A decade in Toronto - 13

Che - quiet, shy & handsome

I’ll continue with 2011 because when I look back at the year, I realise that a lot of things happened. And while it’s not possible to capture everything into this series, I do want to ensure that I don’t miss some important occurrences.

My involvement in the Festival of South Asian Literature and the Arts enlarged my circle of acquaintances in the creative world. I realized that the suburbs of Toronto – Mississauga, Brampton, and Oakville had a thriving cultural scene buzzing with events and programs and that South Asians were organizing most of these events.

I was invited to an exhibition of Hindi film posters – Picture House – organized by Ali Adil Khan and Asma Arshad Mahmood at the Art Gallery of Mississauga. It was a painstakingly put together exhibition, where Ali and Asma put a stamp of originality on a subject that could easily have become a sentimental and lachrymose, not to say banal, depiction of a dying art. 

I blogged rather animatedly about it, and my journalism teacher-turned-friend Teenaz Javat read it. She got me invited to the CBC’s Metro Morning show for a brief chat about the exhibition. (Read the blog: Picture House)

At IIFA, photo by Mariellen Ward

In late June, I was invited to participate in the International Indian Film Academy (IIFA) awards at the Rogers Centre with Mahrukh, Che and Durga who was with us. The invitation was from my friend CP Thomas, who was doing the public relations for the event organizer Wizcraft (co-owner Sabbas Joseph used to be a colleague).

Thanks to CP, a serial entrepreneur and the publisher of Indian Voices, we got some of the best seats at the awards venue. The show belonged to Shahrukh Khan and Priyanka Chopra, and a bunch of film stars from the yesteryears. (Read the blog: IIFA in Toronto)

Farzana Doctor, the author friend who organizes the immensely influential Brockton Writers’ Series invited me to read at the September 2011 edition of the series along with Jessica Westhead and Pratap Reddy. She was greatly amused by the emails I exchanged to finalise my reading at the series and quoted from it verbatim while introducing me.

With Pratap and Jessica at Brocton Writers' Series

I have tremendous admiration and respect for Farzana. She gave key inputs to improve my manuscript and make it more “Canadian,” when I was struggling with it. Of course, by the time the manuscript emerged as a novel, a lot had already changed. At different stages of my writing process, she was willing to assist, suggest, promote and otherwise help in whatever way she could. Being a star author that she is, she’d forgotten my name by the time her third novel was launched.

Later that month, at the Word on the Street, I participated in the “Adopt a Writer” program with Jessica Westhead at the Word on the Street festival. Books and books-related events had become a major preoccupation. The Munk Centre in midtown Toronto became a regular venue to participate in such events. (Read the blog: Parallel Histories) It was to continue for a few years until recently when I began to consciously slow down my activities in view of my deteriorating kidneys. 

Marshall McLuhan’s centenary was celebrated globally in 2011, and in Toronto, his hometown, he was remembered at a panel discussion organized by the McLuhan Legacy Network. It was an important discussion.

McLuhan remains prescient about the future of the media. He’d predicted the Age of Internet long before it became a reality. He said, “The next medium, whatever it is – it may be the extension of consciousness – will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual’s encyclopedic function, and flip into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind.”

My blog was being noticed and I began to get offers from publishers for book reviews. I’d prefer to write mostly about authors, book events and about books without doing reviews. Calypso Editions in the USA sent me a new translation of Leo Tolstoy’s ‘How much land does a man need’. It’s a simple, straightforward folklore of human greed. I blogged about Tagore and Translation in two parts. (Part 1, Part 2)

Che - getting ready for the
school concert

At work, I was doing all that needed to be done to give back to the ICCC – the organization that had made life possible in Canada for me and my family. I enjoyed the work, and what I loved more was the constant interaction with people who were deeply involved with the organization. 

Under Satish Thakkar's leadership, the organisation took off and successfully scaled peaks of glory never before attempted in the three-and-a-half decades of the organisation's history. 

Harjit Kalsi was another stalwart – an unassuming, soft-spoken, hands-on manager, who made the most menial tasks pleasurable. Together, Harjit and I created a short documentary on Hindi film songs with the railway motif for the ICCC’s year-end gala that had the Indian Railways as its theme.

