Read Your Way Across Canada

Canada is a nation of stories and storytellers—from St. John’s harbour to the islands of Haida Gwaii, from our populous southern border to the land above the treeline. Project Bookmark Canada exists to mark our stories in our spaces, by placing fiction and poetry in the exact Canadian locations where literary scenes are set. 

What do you see when you visit a Bookmark? Up to 500 words from a story or poem on a poster-sized plaque that you read while standing in the characters’ footsteps. 

Project Bookmark Canada is the only national, site-specific literary exhibit in the world. It’s a one-of-a-kind Canadian innovation—a nation-wide trail of our country’s literature, so that you can read your way across Canada.

A Great Canadian Legacy

Project Bookmark Canada gratefully accepts undesignated gifts and designated gifts.

Undesignated contributions are vital to create the organizational infrastructure to support this great big, country-wide initiative. Make a gift today to blaze Canada’s literary trail.

Designated gifts are directly used to build the Bookmarks.

Either way, when you make a gift to Project Bookmark Canada, you’re joining an inspired group of readers and trailblazers who are building a legacy for all Canadians.

Project Bookmark Canada is a nationally registered charitable organization, CRA #82725 7569 RR0001. 

Charitable tax receipts are issued for all donations of $50 or more.

This Toronto Bookmark that will mark the baseball field scene from The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky, where the Christie Pits Riot took place on August 16, 1933. 

Join us for a fundraiser:
Thursday, August 15, 2019, 5:30 p.m. – 7 p.m.
Jazz Bistro, 3rd floor bar and rooftop patio
251 Victoria Street, Toronto.

An unveiling at Christie Pits will follow on
Friday, August 16, 2019, at 1 p.m.

Karen X. Tulchinksy (aka Aren) takes us inside the life of an immigrant Jewish family through the war years and into the early 1950s, creating a stunning fictionalization of a defining moment for a family, a city, and a continent struggling with ideas of freedom, tolerance, and identity in a world broken by war. On a sweltering night at Christie Pits Park, after weeks of tension, four youths unfurled a white sheet emblazoned with a large black swastika during a softball game. A group of Jewish youths struggled to capture the flag, setting off the largest riot in Toronto’s history, involving fifteen thousand people and injuring hundreds.

Funded by the City of Toronto and individual donors.

(Read the News Release.)

Unveiling in Toronto on August 16, 2019 at 3p.m., corner of Spadina Avenue and College Street.

Milton Acorn (1923-1986), known as “The People's Poet,” was born in Charlottetown, PEI. He was a radical personality with strong left-wing views and working-class sentiments. Dedicated to class struggle, Acorn peopled his poems with working men and women and paid unceasing tribute to them.

“Milton Acorn’s poem Knowing I Live in a Dark Age (Contact Press, 1963) is a call to arms in order to create a future that benefits all human life, and not just those with economic and social privilege.” Benjamin Lord, Critical Analysis: Seeking Social Justice: The Call for Change in Milton Acorn’s “Knowing I Live in a Dark Age” (http://www.stu-acpa.com/milton-acorn.html)

Milton Acorn biographer, Richard Lemm, and UPEI’s Lee Ellen Pottie are holding a fundraiser in support of this Bookmark in the summer of 2019 in Charlottetown. Date TBA.

Funded by the City of Toronto and individual donors.

On September 28, 2019, Rosemary Griebel’s poem will be unveiled as Alberta’s first Bookmark on the Canadian Literary Trail, at Loft 112, 8th Avenue SE, a literary and creative hub in the East Village. “Walking with Walt Whitman Through Calgary’s Eastside on a Winter Day” is published in Griebel’s poetry collection Yes (Frontenac House, 2011).

“When we first heard about Project Bookmark Canada and the Ondaatje Bookmark, and its work of commemorating locations where literary works are set, we were excited by the idea. Canadian landscapes, cities, and towns truly are the stuff of great literature.  Project Bookmark makes that point by physically marking the places that have touched the hearts and imaginations of writers and readers.” 

~ Glasswaters Foundation

In 2018 and 2019 Project Bookmark Canada will unveil four bilingual Bookmarks that feature writing by acclaimed authors Jean Little, Michel Tremblay, Danny Schur with Rick Chafe, and Gregory Scofield, in Toronto, Montréal, Winnipeg and Batoche. Your contribution will help us create immersive exhibits for these Bookmarks commemorating historic events across Canada.

Read more about our anniversary Bookmarks, made possible in part by the Government of Canada with financial assistance from the Commemorate Canada Program of the Department of Canadian Heritage. 

Unveiling in Batoche, Saskatchewan, in November 2019 (Date TBA)

Louis Riel is one of the most controversial figures in Canadian history. During his short life, he headed a provisional government that led to the founding of Manitoba, and in efforts to preserve Métis rights and culture, he led resistances against the Canadian government of the day. Project Bookmark Canada commemorates the 175th anniversary of Riel’s birth (1844) with Gregory Scofield’s poem “The Sewing Circle,” which is narrated by an older woman to her fellow mothers and wives on the last day of the 1885 Resistance, at the Battle of Batoche.

In November 2019, join Project Bookmark Canada, Friends of Batoche Historic Site and the Gabriel Dumont Institute for the unveiling of bilingual plaques, a reading of the passage by the author, and commemorations marking Métis veterans.