Good Night, Descant–a Literary Gemstone for Four Decades

An old-fashioned newspaper columnist once told me that writing a daily column meant sacrificing his day to thinking up the next column. “It’s a bitch of a mistress,” he said. “She takes up every waking minute.” I don’t know what running a literary magazine entails exactly but I can’t help thinking it, too, is a bitch of a mistress, and that brings me to Karen Mulhallen who celebrated the last issue of Descant Magazine tonight with her staff and a packed house at the Supermarket in Toronto’s Kensington Market.

Karen has run Descant for over 40 years; as its editor-in-chief, she thought up the concepts, she found the staff and the funds (often from her own pocket) and she created a Descant community based on writers, artists, and people who walked in off the street and who had never heard of a literary magazine before along with dozens of young interns who often became Descant contributors after they left. Like many literary journals, Descant was not just a magazine; it was a community. But I don’t know any other journal that lets an intern become the production assistant who puts out the issue. Or that was so open to new writers. When I was teaching creative writing at York University, I used to tell my students to be sure to send their work there because the editors were watching for new talent and not just publishing their friends on the board.

Descant was also notable for its design flair and for its appreciation of creativity in general. Tonight Karen said the human brain was a cabinet of curiosities (the theme of its last issue, Number 167) and she told us she’d wanted the magazine to be a picture of the human imagination.

My own connection to Descant goes back to 1978 when Karen published an excerpt from my first novel, The Biggest Modern Woman of the World, about the giantess Anna Swan. It was my first literary publication and Karen ran the excerpt from my then unpublished book under the heading, A legend is born. I’d never met a literary magazine editor before or asked for funding support, which is what writers often ask of literary editors. So at my first meeting with Karen in her glamorous apartment on Washington Avenue near the University of Toronto, I was awestruck. She asked me how much money I wanted and I said, As much as you’ve got! She laughed and scolded me. That wasn’t the way to ask for money, she said, and told me to come back with a carefully worded budget. I did what she said. As many, many writers before or since have done.

Descant, number 167, is on sale at some bookstores and it is the last issue of a literary gemstone. For those who want to say good-bye to the magazine there will be a wrap part March 25 at Revival in downtown Toronto. The photograph here is of Kay Armatage, U of T prof and former TIFF programmer, reading from her essay about women’s film festivals in this issue.

Thank you, Karen, and thank you Descant for helping not only my generation but many generations that followed to find our voices.

Talking to Orillia Writers on February 22–Come if you’re in the hood

I’m giving a writing workshop in Orillia on February 22. Come if you’re in the area. You can find out more information from The Writers’ Community of Simcoe County http://simcoewriters.ca/simcoe/news/ Here’s some of the information about my workshop published on their website

IS YOUR WRITING DEAD OR ALIVE?

It’s a compelling issue in the craft of writing. This February 22nd Toronto novelist Susan Swan will focus on how to make your work live on the page. Swan has been a published author and creative writing teacher for over 30 years and she can show you some of the professional techniques she’s used in her own fiction, which has been published to acclaim in sixteen countries.

BONUS: WCSC Workshop participants are encouraged to send up to 12 pages of their own prose two weeks before the workshop.

More information about writing is available on her website www.susanswanonline.com Be sure not to miss her website blogs on Anxiety Pancakes: Life in the Middle of a Novel.

Bio: Journalist, feminist, novelist, activist, teacher, Susan Swan’s impact on the Canadian literary and political scene has been far-reaching. Her critically acclaimed fiction has been published in sixteen countries. Susan Swan’s new novel, The Western Light, was published in the fall of 2012. It shares a narrator with her international bestseller, The Wives of Bath. The Western Light was nominated as one of the best books of 2012 fiction and non-fiction by the Ontario Library Association. A feature film based on The Wives of Bath was released in the summer of 2001 in the U.S. and Canada under the title Lost and Delirious. The film was written by Judith Thompson and starred Mischa Barton, Piper Parabo and Jessica Pare. It was shown in 32 countries and picked for premiere selection at Sundance and Berlin Film Festival 2001.

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Join Us For Early & Traditional Christmas Dinner from my Novel, The Western Light

OK, I’m cooking Christmas dinner early with Sang Kim for about 40 special guests at the Wind Up Cafe. The meal is based on Big Louie’s traditional Christmas dinner in my novel The Western Light. Big Louie is Mouse’s grandmother and she tops things off by cooling sparkling Burgundy in the snow.