At home, Che was in his final pre-teen years and was turning into a handsome young man. The next three years would be hard on him; years that’d change him forever.  I’ve often thought about these years and often wondered whether I did the right thing in getting us here.

The Discreet Hero – Mario Vargas Llosa

At the Festival of Literary Diversity, I met Farzana Doctor, an author who I admire. Earlier this year she was in Beirut, Lebanon, with her partner Reyan, and was fascinated by the place. She told me she intends to weave the place into her work someday.

I humbly suggested instead of a novel, she should consider doing a non-fiction book about the place and the people, and how the place has moulded the people, and how the people have made the place what it is.

What I know about Beirut and Lebanon is what the western media wants me to know. Farzana’s book, if she ever wrote it, would be refreshing, different, and something that we need because it’d be a perspective of an outsider who’s a bit of an insider.

I’m reading Jasmine D’Costa’s Matter of Geography. It is a story set in the 1992-93 religious violence between the Hindus and Muslims that tore apart Bombay and nearly all of India. The story is about a resilient Christian community in old Bombay’s Mazgaon that comes together to rescue a Muslim neighbour from a marauding mob of crazed Hindutva fanatics.

Although I’m all too familiar with Bombay and with the 1992-93 rioting, Jasmine’s book is refreshing, different because she is able to weave a story around a people in a place and how both the people and the place affect and transform each other. (More about Jasmine’s novel soon after I finish reading it).

Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Discreet Hero, set in Piura and Lima in Peru, is also a story of people and places and how the two complete each other. It's a story about two senior men living a life afforded by wealth, and one that is not uncommon from others of their age and means. They are blackmailed and/or harassed because they’re wealthy and old.

In the case of Ismael Carrera, an insurance company tycoon in Lima, his layabout sons are waiting for him to die to inherit his wealth. Felicito Yanaque, a trucking company owner, in Piura, who is the other protagonist of the novel, becomes a victim of an elaborate protection racket, that turns into kidnapping and ransom as the story progresses.

Both the stories are full of intrigue comprising people who have malleable morals and possess low cunning. Both the stories are of older men falling for much younger women. Carrera falls in love with Armida, a maid, and Felicito with Mabel, a streetwalker. 

Both attempt vainly to rise above their circumstances without losing their dignity or compromising the dignity of their young lovers, aware that in the life of old men, decency in family ties is better maintained by being quiet and working quietly to safeguard the interests of those you love more than others.

The Discreet Hero is the first Llosa novel I’ve read, and it’s great to be acquainted with Don Rigoberto and Dona Lucrecia, who watch the proceedings from the sidelines and are only tangentially affected by the doings of the Carrera couple. 

They're sophisticated, cosmopolitan better off married couple who’d be more at home in Madrid or Rome rather than Lima, and constantly dream of spending time going to an opera, visiting a gallery and dining in a patio of a fine restaurant in a European city.

Apparently, Rigoberto and Lucrecia and their son Fonchito have also appeared in other Llosa novels, as have Sergeant Lituma.

Llosa’s mastery is in weaving a story around people and places and how both affect and transform each other. The descriptions of the police station, the local bars in Piura acquire a meaning and come alive because of the characters such as Felicito and Lituma. If it were not for these characters, the places would be nondescript.  

The story has a slow pace and the author is more interested in exploring relations between the characters, observing their little idiosyncrasies. He doesn't mind taking the reader on short digressions, holding the story to a standstill, while helping his reader understand a character flaw better by such explorations.

The novel is about the life and the lifestyle of its characters and not much about the linear narration of the story. For instance, the efficiency and speed with which the police resolve the mystery behind the protection racket could perhaps have made this into a tremendous potboiler, but clearly is of little interest to Llosa, who'd rather have his policemen discuss women's asses. 

There are passages in the novel that remarkably bring out the universality of emotions – love and betrayal – and how these are common to all humans.

