Six Cures for Literary Amnesia

A key difficulty in constructing the city’s metaphors is the handling of meaning from one generation to the next, or across barriers of birth, class and circumstance. For a large part of its history, Toronto has been in a state of near-amnesia, seeking desperately for its own memory. (Warkentin 2005)

The past was the secret and mysterious city, the city within the city, the city of the alleyways and swimming pools and the city of the lakeshore. And the lake, which cared nothing for time, would often cast up strange relics of the future, as well as the past, upon its shores. (MacEwen 1985: 81)

1.

You’ve read these words before. You’re sure of it although you’ll remember where only later, when a copy of this very book – the one you thought you were reading for the first time – slides from the shelves of your own library, its leaves smudged with your thumb prints, margins marked by your own familiar hand. You stare at the pages as if for the first time and begin to worry about the extent of your literary amnesia.

Literary amnesia is a phenomenon familiar to anyone struck by déjà vu while reading. It is so common that it has its own its own treatise (Patrick Sűskind’s Amnesie in Litteris) and its own anthology (Jonathan Lethem’s Vintage Book of Amnesia). Indeed, Lethem points out in his introduction that despite its medical rarity, amnesia is so widely used as a literary device that it might be considered an intrinsic feature of fiction. Lethem suggests further that if every novel is “conjured out of the void,” amnesia may be this era’s ultimate fictional metaphor, reflecting or responding to contemporary preoccupations with alienation, finitude, anomie, violence and even political forgetting.

If literary amnesia has its etiology not only in the writer’s craft but in the reader’s relationship to it, then who is to say it might not seep out like a dream fog even further, to envelop publishers, reviewers, even an entire city? I say this only because a collective amnesia appears to afflict Toronto, a city where nearly everybody is a writer or aspires to be one, where books have their own television shows and street festivals, where celebrity authors are jostled and fawned over in the street – but where books, no matter how enthusiastically they may be read, reviewed and rewarded when they are first released, slide irretrievably into oblivion like flotsam beneath a somnolent sea.

2.

There is a persistent if unwarranted belief that Toronto lacks a literary character, or that what literary tradition does exist here dates back no further than two or three decades. In the first volume of Coach House’s groundbreaking uTOpia: Towards a New Toronto series, Toronto journalist Bert Archer claims that Toronto is "a city that exists in no one's imagination, neither in Toronto, nor in the rest of the world." He adds, "Toronto is a place people live, not a place where things happen, or, at least, not where the sorts of things happen that forge a place for the city in the imagination." A 2005 Vanity Fair article allows that “A vision of modern Toronto gradually took shape before our very eyes,” but dates this genesis back only as far as the 1987 publication of Michael Ondaatje's iconic Toronto novel In the Skin of a Lion. In a 2006 literary roundtable organized by Toronto Life editor Mark Pupo, novelist Andrew Pyper observes, “I think there’s a reluctance in our fiction to engage Toronto directly as a place,” a sentiment echoed a few months later by the Toronto Star’s Philip Marchand, who wrote flatly of the “bland and featureless reputation” of Toronto’s literary landscape and insisted that “our city awaits its great novelist.”

At best the existence or eminence of Toronto’s literary culture meets with ambivalence. Stephen Marche (whose 2005 Toronto novel, Raymond and Hannah, was shortlisted for the Toronto Book Award) asserted in a late 2005 Globe & Mail article that "Toronto may be the only city where novels are integral to high art, the alternative scene and mainstream culture all at the same time" but derides Toronto’s physical spaces as “unimaginative to the extreme” and describes both the city and its fiction as “insular” and focused on “interior rather than public spaces.” Some reason for optimism, at least, is offered by author Dionne Brand (a two-time winner of the Governor General’s Award for poetry and the winner of the 2006 Toronto Book Award for her beautiful, evocative local novel, What We All Long For) who is quoted as having suggested that “the literature is still catching up with the city, with its new stories.” (Tepper 2005)

3.

Two years ago when I began amassing Toronto novels, stories, poetry and drama for a course I was developing in the Geography Department at York University, I was prepared to believe that Toronto didn’t have much of a literature. Like most Torontonians I was familiar with Margaret Atwood’s Toronto novels, Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces, Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion and Hugh Garner’s Cabbagetown. Unlike many Torontonians I had even read them. For years I had picked up local small press novels and poetry chapbooks at garage sales, and thought I might just manage to pull together enough material to justify a course on Toronto’s literary landscapes.

