Writers Loving Their Towns

[dewline]

Some day, I want to do something like this for Ottawa:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/first-person-ode-to-montreal-mile-end-1.7092013

I've lived here since the summer of 1985, so...

Comments

[blogcutter]

What an uplifting article! Interestingly enough, I've just been reading two very different books that have Montreal as a setting: Two Solitudes by Hugh MacLennan (first published in 1945) and Bookworm by Robin Yeatman (c2023). The latter book is often laugh-out-loud funny. It concerns a woman who regularly frequents a coffee shop with her book, creating elaborate and improbable backstories for all the other people there. One day she sees a man who happens to have with him the very same book (all 780 pages of it) as she's reading and she decides right then and there that he's her soul mate. The main obstacle to getting together with him is that she's already married to a very boring upwardly-mobile lawyer who just can't fathom the idea of reading for pleasure. She cooks up all kinds of schemes to do in lawyer-spouse and find her happily-ever-after with literary-guy.

Anyway, Sarah Gilbert just moved up in my TBR pile and if you ever write your ode to Ottawa, let me know and I'll be sure to read it!

[spiralsheep]

I used to live in a place named Albion and while I was there I wrote a poem cycle called The State of Albion, lol. I've always enjoyed narratives that are love letters (or love-hate) to very specific locations.

[misyachnakvitka]

I'd love to do that with Newmarket. :)