So if you want to get Christmas over with, or if you want to bone up on how to make perfect hard sauce and unlumpy Christmas gravy, be sure to join Sang and I as we cook up our feast. We talk, you see, as we cook, and you watch and eat. The price for the meal is $45 and the time is six thirty on Dec 3. There is only space for 42 guests so sign up right now if you’re interested and let us sock some Christmas cheer your way.

Why We Should Stop Worrying about Taxes and Figure Out the Best Way to Spend Them

I was struck by something Joe Cressy said last night at an informal gathering at the house of my friends, architect Robert Chang and writer Karen Connelly. Joe is pictured above with his wife Nina. He is a candidate for Ward 20 in our city election and last night he told us how he was being portrayed in some of the media as “a tax and spend” guy–as if he was going into politics to empty our pockets until we don’t have a sou left to our names.

Then he laughed. And that’s what’s great about Joe Cressy. He has the confidence to see how bogus the tax and spend criticism is.

Taxes are inevitable, he pointed out. We need them for our schools and our roads and transit system and for child care and clean air and water. We can’t avoid taxes so the important issue is how wisely we spend them. Government spending is not a social evil, in other words. It’s how we take care of ourselves and our communities. It is, in fact, the foundation of democracy, and we need to spend our tax money well so a city like Toronto can be a creative, prosperous place to live.

I like someone who says the truth when it needs to be said. For too long, it feels like Torontonians (myself included) have dwelt inside a bubble of magical thinking, expecting our roads and schools to be good and not wanting to pay for the things that make them that way. Well, time to grow up, huh? Let’s stop being swayed by accusations of government over spending and examine how it can be done better.

The other thing I liked about Joe Cressy’s views on Toronto is his belief in our waterfront. Right now the number one thing tourists come to see in Toronto is the Eaton Centre. Number two is our waterfront. “Wouldn’t it be great,” Joe asked. “If our waterfront was number one?”

Yes, wouldn’t it? And that means not expanding the island airport so planes dominate our harbour. Joe says the Billy Bishop expansion plans will harm the wonderful rebuilding of the waterfront that is going on right now. More planes will make it harder than it already is to enjoy the new promenades and civic spaces.

As you can see, Joe is also down to earth. Intelligent, sincere and honest. Maybe that’s the definition of authenticity.If you want to read more of his views see his recent article in Now, Progressive is not a four-letter word http://www.nowtoronto.com/news/story.cfm?content=199716

Summer is over and I’m on the Writers’ Blog Tour

My friend, the author Lauren B. Davis has tag teamed me for the next Writers Blog Tour. This summer, I’ve been isolated on a remote rock in the Georgian Bay, away from the online world but here we go again–the digital bliss of interconnection. I’m to answer the four questions below and then ‘tag’ two other writers to pick up the challenge:

1. What am I working on?

I’ve just finished my third draft of my new novel, The Dead Celebrities Club. It’s about a white collar criminal (born in Toronto) who runs a dead pool in an upstate New York jail. The idea is to pick the celebrity who will die before the other ones do, and there is a prison jackpot for the lucky winner.

2. How does my new novel differ from others of its genre?

I can’t think of another novel that resembles The Dead Celebrities Club and I’m not sure how to classify it. Maybe the safest thing to say is that it’s a portrait of a certain kind of individual, the sly fox, who is always up for a new way to make money, an optimist who is out of touch with his feelings until the events he sets in motion catch up to him.

3. Why do I write what I write?

In Heroines of the Sexual Gothic, my recent theatre show with the Billie Hollies (an all female Gothic Noir musical group), I talked about how the protagonists in my novels represent a part of me that I repressed when I was younger because exposing that side of myself would have been dangerous or humiliating. But The Dead Celebrities Club has nothing at all to do with this theory of mine. So there you go!

4. How does my writing process work?

After I think and think and think and after I do a lot of research and make notes on a huge drawing pad, listing things like the ten most important scenes, and each character’s three favourite words, I dictate chapters in my first draft on an audio file. My assistant or myself types up the chapters. Then I revise until I’m blue in the face. For me, writing involves discovery although I usually have a bare bones outline that I use to start myself off. I don’t write about what I know exactly. I believe in writing about what obsesses you, and what you know will inevitably come into the story.

Have you heard of the Writers’ Blog Tour? (Google it, and you’ll see all the various writers on the Tour.) Each writer tagged to join the Tour posts answers to the same four questions on their blog. They might post answers all at once, or one at a time, whatever suits. They also provide links to the posts of writers who came before. To see what Lauren wrote, check out her blog below. And to see what the other authors wrote on their blogs, google the great Writers Blog Tour.

