By Anna Bowness
My best friend at school was Mary Clare. Together, we lurked and skulked around downtown London, Ontario, wearing disobedient outfits and disdaining the place we were in. This was our hometown, and so it was a place to be gotten away from, to be left and never looked back at.
Now, we are grown up and free, but Mary Clare is still there. She’s happy to be there, happy to keep an eye on things and disdain them when it’s called for, happy to sink in and settle down, happy that she didn’t jump ship.
I left and came to Toronto, and now practically everyone I meet is from somewhere else, has mutinied their hometown. Matt came from Kingsville, Ontario, fleeing its graveyard calm for the safe noise of the city; Lori left Wolfville, Nova Scotia, at the continent’s edge, to get closer to its warm middle. Todd and Marlena came from Scarborough and Etobicoke respectively, falling from Toronto’s satellites to its centre of gravity as soon as they could. But we still talk about the places we abandoned, and sometimes we obsess on them-Matt and me both write stories that have Southwestern Ontario in the background, looming and haunting and making its mark. Those of us who ran away are, we admit, still looking back, and are, in fact, still buying bus tickets back. What confuses and intrigues me now is the hold our hometowns have, still, on those of us who left them.
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A hometown is a place with its own special dot on the map. It can be tiny and nowhere, like Rosebud, Alberta, or it can be medium-sized and in between everywhere, like London or Winnipeg or Windsor. There are places that people from small towns imagine to be cultural utopias, like Toronto or Montreal. We imagine that if you are from there, you can’t relate to the peculiar genre of torment that a hometown offers, since you grew up in a place with its own arts council, film festival, and celebrity graffiti artists. Culture came looking for you; it stalked you in the alleys and jumped out at you from the stages of enormous, civic-funded stadia and music halls. No matter how marginal and unpopular you were, there was still someone else weirder than you in town, and no matter how unlikely and perverse your interests were, there was somewhere you could go to express or exploit them. We figure that if you grew up in Vancouver or Montreal you probably have a thing or two to complain about, but they’re different, more urbane things than the rest of us have to complain about. We are probably wrong, but this is part of the smalltown-hometown victim complex we have.
A hometown, wherever it actually is, comforts you and makes you cry at the same. It sends you screaming, and then lures you screaming back. It conspicuously lacks all or most of the cultural stimuli you think you need to survive. And it forces you to try to make your own culture. This might take the form of overzealous punk ballads about conformity at your Club Monaco high school. It might be morbid, angry zines about the sins of the county bourgeoisie. It might be impenetrable but earnest Super-8 videos of your suburban crescent as it descends into the Hamburger Helper dinner hour. In the big city there are zines about different kinds of angst-about things like punk and straight edge and goth and sneaking into to see bands that would never, ever, come to places whose claim to fame is a giant nickel or a big wooden apple visible from the highway. Somewhere out there is a beautiful big city zine of poetry and pictures depicting plastic bags caught in trees. Urban zinesters can afford to focus on these harmless minutiae because they don’t have to worry about the real monsters of cultural alienation. Toronto zines can coyly muse on the vagaries of a charmed urban existence; hometown zines have to start with the first, most fundamental needs of the growing artist brains that make them. A hometown zine rings with claustrophobia, and addresses the loneliness of the area code. It’s different than a big city zine; it’s more tenacious. And it has a way of getting out, across the county lines, by Canada Post or by any means necessary.
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Hometowns cause culture, and they do it from a distance as well as from up close. There’s the art people make when they still feel trapped in the place they’re from, there’s the art they make when they grow up and have free will and decide to stay in their hometown, and there’s the art they make once they grow up and escape. Each condition makes for a different kind of art, but all of it is driven by the ambivalence that a hometown naturally breeds. The ongoing arm-wrestle between the love and the hate we feel for these places is a reliable source of inspiration.
In the 1990s, there was an unlikely surge of cultural production in Kamloops, BC. For some reason, zines started pouring out of there at a Torontonian rate, and the stuff that came out was good. Kamloops inspired and facilitated things like Yum and Smudge and Adversaria and Thee Rift, all of which are worth a look even if you don’t care about the new Value Village that just opened up on Seymour Street. A similar phenomenon happened in Halifax (a capital city with hometown cred) when I was living there: the zine table at the Khyber Centre for the arts was a burgeoning mess of productivity, with new things appearing daily until the piles were as tall as people-they had no choice but to organize a zine fair there. London, Ontario has an unfair share of smart writers who threaten to leave but who stick around anyway and make good things like The London Reader; Brampton has so many fabulous local bands that it’s starting to look suspicious. And Saskatchewan, of all places, puts out more zines than its bigger, brawnier brothers on either side.
