Mary Soderstrom's Blog, page 114

Montreal Gazette Columnist Highlights the Making Waves

The Montreal Gazette's Mike Boone likes the idea of Making Waves: The Continuing Portuguese Adventure. In a column the day the book was launched, he wrote:

"It is tempting to make a piscatorial comparison:

In Making Waves, Mary Soderstrom's latest book, the Portuguese are packed like sardines into 171 pages.

Soderstrom's style, however, isn't dense, claustrophobic or oleaginous. Making Waves is not a bite-sized condensation of 600 years of history but rather an appreciation of people who have fascinated Soderstrom since her 1950s childhood in San Diego."

He goes on : " Making Waves includes a timeline. But the meat of the book is taking readers to particular places and explaining the locales' significance in Portuguese history. And if you want to skip ahead, the chapter titled Sex begins on Page 78. "

Well, yes, the story contains some steamy stuff, and not just because a lot of the Portuguese adventure took place in warm climates. It will be interesting to see just how much other readers are hooked that part...

Making Waves Arrived on the Fall Tides!

The first copies of Making Waves: The Continuing Portuguese Aventure arrived at Véhicule Press a week ago, and bookstores are getting them as I write. We'll launch the book officially on Wednesday, November 24 from 5:30 to 8 p.m. at Bobards, 4328 St. Lawrence in Monteal. It's a bar just across the street from Parc du Portugal and where Brazilians hung out during the World Cup last summer.

All Lusophiles are cordially invited.

Coming Soon: The Continuing Portuguese Adventure

The revisions are nearly completed and we're headed for a publication date in early October for Making Waves: The Continuing Portuguese Adventure.

The book is the latest in a series of non-fiction books arising from reflections and travels over the last decade. While it seems to be quite a departure from The Walkable City and Green City, there is a direct link. As I traveled to research them, I kept coming across the Portuguese, who had been there before other Europeans.

As I investigated, two things happened. First, the great story of the Portuguese adventure became clear. Second, I began to remember my own contact with stalwart Portuguese immigrants as a child: people who had come from mainland Portugal, Madeira or the Azores to San Diego and whose children and grandchildren I grew up with.

Other reflections followed. Amazingly, Portuguese descendants in Brazil seemed to have built a multi-racial society where skin colour mattered much less than in the US where "any known blood" was enough to make you a second-class citizen. The Portuguese had also overthrown a dictatorship almost without bloodshed, and the Brazilians appeared to be rebuilding their civil society successfully after decades of dictatorship, also.

The result will be, I hope, a readable account of under-appreciated cultures and societies, which offers some hints of what might be done elsewhere.

Stay tuned for details about a book launch near you!

The Walkable City Continues to Make Its Way: An Interview with Mary

Susan Olding, a Kingston-based writer and reviewer, asked Mary a few questions recently for her blog which regularly features interviews with writers. She thinks highly of The Walkable City, particularly the idea of having the architect of Paris's 19th century make-over, Baron Georges-Etienne Haussmann, and urban cage-rattler Jane Jacobs exchange ideas about cities.

The book, she says, is "an original idea, gracefully executed," which " compels us to think harder about our own neighbourhoods and what we expect and hope from them. "

She also asked about what project Mary's working on these days. Here's the reply:
" Well, there are two. One is a novel I've just sent to a possible publisher. It's called River Music, and is about three generations of women: the grandmother is a pianist, the daughter is an engineer and the granddaughter is a harpsichordist. The time runs from 1935 to Dec. 6, 2009, and I hope in addition to a good story, the novel says something about North American women over the last 75 years.

"The second, called Making Waves: The Portuguese Adventure, is a direct outgrowth of my three non-fiction projects, although it doesn't seem so at first glance. During the travel I did for them and for Violets, I kept running into the footprints they left—in Brazil, of course, but also in East Africa, the West coast of India, and Singapore as well as other places. Then I began thinking about the Portuguese kids I grew up with in San Diego, whose families had come from the Azores and Madeira to fish tuna off California, the Portuguese sailing ship we saw in 1972 in St. John's Newfoundland (one of the last of white fleet cod fishers) and the 40,000 people of Portuguese descent in Montreal. In short, I was bowled over by the worldwide legacy of this small nation on the edge of Europe.