Lauren B. Davis, Author: Writers’ Blog Tour – Why do I Write What I do? Question #1

The Raw Intimate Experience of Reading the New (unromantic) Romantics

Karl Ove Knausgård image by Kjetil Ree (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Karl Ove Knausgaard is coming to the IFOA in October. Be sure to check him out. He has turned fiction on its head by using real names in his fictional work. I talked more about this in my essay in the Globe this spring: Here is the old unedited draft I wrote for the Globe, warts and all:

Growing older, it’s not only the wrinkles I notice, but a new sensibility created by a generation of younger writers. If I felt paranoid, their sensibility could rock my boat. But I love new frontiers so for me, their writing is a reason to get excited.

One of the leaders of the new writing, a generation I call “the new (unromantic) romantics,” is Karl Ove Knausgaard, a Norwegian novelist who has created an explicit and powerful autobiographical fiction that has been standing the literary world on its ear. This spring, the third volume of Knausgaard’s six novel series titled My Struggle is out in English. It follows the English translations of his first two novels. Three more volumes in English are coming soon.

I’ve read My Struggle: Book One and volume two titled A Man in Love, so I came prepared to Boyhood Island. But before I talk about Knausgaard’s fearless work let me explain why I see him as part of the new writing. While literary prizes are lost or won, and creative writing schools teach graduates how to shape story arcs, this brash new fiction has been finding a younger, less traditional audience for its very non-traditional approach.

Influenced by the confessional nature of the Internet, with its disregard for literary forms, the younger generation of fiction writers includes Sheila Heti, whose brainy, original novel How Should a Person Be? is quickly becoming a classic; Ben Lerner, author of Leaving the Atocha Station, a virtuoso tale of self-exposure; and Kate Zambreno, who wrote Heroines, a daring personal account about the condescending way modernist fictional heroines were treated.

Countless others under forty are part of this gritty new sensibility, novelists like Tamara Faith Berger, author of the vivid, transgressive Maidenhead, and Marie Calloway who wrote about her sexual exploits in the unclassifiable, what purpose did I serve in your life.

Most fiction offers us a story or plot. But the audacious fictional accounts of the new romantics often have little time for narrative masks or literary frames. They aren’t interested in post-modernism either and its fascination with how stories are told. Disclosure is the spirit of our age, and their work seems designed to bring the reader “close to a self,” as Knausgaard puts it.

For instance, when Sheila Heti started writing How Should A Person Be? she purposefully did everything a writer of realistic fiction is NOT supposed to do. She disregarded the modernist notion that the novelist should be invisible behind his or her work and she ignored the dictum about coming up with the brilliant, telling detail that conveys the world of a story.

The authorial signature of this generation vis-a-vis most modern novelists is like comparing a naked story teller to one in an Edwardian ball gown. Or maybe it’s more like the difference between a very intelligent reality TV contestant and an English professor schooled in Victorian literature.

Why do I call them romantics? This new generation of fiction writers makes the self their subject and describing the self and its emotions was a preoccupation of the early Romantics.

Of course, writers like Henry Miller and Marcel Proust have made themselves the subject of their fiction before, but their work is washed through with romanticism and its view of the writer as an Olympian explorer of the human spirit. No such romantic notion of the writer shows up in the writing of the new generation who report on the deepest, shallowest, creepiest and most unworthy feelings and thoughts that can go on inside an individual.

Ultimately, there’s nothing dignified or heroic in their stance, although the authoritative “I” who writes the story always gets the last word, and there’s a tinge of Olympian power in that.

Knausgaard, at 45, goes further than most of them. His fiction is controversial because it says extremely revealing things about real people in his life without bothering to disguise their identities.

In interviews, Knausgaard says that the naming of real people is an ethical issue but he believes that to create literature of lasting value, a writer must carve a freedom outside the rules of society. That means putting honesty before consideration. These days he tends to beat himself up over the pain his fiction caused his family. But when he was writing My Struggle he put his art first. He had felt bored and overwhelmed by the millions of paperbacks, hardbacks, DVDs and TV series whose stories were all about made-up people in a made-up world. He preferred genres like diaries and essays that focused on the voice of the writer’s personality.