I began to have an inkling not only of the great range and depth of Toronto literature but of the extent of this city’s literary amnesia when I browsed the 30-year list of Toronto Book Award winners and found that surprisingly few of the approximately 200 winners and runners-up had remained in print. I began contacting local publishers to ask about their backlists, and found that while their staff spoke enthusiastically about new titles, they had a hard time recollecting anything more than a few years old. I noted that while the Toronto Public Library maintains a modest list of recommended “Toronto Arts and Stories” on its website, it appears never to have formally catalogued its vast inventory of local works into any sort of “Toronto collection.” With feverish anticipation I ordered a copy of Greg Gatenby’s Toronto: A Literary Guide (1999) and was disappointed to discover that while it included exhaustive descriptions of where (and sometimes with whom) literary figures had slept while living and writing in Toronto, it focused only incidentally on works actually set in this city. And yet, whenever I asked colleagues and acquaintances if they knew of any Toronto novels I could add to my list, they would begin by saying they didn’t think there were that many, but almost never failed to mention a novel, story collection or poetry anthology I had never heard of before. It became clear to me that in this city we’d lost our ability to navigate what writer Hal Niedzviecki calls the “concrete forest” of urban literature (Niedzviecki 1998) because we’d gotten hopelessly lost among thickets of books so dense we’d forgotten they were there.

And so I began to build my own library of Toronto literature. I haunted local used bookstores and dowsed their alphabetized shelves for Toronto titles. I typed “Toronto” into the searchable databases of libraries and online book purveyors and was warned curtly that I had exceeded the number of results their servers could generate. My study – a converted sunroom at the back of our house – began to sag visibly under the weight of the dozens and then hundreds of Toronto books I stuffed into its jury-rigged shelves. I spent my Arts Council grants on books long before the cheques arrived in the mail. I created an online inventory of Toronto literature and have received so many suggested additions it is difficult to keep up to date. And every time I pick up an unfamiliar Toronto novel at a book sale or receive another email notice about a poetry launch, I am struck with the simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying sense that I am still just scratching the surface.

4.

Toronto’s undeservedly neglected ‘mythopoeic poet’ Gwendolyn MacEwen engages directly with the problem of cultural forgetting in Noman (1972) and especially in Noman’s Land (1985). Noman, who emerges naked and amnesic from the Ontario wilderness and hitch-hikes to Toronto to search for his identity, observes,

Sometimes he couldn’t even remember how long he’d had the amnesia. But one of the nice things about not remembering anything was that the world was almost unbearably beautiful; everything was fresh and new. The city was full of surprises. (MacEwen 1985: 52)

For MacEwen, Toronto’s amnesia was not merely a local problem but a national one rooted in the absence of a shared or at least communicable cultural mythology, and so she undertook to create one. By reconstructing a personal connection to significant events in Toronto’s history, including spending time inside Henry Moore’s Archer (the famous sculpture anchoring Nathan Phillips Square) and recreating Marilyn Bell’s marathon swim across Lake Ontario, Noman realizes that identity is something we must recognize or invent within ourselves. As he tells a reporter upon the victorious conclusion of his swim across the lake, “There is another country, you know, and it’s right inside this one.”

Seeking “the city within the city” (MacEwen 1985), archaeologists of Toronto’s literary memory have tended to trace its origins to the late 1960s. Literary scholar Sophie Levy suggests that a “consciousness of the city” begins to “manifest […] in the work of its writers” in 1968, the year Dennis Lee’s Toronto sequence Civil Elegies (a series of lyrical meditations on and in Nathan Phillips Square) first appeared (Levy 2001). Similarly, in his monograph on Toronto publishing houses Anansi and Coach House, poet and academic Stephen Cain attributes the rise of a genuinely local literary and publishing culture to a “new generation of writers” buoyed by the “nationalistic spirit of post-Centennial Canada.” (Cain 2002)

It is true that this period produced numerous groundbreaking Toronto works. The Meeting Point, the first novel in Austin Clarke’s ‘Toronto Trilogy’ exploring the lives of West Indian Torontonians, was published in 1967. Hugh Garner's Cabbagetown first appeared in its complete form in 1968, a year before Margaret Atwood’s first novel, The Edible Woman, was published by McClelland & Stewart. In that same year McClelland & Stewart also issued Scott Symons’ outrageous Toronto satire, Civic Square, as 800 or so typed manuscript pages signed and sealed with ribbon in a large blue box (I have number 206 of the limited edition but have never managed to read beyond the first 50 pages for fear an unexpected draft will blow them irretrievably out of order). In 1972 Oberon Press released Gwendolyn MacEwen's Toronto mythology, Noman. In 1974 the City of Toronto established the annual Toronto Book Awards, and after that Toronto literature came thick and fast.

