Miranda Hill fan club

(file under - I think I'm going to start one)

Hamilton writer and Journey Prize finalist, Hill is guest editing The Afterword all this week. Two recent pieces of interest:

• "Reading here," about her creation of Project Bookmark Canada: "One day, I realized that my walks were covering the same ground as the books I had been reading. I felt that I was stepping into the stories, and my experiences with the books and with the places were suddenly and forever altered."
• "Since you asked…," about breaking down the subtexts in the question she commonly gets about what it's like to be married to Lawrence Hill (yeah, that Lawrence Hill). An excerpt: "How do you put up with all those moods and pouting? If a plumber storms around and is generally miserable to his wife and children, we call him a jerk. We don’t say, “You’ll have to excuse him. It’s all because of his plumber’s soul.” And plumbers don’t get to say, “There’s only room in this family for one plumber, and I’m it!” Thus, writers who do this are also just jerks. Happily, I’m not married to one of them. I hope Larry isn’t either."
  

Project Bookmark plaque in Ottawa

I almost forgot to post these pics I took of Ottawa's first (one hopes, of many!) Project Bookmark plaque. It is located on the north-east side of Bronson Bridge, or more accurately, on the grassy knoll between the bridge and the off-ramp. I snapped these pics on a recent run down to Dow's Lake.

Here is a shot of both the French and English plaques (hadn't thought about the bilingual nature of our plaques here until I saw them!)...



And here's a mostly legible (click to make it bigger) close up of the English one:



Now, seriously, not to be a jerk, and I know Garbo Laughs is set in Ottawa South, but it struck me as a bit funny that the quote is about Laurier Bridge, when the plaque is located near Bronson Bridge. Potentially confusing for the literary tourist!

Ottawa's getting its first Project Bookmark plaque next Tuesday!

I almost missed this story:

"On October 26, Ottawa will mark its place in Canada’s literary landscape when a plaque bearing a portion of Elizabeth Hay’s Garbo Laughs is unveiled in the neighbourhood of Old Ottawa South. Members of the public are invited to the unveiling ceremony that will take place at 1 p.m. on the West side of Bronson Place (near Fulton) at Colonel By Drive, on the South Side of the Canal, just East of the Bronson Street Bridge."

More information about Project Bookmark is available on their website. Ours is the sixth (not the fifth, as reported above) bookmark in Canada. The others, in reverse chronological order of installation, are:

• The text of the poem “Essentialist” from poet Ken Babstock’s Trillium Award-winning collection, Airstream Land Yacht, on St. George Street at Bloor, across the road from the St. George subway station, in Toronto.
• An excerpt of author Anne Michaels' novel, Fugitive Pieces, at the Northwest corner of College and Manning streets, in Toronto.
• The entire text of one of the late Bronwen Wallace’s poems, “Mexican Sunsets” (from Common Magic) in downtown Kingston, on the Northwest corner of Princess and Clergy streets.
• Approximately 500 words from author Terry Griggs’s novel, Rogues’ Wedding, depicting a scene that takes place at the Owen Sound harbour, on the exact site where the plaque was installed.
• A passage from Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion, installed at the Bloor Street Viaduct, in Toronto, in April 2009 (pictured below and at right).
  

London's literary landscape - on your iPhone

Well, I just might have to get a smart phone for my next visit: there is a free Get London Reading app, which "brings the locale you are in at any given moment to literary life."

We should be doing this in North America! I know Toronto has Project Bookmark, and another project, the name of which escapes me, where you can dial a number to hear snippets about local history on that spot, but we need an app!