So in all three English volumes he immerses the reader in his Norwegian time and place without worrying much about narrative structure. Knausgaard excels instead at describing sensory details, whether he’s writing about the shelves of sweets he saw in stores as a boy, or his deep shuddering hatred of his tyrannical father. It’s the depth of his far ranging feelings and philosophical reflections that make his autobiographical work read like fiction. (I used to teach a course in the memoir at York University and most contemporary memoirs describe a less complicated journey through one particular kind of experience.)

Critics sometimes compare Knausgaard to Marcel Proust, and the two are certainly alike in their flowing descriptions about the minutiae of daily life. One critic said it took Proust seven pages to describe a man turning in his bed. You could say the same sort of the thing about Knausgaard. But the similarity stops there.

Proust was writing elegantly about retrieving lost time and he sometimes disguised gay relationships as heterosexual. Knausgaard, on the other hand, is telling shamelessly personal truths with an excoriating honesty that feels masochistic. For instance, he incorporates a description of his bowel movements because he sees “shitting” as worthy of attention too.

In the first two widely praised volumes of My Struggle, he deals with his difficulties as a boy, the son of an English teacher and a nurse, and later, his frustrations with trying to write while he helps his wife raise their children. In volume two, although he accepted child-raising as the duty of a progressive husband, he walked around the streets of Stockholm “with a furious nineteenth-century man inside me.”

In volume one, Knausgaard deals with his father’s death from alcoholism, and describes the experience of cleaning up his father’s childhood home, where furniture has been burnt and excrement has been smeared on the furniture and the walls.

In this third volume, Boyhood Island, he exhibits the same hypnotic descriptive powers displayed in the first two volumes. And his father and his pernicious influence on Knausgaard emerges as the central theme. He takes almost four hundred pages to tell us how the man terrified him, (not by beatings or starving a child), but through a continuous vicious deflating of a child’s natural boisterous spirit.

In one of the childhood scenes, Knausgaard describes himself looking out the window and watching a cat hunting a mouse. What could be more clichéd than a cat chasing a mouse? Yet he brings the mouse’s fear and the cat’s playful cruelty to life on the page. As I read on, it was obvious the cat and the mouse were a metaphor for Knausgaard’s relationship with his father.

Here he is describing his father in volume three: “I was so frightened of him that even with the greatest effort of will I am unable to recreate the fear …His footsteps on the stairs—was he coming to see me? The wild glare in his eyes. The tightness around his mouth… And then his voice: Sitting here now, hearing it in my inner ear, I almost start crying.”

In adolescence, other children called Knausgaard “a Jessie,” high school slang for an androgynous person. Knausgaard knew it wasn’t true; he was a teenage boy who loved boyish things like sports and pop music but he still suffered over not fitting in.

Knausgaard’s father, who was modern enough to share household chores with his wife, had a Victorian remedy for his child’s problems; he would lash out when the boy expressed his feelings. As a result, Knausgaard’s childhood struggle to be himself may have set up a life pattern that’s repeated in his fiction. First, there’s self-expression, followed by anger and retribution. (Some of Knausgaard’s family tried to sue him when the first volume was published, then dropped their case.)

Luckily, Knausgaard’s mother was a kinder, gentler person. She encouraged Knausgaard in his love of books although, mysteriously, she didn’t protect him from his father’s verbal abuse or cruelty. When the pair separate, the mother seems weirdly detached. Either she couldn’t share her emotional grief over a failed relationship, or like many women of her generation, she was relieved to rid herself of a difficult husband.

So Boyhood Island is another triumph for Knausgaard.

However, Boyhood Island didn’t always hold my attention and I longed for more of his philosophical reflections on adult life. Maybe agency is necessary to sustain a lengthy narrative, and agency is what children lack. Knausgaard himself points out that the landscape in childhood is different. In childhood, he writes “every rock, every tree, has a meaning and because everything is seen for the first time and because it is seen so many times it is anchored in the depths of your consciousness not as something vague or approximate the way a landscape outside a house appears to an adult … but as something with immense precision and detail.”

In other words, childhood is a land of sharply felt sensory impressions, and he’s described it masterfully, shaking out his younger self like a pillow until the stuffing, feathers and all, bursts out and floats away on the wind.
(Susan Swan’s latest novel The Western Light will be available this June in paperback.)

