Imagining Toronto Gets Social

Wasting time when I should be marking end-of-term research papers, I have created several satellite groups for the Imagining Toronto project. One, Imagining Toronto at Facebook, is a bit of a collaborative sandbox. Another, Imagining Toronto at Ning, is really just a loud version of the RSS feed for this blog. If you are partial to either of these networks, please feel free to join in.

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I am pleased to report considerable interest in Toronto: The Novel, an idea to help the city catch up to its new stories by engaging in multiple collaborative writing projects with a variety of communities. I have decided to pilot Toronto: The Novel in the Imagining Toronto course at York in September, and will then be open to expanding the idea. If you would like to join in, I would love to hear from you. I'll be announcing further details soon.

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I am also pleased to report several other developments of the Imagining Toronto project.

First, I would like to gratefully acknowledge new funding from the Ontario Arts Council under the Writers' Reserve Program, which is a helpful addition to the Toronto Arts Council grant the Imagining Toronto project received last September.

Second, I will be delivering a public talk on Toronto literature as part of the 2007 Toronto Festival of Architecture and Design. Full details are forthcoming, but the talk is scheduled for Thursday 31 May 2007 at the Lillian H. Smith Library on College Street.

Third, I have a bunch of essays and book reviews in the works or forthcoming, including an article on literary watersheds (in particular, the influence of Hurricane Hazel) in/on Toronto literature in Spacing Magazine (coming out in June). Peter and I are scheduled to have a co-written essay on urban scavenging published in GreenTOpia (the third volume in the uTOpia series) forthcoming from Coach House Books later this year. There are other things in the works, too, which will be announced as they develop.

And best of all, the Imagining Toronto course is slated to run for the second time as a fourth-year undergraduate course in the Department of Geography at York University in 2007-08. This course is where the Imagining Toronto project had its formal origin (the project emerged out of a new course proposal the Department invited in 2005), and is where many of its themes are worked out and explored. For this I am very grateful to both the Department of Geography and its wonderful students.