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Writing Toronto

The latest issue of Open Book: Toronto has a couple of articles on writing about Toronto. The first piece describes the inspiration provided by the city, the second describes the perspiration involved.

Torontoist’s Kevin Plummer offers a summary:

First, poet Stephen Cain explores the Annex’s deep literary connections. For generations, the neighbourhood has been home to and inspiration for countless poets and authors. He expands on Greg Gatenby’s Toronto: A City Becoming (1999) to include more avant-garde writers and new writers who’ve emerged since that book’s publication.
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Offering a different perspective in the second article, columnist and author James Grainger recounts the difficulties of capturing a sense of place for North York. He writes: “North York may occupy an impressive chunk of the map of Toronto, but it had failed to colonize a comparable space in the consciousness of the city.” Cut off from Toronto proper by the 401 but connected to downtown by subway, North York is neither its own city, nor a purely suburban appendage. In an age when the common culture of television and pop music has loosened the civic bonds of local references and region-specific slang, Grainger found North York difficult to write about in his own short stories.