How The Web Fits Our Cities: What I Learned from Cory Doctorow, Sara Diamond and Mark Surman

Posted on June 12, 2011 | 1 comment

Last week I attended an excellent panel discussion entitled “How Can We Build A City That Thinks Like The Web?” It was part of a conference/festival at the University of Toronto (May 28 to June 5, 2011)  called Subtle Technologies: Where Art and Science Meet.

Three “big brains” (as moderator Dan Misener called them) convened to discuss the issue of cities and the Internet: Mark Surman, executive director of Mozilla (creator of FireFox); Sara Diamond, digital-media artist and researcher, and president of OCAD University (formerly the Ontario College of Art and Design); and sci-fi author, Boing Boing co-editor and renowned blogger Cory Doctorow.

I went to the discussion mainly to hear Doctorow, as I have read several of his columns with interest and pleasure, but happily found that the other two panelists were as interesting as he was. I was particularly intrigued by what Dr. Diamond had to say, with her prodigious knowledge about the intersections among art (and artists) and technology, and the connections of these conjunctions with social history and design.

What I heard that evening surprised, worried and encouraged me, and it made me think about potentials for the Internet that I had never previously considered. In fact, I’ve been thinking about some of them all week. If a successful presentation makes you see the world in a new way, then this panel was a success for me.

The title of the discussion was inspired by a comment made by Surman in 2008, at which time he had been feeling optimistic about the ways in which Washington, D.C. was opening its data bases to the public, contributing to “a buzz around the city as an organism.” By last Saturday, he was feeling less excited about the speed of the transition to municipal-data accessibility: with a few notable exceptions (Boston being one, he said), the provision of municipal databases for public access has progressed “more by bits and pieces than leaps and bounds.” Still waiting for “the tip” (the reference pleased me as I am currently reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book),  Surman joined his fellow panelists in pointing out the social, cultural and other benefits that can accrue through citizen access to public databases—and some of the downsides.

The topics the panelists discussed fell into three general categories: 1) the potential for the Internet to make citizens into more active members of local communities; 2) the conflicting interests of personal privacy and personal security, particularly those associated with advances in surveillance technology (these affect more than municipal contexts, of course); and 3) some really interesting Internet-based urban initiatives that are already underway.

Here are some highlights:

Surf Locally

The panelists discussed:

  • The ways in which citizens can work with Internet data to make their communities and governments (municipal and others) work better, citing as an example a traffic-monitoring experiment in Galway, Ireland, where citizens provide real-time information on traffic congestion on the motorways for the benefit of other drivers;
  • The Internet’s capacity to galvanize large numbers of people around local issues (such as the recent rash of on-line/social-media photos and complaints by Toronto Transit customers), bringing matters of public concern to a point of visibility where they can no longer be ignored by bureaucrats and elected officials;
  • How public access to aggregate data — on neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood power usage, for example — can encourage residents to act: by, for example, reducing their power consumption. “If we can actually see online the impact of turning off a light,” one panelist said, “we’re more likely to do it.” The importance of releasing only aggregate data in this and other contexts was stressed: knowing exactly how much power your next-door neighbour is using can only lead to conflict;
  • How the Internet has led in some cases to what Diamond described as “intense localization,” facilitating such initiatives as community gardens and even block parties. In Surman’s words, “Smaller groups with fewer resources can achieve more than ever before.”

