by train, an old stone residence, cold rain falling against narrow windows lit against the coming dark.

In our fantasies of away, even the rainfall is otherwise. Therefore meaningful. Therefore story-worthy.

But my grandparents were not keen ( “I’ll ‘boarding school’ you in a minute”), and so I began to lobby for the next best thing, and at last, at age 11, I was finally allowed to leave home. It was only an hour and a half to Camp McDougall in Thessalon, but it was away, it was elsewhere (other, otherwise, different).

Eventually my idea of away began to assume the shape of a big city. Cities had bookstores, literary festivals, publishers. Cities were where stories got told. You moved to a city and you found your community and it was different (other, elsewhere), and this was how (I thought) you became otherwise (a writer).

I left Northern Ontario almost thirty years ago, and have lived away ever since. But I went back to Thessalon last weekend as part of Stories in the North Literary Festival and when we passed the entrance to the summer camp, I felt a surge of excitement, not at the idea of leaving home, but at the idea of returning. The northern landscape, after so many years in a city, now seems like elsewhere: the long lines of hills, old stones emerging out of cold water, narrow farms, white pines against a dark sky.

Stories in the North was created four or five years ago by serious writers and readers.  A serious writer is someone who writes. These people write. They meet to share what they've written; they reach out to writing groups in other communities; they publish and host open mike nights. Their schedule for National Novel Writing Month is full (go to the cafe, the funeral home, the library, write for three hours, six hours, twelve hours). And of course, they created this literary festival, and found funding (through the Ontario Arts Council), and it runs smoothly and beautifully.

Writers with a connection to the north are invited (and paid) to lead workshops and to read, and the writer who accepts this invitation is rewarded by serious enthusiasm (along with music and home baking). This is a place where stories get told. Disappearing lakewater, pioneer grandparents, a woman on fire, a ghost sheep in the middle of the road. Stories that light up the windows against the coming dark.

Yes, you can leave home and seek out a community of writers elsewhere, or you can make one where you are. Elsewhere, like home, is a state of mind. The physical journey is not necessary. But community? Writers write to be read. Community is essential. Therefore meaningful. Therefore story-worthy.

Making It Up

I am a terrible researcher. Everything distracts me. I end up copying out passages because I like the way they sound or because they make me laugh, or because I have forgotten the question.

Today at Robarts, I am supposed to be finding very specific answers, like, if you had 61 cases of unopened whiskey in your basement in Sault Ste. Marie in 1921, could you be arrested under the Ontario Temperance Act, yes or no?

Instead, I am reading Stephen Leacock's responses to Prohibition: "As silly and as futile as if you passed a law to send a man to jail for eating cucumber salad."

Or Stephen Leacock on how to get liquor in Ontario, when alcohol could be legally obtained only with a doctor's prescription: "It is necessary to go to a drugstore...and lean up against the counter and make a gurgling sigh like apoplexy. One often sees these apoplexy cases lined up four deep."

Plus, I have questions for which answers cannot be found at Robarts (or at least, not found by me), such as, if your basement door is padlocked and you have lost the key, could you open the door by removing the bolts from the hinges?

It's terrifying, making things up. There are so many ways things can be wrong.

Re: 61 cases of unopened whiskey during Prohibition in Ontario. After April 1921, you couldn't carry it, transport it, deliver it, receive it, sell it, or import it into Ontario. But if you had a "cellar supply" already? The law had many holes. Legislators kept trying and failing to plug them up. So could you be arrested, yes or no? Probably not, but maybe.

Cucumber salad. Hee hee.

Home, Queen Street, Home

A balmy (for mid-November) Saturday with no marking; I take a trip down Queen Street East, just to see what's out there.

On the streetcar, I think of the Queen Street of my adolescence, a seedy strip of stores that no one went into, in a town that no one came to, in a section of the universe where the rules of time and space broke down. The opposite of Toronto, where everything was new and went fast and stayed cool. Toronto was, in fact, the coolest place in all the world. My father lived there. Margaret Atwood lived there. Kids who went for the weekend came back with Mohawks and parachute pants and so laden with coolness, and the knowledge of coolness, they could barely move their jaws to eat or speak.

My grandmother wouldn’t allow me to go to Toronto for the weekend. My father lived there.  Kids who went came back with Mohawks. Parachute pants were for the birds. She didn’t have an opinion on Margaret Atwood, but had I brought her up as a reason to go, most likely she would have said, “I’ll Margaret Atwood you in a minute.”

Someday I would leave and become a writer in Toronto, but until then I was trapped in the thick temporal-spatial molasses of northern Ontario uncoolness.

I began taking bus rides around the Soo for the purposes of passing time while trapped, for the purposes of observing and noting, for the purposes of pretending I was a writer until I could leave to become one. Standing inside the city bus terminal, facing a 28-minute wait for the next Second Line bus, I observed that the bus terminal smelled like stale popcorn. I noted that everyone inside looked chronically depressed or deeply enraged. I was shaken by a sudden desire to weep at the awfulness of my hometown.

It would be many years before I understood it wasn’t the town that was the problem. It was the other part of the word.  It would be many years before I understood the word projection.

Toronto is not my hometown. I don’t know who Ashbridges Bay was named after, or what went on at Fort York, or where to get the city’s best anything. I still know absolutely nothing about coolness. But Toronto is where I live and work and where I have raised my son. It is the place I came to after I left Bhutan, thinking I would never be happy again.

Toronto is where I am happy again.

And therefore, I think, it would behoove me to know it better. Hence this trip to the Beaches. (Yes, I know: it’s singular. They had a referendum. But I’m passing signs: Historic Woodbine Beach, Historic Scarborough Beach, Kew-Balmy Beach.  Walking the boardwalk, it’s going to seem like one beach, but historically, numerically, signage-wise, it’s plural. (The Beach is large; it contains multitudes?)

I get off the streetcar at the Intergalactic Headquarters of Art Deco Superheroes. Even clad in scaffolding, the R.C. Harris Water Treatment Plant soars, a vaulted, streamlined temple of water purification (and also of coolness).   

The wind is loud and strong, and the lake thinks it’s an ocean here, swelling wildly and crashing over rocks. Dogs gallop across the sand. I envy the occupants of the waterfront homes, maybe not in the sweltering summer when this place must be overrun and noisy, but now, when they can stand at their windows and see nothing but a lake that thinks it’s an ocean.

I walk the boardwalk in the surging wind right to the end. The sun is swaddled in cold cloud. I don’t know what owns this collection of smoke stacks beyond the parking lot. I don’t know if that glimmer of white to the east is the Scarborough Bluffs. I will google everything when I get home.

The westbound streetcar is stopped by Occupy protestors. We get off and walk to the subway behind a large group of mostly young people carrying signs: Evict the 1%. A young woman with a megaphone calls out, “Show me what democracy looks like!” The group answers: “This is what democracy looks like.” A drummer keeps the beat.

A disgruntled pedestrian yells, “Go home.”

“I am home,” a protestor yells back.

Me too.