Is it the way you are shaped by memories of walking across the Maryland bridge? Maybe you walk it everyday on your way to work/maybe all it is to you is that one time you were following the ambulance that was taking your sister to the ER/maybe its where you live/maybe you don’t even know where it is.
No matter what it is to you/ its presence or absence in your life/ it is a part of this city. And in some way, it is a part of you.
Maggie Helwig tells us that cities are about how we live in them/who is included and excluded.
Cities are about our lives/and our lives are about our cities.
And when we write, our setting is something that is living
Our characters live in it and through it.
Andre Alexis, with the soothing hum of his beautiful voice, read to us a story of a man trying desperately to kill himself. But his city just kept interrupting him.
Does your city ever interrupt you?
Larry Krotz told us of being in Nyrobi, Kenya. Of being the strange white man, there to learn from the Sex Workers Committee/saying the wrong half of the 2 part greeting he learned in Swahili. And when he is not in Africa/catching a hint of just the right accent/caught on the wind/sending him right back to Kenya.
Who are you when you are not in your city?
War-torn Sarajevo and a cellist who plays for hope. Steven Galloway asks us to come inside human connection in the midst of a snipers internal conflict with killing. The war inside the war, and the question “Does the music sound the same to him?”
How are you at war with your city? And how much is this about how you are at war with yourself?
Maggie Helwig, with her eccentric charm takes us under a bridge and into the mind of a man living in the liminal, both within himself and within the city.
Where do you exist within your city and where does your city exist within you?
Fantasies of having power over those who condemn you, by the colour of your skin, to a place of unrelenting powerlessness. So that you cannot walk down the street, take a breath, without remembering those hands of your back, that gun up your skirt. Austin Clarke takes us to a place of fear and resistance. A girl in a city that sees herself pushing back. A black girl that sees herself in the black man going through her garbage and begs him to push back too.
All of the faces in your city - who do you see yourself in?
What do you do with that/what does that do to you?
Charles Wilkins brings us to the city of the dead-with hints of who might walk there. Digging a grave that is filling with water, and dreams of a man with one arm who grows it back.
Is not our whole city one big cemetery? Which ghosts are yours as you wander through these familiar streets?
Home.
And the cities where we live.
* * *
Courtney Slobogian likes to sit quietly memorizing all of the reasons she is in love with this city. She graduated from University of Winnipeg in 2007 with her BA in Women’s and Gender studies. Her honours thesis was entitled “mother[loss]: An exploration of our silences in grief and longing.” She is putting that degree to use mostly by insisting that there is a need for theory in everything. Along with writing academic papers for fun, she finds herself constantly playing with poetry (where it is desire, and not theory, that she finds most useful).
By day she busies herself with women’s reproductive health issues, by night she rides her bike.
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