And there are thousands of examples like these ones: every town that has a stapler and a photocopier has someone making zines in the basement. There are, of course, more zines and more books and more bands and more 3-D sculptural experiments coming out of Toronto and Montreal than out of Beebe, Quebec or Carrot River, Saskatchewan, but that’s not what’s interesting. What’s interesting and, in fact, miraculous, is that so much culture comes out of the Carrot Rivers and Beebes at all, and then that what comes out of them is so often so artful and good. So much of Canadian literature seems to come from its barren wheatfields and craggy maritime rims; so many of its filmmakers seem to emerge from these same landscapes, and so many of its singers and rockstars have something to say about the suburban or subarctic or Saskatchewanian tempo of their humble beginnings.
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John K. Samson, the lead singer and the songwriter for the Weakerthans, has contributed more to the discussion about hometown ambivalence than anyone else I can think of. He’s from Winnipeg, and a funny thing about him is that he still lives there, even though he’s a grown up and can do whatever he wants. He wrote a song with a chorus that says “I Hate Winnipeg”. What’s it about? It’s about how much he loves Winnipeg. He could deny it, but listen to these words:
Late afternoon, another day is nearly done.
A darker gray is breaking through a lighter one.
That hollow hurried sound of feet on polished floor,
And in the Dollar Store the clerk is closing up,
And counting Loonies, trying not to say “I hate Winnipeg.”
And up above us all, leaning into sky,
Our Golden Business Boy will watch the North End die,
And sing “I love this town,” then let his arcing wrecking ball proclaim,
“I hate Winnipeg.”
John Samson hates Winnipeg so much that he has made some of the loveliest poetry in rock and roll out of it. He hates it so much that he has been singing about it for years and has worked with other artists-like Clive Holden who directed the Trains of Winnipeg (see film reviews), and Marcel Dzama, the darling of Winnipeg’s Royal Art Lodge and the artist who did the last Weakerthans cover-to immortalize the place. John Samson hates Winnipeg so much that he moved back there, and so much that he’s built up a vast stash of inadvertent love notes to the city, and has mythologized it in such a way that it sits beside Paris and Las Vegas on the map.
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Years after I had left London and thought for sure I was over it, I wrote a little story. It was for a writing workshop in Montreal, and I almost didn’t hand it in because it was so mean-so unabashedly anti-London, so callously critical and such an ugly portrait. But when I read it out loud, it was met with sighs and ahhs and fond, knowing looks. What a sweet story, people said, about such a sweet little town. No, I tried to explain, I hate this place! This story is mean! But it seemed that in the process of explaining how much I hated my hometown, I had accidentally confessed how much I love it.
So you can see a trajectory of hometown feelings: when you’re there and you have no choice, you create things that offer scathing critiques of the place and talk about how much you want out. When you grow up and stay there because you want to, your scathing critiques get a little more objective and gracious. And when you grow up and leave, all the stormy scorn you had for the place gets tinged with an undeniable fondness, or nostalgia, or something resembling love that we’re reluctant to admit.
Real Canlit seems rife with this same paradox: so much of our canon is about where we came from and why we had to get out of there as fast as we could. Remember Margaret Laurence? The Diviners, cursed though it was for being on my grade nine syllabus, held a special place in my heart because I learned from it that people everywhere-not just in London-were languishing. Its sad protagonist lived in Manawaka, a nowheresville in Manitoba. She writhed inside its straightjacket county lines and felt like the air there was poisoning her, like every day spent there was a day lost. She got out, I recall, and went to Winnipeg, and then had the good sense to get to Toronto. The rest of the novel is denouement: trips back home, each one for a sad reason-to bury a relative, to right a wrong, to confront something or to pick up some pieces. I can’t remember details from that book, just the suffocating atmosphere of the hometown and the eerie, wistful, sad, fond, awful, lovesick pity that the narrator felt for it. Margaret Laurence felt like I did, and like a lot of us do: she got out, but she never ever really actually left.
Joel Gibb, lead singer of the exuberant and Toronto-identified Hidden Cameras, got out of Mississauga. He made a heartbreakingly gorgeous album about it, called Mississauga Goddamn. The name is a tribute to Nina Simone’s sad and brutal critique of American race policy, Mississippi Goddamn, and Joel Gibb means every word of it, too. He complains about it thusly:
Mississauga goddamn
Bears the treachery of my own man
I’ll be wearing my disguise
Until I rid my life of Mississauga goddamn.
Mississauga people
Carry the weight of common evil
And go about their lives
With a whisper and a whine about Mississauga goddamn.
Anybody who was gay and in suburbia knows what he’s talking about; anybody who was anything and in suburbia probably knows what he’s talking about too, because the grievances of one hometown victim often sound like the grievances of them all. It’s sad but it’s beautiful: if Mississauga hadn’t been so goddamned Mississaugan, there would be one fantastic and lovely record that might not have got made.