The Individual vs. The Machine

  • Cory Doctorow, who was born and raised in Toronto but now lives in London, England, wants to see a future in which people are “scanners rather than barcodes.” Humans, he points out, have the capacity to explain and interpret what we see, and designers and individuals should be thinking about how our mobile devices have the capacity to provide us with data and information that we can put to use as individuals, rather than expanding the ways in which they act like implanted wildlife-tracking devices. Doctorow says this requires a shift in attitude: we need to start thinking about the information our mobile devices store over the course of the day that can help us to understand what has happened to us – sort of the way a journal does. He suggests that we should be framing the development of both hardware and apps in a context that puts us, as thinking beings, at the centre;
  • In order to capitalize on the potential humans can bring to information, Doctorow points out, we need network services that provide no caps on data, and do not prefer one type of data over another: we must be allowed to be the filters. He said, “We need a world where the majority of us have access to the available data, and know how to get at it”;
  • Doctorow also raised the matter of the conflicting goals and purposes of technology intended to protect individuals and families from criminals such as burglars, stalkers and pedophiles, and the invasions of our privacy. He cited the irony of the situation in which he finds himself when he walks his child to day-care from his home in London: he passes about 40 closed-circuit tvs (CCTVs) en route, which have been installed for the security of the property owners but end up monitoring him and his daughter, too—recording their passage through the neighbourhood—but when he gets to the school he is not allowed to take a photo of his own child anywhere on the property because of the school’s child-protection concerns;
  • The ultimate question is how we can keep our own data under our own control — although Sara Diamond also wondered whether the next generation (the one that has grown up with the Internet) cares as much as their elders do about privacy issues in such arenas as social media. The younger members of the audience seemed to suggest that they do still want to protect their privacy (giving only first names when they went to the mike, for example, or in one case an email-type nickname). In regard to data control, Surman pointed out that we need to turn the existing paradigm of information acquisition upside down: “Now as a society, and as local business people, we get a lot of benefit from the proliferation of specific user data. For example, it allows us increasingly refined location-based marketing. Now we need to provide evidence of ways in which controlling the distribution of our own personal data can offer us benefits”;
  • The matter of data collection, even in aggregated format, continues to be a concern.  “Aggregating data for no good reason almost always leads to a leak,” Doctorow pointed out.

Cool Stuff

  • Sara Diamond pointed out the artistic possibilities of open access to data: she said that “amazing stuff” has come out of “open-data hackathons” – such as tracking the activities of local humane societies;
  • Diamond also mentioned what can happen when artists are involved as artists in efforts to bring about change—the Surveillance Camera Players, for example (among other subversive activities) create artistic performances in front of the CCTV cameras that have proliferated in urban areas since 9-11;
  • Diamond also talked about the potential of data visualization in social contexts in urban areas, mentioning the work of architect and activist Laura Kurgan who studied data in new ways to relate incarcerations with federal census blocks—showing that the enormous costs of incarceration go to residents of a disproportionately few number of neighbourhoods—in a project entitled Million Dollar Blocks;
  • A great example of local initiatives facilitated by the Internet is [murmur] (So cool! And it’s not just in Toronto. Check out the other cities). The website describes it thus: “a documentary oral-history project that records stories and memories told about specific geographic locations. We collect and make accessible people’s personal histories and anecdotes about the places in their neighborhoods that are important to them. In each of these locations we install a [murmur] sign with a telephone number on it that anyone can call with a mobile phone to listen to that story while standing in that exact spot, and engaging in the physical experience of being right where the story takes place.” As Diamond pointed out, [murmur] allows the remapping of geographical areas, creating the overlay of a virtual space of memory and history on our actual neighbourhoods;
  • Several panelists mentioned Toronto’s new Bixi Bike program. The status of the bike stands are monitored digitally and, Misener pointed out, within a few days of the program’s establishment someone had mashed up a map of stands where the bikes were out – an act of citizen ingenuity that suddenly provided us with a new way of looking at the data — and the city.

It is human participation and ingenuity that is going to make the Internet an essential partner in local initiatives. The “web and the city” panelists agreed such enterprise will also add a level of beauty and art to our worlds (both its “meet spaces” and its “techno spaces”), as we–for example–communicate information online about our neighbourhoods, and our memories of those neighbourhoods. But it is essential to the range and success of creative local projects that citizens have open access to all the data that is relevant to their undertakings. Our governments can help us make our communities better, more interesting and more beautiful places by sharing the aggregate data they currently control on issues that affect us.

“Structures of control are what have made our cities ugly,” Sarman said. “Hope lies where it has always been: in our capacity to provide the human overlay.”

Note: My interest in the individual uses of digital technology and the Internet is explored further on my Militant Writer blog, most recently in an article entitled “As Publishers, Agents and Booksellers (unfortunately) (for them) Go The Way of the Dodo, Writers Learn To Fly.“

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Into India (2)

Posted on May 7, 2011 | Leave a comment

I had hoped to get to see the magnificent exhibition Maharaja: The Splendour of India’s Royal Courts at the Art Gallery of Ontario (it was organized in cooperation with the Victoria and Albert Museum in London) for a third time before I left town for a family vacation in late April, but it was not to be. The first two times I had visited Maharaja, I had stayed for about two hours each time—but I could have gone a third and fourth time and still not have given any appropriate amount of attention to the artifacts on display.