"A great deal of research and some more travel followed, and I'm now revising a manuscript for Véhicule Press which is scheduled to publish the book next fall. Although I picked up enough Portuguese on my own to be able to read newspapers, magazine articles and history, I ran into a wall, trying to speak it, so this winter I've been taking an intensive course at the Université de Montréal. So I'll sign off, and get back to the oral presentation on Brazilian singer/songwriter/novelist/dissident Chico Buarque that's due for Monday."

Photo: Strollers in the Chiado district of Lisbon, taken in May 2009 on a research trip to Portugal.

Talking about Walking in One of Canada's Least Dense Cities: Mary at Kamloops' Walking Lab

On Saturday November 7, I'll be giving the closing address at the Fields of Walking conference at The Walking Lab in Kamloops, British Columbia. The gathering will feature walks around the town and much talk about the social and other benefits of walking. It is being organized by an inter-disciplinary group from Thompson Rivers University.

They got my idea of including me, I gather, from reading The Walkable City. For more information, contact Bruce Baugh at TRU: bbaugh@tru.ca Here's what I told them I'd be talking about:

Baby Needs New Pair of Shoes: the Gamble Necessary on the Road to Walkability

The idea that a city might not be walkable would never have occurred to anyone who lived before 1800. Walking was the way everyone but a few gentry and soldiers got around, but the Industrial Revolution changed that, as it changed so many other things. The private automobile pushed walkability only further into the background in the 20th century.

Why should that bother us? We've got our cars and our patch of green outside the center of the city: we're pretty well set, aren't we? Perhaps, as long as we don't put much value on the time we need for commuting, for what we're doing to our planet as we guzzle petroleum products, or for the kind of social interaction and convenience that living where walking reigns can bring.

Is there any exit from this highway along which we're racing toward social and environmental crisis? That is a question that will occupy us increasingly in the 21st century. We are going to have to take some chances, and make some gambles about the way we live in the very short term if we are to survive in the long term.

Noted Urbanist Christopher Leinberger Praises The Walkable City: From Haussmann's Boulevards to Jane Jacobs' Streets and Beyond

It's always encouraging to hear words of praise from someone who cares passionately about cities and who has thought about them carefully and in depth. That's why the words of Christopher B. Leinberger, author of The Option of Urbanism, are particularly welcome.

The Brookings Institution Visiting Fellow writes: "Mary Soderstrom's The Walkable City addresses one of the most important environmental, economic, social, public health and foreign policy issues of our day that is also the most unexpected and simplest; building walkable urban places. Using an approach I personally enjoy, taking a long historical perspective from pre-history through the various ages of city building, Ms. Soderstrom demonstrates that we as a civilization know how to build walkable cities. We just have to speed up our efforts."

The Washington Post's Ezra Klein Wishes I'd Written a Different Book

What to do when a review isn't a particularly good review, especially when it is published some place where a lot of people are going to see it? The past few days I've been faced with this dilemma over a review of The Walkable City by Ezra Klein, the Washington Post reporter and master blogger, in The Barnes and Noble Review.

Klein, in short, says the book isn't tough enough. He likes the chapter about Carlsbad, California, and shopping centers, but says that the book doesn't include enough research about questions of urban policy. Nor does he like the conversations I imagine between urban planning icon Jane Jacobs and Baron Georges Eugène Haussmann, who was responsible for rejigging Paris in the mid-19the century (which, by the way, are taken word for word from their writings or interviews, as is noted in the book.)

Well, I'm sorry I didn't write the book he would have liked to have read, but I wanted to make my book as amusing as possible. I tried to keep the tone light, particularly because the implications are pretty heavy, and I'm convinced that ordinary folk turn off when things are painted in somber colours. Klein and I had a very civilized e-mail/Twitter exchange about this, from which I think we both gathered that we don't disagree very much.