But Centennial convenience and even critical literary mass aside, 1967 is ultimately an arbitrary date, one which risks consigning decades worth of Toronto literature to pre-history, and indeed Cain acknowledges that the kind of Toronto literature appearing after the late 1960s was “different” from what preceded it rather than suggesting it had appeared out of nowhere. He comments that a transformation had been “fermenting for many decades previously.” (ibid.) If this is the case, one wonders, then what was bubbling away in the pot, and why is it that we have so little memory even of its taste?

In Literary Images of Ontario, William Keith traces Toronto literature to the 1770s, observing, “by a happy chance we are favoured with continuing literary impressions of Toronto from its very beginnings as an English settlement – even, indeed, a little before those beginnings,” citing accounts such as Elizabeth Simcoe’s diaries which mingled fact and fantasy drawn from English, French and Mississauga narratives of the region. (Keith 1992: 191) He suggests that a distinctly Torontonian sort of poetry emerged during the rebellion of 1837 (ibid; see also Moir 1965), and inventories a rising fictional tradition dating back to the 1831 publication of John Galt’s Bogle Corbet. (ibid.: 194) My own library of early Toronto literature doesn’t go back quite that far, but includes Annie G. Savigny’s A Romance of Toronto (1888), Ernest Thompson Seton’s Wild Animals I Have Known (1898), Frederick Nelson’s speculative Toronto in 1928 A.D. (1908) and George F. Milner’s The Sergeant of Fort Toronto (1914), suggesting that an active local literary culture existed decades before Morley Callaghan’s Strange Fugitive – supposedly “Canada’s first urban novel” (Edwards 1998) – was published in 1928.

5.

But addressing Toronto’s literary amnesia requires more than a simple historical inventory of literary works. A list of this sort can gain provenance only when these works are seen as antecedents for contemporary Toronto literature – that is, when one starts tracing Toronto’s literary genealogies, looking for preoccupations, motifs, even characters and neighbourhoods that recur across genres and time periods. At this point things cannot help but get really interesting.

Commentators on Toronto literature tend to fixate on its more rarefied expressions, and are perpetually on the lookout for new works bursting with the kind of mimetic resonance we hope will put Toronto on the international literary map. Such a grudging estimation of what counts as ‘great’ literature risks excluding popular narratives that may not only have more to say about lived experiences in Toronto but in many cases have enjoyed far greater international prominence.

Hugh Garner’s Cabbagetown is familiar to most readers as the Ryerson Press version published in 1968. But this was not Cabbagetown’s first appearance: the novel was first published in abridged form in 1950 by White Circle, a pulp imprint of Collins that produced disposable fiction sold at newsstands and bus stations. That same year under the pseudonym Jarvis Warwick, Garner published Waste No Tears (subtitled The Novel about the Abortion Racket) with News Stand, a similar pulp imprint of Export Publishing. Most notable for their depictions of Toronto’s ‘skidrow’, Garner’s early works seem directly to anticipate subsequent literary explorations of poverty and violence on Toronto’s streets, most notably Ted Plantos’ The Universe Ends at Sherbourne & Queen (1977) and Michael Holmes’ Watermelon Row (2000). This is not to say that either Plantos or Holmes drew (consciously or otherwise) on Garner’s work, but it seems to me that their subsequent texts cannot truly be appreciated without an awareness of the socio-economic, historical and literary milieus that preceded them.