Quite aside from the hundreds of individual pieces of jewelry—(one platinum necklace designed by Cartier for Maharaja Bhupinder Singh in 1928 originally contained 2,930 diamonds), art, drapes, pillows, furniture, clothing, weapons, even thrones, carriages and the “Star of India” Rolls Royce, each opulently decorated with jewels, embroidery, filigree, carvings and enamelling—the exhibition offered so much written and video history that in fact it would have taken weeks to absorb all of it in any way that could have hoped to justify the monumental effort that had gone into the curatorial process.

I was surprised by one of the historical perspectives I acquired in my visits to the Maharaja show: I realized that the maharajas had been largely figureheads, at least from the time of the Mughal Empire through the era of the British Raj, which was shortly before their decline in the latter years of the 20th century. These noblemen are depicted in art and photographs emerging on festive occasions from their  palaces clad in diamonds, rubies and silk, riding on an elephant or, later, in one of their elegant carriages—only to fall into line behind the then-rulers of their countries—the Persians, various Europeans, the officers of the British East India Company and other governmental leaders.

I was also interested to note evidence in the Maharaja exhibits of the freedom that royal women evidently enjoyed in the 1600s and 1700s, participating publically in hunting expeditions and military exercises. This was quite a contrast to the article I read recently in the New York Times, “Improving Women’s Status, One Bathroom At A Time,”  that pointed out that the shortage of public bathrooms for women in India has an enormous effect on their ability to participate in the workforce or go to school. But perhaps this contrast has more to do with birth status than the century in which these women live or lived.

I turned back to John Keay’s India: A History, looking forward to finding out more about the Aryan civilization to which 19th century historians had attributed the evolution of Sanskrit language—one of the important influences on all “Indo-European” languages including English—but when I finally had time to read Chapter 2  I discovered that there are two histories to be taken into account in all matters Aryan: and probably all matters historical when it comes right down to it. First there is the actual history which (obviously) the historians are attempting to uncover; then there is the history of the history that the historians are uncovering. If you get my drift.

In this case, after the 19th century excitement among historians and the public about the possibility that a huge Aryan civilization had once spread across much of eastern Europe, which was followed as we know by widespread efforts particularly on the part of certain Teutonic leaders in the 1930s to show themselves to be direct descendents from this “pure” “white” civilization, new evidence came to light that suggested that there might never have been such a civilization at all.

Early in the chapter called “Vedic Values: C 1700 to 900 B.C.,” Keays says, “Questions tantamount to heresy among an earlier generation of historians are now routinely raised as to who the arya were, where they came from, and whether they were really even a distinct people.”  (p. 19).

Take that, Klu Klux Klan and Adolph Hitler!

Keays goes on to explain how the confusion came about, which was primarily as a result of efforts by historians to explain how the Sanskrit language had come into being. He also points out that this investigation led to an interesting series of discoveries in which probable historical events were deduced on the basis of philology, or the study of how language changed.

The philological study of the Sanskrit Vedas, songs or hymns which are held sacred by Hindus, led to intriguing revelations such as that the word used for “plough” in the Vedas was not a Sanskrit word but was adopted from another language—which meant that the original speakers of Sanskrit did not have ploughs. (I love this stuff.) Sanskrit originally (and ironically) also has no words for “writing” or “scribe.” It does, however, contain lots of terms relating to managing herds of sheep and cattle, so it is likely that the arya cultures were pastoral rather than agrarian. Nice, eh?

Anyway, one of the sums of all these findings is that today historians think that a group of ethnic influences on language (Sanskrit), priesthood (brahmans) and social structure (castes) either invaded or migrated into India, or perhaps it was far more subtle: maybe over the centuries the influence of the thinking of these speakers of Sanskrit merely had increasing sway over the thinking of others among whom they lived and worked.

Keays then explores the related and similarly fascinating (to me) subject of how the Vedas, which were passed down generation to generation by word of mouth, affected the subcontinent’s religion, culture and even scientific thought for the next several hundred years.

I must admit that the story of India seems to grow even more complex and unfathomable the more I attempt to learn about it, but mysteries that are too easily resolved are boring, so I’m okay with this.

