Is it only a gathering, this city? Reference points that transmogrify the landscape? Is it a dream-this city, that subsists between us–from which some wake hungry holding their mittened fingers out for change?

One could argue that all the great cities in the world are walking cities, and to walk a city is to read it, and once one has read it, one has to write it, and once that is done enough times the city turns into a dream-city: it becomes permanent in the shared imagination of its inhabitants–despite their restless departures and returns from the actual city, their varying and renewed perceptions of it, and the inevitable process of fragmentation, transformation, and decay that is the "natural" law of urban life.

Representation by the population

Edmonton on Location, a collection of local literary musings, from essays to poems, owes its existence to its editor, Heather Zwicker, taking a walk. Her off-the-beaten-path encounter with some old dates etched onto the Pumphouse and Turnbine Hall was, literally, the writing on the wall. It pointed to her lack of knowledge about Edmonton’s history, and sobered her to the dearth of literary representations of the city.

"The thing about a city being unwritten," says Zwicker, "[is that] you have no idea what you’re looking at."

The resulting collection is replete with a desire to engage the material traces of history and write Edmonton into a literary existence, giving it a permanent place in the imagination of readers.

"Excitement and delight are the big things I would like to produce," says Zwicker. Her own ambivalence toward the city growing up was "due in a profound way to the absence of representation of Edmonton as an interesting or an exciting place to be." With the reader’s pleasure in mind, Zwicker invited the fresh voices of emerging writers, challenged academic contributors to write in a popular idiom, and included journalistic pieces filled with engrossing details and events of daily life, such as: a portrait of one of our 1000 urban-jackrabbits; the salvage and relocation of a mural originally painted to celebrate the transformation of drug den into a drop-in centre for women and transgendered individuals; the search for the site of Club 70, a ’70s downtown gay and lesbian bar.

Language itself is what is exciting about Dianne Chisholm’s opening piece that traces her love of the city through the emerging story of her mother’s life. Consider the seductive rhythm of these fragmented sentences: "My place begins making sense to me. City of maternal pre-history. Living on. Not Deadmonton, but Delphi."

It is also hard to resist Lisa Gregoire’s hardboiled and hilarious attempt at hotel-life in four of our city’s "fading grottos [that] were depositories for decades of local toil and sweat between the Klondike and karaoke." She recounts afternoons spent yakking with the old men who are the custodians of the hotels’ histories.

Mark Hiemstra also deserves notice. The only short story in the collection, "How To Breath Again," is a completely engrossing moment-by-moment account of a cab ride through the city as told by a likable but heartbreakingly desperate young man trying to score enough crack to numb himself to the complex factors of his displaced existence.

The Real Deal

There are, of course, the inclusion of more familiar landmarks and stories; "You need your MacDonald hotels in there as a common text that people know," says Zwicker, "but it’s the intimacy of these smaller places, and the heartbreaking absence of the one’s that aren’t here anymore, that I wanted to get at people."

Setting the big against the small: the known names against the less familiar; the small stories inside the big narratives (did you know that Leonard Cohen wrote the words to "Sisters of Mercy" at the Hotel Mac?)–it’s this contrast that makes Zwicker’s book dynamic. She was aware that putting these multiple perspectives together in a collection "where they would rub up against each other, not all together easily" would create tensions, but says she was "anxious to let those tensions exist and to let people’s voices come forward without overly managing them."

When I ask Zwicker what defines a "real city," a question Edmontonians are forever absorbed with, she replies that it is, exactly, this complexity of voices. "A real city is a place where people’s lives unfold. And if you believe that what is really important in the world can happen in the lives of everyday people, it follows that Edmonton is a real city by virtue of the complexity and dynamism of everyday lives here; and it’s stories about those everyday lives and experiences of the city that I hope has been central to this book."