In Toronto

If I crane my neck from where I am sitting, up on the fifth floor of the student residency in Toronto, I can just about see Lake Ontario. It’s a beautiful early evening here in Canada and the Candian Creative Writers and Writing Programs conference at Humber College is just about due to start. I have to say, I’m very glad to be here. Simon Perril and I flew over yesterday from the UK, leaving behind a large pile of marking, and several eye-wateringly pressing deadlines. It was a surprisingly relaxing journey, with even Heathrow being relatively bearable once they had established that I didn’t have a bomb in my underpants (when it came to checking for underpants bombs, the staff at Heathrow were very professional and courteous…).

As the conference begins only this evening, we had time today spare; and so we decided to spend most of it wandering around Toronto and hitting the second-hand bookshops. On a tip-off from the owner of Ten Editions Books — who left her shop unattended to take us half way there, and then accosted a grumpy woman who was pulling a heavy box on a trolley, to see if she could take us the rest of the way (she couldn’t, she said…) — we called in on Coach House Press, tucked away down a side alley, a glorious haven of literary enthusiasm, hulking printing presses, and intriguing-looking books printed on the kind of quality of paper that is used only by people who really care about books. I’ve got an unread copy of Coach House’s Saudade: The Possibilities of Place by Anik See on my bookshelf at home, so I’ve made a mental note to get round to reading it when I get back. Simon was less restrained than I was, and came away from with a huge pile of books and a somewhat bruised credit card account. Later on I did manage to pick up a cheap copy of Will Eisner’s classic, Comics and Sequential Art.

This evening is going to be relatively low-key, and tomorrow I’ll be talking about my Yijing stories, so I’m currently shuffling them around here and there and deciding what to read. But mainly I’m looking forward to just hanging out, chatting to people at the conference, and sitting back for the next few days and soaking up some intriguing writing.