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Posted in My Trip To India, Preparation

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Into India (1)

Posted on February 21, 2011 | 1 comment

India has fascinated me for as long as I can remember. When I was given the  incredible opportunity a few months ago to choose the “trip of a lifetime,”  it didn’t take me long to commit to India for my destination. I have now booked a ten-day, small-group excursion in November that begins in Delhi and tours northern India for several days, then takes an overnight train to Mumbai for a quick look at that city before winding down on a beach in Goa.

I know that to say “I am fascinated by India” is simplistic, and sounds naïve. India is not a single thing—it is a blend of cultures, religions, economies, perspectives—and I also know that many of the things it is are likely to repel rather than appeal to me. I realize that India is nothing an outsider like myself can even begin to understand.

Maybe it is my perception of the impossibility of defining the subcontinent that attracts me to it. “I am fascinated by India” is a very different kind of statement than is “I am fascinated by Belgium,” or “I am fascinated by Kenya,” or even (to choose a larger geographical space) “I am fascinated by Australia.”

Being fascinated by India is like being fascinated by garam masala: I have no idea what it’s made of, and even if I did, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be all that familiar with the constituent parts; the mystery of the parts as well as of the whole is a lot of what makes it appealing. I know that India can be a dangerous place to go, and its dark side may be part of the attraction too. It ain’t Switzerland, and I know it.

All in all, I am beside myself with excitement at the prospect of going there.

It has become my goal to conquer in advance as much I can learn about India from books and other media – to gain intellectually what I can before I face the country emotionally and physically. What I already know about India’s cultures and its history I have learned primarily from novels (by Salman Rushdie, Vikram Shandra, Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth, Arundhati Roy, Rabindranath Tagore, E.M. Forster, and several others) and films (Deepa Mehta and Satyajit Ray, for example), but I have never made any attempt before to gather these bits of knowledge together into any kind of historical framework. After consulting several sources, I decided to start by reading India: A History by John Keay.

So far I have read the introduction and first chapter, and already I have learned some fascinating stuff:

  • Despite evidence left behind since at least 2000 BC by several highly evolved civilizations in the geographical territory encompassing what we now call India (and Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, etc), no one set the history of the area down in writing until about 1200 AD;
  • The story of the flood that is found in both Christian and Jewish scripture may have come from a inundation that entirely wiped out the Sumerian city of Shuruppak, possibly around 3000 BC and/or from another flood or series of floods around 2000 BC that submerged the highly productive and sophisticated Harappan civilization, an agriculture-based society in the region of the Indus river basin;
  • While the Harappan civilization left no written record of its existence, it did leave a legacy of artifacts and ruins that have been uncovered since 1920 in a wide swath extending (in terms of current-day geographical reference points) more than 1800 miles from the southern shores of Pakistan, down the coast of the Arabian Sea towards Mumbai, and west beyond the city of New Delhi;
  • The first and most extensive archeological evidence of the Harappans is located north of Karachi at Mohenjo-Daro. Although this civilization left no written record that can yet be deciphered, it was evidently a sophisticated culture that used imprinted soapstone seals for trade, and created figurines, pottery, tools and jewelry from precious metals such as bronze and silver, and other materials like lapis lazuli and soapstone. Their buildings, including homes, granaries and public buildings, were constructed from brick;
  • The Harappans are conjectured to have been the first civilization in the world to have planned their cities, woven cotton, and used wheeled transportation;
  • Incredibly, at the same time as the Harappan civilization evolved and then disappeared without (apparently) leaving a single written word describing its existence, another whole civilization, the Aryan, was also flourishing, possibly in the same geographical areas and at approximately the same time. The Aryans, by contrast to the Harappans, have been thoroughly described in Sanskrit in the Vedas; also by contrast, there is no physical evidence that they existed.

It appears that the second chapter of India: A History will focus on this Aryan contribution. I’ve been hearing about Sanskrit since I took a course in English etymology in university, and I am looking forward to learning more.

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Public Transit: Telling Tales on Two Cities

Posted on February 9, 2011 | 2 comments

Recent stories and editorials in The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star and elsewhere have accused a surprising number of Toronto Transit Commission employees of unprofessional conduct, ranging from sleeping in their ticket booths, to texting behind their wheels, to pushing the passengers around. To add to the TTC’s besmirched reputation, several of its vehicles have recently been involved in accidents that have left motorists and pedestrians seriously injured and even dead.