Edith Grossman has skillfully translated the book from Spanish into English, transcending the barriers of language-specific nuances. Towards the end of the story, the novelist abandons the rigours of form and dovetails several separate sections of different characters into seamless paragraphs. This could’ve been challenging but Grossman pulls it off without any effort.

Here are some passages from the book that I found interesting:  

“I’ve been paying for my faults all these years, Felicito,” he heard Gertrudis say, almost without moving her full lip or taking her eyes off him for a second, though she didn’t appear to see him and spoke as if he weren’t there. “Bearing my cross in silence. Knowing very well that the sins one commits have to be paid for. Not only in the next life, in this one, too. I’ve accepted it. I’ve repented for myself and for the Boss Lady. I’ve paid for myself and my mama. I don’t feel the rancor towards her that I did when I was young. I keep paying and hope that with so much suffering, Our Lord Jesus Christ will forgive so many sins.”

*******

To die just when he thought he’d won all his battles and felt like the happiest man in creation. Had his happiness killed him, perhaps? Ismael Carrera wasn’t used to it.

*******

“It’s just that there’s something I don’t understand,” Fonchito ventured uncomfortably. “About you, Papa. You always liked art, painting, music, books. It’s the only thing you seem passionate about. So, then, why did you become a lawyer? Why did you spend your whole life working in an insurance company? You should have been a painter, a musician, well, I don’t know. Why didn’t you follow your calling?”

Don Rigoberto nodded and reflected a moment before answering.

“Because I was a coward, son,” he finally murmured. “Because I lacked faith in myself. I never believed I had the talent to be a real artist. But maybe that was an excuse for not trying. I decided not to be a creator but only a consumer of art, a dilettante of culture. Because I was a coward is the sad truth. So now you know. Don’t follow my example. Whatever your calling is, follow it as far as you can and don’t do what I did, don’t betray it.”

“I hope you’re not annoyed, Papa. It was a question I’d been wanting to ask you for a long time.”

“It’s a question I’ve been asking myself for many years. Fonchito. You’re forced me to answer and I thank you for that. Go on, that’s enough, good night.”

*******

The function of journalism in our time, at least in this society, was not to inform but to make the line between the lie and the truth disappear, to replace reality with a fiction in which the oceanic mass of neuroses, frustration, hatred, and traumas of a public devoured by resentment and envy was made manifest. One more proof that the small spaces of civilisation would never prevail against immeasurable barbarism.

*******

From time to time, taking a breather, the captain would burst into praise, charged with sexual fever, of the curves of Senora Josefita, with whom he’d fallen in love. Very seriously, and with salacious gestures, he explained to his subordinate that those gluteals were not only large, round and symmetrical but also “gave a little jiggle when she walked,” something that aroused his heart and his testicles in unison. For that reason, he maintained, “in spite of her age, her moon face, and her slightly bowed legs, Josefita is the goddamnedest woman.

“Hotter than gorgeous Mabel, if I’m forced to make a comparison, Lituma,” he went on, his eyes popping as if he had the backsides of the two ladies right in front of him and were hefting them both. “I acknowledge that Don Felicito’s girlfriend has a nice figure, aggressive tits, and well-formed, fleshy legs and arms, but her ass, as you must have noticed, leaves much to be desired. It’s not very touchable. It didn’t finish developing, it didn’t blossom, at some point, it went into decline. According to my classification system, hers is a timid ass, if you know what I mean.”

“Why don’t you concentrate on the investigations instead, Captain?” Lituma asked him.  “You saw how furious Colonel Rios Pardo is. At this rate, we won’t ever get rid of this case or be promoted again.”

“I’ve noticed that you have absolutely no interest in women’s asses, Lituma,” was the captain’s judgement, pretending to commiserate with him and putting on a grief-stricken face. But immediately afterwards he smiled and licked his lips like a cat. “A defect in your manly formation, I’m telling you. A good ass is the most divine gift God gave to female bodies for the pleasure of males. I’ve been told that even the Bible recognises this.”

“Of course I have an interest, Captain. But with all due respect, in you, there’s not only interest but obsession and depravity too. Let’s get back to the spiders now.”

