The trend is toward the generic and impersonal. Mergers and amalgamations reduce options and leave us all -- wherever we live -- wearing the same clothes, watching the same programs and movies, reading the same articles and working the same jobs. Even the occasional celebration of "diversity" comes across as perfunctory -- kids in suspenders and clogs doing a dance nobody remembers while the elders tear up and calculate the exact amount of time until they are back on their IKEA couches enjoying the Magnum P.I. marathon.

So there's something sad, almost elegiac, about Prairie Fire's 250-page special issue entitled Winnipeg in Fiction. George Melnyk, in an essay on the 1957 John Marlyn book Under the Ribs of Death -- the classic rags-to-riches "novel of ethnic Winnipeg" -- puts it this way: "The struggling world of the melting pot/mosaic that gave Winnipeg its mythic character has evaporated into history or, at least, moved to suburbia." Unfortunately, insights such as Melnyk's are rare in the journal. While providing an excellent chronicle of early Winnipeg writing, the issue ignores contemporary writers who must somehow confront the bland, pureed world Winnipeg now finds itself a part of.

Still in Winnipeg, I turn to the fantastic, free monthly zine Tart to find out how that new generation of writers is encountering its city. Postmodern pundit Tartar Decaf doesn't let me down with his rumination on the way that Winnipeg put a new face on old neighbourhoods in preparation for hosting last summer's Pan-American Games. Decaf moves with skill and hilarity from urban whitewashing to expatriate Winnipegger Tyler Brule's Wallpaper* formula of creating "a neat, orderly, modern world with just a touch of postmodern kitsch for the expression of personal taste." These are the kinds of connections that we should all learn to make: the way global conformity seeps into the minds of the city planners and ends up changing how and where we live.

If there is any place in Canada where rugged individualism and a sense of community identity still thrive, you'd think it would be the island province of Newfoundland. The literary magazine Fiddlehead tested that theory when they devoted their 201st issue to new writing from the rock. But the first three stories -- the best in the magazine -- could have come from pretty much anywhere. Of course, there is a considerable amount of what you might call traditional writing in the issue -- mysterious, magic babies washing up on the shore, men disappearing on sealing hunts, that sort of thing. But these stories seem even more rigid and contrived than the contemporary fare -- they are like antique-style furniture, pre-aged to satisfy our need for pre-digested history.

Perhaps identity can only be found in the little ironies of everyday life that both preserve and chip away at our sense of ourselves. The Brooklyn zine Here You Are arrives with a tasty picture of a loaf of Wonder Bread on the cover. Not surprisingly, the stories inside speak to the individualist's solitary struggle -- standing on the edge of the highway as the Mercedes SUVs whoosh by on their way to the Price Club. Tim Morris lives in the suburban enclave of Arlington, Texas, and contributes a lengthy, very funny essay on mail and mail boxes. After chronicling his battle to protect his mailbox from teen destruction and Have You Seen Me? missing kid flyers, he finally concludes that getting the mail isn't all it's cracked up to be: "The longest walk people ever take is the ten yards from their garage to the mailbox," he notes. "They gather up the AOL diskettes, close the box with a sigh, and disappear into their garage again."

Morris' lucid reflections remind us that only through confronting the absurdities of living in our prefab world can we give it what it most lacks -- a human face.