Michael Redhill’s acclaimed recent Toronto novel, Consolation is, like Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces and Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion before it, credited with awakening interest in Toronto’s historical origins. But literary efforts to historicize the city date at least as far back as Annie G. Savigny’s tedious, plodding A Toronto Romance (1888) and fictionalized accounts of Toronto’s history had become sufficiently interesting to readers that novelist Isabelle Hughes was able to publish four volumes of her ‘Toronto gothic’ Telforth saga – Serpent’s Tooth (1947), Time in Ambush (1949), Lorena Telforth (1952) and The Wise Brother (1954) – tracing a fictional Kingsway family and the City’s own progress from the 1830s forward.

Another undeservedly forgotten mid-century Toronto novel whose shadow looms across this city’s contemporary fiction is Phyllis Brett Young’s The Torontonians (1960; reissued 2007). Reportedly the first novel to feature Toronto's nascent City Hall on its cover, The Torontonians was an international bestseller in its time, reprinted in international editions for nearly a decade and its rights sold to Hollywood film producers. Until literary scholars Suzanne Morton and Nathalie Cooke pressed for its re-publication this year, The Torontonians had been almost entirely forgotten. And yet, the rapidly changing city Young depicts – beset by sprawl, rapid redevelopment, and a veritable revolving door of cultural and architectural changes – seems an apt representation of Toronto today. More provocatively, this enormously subversive novel may be seen as a direct precursor to Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman (1969) and The Blind Assassin (2003), which invoke startlingly similar landscapes and social conditions and whose female protagonists find unusual solutions to their social confinement. Whether these homages are inadvertent or planned, it is my view that such connections are not accidental, but instead provide evidence that Toronto's literary genealogy stretches back further and more firmly than we have come to think.

As I pore over vintage Toronto novels uncovered through painstaking research or fortuitous luck, I am struck repeatedly by their connection to current works. It seems to me that Gwendolyn MacEwen's ‘mythopoeic’ voice echoes strongly in both Darren O'Donnell's Your Secrets Sleep with Me (2004) and Bruce Macdonald's Coureurs De Bois (2007). The Jewish immigrants of John Miller’s A Sharp Intake of Breath and David Bezmozgis’ Natasha and Other Stories (2004) have a great deal in common with Jacob Grossman in Henry Kreisel’s The Rich Man (1948). Even literary scholar Germaine Warkentin, who offers a succinct diagnosis of Toronto’s literary amnesia in an essay titled “Mapping Wonderland” (Warkentin 2005) borrows its title from George Walker's now-cancelled Toronto-based television drama, This is Wonderland, which represents Toronto as a labyrinth of justice mapped against city streets and weathered faces. And even This is Wonderland has a literary precedent, traceable to Harry Wodson's The Whirlpool: Scenes from Toronto Police Court, first published in 1917 and describing an almost identical drama of corridors and labyrinths.

6.

If I have succeeded to this point in establishing that Toronto exists in the literary imagination and has done so for well over a century, I would like to conclude by suggesting some cures for the literary amnesia that has afflicted so many of this city’s cultural commentators.

1. Become a literary genealogist. Nearly every Toronto novel, poem or story has its genesis in some meaningful experience or observation that may be traced to some literary precedent. For all the myriad ways Toronto has changed over the decades, it remains a city whose occupants struggle with the persistent and intersecting challenges of identity and city-building. You can’t really grasp Dionne Brand’s polyphonic city or the lyrical currents running through T-Dot Griots (2004) without having read Austin Clarke’s The Meeting Point. The vivid poetic careers of Margaret Atwood, bpNichol and Michael Ondaatje lose resonance if their origins are not traced to Raymond Souster, whose Contact Press nurtured some of their earliest work and whose own poetry – most of it engaging with Toronto in some respect – has spanned six decades. As Gwendolyn MacEwen writes, “the present is the logical outcome / Of all points in the past, and that building going up across the / street has been going up forever. Everything we do now contains the / seeds of its own unfolding.” (1987)




2. Abandon the Canon. The Toronto Canon consists of a small number of works – for convenience let’s say they include Garner’s Cabbagetown, any of Atwood’s Toronto novels, Dennis Lee’s Civil Elegies, Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion and Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces – that have achieved sufficient prominence to stay reliably in print. These are all worthy books, deservingly well known for their iconic depictions of Toronto. But the city’s fictions flow well beyond these pages, and it is an error to stop reading so soon. Start anywhere – attend a local reading series, visit the Small Press Fair, ask at your local library, start haunting used bookstores – and read something by someone you’ve never heard of before. Begin with your own neighbourhood: the Annex, Cabbagetown, the Junction, Kensington Market, Parkdale and even Etobicoke have inspired local fictions. Ask a local publisher about their backlist. Attend literary events and ask local celebrity authors what – and more importantly, who – inspired them here in Toronto.