*******

All Inclusive - Farzana Doctor

Warning: This post has spoilers. If you haven’t read All Inclusive and intend to read it, postpone reading this post until after you’ve read the novel. Also, this is not a review of the novel.

Beside frightening readers, ghosts have often made fiction more humane. If we ignore the ghosts who scare and focus on the friendly or at least the non-scary ones, the ghost in Hamlet is perhaps the best known fictional character of all times. There are countless other characters that are sometimes more alive than the living characters in a book.

Azeez Dholkawala, in Farzana Doctor’s All Inclusive, is a friendly spirit, who is in search of his release that will only occur after he has fulfilled his duty. Azeez is unable to give up his spectral form because he has to help someone find her purpose in life. The dead helping the living find their mission to live - the idea is counterintuitive but the author handles it with consummate skills.

Azeez is killed in the terrorist bombing of the 1983 Air India Kanishka, and his body rests at the bottom of the Atlantic. Unbeknownst to him, he had fathered a lovechild just a day before his boarding the ill-fated aircraft.  His daughter Ameera grows up to be an independent woman.

The reader meets her when she has fallen out of a long relationship and is seeking a prolonged but temporary diversion. This diversion is a job as a tourist-trapper for an all-inclusive holiday resort in Mexico; a job at which she is effortlessly successful. Unconventional and free spirited, Ameera is addicted to non-traditional sexual experiences and frequently indulges in threesomes with tourists at the resort, which eventually gets her into trouble.

All Inclusive is Farzana Doctor’s third novel (after Stealing Nasreen (2008) and Six Meters of Pavement (2011)) is an easy read, and an unexpected page-turner; unexpected because the story and the characters are laid back and are in no hurry to do anything except just be who they are. 

Ameera is good at what she does but suffers from ennui that leads her to unusual sexcapades, which are rather gleefully described in explicit details. Azeez, of course, is on a mission to find his release and he doesn’t know what it is that will either release him or reincarnate him; the ghostly guides nudge him but don’t really help him in his quest.  

In Six Meters of Pavement, Farzana’s second novel, the lead protagonist Ismail Boxwala loses his infant daughter Zubi. She then permeates the novel despite her absence. In All Inclusive, Azeez is a constant presence throughout the novel. His steady and measured moves to find his purpose in death keep the reader riveted.

Farzana possesses a rare felicity of being able to under the skin of a character and make it come alive, even when the character is a ghost. Just as Ismail Boxwala in Six Meters, Azeez Dholkawala is utterly believable, if not always likeable. Ameera, on the other hand, is often a character from a deeper Shade of Grey.

All Inclusive is published by Dundurn, Toronto. You may buy the book here: All Inclusive

Writing is rewriting, review, patience, prayers...

This is equally applicable to readers and to writers

What do writers feel about the process of writing – generally most writers describe it as a very lonely thing that they do.

Andrew J. Borkowski, whose Copernicus Avenue won the 2012 Toronto Book Award had a contrary view. In his acceptance speech, he said for him writing wasn’t a lonely process for him at all.

On his website Borkowski says “writing is rewriting”.

I remember Isabel Huggan telling a group of wannabe writers the same thing at the summer program at Humber School of Writers.

My friend Farzana Doctor gave me the same mantra when I met her recently to discuss my manuscript.

Farzana’s second novel – Six Meters of Pavement – was shortlisted for the award that Borkowski’s Copernicus Avenue finally won.

She also told me to be patient when reworking on the manuscript.

I recently met Jaspreet Singh, author of Seventeen Tomatoes: Tales from Kashmir, a collection of short stories and Chef, a novel (and a forthcoming novel Helium) wryly remarked that has a lot of experience in being patient.

I had gone to his reading a couple of years ago at the North York Central Library when I was new in Toronto, and nobody knew me, or took me seriously.

I don’t know too many people even now, and absolutely nobody takes me seriously as a writer.

But that’s not the subject of this blog post.

It’s about the writing process.

Some writers prefer to keep their writing under wraps and prefer not showing it to peers.

I’m sure they’re in a small minority. Most writers prefer to seek peer review and are open to making changes based on feedback.

