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Urban camping >> Concrete Forest visits new Canadian writers in their natural habitat
by JULIET WATERS
I know he meant forests, but I didn't correct him. It was too much fun trying to keep a straight face while I said something pseudo-cynical like: "There are no jungles in Canada, Juan. Canada is just one big jungle and everyone's in there alone." According to Hal Niedzviecki, editor of Concrete Forest: The New Fiction of Urban Canada, my attitude and vision are pretty typical of writers from what he calls the "TV Generation." One of the trademarks of new urban fiction is a sense of alienation. "But it's kind of a sarcastic alienation," he explained last week, while in Montreal to launch his anthology. "These writers are almost making fun of their own malaise." Nevertheless, the malaise in Concrete Forest is still very real, no matter how many layers of irony it's wrapped in. From Vancouver poet Michael Turner's "Hello, Saskatoon" (an excerpt from Hard Core Logo, the prose poetry book that inspired the Bruce McDonald film), to Toronto cult figure Crad Kilodney's "Girl on a Subway"; from Dany Laferriere's "Pigeon in Lemon Sauce" (a translated poem from his recent memoirs of being a Haitian refugee in Montreal) to Julie Doucet's surreal metro comic, "Missing," there is a sense that these writers are living on the edge of a deep wilderness that they may end up disappearing into any day. All of these stories have appeared previously in the barely known world of minor Can-lit. What distinguishes Concrete Forest is that it's the first collection of this kind of literature to be backed by a major publisher (McClelland & Stewart). "I'd been thinking about the idea for a while before I approached M&S," says Niedzviecki, whose main credential for this project is his experience as editor of Broken Pencil, the guide to alternative publishing and culture in Canada. "There's been a real lack of opportunity and a marginalizing of younger voices and particularly of new urban writing. Either they're published as [Toronto writer, Russell Smith's] 'How insensitive' kind of yuppie satire, or as obscure small press stuff. Yet at the same time, it's the most important, vibrant writing coming up in Canada. So I said, 'Well, I want to do something about this. I want to collect these writers.'" His criteria for what constitutes "new urban fiction" is pretty loose. "Mainly it was this unquantifiable expression of our common urbanity. And a lot of that comes out of our increasingly fragmented sense of self. You know, one minute we're watching TV, the next we're listening to the radio, or reading the newspaper, or going out to a show, or getting hit by a car. I feel like everything happens in little sound bites in the our culture." But Niedzviecki insists that there is something particular about this kind of literature that distinguishes it from other strains of postmodernism. "Our fragmentation is different from any previous generation's fragmentation. We've got common denominators--pop culture, mass broadcasting things--things that are unique to our life and times. Our fragmentation is that post-postmodern sensibility of having a million images stored in our mind and being able to access a common environment almost instantly. You see that in the stories of Concrete Forest. You're moving through a lot of different places really quickly without a lot of description. That's something that our generation can do and that younger generations of writers are perfecting. A quick reference to a pop song and bang you're in the hospital. Everyone knows what a hospital looks like, everyone knows what the nasty nurse who just tells you to sit down looks like." And dark as it is, everyone probably has an idea what the Concrete Forest looks like, something like the jungles of Canada. Concrete Forest, ed. Hal Niedzviecki, McClelland & Stewart, pb, 288 pp, $29.99
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A couple of years ago, in Mexico, I met a South American surfer named Juan Carlos who'd never travelled anywhere farther north than Huntington Beach, California. He had a two-month-old pit bull puppy named Yellow which he said he'd named after a dog he'd seen in a Canadian movie: an inspiring tale about a boy and his pup who somehow get separated from their family and must try to survive, as Juan Carlos put it, "all alone in the jungles of Canada."