There are two sides to everything of course, and out of the hundreds and hundreds of drivers and other employees, this rash of incidences of inattention and frustrated behaviour is probably representative of a small minority. Most of the drivers I’ve run into as I wend my way through Toronto almost exclusively by public transit have been helpful, friendly, attentive and — for the most part — apologetic when something wasn’t working or they couldn’t answer questions. Some have even gone out of their way to help passengers with problems, remind them of an upcoming stop that they have asked about, and patiently listened to the nutbars who stand next to them and yak on and on about religion and politics as the drivers try to steer through traffic and snow to their appointed destinations.

My sympathies for transit staff increased when I read this excellent article in Toronto Life about the impact of “subway jumpers” on the drivers who become their unwilling killers.

It’s true that there are lots of problems with the transit system here — long subway delays (sometimes because of the aforementioned jumpers) are part of the fabric of daily life. When I was at a hospital recently for a minor procedure, I noticed a form that staff needed to fill out to indicate the status of scheduled patients, and one of several boxes that could be checked to indicate the reason for a patient’s non-appearance was “delayed on subway.”

Still, it hasn’t been so long since I lived in a city where the only “rapid transit” was the occasional cab driver who drove too fast, where buses sometimes appeared earlier than the appointed hour and if you missed them, you could be left standing in lethal cold for an entire half hour or longer before the next one came along, and where driver rudeness and inattention seemed more the rule than the exception. On one occasion a bus I was taking to a meeting drew up to a regular stop, and the driver quietly called in to central office for a repair team and then sat and waited for it, without bothering to inform the passengers that the bus would not be going anywhere for quite a while. In the meantime, several other buses went past to which we might have transferred.

So I am not complaining here in my new city. I am still astonished at the number of buses and streetcars that show up on a regular basis throughout downtown Toronto, and I still see the subway as a modern miracle—even if it is apparently outdated and slow compared to those of other large cities. But I also understand why everyone else here is frustrated. This, to them, is like Saskatoon Transit was to me (and apparently still is to those who continue to reside in that otherwise warm, friendly and accommodating prairie city).

___

Note: I have pretty much stopped posting to this blog. After a year and a bit I no longer consider myself a newcomer to Toronto. But I do still blog, fairly often, and you can check out my other writing locations here:

I’m All Write: Some thoughts and an occasional update for those who don’t follow me on Facebook or Twitter

The Militant Writer: My flagship blog — I am militant about lots of stuff, and I think other writers should be too

Notions: Observations on life that I can’t think where else to put

Book Reviews:  An occasional blog

Film and Movie Reviews: Another occasional blog

Fiction Tips and Writing Tips for Bloggers are even more occasional

Some of my Short Stories

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Posted in Long after the move

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Barney’s Version

Posted on January 23, 2011 | Leave a comment

Barney Panofsky (Paul Giamatti) is a man who forges his own destiny by making decisions that are usually bad and almost always selfish—but wants to live with only those consequences that suit his wants and needs. A man of mostly average ability, looks and brains, he surrounds himself with talented, beautiful and intelligent friends and lovers and then, one way or another, he double-crosses and neglects them all.

Barney is easy to dislike – a serious boozehound whose words slide through truth to viciousness when he’s had too much to drink—and sometimes when he hasn’t—and a man continually driven to let down those he loves and then to refuse to take responsibility for his actions. But he is also easy to love, for his deep and unremitting respect and affection for his father (Dustin Hoffman), the all-consuming passion he feels for his third wife Miriam Grant (a strong and delicate woman whom even their son recognizes as too good for Barney, played by Rosamund Pike) and for a host of unexpected and undeserved acts of kindness toward at least three people: his first wife, Clara (a deeply troubled beauty played by Rachelle LeFavre), the long-suffering actress in the bad soap opera that earns Barney all his money (Masha Grenon), and his talented but utterly degenerate best friend, Boogie (Scott Speedman).