3. Get to know some of Toronto’s great genre fiction. Despite having relatively low crime rates, Toronto is a great city for crime fiction, and detective novels are perhaps this city’s most widely read literary export. For decades writers including Eric Wright, Rosemary Aubert, Scott MacKay and Maureen Jennings have narrated Toronto’s seamy underside to rapt international readerships. Science fiction writers including Cory Doctorow, Robert Charles Wilson and the ubiquitous Robert Sawyer have set internationally best-selling novels and short stories in Toronto. Children’s writers, too, among them Gordon Korman, Beatrice Thurman Hunter, Richard Scrimger and Marlene Nourbese Philip inculcate their young readers with an appreciation for Toronto’s literary and cultural landscapes that may well (as it did with me) extend to their adult reading.




4. Embrace local tropes. Who’s afraid of the CN Tower? Not Gwendolyn MacEwen (1985), M.G. Vassanji (1991), Catherine Bush (1993), Nalo Hopkinson (1998) or Darren O’Donnell (2004), who have managed brilliantly to incorporate Toronto’s most recognizable architectural icon into probing analyses of the city’s social conditions. No symbol becomes trite as long as it is employed in new and original ways, and if Americans have never tired of seeing King Kong scale the Empire State Building, then there is no reason why Toronto’s writers should be derided for mythologizing our city’s landmarks. Similarly, if Toronto’s ravines, buildings and neighbourhoods recur among works, there is no reason why we might not do the same thing with literary characters. I wouldn’t mind, for example, coming across Hugh Garner or Gwendolyn MacEwen in a contemporary Toronto novel. It would be a deserved homage and reminder that even fictional lives have pasts.




5. Support diverse, autonomous local presses. Years after their alleged demise, many of Toronto’s presses survive and some even thrive. Some, like Anansi, ECW and McClelland & Stewart, produce a mix of commercial and literary works. Others, like Cormorant and Porcupine’s Quill, specialize primarily in literary fiction and others, like Sumach, Between the Lines and Tsar Books might be considered niche publishers. Toronto also has a thriving community of micropresses such as Bookthug and Junction Books who mainly produce experimental poetry, often in beautifully made limited editions. The traditional path for writers was to start with small presses and, having established a reputation, move progressively to larger ones. But as poet Sandra Alland points out, small presses can offer advantages even to established authors in the form of intellectual rights and artistic quality (Alland 2006). Alland suggests further that because many established writers have benefited from the small presses who nurtured their careers, they should consider at least occasionally publishing new works with them. I agree, not because I think that small presses have the market cornered on ethical publishing, but because I think Toronto’s literary culture benefits from a healthy mix of small, large, local and international presses who in their turn can foster emerging writers, promote established ones, and provide space for literary experimentation.




6. Stop comparing Toronto to New York. Toronto’s literary naysayers routinely judge Toronto wanting against the literary weight of other cities. As an experiment I have begun asking my literary acquaintances about the poetry, fictional works and literary landscapes they associate with other cities. In most cases my respondents can connect a few authors with cities (Joyce’s Dublin, Baudelaire’s Paris, Coupland’s Vancouver, Richler’s Montreal, Mistry’s Mumbai, Ondaatje’s Colombo) before drawing a blank. I am amused that they seem no more familiar with most cities’ literary cultures than foreigners are with ours (in London or Mumbai I suspect my literary acquaintances would name Atwood, Ondaatje and perhaps Barbara Gowdy before running out of Toronto writers). I find it significant, too, that Toronto-based Mistry and Ondaatje are cited both locally and internationally for their international literary achievements. This suggests to me that many Toronto writers are doubly accomplished, in the sense that they can write as compellingly about Toronto as they do about other regions and cities. And this, I think, is the most significant achievement of Toronto literature to date: that rather than wearing itself a familiar rut, it has reached out to connect with other regions of the world – much like the city itself. Open Book indeed.

Amy Lavender Harris teaches in the Department of Geography at York University. Her current research, the Imagining Toronto project explores intersections of literature and place in the Toronto region. She is currently writing a book about Toronto literature and the imaginative qualities of cities.