I’ve got some exceptional feedback to my manuscript from my friends.

I think peer review is vital.

Also vital is feedback from one’s mentor.

At a lively discussion last week Anand Mahadevan and Kristyn Dunnion emphasized the importance of seeking peer and mentor review.

Mahadevan narrated his experience (re)writing his first novel The Strike, based on his mentor MG Vassanji’s feedback , and how finally when he had worked on the manuscript and incorporated nearly all the suggestions that his mentor had made, the manuscript had acquired a reached a completely different realm.

They were at the Impossible Words.

Irfan Ali and Emily Pohl-Weary curate Impossible Words. The Academy of Impossible website describes Impossible Words thus: “Impossible Words is a unique literary salon that presents culturally and stylistically diverse Canadian writers in conversation with young writers from the Toronto Street Writers. It takes place on the second and fourth Saturdays.”

I’ve attended two sessions so far, and I’ve liked the raw energy and the in-your-face quality that the young writers from the Toronto Street Writers bring to these sessions.

So, basically, writing is rewriting, review, patience, and then I guess prayers. I’m teaching myself the first three, but as an agnostic, it’s going rather difficult having to pray.

Image: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=449087115142883&set=a.206192099432387.66730.122703407781257&type=1&theater

Writers & labels

Finding the right voice to write

Are labels important or even relevant for writers?

LGBT, visible minority, Muslim, Asian, Tamil are labels that one often hears to define a writer and her writing; quite often randomly, and unnecessarily. This is stereotyping is often reflexive and on occasions offensive because a writer’s origins and roots are almost always irrelevant to her writing, except in specific genres such as memoirs.

Kanaka Basu reviewing Farzana Doctor’s novels (The Hindu) makes a pertinent observation. “The cover of the second novel grandly announces that Six Metres of Pavement is the recipient of the Lambda Literary Award 2012: Lesbian Fiction, a fact that leaves the reader duly impressed and slightly baffled. Baffled because the novel begins with and moves primarily around the phenomenon of immigrant angst and for the larger part, the lesbian factor is incidental and casually relegated to the sidelines.”

Basu goes on to praise Farzana's writing: “This is seriously good writing here, such good writing that it hurts. The prose is punctuated with the most delicious silences, the characters display the most eccentric twirls and loops and the tone of the novel, is never, never quite predictable. Such a breath of fresh air!”

Then, is being a lesbian relevant to writing? Mariko Tamaki, the young Toronto writer, was asked whether it was limiting or liberating to be identified as a lesbian. She said it varied. In her case, she said, she was also identified as an Asian. Mariko read from her novel (You) Set Me on Fire at the Academy of Impossible.

This is an interesting debate and at its root is the issue of voice. A few years ago, at Sheridan College, when I said I had written a short story about an immigrant Muslim family, many in the class felt that I wouldn’t get the voice right because I’m not a Muslim.

Recently, I read Pradeep Solanki’s piece in Descant on the same subject. Solanki says, “The ethics around appropriation of voice is still unresolved, and people feel passionately on both sides of the issue, particularly when the voice involves a minority community...Personally, I don’t believe there can ever be a definitive resolution to this debate. So much of it depends upon the sensitivity of the writer, his research and her skills.”

Writing about 'New York, run by the Swiss'

Paul Vermeersch, Alissa York, Amy Lavender Harris,
Farzana Doctor & Susan G. Cole

The Atlantic has published the fourth installment of Cities of Opportunities – a joint effort by PwC and Partnership for New York City (PNYC).

The report lists “the world’s most impressive metros in a new survey of global capitals of finance, innovation and tourism,” and grades “26 cities from Stockholm to Santiago on business opportunities, culture, liveability, and innovation.”

Toronto grabs the second spot, just after New York.

My FB friend Susan Hopkinson, who’s originally from Toronto, but has made Brussels her home, explains this result thus: “Second to NYC - it makes me think of Peter Ustinov, who called Toronto ‘New York, run by the Swiss’.”

The authors of the report term Toronto as a ‘beta’ city that has all the building blocks of a superlative international city, beginning with smart ideas about sustainability and innovation.