Barney Panofsky is in short, human. And, even more than the death of Boogie which is intended as the central mystery of the story – Did Barney kill Boogie in the midst of a drunken argument after finding him in bed with his second wife?— it is this very humanness that provides the drama of Barney’s Version. We feel as though we are looking inside the workings of real human relationships comprised of people who stumble through their lives the way we all do, with occasional moments of great heroism and passion and others of great stupidity and cruelty, all of which have the potential to change everything forever. The tension is waiting to find out whether Barney’s next act is going to be one that reinforces or undermines the kind of peace of mind that provides the necessary scaffold for a happy life.

The performances in this movie are stunning and Paul Giamatti in particular has earned every accolade he gets. Among other strengths he brings to the role, it is almost impossible to believe he’s not Jewish, and Canadian. Dustin Hoffman, as Barney’s father, reveals the depths of his dramatic talent that Hollywood has seemed bent on hiding for too long. Rosamund Pike is perfect: restrained, quiet, talented, intelligent, beautiful, more than deserving of the love that Barney heaps on her from the moment he sets eyes on her (which he does in the midst of his second wedding).

The makeup artists also deserve commendation. Rosamund Pike (born 1979) ages convincingly not only because of the increasing maturity of her character but also because the close-ups reinforce that she is getting older, while Giamatti (b. 1967) looks as utterly believable as a young man as he does as the father of young teens and later in older middle age. And a special shout-out to my dancing instructor Nathaniel who was outstanding during his six seconds of screen time during Barney’s wedding to his second wife (played by Minnie Driver).

It has been many years since I read the novel by Mordecai Richler upon which this movie is based (also excellent; you can buy it here), and I know that the scriptwriter has cut out quite a lot, but what is left is still pure Richler – a story that makes you laugh and cry for all the gains and losses experienced over a lifetime by a group of people you feel you have come to know and love as well as you do some of your own relatives and friends.

Watch the trailer: Barney’s Version

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Curb Dreams

Posted on January 22, 2011 | Leave a comment

by Mary W. Walters

originally published in Open Book Toronto. Also reposted to my ongoing blog, The Militant Writer

Waiting for the lights to change at Bay and King, I looked happily up at the office buildings and through a gap in the high-rises to the southwest at the CN Tower lit up in blue and red. Even after two months, I still could not believe that I was actually living in Toronto — a city that I found endlessly appealing for its size and sprawliness, its geographical and cultural variety, its human diversity, its sounds, its smells, its industry and (most particularly, to my mind) its status as one of the world’s great writing and publishing centres.

A friend and I had decided to walk, despite the dampness of the afternoon, from College Street down to Front, where we would survey the rich literary wares on offer at Nicholas Hoare Books. Just ahead of us now was Harbourfront, where internationally renowned writers read to captivated audiences. A few miles back were the publishing houses whose logos had marked the spines of books I’d been reading since I was a child — McClelland & Stewart, HarperCollins Canada, Penguin. From the very spot where I now stood on the street corner, I was sure — if I only knew which way to look — I would see a few of the windows to the mysterious aeries where the literary agents dwelled.

I laughed aloud from my pleasure just to be there, and my friend pulled me closer in a hug to share my joy. I wished that I could have beamed my feelings of excitement and anticipation back across the miles to the friends and family I’d left in western Canada — most of whom had received the news that I was packing up everything I owned and moving all alone to Toronto with a mixture of indulgent good wishes and mystification. There had probably also been prayers for both my safety and my sanity (Toronto being, after all, the city most Canadians love to hate).

But I had done it. And here I was: poised on that very curb that very afternoon — ready, I firmly believed, to fulfill my destiny as a fiction writer.

* * *

Mine is not an uncommon story. Every year, hundreds or possibly thousands of aspiring writers, actors, designers, visual artists and musicians make the trek east from the frozen prairie by bus or plane or car (or west, from the Atlantic stormlands), their backpacks set, suitcases rolling along behind them, their gazes lifting with their hearts as the office towers emerge from the mists like physical representations of their dreams. Nor is my story uniquely Canadian: it repeats itself in big cities all over the world — from Mumbai to London and New York — and has for generations. Whenever and wherever there are dreamers in the hinterlands, there will be those who will make their ways toward the cities.

So I was just one of many — but in my case, there was a twist. Most of my fellow-travelers were kids: 18 years old or less, 25 at most — young people who’d been motivated to take action by the need and determination to fulfill their destinies before real adult life intervened. I, on the other hand, was 59, with much of my adult life behind me, and my dream had been 30 years in the percolation.

