The Stories That Are Great Within Us

Cities are made to exist in one’s imagination by storytellers… James T. Farrell, the American storyteller, once said, “Those people of mine, my characters, they are Chicago. That’s the way it is, what’s mine is yours, in your imagination, Chicago is yours.” Farrell bespoke a great truth. Cities are made to exist in your imagination by storytellers–think of Joyce and his Dublin, Dickens and his London, Dostoevsky and his St. Petersburg–and you realize that what is theirs forever is also yours for the taking.

Toronto was once a mean, narrow town, wryly praised as a city of churches, dourly dismissed as a grungy little Belfast, a town with no story of its own. It is now the fourth largest city in North America. Over the last 60 years, the city has been turned upside down and inside out; it’s a place where skyscrapers seem to spawn skyscrapers. It is now brassy, gauche, imposing, a city powered by people of colour and creeds from all over the world–and so too the city’s storytellers, who have given vibrant voice to the city’s character–a cacophony of voices that dare to be themselves, dare to be great… and because of them, we are certain that, like Dublin, London, St. Petersburg, or Berlin, Chicago and New York, Toronto exists.

Contributors: Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Anne Michaels, Austin Clarke, Leon Rooke, David Bezmozgis, Morley Callaghan, Dionne Brand, Robertson Davies, David Cronenberg & Norman Snider, Katherine Govier, Timothy Findley, Barbara Gowdy, Joe Rosenblatt, Sheila Heti, Joseph Boyden, Barry Callaghan, Steven Hayward, bpNichol, Mazo de la Roche, Alice Boissonneau, Matt Cohen, Max Haines, Janice Kulyk Keefer, Hugh Garner, Christine Miscione, Joe Fiorito, Lisa Foad, B.W. Powe, Paul Quarrington, Susan Perly, M.T. Kelly, Helen Weinzweig, Bruce Meyer, Matt Shaw, Elizabeth Phinney, Sarah Sheard, Linda Griffiths, Sang Kim, Greg Kearney and H. Masud Taj. Artists Robert Markle, John Reeves, Sorel Etrog, Vera Frenkel, Nina Bunjevac, Ludwig Zeller, R. Murray Schafer, Michael Snow and Charles Pachter.