Book City Gets Its Dues: Why We Love Its Indie Book Stores

My partner, the editor Patrick Crean told the world tonight why many of us love Book City and are sad about it closing its 501 Bloor street store. Here’s what Patrick said to a crowd of over 150 who showed up to tell Book City why they care. Patrick has lived in the Annex since 1972, and he was one of Book City’s first customers:

“As a life-long book editor and a long-time resident of the Bloor/Brunswick neighborhood, I have bought hundreds of books and magazines at Book City since it opened in 1976. I was surprised at how sad I felt when the closing of its 501 Bloor street store was announced. It took me weeks trying to get over it. It was just a bookstore wasn’t it? Well, it was so much more: it fed our intellectual curiosity; it sustained us on some psychic level; it made us feel connected to something bigger; something that mattered.

When the store opened in 1976, it created a definite buzz in the hood. There was an kinetic energy to the place: a kind of urban hip atmosphere on two floors. And for 36 years it provided us all with an exciting place to hang out, discover new books, and gossip about the industry. There was a sense of community in that store and it provided a focal point for the neighborhood.

There is no other experience quite like that of patronizing a good independent book store. This is often where we discover new books by chance. And until they discover an algorithm for replicating on line the discoverability aspect of the curated book store, there is no substitute for it.

I would go to Book City to find a particular title and leave clutching at least 3 or 4 books. If you live in the world of ideas, going to the store was always an exciting experience. You never knew what you would find. For me buying books was retail therapy. It was – dare I say – almost an erotic experience going into 501 Bloor. Books are sexy objects and if you are a book nut like me you want to hold them, touch them and possess them. Hooked on books is my motto.

Let us all thank Frans and Gini Donker for their years of inspired and exciting bookselling in the Annex. They have made a huge contribution to our culture over the years and continue to do so with their other stores in the city. Bless you both.

Let’s salute Ian Donker who continues the Donker family tradition of fine bookselling. Good luck Ian.

Let us also thank John Snyder who managed and curated the Annex store with such intelligence and flair. With John, you always knew you would find books of interest without having your brain freeze – as it does when you are confronted with the massive and seemingly unlimited choice at the big box stores. Book buying is an intimate experience and John understood this. He knew his clientele. He hand-sold many a book to me and his kind of bookselling will be missed. Thank you John. We wish you the very best.

The closing of 501 is a great loss to our neighbourhood, but we carry on, we readers and lovers of the book never stop seeking out good books wherever they may be found. It’s comforting to remember that there is actually a line in the Bible – the last verse of Ecclesiastes – that says ‘ of making many books there is no end.’

Help Us Make Protest Go Viral Today Vs Expanding Airport

You have less than three hours to help NoJetsTO make a protest go viral against expanding the Billy Bishop airport. All you need to do is sign up on this link to make happen: This is the link:

https://www.thunderclap.it/projects/9696-saying-nojetsto-to-to-council?locale=en

Meanwhile, as many of you know, I’ve been working hard to publish information about the dangers of expanding Billy Bishop airport in Toronto. A lot of the crucial information about the proposed expansion hasn’t been making it into the newspapers. So I was glad to see the Toronto Star ran an op-ed column today by Air Canada CEO Calvin Rovinescu.

Rovinescu is against the current expansion plan and he made some points that don’t get aired a lot. Rovinescu pointed out that the Billy Bishop Airport is a public facility that has been handed over to a private company, Porter Airlines. He also said that expanding the airport will cost taxpayers over one hundred million to three million to upgrade airport facilities. He wondered why one private company would be given such preferential treatment. Why, indeed?

Rovinescu didn’t say this in his article but another word for Porter’s dealing with Toronto politicians and the Toronto Port Authority is crony capitalism. That is, a select group of business people make strategic alliances with politicians in order to get public funding for their private companies.

If you want to see more of Rovinescu’s case check out page 16 of today’s Star or the link: http://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2014/03/24/public_interest_must_prevail_in_island_airport_debate.html

We thought the city agreement protected us

My name is Bob Ramussen and I live near the island airport. Why am I against its proposed expansion? When the large jets start flying, whether louder or quieter, the increased traffic congestion will make the waterfront a dead zone.

It is simply not possible to squeeze the same number of passengers who now fly through Ottawa’s airport through Billy Bishop. The island airport is located smack dab in the middle of an area that the city of Toronto has zoned as a residential, park and cultural community.

Let me say it again: Why am I against the proposed expansion of the island airport? Because it will only make the quality of downtown life worse. Recently, the island airport has expanded to over two million passengers a year, and that makes our quality of life bad enough. But the proposed expansion to well over four million will degrade our once beautiful waterfront even more.