Shawn Micallef is a writer who comes from a tiny suburb of Windsor and now writes for big-city publications like eye Weekly and Spacing magazine. In his writing, he is preoccupied with the personalities and intricacies of cities, and this gives him a good view of his own ambivalence about his hometown. On his weblog, he says things like this:
Windsor was full of good stuff when I was a kid. It was a fine place, full of good buildings like the YMCA and good signage like at Lazares Furs. Now we’ve been left with parking lots and empty buildings and vulgar displays of shitty cool in the form of dancing hot peppers. Peppers Bar is a particular contrast with my old Windsor. On weekends, if you walk by the lineup waiting to get in the place, you can be certain you’ll be verbally accosted by the Abercrombie and Fitch date rap mob lined up out front. They come from Michigan, mostly for the lower drinking age, but maybe they stay for the wet T-shirt contests. This used to be the Windsor Birks store, where blue haired ladies took home their blue boxes filled with blue tissue paper that held jewelry or whatever it was they were into. I don’t know where the blue haired ladies go now. Maybe they get rides out to the Costco.
Shawn Micallef sees all of Windsor’s decline and decrepitude, and mourns and scorns its fall, but he holds fast onto all its broken pieces: they’re the documents of his lifetime, whatever shape they’re in.
Emily Schultz was the editor of this magazine before me. She grew up in Wallaceburg, Ontario, which is stuck between America and nowhere, in Ontario. Emily edited a book called Outskirts: Women Writing from Small Places. It showcased writers who are cloistered inside city limits of nowheresevilles all over Canada. One story from the collection, “Carmen: the Idea of Red” by Melanie Little, illustrates a tug of war between love and hate for northern Ontario, where the author comes from: “Even this far north, the snow is spiked, peppered with stones. You know because they hold you down in it, rub your face in the sharp sidewalk mess. You buck up, rearing, and icicles sprout from your nostrils in the minus-forty-degree air…. But your mom sometimes says: This is the hardest place on earth. Before you were born, the American astronauts came up here to practice walking on the moon.”
Emily, the editor of Outskirts and also a writer, says the same ambivalence applies to her own work. “Most of my work is influenced or set in the flat, rustbelt landscape of southwestern Ontario. I love the emptiness of it, the way that you can drive through it and everything is accessible to your eyes: every house on the horizon, every telephone pole toothpicking the land. I lived in Virginia for a while after I finished school and even though I felt my biggest success was having ‘made it out,’ I remember also just wanting to get home to see the way the light seeps through the whole of Kent County like sulphur. Living far away in a lush rolling state, that was what I missed most. In writing about the places we come from, we express a deep love, even when we are writing about the problems of poverty, backwater attitudes, violence, or illness.”
Even though ambivalence sounds like what you get when you’ve stopped caring, I think it’s one of the most creative forces there is: it’s the nearly unbearable tension between two equal and opposite feelings. If you love and hate something in equal parts, you have to act; that’s not a situation you can let sit for too long. The things that make us ambivalent are the things that make us make art.
Winnipeg, Windsor, Moose Jaw, Annapolis Royal: these places are all roiling with paradoxes and mixed emotions. It’s because hometowns are containers for all the other things we feel ambivalent about: our parents, for example, or our high schools or our adolescent selves. Our first time having sex, our next-door neighbours, our teacher from grade five, our friend who got pregnant, our friend’s weird mom who let us do drugs in her house, our dog who ran away and then died, the inauspicious storefront where we loitered with our friends, the cemetery where we got arrested for trespassing, the park where our dad took us for bike rides on Sundays, the pool where we cried through our swimming lessons instead of learning how to swim, the donut store where we ran into our grade-five choir teacher after the night we did acid for the first time and had sex for the first time and didn’t enjoy either one of them at all, the hill where we tobogganed and where some of us broke bones, the fences we climbed, the windows we peered surreptitiously into, the sidewalk cracks we learned by heart, the hospital where we candystriped with Mary Clare and competed for the affections of Mark Darling who, come to think of it, was totally gay.
Our hometowns have all of this to answer for! All these little episodes from our childhoods-and our childhoods themselves, of course-are the sites of such searing ambivalence that they could almost tear us in two. A hometown has to house these feelings, and support their cumulative weight. That’s why, I think, hometowns are spawning grounds for art. They cause the kind of art that’s inevitable and organic, the kind that boils up and makes us make things, if only to quell the turmoil of our mixed emotions. Hometowns make us make angry zines while we live there, however long that turns out to be, and they make us revisit them again and again, in real life and in stories or songs or paintings, long after we’ve escaped.