References

Alland, Sandra. “Was this book shade-grown? Towards fair-trade Toronto lit.” In The State of the Arts: Living with Culture in Toronto, ed. Alana Wilcox, Christina Palassio and Jonny Dovercourt, Toronto: Coach House, 2006, 210-219.

Archer, Bert. “Making a Toronto of the Imagination.” In uTOpia: Towards a New Toronto, ed. Jason McBride & Alana Wilcox, Toronto: Coach House, 2005, 220-228.

Atwood, Margaret. The Edible Woman. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1969.

Bezmozgis, David. Natasha and Other Stories. Toronto: HarperCollins Canada, 2004.

Bush, Catherine. Minus Time. Toronto: HarperCollins Canada, 1993.

Cain, Stephen. “Imprinting identities: An examination of the emergence and developing identities of Coach House Press and House of Anansi Press (1967--1982).” PhD dissertation, Department of English, York University, 2002.

Callaghan, Morley. Strange Fugitive. M.G. Hurtig Ltd., [1928] 1970.

Edwards, Justin D. "Strange Fugitive, strange city: reading urban space in Morley Callaghan’s Toronto." Studies in Canadian Literature. 23(1), 1998.

Garner, Hugh. Waste No Tears. Toronto: News Stand, 1950.

Garner, Hugh. Cabbagetown. Toronto: Ryerson, 1968. See also Garner, Hugh. Cabbagetown. Toronto: White Circle, 1950, which in many respects is a different novel.

Gatenby, Greg. Toronto: A Literary Guide. Toronto: McArthur & Company, 1999.

Clarke, Austin. The Meeting Point. Toronto: Macmillan Canada, 1967.

Holmes, Michael. Watermelon Row. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2000.

Hopkinson, Nalo. Brown Girl in the Ring. New York: Warner/Aspect, 1998.

Hughes, Isabelle. Serpent’s Tooth. Toronto: Collins, 1947.

Hughes, Isabelle. Time in Ambush. Toronto: Collins, 1949.

Hughes, Isabelle. Lorena Telforth. London: Peter Davies, 1952.

Hughes, Isabelle. The Wise Brother. Toronto: Ryerson, 1954.

Keith, William John. Literary Images of Ontario. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992.

Kreisel, Henry. The Rich Man. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1948.

Lee, Dennis. Civil Elegies and Other Poems. Toronto: Anansi, 1974 [reprinted 1994].

Lethem, Jonathan, ed. The Vintage Book of Amnesia. New York: Vintage, 2000.

Levy, Sophie. “Torontology.” Master’s thesis. Department of English, University of Toronto, 2001.

MacEwen, Gwendolyn. Noman. Oberon, 1972.

MacEwen, Gwendolyn. Noman’s Land. Toronto: Coach House, 1985.

MacEwen, Gwendolyn. Afterworlds. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1987.

Marche, Stephen. “Drab and dull, yes, but we write a mean novel.” Globe & Mail, December 31, 2005, page M2.

Moir, John S. Rhymes of Rebellion. Toronto: Ryerson, 1965.

Niedzviecki, Hal. Concrete Forest: The New Fiction of Urban Canada. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1998.

Plantos, Ted. The Universe Ends at Sherbourne & Queen. Toronto: Steel Rail, 1977.

Pupo, Mark. “Facts and Fiction. A roundtable discussion on Toronto literature” with Sheila Heti, Andrew Pyper and Shyam Selvadurai. Toronto Life (online edition). 2006. Available electronically at http://www.torontolife.com/features/facts-fiction/

Sűskind, Patrick. Amnesie in Litteris. 2001.

Symons, Scott. Civic Square. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1969.

Tepper, Anderson. “Northern Exposure: Can you hear that literary buzz? It’s coming from Toronto.” Vanity Fair (online edition), week of 5 December 2005. http://www.vanityfair.com .

Vassanji, M.G. No New Land. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1991

Warkentin, Germaine. “Mapping Wonderland.” Literary Review of Canada 13(10): 14-17. 2005.

Wodson, H.M. 1917. The Whirlpool: Scenes from Toronto Police Court. Toronto: H.M. Wodson.

Young, Phyllis Brett. The Torontonians. Toronto: Longmans, 1960 [reissued 2007, McGill-Queen’s University Press.]