Toronto is, indeed, a beautiful city. It’s been my home now for 34 months.

Without being immodest, I’d say that it people like me – immigrants – who make this city what it is. It’s what makes my former home Mumbai (Bombay) great, too.

The report states this explicitly. “A great city is all about growing, retaining and attracting talent. Whether it's Stockholm with its strong education system or Toronto benefiting from its smart immigration policies, getting and keeping talent matters.”

A city’s beauty is not merely its physical manifestation, howsoever impressive it may be. The beauty is in the various different ways in which its inhabitants, both old and new, make an emotional connection with it.  

As Helen Walsh, editor of TOK 6: Writing the New Toronto, says, “this shared urban environment belongs to everyone who calls it home regardless of how long they have been here, and from where they came.”

Amy Lavender Harris in Imagining Toronto says, “In the iconic Toronto novel In the Skin of a Lion, Michael Ondaatje writes, ‘Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting.’ With vivid language Ondaatje shows us how the city is conjured into being by acts of imagination that flesh out and give form to its physical and cultural terrain. As we navigate the city in restless pursuit of accommodation, commerce and community, we give the city meaning through narrative, through stories that help us chart a course between the concrete, lived city and the city as we understand, fear, remember and dream it.”

Lavender Harris was one of the authors who read at Writing Toronto, this month’s Brockton Writing Series. She read Parkdale, Scummy Parkdale from Imagining Toronto. 

The other authors in the series included Alissa York, who read from her new novel Fauna, poet Paul Vermeersch, and Farzana Doctor, who read from her new novel Six Meters of Pavement.

Susan G. Cole of Now magazine was the 'guest host' of the evening.

It was one of the most scintillating sessions in the series. 


Image from Brockton Writing Series' Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150249096960786&set=o.176001662856&type=1&theater

South Asian-Canadian sensibility

A few days ago, I saw an exquisite documentary Carmel Ashram – A brief glimpse my friend Gavin Barrett posted on Facebook.

In his trademark self-deprecating manner Gavin describes what is a remarkably lyrical and poetic memoir as a “poorly produced account” of a journey he took in January to Jalpaiguri (on the foothills of Darjeeling) to meet his Aunt June, a poet and an advertising professional-turned cloistered nun at the Carmel ashram. (See the video here: Carmel Ashram – A Brief glimpse).

Eschewing hyperbole – which wouldn’t have been out-of-place and perhaps more natural, given that the narrator was meeting his aunt after decades – Gavin’s austere and simple narrative captures the austerity of the ashram, the simple and industrious life that the nuns lead.

The film’s appeal lies in its depiction of India that is rarely seen or acknowledged – an India that has been shining even when its GDP wasn’t galloping.

The subdued and sublime sensibility of a poet surfaces effortlessly and consistently throughout the short film, both in the images and the words that he chooses to tell his story; a sensibility that is clearly a confluence of the filmmaker’s Indian past and Canadian present.

Although, I’m not sure that is his identity.

I was reminded of MG Vassanji’s essay The Postcolonial Writer: Myth Maker and Folk Historian in A Meeting of Streams: South Asian Canadian Literature (Edited by MG Vassanji and published by TSAR Publications 1985).

Vassanji explains, “...He (the writer) gives himself a history; he recreates the past, which exists only in memory and is otherwise obliterated, so fast has his world transformed... To borrow an image from physics, he creates a field space – of words, images, and landscapes – in which to work with, and install the present.”

South Asian and Indian sensibilities were among the many aspects of a discussion in which I participated a couple of weeks ago.

Travel writer and India tourism expert Mariellen Ward moderated an informal chat in which Jasmine D’Costa, Farzana Doctor, Niranjana Iyer and I shared our views with Mariellen on the rise of Indian writing in English in Canada.

The discussion was in the wake of the launch of Indian Voices 1 – an anthology of prose and poetry by Indians residing in 16 countries across the globe. The second largest number of writers in the volume – that will be released in Toronto next month – is from Canada.

