Canada is a country of stories and storytellers. Our geography and architecture serve as locations for a rich variety of tales. When you walk through this country’s villages, towns and cities and explore the buildings and neighbourhoods, you are walking on fabled ground.
How is your experience of St. Urbain heightened or altered after reading Mordecai Richler? What does seeing Winnipeg through the eyes of a character from a Carol Shields story do to your own vision of familiar spaces? How do the docks of St. John’s shift after reading the novels of Michael Crummey? Now imagine that you could read passages from these stories while standing in the exact spot where the scenes are set.
In Toronto, picture standing on the Bloor Street Viaduct and reading about a nun who falls into the abyss at the end of the unfinished bridge and is caught by a man suspended underneath, from Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion. Or reading Dennis Lee’s classic children’s poem, “The Cat and the Wizard” to a young visitor while marvelling at the castle itself. On Grace Street, imagine walking with Jacob from Anne Michael’s Fugitive Pieces, as he sings the songs of his childhood into the summer night, heard by other immigrants, silent and invisible, on their dark porches.
Project Bookmark Canada exists to bring these written narratives beyond the page and into our physical spaces. Through a series of permanent markers bearing a fragment of text, Project Bookmark Canada reveals where our real and imagined landscapes merge, allowing the writers’ words, images and characters to stir us (residents and visitors, pilgrims or passersby) in the very locations where the stories take place.