Here’s some background on me: When my wife and I purchased our harbourfront condominium in 1996, we lived in Hong Kong. But we had decided to retire to Canada, and we wanted to live in a waterfront environment close to city amenities. We chose downtown Toronto over Victoria and Vancouver so we could enjoy the cultural excitement of this city and, in particular, Toronto Island, Harbourfront Centre and the Music Garden.

We knew there was a small airport serving mainly small planes. We also knew the city’s Tripartite Agreement protected our investment because the agreement forbid the use of jet planes. But we really never worried about airport expansion because no city would ever consider destroying its greatest asset. Or so we thought.

Our building has a beautiful garden plaza. It was a spot where, for many years, we could lounge, eat, visit with friends and enjoy the greenery and lake view. It has now become a noisy, unpleasant place to be. During the busy late afternoon flight period, eating and talking with friends is no longer the joy we used to experience. In the past, we also kept our windows open to let the lake breezes blow through our home in the summer. Rarely did we use air conditioning. Now the island airport makes it necessary to always keep windows closed when watching television, listening to music or talking.

Many years ago we lived in Mississauga underneath a flight path to Pearson. We looked up, way up, to see the planes fly overhead. Now we look down to see the planes pass by our windows. Hong Kong had an airport like the one being proposed for our waterfront. Hong Kong closed it. Toronto wants to build one.

Toronto’s Department of Health voted against expansion last November. So here’s my last question: Why are city councillors still debating this irresponsible expansion?

What’s With the Sticky Black Stuff on the Window Sills?

Photo by Llima Orosa

I’ve made it my job (since the papers aren’t doing it) to find out about the sticky black stuff on the windows of downtown residences along with the impact of jets on our air and water quality. So check out my blog next week for missing information about Toronto’s air and water quality. On Dec 9, 2013, Toronto’s board of health voted against the expansion of the island airport because it is a threat to Torontonians’ health.

In a city map based on the board’s report, NOW magazine demonstrated that serious pollution from the airport goes as high as Queen street and reaches as far as Queen’s Park. More pollution brings more lung and heart disease, the Toronto Board of Health says. So don’t assume you’re safe from the impact of the airport just because you don’t live on the harbour.

In the meantime, here’s my interview with Rick Persich who will move out of his home on Bathurst Quay if the airport expansion is approved. By the way, Rick Persich is still waiting to hear what the city’s health officials have to say about the black sticky substance on his window sills:

I live in Windward Co-op at 34 Little Norway Crescent. Looking out my window, I can almost count the distance on my fingers from my town house to the airport hangars. It feels about three hundred meters. (The quotes are different depending where you’re counting from.) So if the airport expansion is approved I will move after living here twenty-five years. Ideally, I’d like to stay close to the city but I’m an actor and a recently certified teacher and I will go where the work is.

The particulate matter on my window sill used to be a brownish colour but it’s turned blacker. In February, some city inspectors took a sample of the sticky black residue and put it in a petri dish. They haven’t got back to me yet. Inspector Barbara La Chapelle was here in her fur coat. She said while standing on my balcony, “You sure do live close.” Or something like that. She said the city’s health study would not be biased. That was one of my concerns because the Toronto Port Authority paid for the city’s study.

Last Monday, perhaps because of stormy weather, the airport activity was almost nil. I couldn’t put my finger on what was different until I realized how quiet it was. My whole being felt calm and peaceful. It was a profound feeling, and I realized how the ubiquitous din from the airport helps create a kind of inner tension in my personal being. One seems to get used to it and not realize what an assault constant noise is.

When I moved to the Bathurst Quay neighborhood I expected to live a fairly peaceful life, slightly separated from the inner city core and near the fresh air of Lake Ontario. At the time, BBTCA was a small and acceptable regional airport. But that changed when Porter expanded its flights in 2006 and the proposed expansion would pretty much finish off our wonderful neighborhood by the water.

By the way, an increase in cancer has been recorded in my area, especially in Arcadia Co-op which has a high concentration of people with cancers on the 6th and 7th floors of their building. I mention this because a dear friend of ours, who lives in Arcadia, has just been diagnosed with breast cancer. One cannot conclusively say that this cancer was caused by air pollution emanating from jet fuel but a connection could be drawn. The turboprops now in use at the airpot have jet engines with propellers and they run on the same highly toxic fuel as jets.

Read more on this topic at Now Magazine’s: The Island airport: hazardous to Toronto’s health