Is there a South Asian or an Indian sensibility that is inherent and perceptible to writers who may be from different parts of the world but are of a South Asian or Indian descent?

In his Introduction to A Meeting of Streams: South Asian Canadian Literature, Vassanji says, “The term South Asian is a self-definition of the kind just introduced. It implies much. It refers to people who trace their ancestry to the Indian subcontinent. It includes, besides those who come to North America immediately from the countries of South Asia, the “East Indians” of the Caribbean and the “Asians” of East and South Africa.

“Obviously, then, it does not represent a single stand, a single outlook or concern in political, cultural, or literary matters. Each of the several South Asian groups comes with greatly differing immediate experience. South Asian is then perhaps a term used as one of contrast...South Asian Canadian Literature, similarly, is not intended to convey a single outlook in literary matters."

Six Meters of Pavement

It’s rare for everyone to be smiling at a book launch, and for that reason alone (although there were many other reasons, too) the launch of Farzana Doctor’s Six Meters of Pavement at Gladstone on March 7 was a colossal success. 

The place was full; many were standing in the aisle and near the bar. The evening’s highpoint was Farzana’s interview by Marc Glassman and the short narratives by volunteers in 10-1/2 stories.  

The title of the novel is intriguing. It's the distance between the homes of Ismail and Celia, the lead characters of the novel. This is Farzana’s second novel and is published four years after Stealing Nasreen. 

What I remember of the evening: Farzana said she did 14 drafts of the book before it was published.

All images from Farzana Doctor's Facebook page

Six Meters of Pavement

Farzana Doctor's second novel Six Metres of Pavement will be out on March 7.

Brockton Writers Series

Brocktown Writers Series image

Farzana Doctor is a writer. Her Stealing Nasreen is a book I intend to read before the end of 2010. 

At the launch of Canadian Voices II she invited me to the first anniversary celebrations of Brockton Writers Series. 

Fraser Sutherland's book 

It was at St. Anne's Anglican church on Gladstone Ave. I went because Fraser Sutherland was to read his latest poems from his highly acclaimed book The Philosophy of As If...

The venue for the event – St. Annes Anglican church – is an absolute marvel. 

Fraser told me that among the artists who painted the murals on the church’s walls include artists from the famous Group of Seven. Reading about the architecture of the church on its website revealed its fascinating story. 

Vivek Sharya's book

This is serendipity, and I must thank Farzana for it.

St. Anne's Anglican Church

I must also thank her for introducing me to the work of Vivek Sharya, a young writer who has written a book of short stories – God Loves Hair. The stories are about growing up in a world where his sexual orientation is an issue that seemingly acquires a larger dimension than his being.

He cast a spell with his reading and singing. His reading was especially memorable because it was accompanied by a slideshow presentation of illustrations of his stories. The stories carry original illustrations by Juliana Neufeld.  

Fraser Sutherland is a friend, mentor, editor, and a lot more. He wears his fame lightly and is embarrassingly modest for someone who is quite simply brilliant. 

He read from his book The Philosophy of As If... A poem in the collection is called Replies To a Little Girl in the Back Seat of a Car That Draws Up Beside Me at a Bus Stop on Chilly Night in March Whose Smiling Mother Calls Out ‘She Thinks You're Santa Claus'. 

Other writers and poets who read included Catherine Paquette, Michael Erickson, Hema Vyas. 

Images from Internet

Canadian Voices Volume II

Canadian Voices 2 Launching at Supermarket Art Bar from Imelda O. Suzara on Vimeo.

BookLand Press organised the launch of Canadian Voices Volume 2 at the Supermarket Art Bar on September 20. 

It was without any doubt the most rocking book launch events I have attended in Toronto in the last couple of years that I’ve been here. 

There were writers everywhere – Fraser Sutherland, Katherine Govier, Dawn Promislow, Farzana Doctor, Mariellen Ward and Kevin Lobo, among many others.

Writers and poets whose works are in the volume were there in good numbers, too. As Zohra Zoberi wrote about the event, “people were spilling out on the streets.”

Robert Morgan and Jasmine D’Costa had put together a rocking event.

..whoever said writers are boring?