And there's a lot to be said about getting even a doubtful review from Barnes and Noble. They haven't carried my books in numbers in the past, but apparently they are with this one. An old high school friend just wrote that she'd been able to get her local B&N store to order it for her, and I know my publisher did a reprint because of B&N orders.

So maybe the old adage is correct: it doesn't matter what they say, it's whether they spell your name right. Check out the review, take a look at the book, and see if you agree. In addition to Barnes and Noble, it's available at many independent book stores, on Amazon.ca, Amazon.com, and directly from Véhicule Press.

Back from Portugal, and at Work on a New Book

Véhicule Press is taking a chance again: we've just signed a contract for a new book, tentatively called Making Waves: The Portuguese Adventure. Doesn't sound like it has much in common with my recent non-fiction, but, never fear, there is a direct line.

As I've traveled around over the last few years, researching my trio of books about nature, cities, and history and my recent fiction, I've been amazed at how frequently I encountered the Portuguese and their descendants. That wasn't a surprise in São Paulo, Brazil, featured in Green City, but in Kochi, India, I visited the church where the great explorer Vasco da Gama was buried after his death in 1524. Then there were the people with Portuguese surnames I met in Tanzania when I went looking for the home of wild African violets for The Violets of Usambara. Long before then, though, I saw Portuguese cod fishermen playing soccer in a parking lot in St. John's, Newfoundland, and even farther back, I remember the local grocery in San Diego, founded by a Portguese family to provision the tuna fleet.

In short the Portuguese were everywhere, and, as I discovered when I began research, they were leaders in other ways too--Lisbon was rebuilt along rational, Haussmannian lines a century before the Baron rejigged Paris, while the Carnation Revolution of the 1970s is a model of how to change a regime peacefully, to name only two.

Now all I have to do is write the book!

Photo: the view across the Tagus River, not far from where it flows into the Atlantic.

Joseph Beaubien's Statue is Meeting Place

Here's the picture of the statue where we'll be meeting for a Jane's Walk of Outremont on Saturday Mary 2 (in French) and Sunday May 3 (bilingual.) As you can see the park is beginning to turn green. The forecast for the weekend is sun, too, so be there or be square.

Meeting Place: Parc Beaubien, Côte Ste-Catherine Road between Stuart an McEachran in Outremont.

Duration: An hour and a half, or so.

End: Parc Saint-Viateur, where those who want can picnic together.

Jane's Walk comes to Montreal this year, and Mary will lead two in Outremont.

In May 2007, a year after Jane Jacobs died, her friends in Toronto began a tribute to her--free walks led by people passionate about a neighborhood in honour of the urban pioneer and great champion of the walkable city. Since then the Jane's Walk idea has spread across the continent. This year there will be more than 20 cities participating, and Montreal will probably have about a dozen individual walk, all taking place on May 2 or 3.

The Centre for Urban Ecology is the organizer in Montreal. So far walks are set for Mile End, Milton-Park, NDG, la Petite Patrie, the Gay Village, St. Henri-Tucot interchange area, Villeray and Ouotremont, with some neighborhoods getting more than one walk. Since this is a citizen's initiative, the walks will probably be quite eclectic.

Among them will be two in Outremont led by me, one in French on Saturday May 2 and a bilingual French-English one on Sunday May 3. The title is: From Dr. Beaubien's Farm to Bernard Avenue Bling. Both will begin in Parc Beaubien before winding around the neighborhood where I've lived for ages. We'll go past the remnants of one of the first farms in the area, go along an old Amerindian trail (Côte Sainte-Catherine Road,) past some truly lovely big houses, check out the eruv and some much more modest housing before ending up along the Bernard Avenue shopping street. Then those who want can picnic in Parc Saint-Viateur, either feasting on a lunch they'd brought or on goodies bought at one of the restos on Bernard. Sign up here.