I hadn’t even figured out the nature of my destiny until after I’d had children. Although I’d once imagined myself as a translator at the UN, I’d set my sights on more proximate goals — obtaining a degree, falling in love, getting married and starting a family. Still, something was always missing — some part of me felt underdeveloped. I took piano lessons, a course in clothing design, aerobics. And then, one day, age 29, I signed up for a correspondence course in fiction writing… and my fate was sealed.

In the years that followed, as I raised my children and gradually acquired the editing skills that allowed me to earn a living, I also wrote and published dozens of short stories, works of creative non-fiction and two novels. I wrote radio dramas and documentaries. I won writing awards, critical accolades and even an entry in Who’s Who in Canada. But I was unable to extend my fiction-writing reputation beyond the West. I came to believe (to the scorn of many of my fellow prairie writers) that if I wanted to fulfill my dreams for my fiction and myself, I would need to move closer to Canada’s largest centre for the literary arts.

By the time my first book of non-fiction was released, my kids were well launched and my daily life was my own again. As an editor and writing consultant, my physical location no longer mattered: I could earn a living in cyberspace. I decided that moving to Toronto would provide me with the kind of big-city environment I had always found inspiring, and I decided that it was now or never. The fiction writer in me smiled at these decisions, and stretched, and opened up her arms to opportunity.

So here I am, with all the younger dreamers, and I’m holding some cards they’re not. A few them will find success in their chosen fields, but before long most of them will need to relinquish their artistic hopes in favour of the joys and realities of adult life: marriages, careers and children.

I, on the other hand, have all the time in the world… not to mention thirty years of credentials and experience. In my more mature and serious moments, I imagine that I am here not only for myself, but also for them: the wide-eyed talents who are standing beside me on the street corners (not to mention the ones back home who, in their late twenties or mid-thirties are just now discovering their passions). I’m here to remind them to be patient and to practise: there will be time for them to stretch and fly after the kids grow up. I’m here to tell them, too, that if they nurture and groom their talents, they will have as many dreams at 60 as they did at 17.

But most of the time I’m not mature and serious. Most of the time I’m just a kid standing on a Toronto street corner, imagining a red-carpet of a future rolling out before me as I step down off the curb.

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Posted in After the move

Eavesdropping

Posted on August 23, 2010 | Leave a comment

Overheard in checkout line at Shoppers’ Drug Mart late this afternoon, a cell phone conversation between a very pretty and wealthy-looking young woman and her mother (ellipses indicate mother’s end of the conversation, which I could not hear) —

Daughter (in a petulant tone): Oh, there you are! Why don’t you ever pick up the phone? You’re driving me mental!!!

Mother: [. . . . . .]

Daughter (in a snide tone): Well I’m just calling to say that you don’t have to pick me up from work. Jeremy’s giving me a ride home.

Mother: [. . . . .]

Daughter (in a harsh tone): Jeremy! From work! He’s giving me a ride home. So you’re welcome to go out.

Mother: [. . . . . .]

Daughter (sharply): Yes. You can go out, Mom. That’s what I said. You’re welcome to go out.

Mother: [. . . . .]

Daughter (smoothly): Around seven. By the way, do you think you’ll go home first?

Mother: [. . . . .]

Daughter (smoothly): Yeah: first. Before you go out, I mean.

Mother: [. . . . .]

Daughter (cajolingly): . . . because if you do go home first, I’m wondering if you could tidy my room for me.

Mother: [. . . . .]

Daughter (sweetly): Oh please oh please oh please. Go home first and just . .  . just tidy my room for me, okay? And then go out.

Mother: [. . . . .]

[incredible but true — mother does not hang up. This conversation continues as I leave the store.]

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Posted in Overheard

Welcome to my newest on-line home

Posted on August 17, 2010 | Leave a comment

I’m leaving FaceBook until I get some work done on my novels, and I don’t hang out in any other social media too much these days. So I thought I would start this blog so people who wonder how I’m doing can find out. I’m just going to put the day-to-day stuff in here that I used to put on FaceBook — my thoughts and my activities. And in order to make sure this is just as boring as FaceBook, I’ll start by telling you this: Today I made white beans with pesto sauce. But I didn’t eat any of them for dinner. I ate something else instead. I might eat the beans tomorrow.

Also, The Whole Clove Diet is being considered by a publisher, which is why I have abandoned that blog for now. I will keep you posted on any progress and I will put TWCD blog up again once the publisher has made a decision. (I had a really nice rejection from Coach House Press this week, which helped to boost my ego. Seriously. A nice positive rejection from one of Canada’s finest literary presses is a very good thing to get.)

Okay. So if you are gripped by interest in my witty repartee so far, you can subscribe to this blog by clicking the button on the right.

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Posted in Blah blah blah

A Costly Mistake, but all is well.

Posted on April 25, 2010 | 1 comment

Post 24

There are advantages to moving to a new city five months before your belongings arrive. One of them is that you are calm and collected when the boxes and furniture are delivered, and you are not already exhausted when you start to unpack. I am taking my time and enjoying re-discovering what I own. The move was not, however, quite the triumph I had hoped it would be from a financial point of view.

At storage unit in Saskatoon

On the morning of Sunday, April 18, right at the appointed hour (i.e., at 8 a.m.), Country Wide Movers/Allied Van Lines arrived at my storage unit in Saskatoon to pick up my belongings and bring them to Toronto. Three weeks prior to that, I had sent out quote requests to seven or eight movers. Four replied –with five estimates. The two lowest bids both came from the same company – Two Small Men with Big Hearts. (One of their estimates was for $2,300 and the other for $2.760 for the same weight and distance.) The other three were about $1,000 more. After checking on-line for the reputations of all four companies that submitted estimates, I took the lowest of the three higher bids (all of which were within $100 of one another): the one from Country Wide Movers/Allied Van Lines.

Due to the small print and confusing layout of the estimate (see below), plus the fact that it was so close in amount to the other two acceptable bids, I neglected to notice that the Country Wide quote was based on a weight of 3,000 lbs while the others were based on a weight of 4,000 lbs. I did realize that all companies would weigh the truck before and after they had loaded the goods, and revise their estimates based on the actual weight. However, if most companies figured that my belongings would weigh at least 4,000 lbs based on the list I had provided (which included 30 to 40 2 x 2 ft. boxes of books), why didn’t Country Wide?

Still, the fault is mine for not reading more closely. Never assume anything when it comes to a moving company. Or any cost estimate, I suppose.

As it turned out, the actual weight of my possessions was about 4,600 lbs, so my charge from Country Wide ended up being about $1,000 more than the estimate. In the long run, I could have got the move cheaper from ANY of the other companies. Stupid me.

Allied did do a good job of moving my things efficiently and safely from Saskatoon to Toronto. They arrived for the pickup exactly when they said they would, and they delivered when they said they would. Both times the driver called the night before to double-check the time and the address. I was very happy with the driver and his assistants in both Saskatoon and Toronto. It was only the estimator who did not leave me feeling very pleased. Considering how many problems people have with movers, I guess I should be contented that nothing else went wrong — but money is money, especially when you’re moving and so many other costs are involved. As far as I’m concerned, $1,000 is a lot of money at any time.

By the way, the Government of Canada has a very good checklist for consumers when it comes to choosing a mover. I highly recommend that others (even non-Canadians!) read it before undertaking any major move. It’s located here: http://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/oca-bc.nsf/eng/ca02029.html

My apartment before the movers arrived...

And now I have all my belongings in one place. All I have to do is unpack and figure out where to put everything. I have had no second thoughts about moving to Toronto. I am already finding more work here as a freelancer than I have had before, and I’m busy with social activities, visitors from the west and south, and events I want to take in solo or with other people. And I still love the subway. 🙂

... and after the delivery

It was a good decision for me, and I am one happy former-Saskatoonie-former-Edmontonian-former-Londoner(ON)-former-Wainwrightian-current-Torontonian.

The estimate from Country Wide

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Posted in After the move

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Yeah!

Posted on April 23, 2010 | 1 comment

Post 23

Today I get all my stuff from Saskatoon. Welcome to your new home, Cuisinart coffeemaker!!!!! How I have missed you. Welcome books and bookshelves: we must never be separated for this long again. Welcome, mattress. The airbed and I just never hit it off. And Watch Out, Toronto: I am grounded. Hear me roar.

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Posted in After the move