Y CANADA

by Leigh Lundin

Occasionally, I sit in on a monthly literary gathering run by Liz Ruch at the Morse Museum‘s Pavilion. They like to like Southern writers, but they love Canadian writers, including Ann-Marie MacDonald and Mary Lawson, just to name two. Talk at Tuesday’s meeting brought to mind a small college north of the border that has a writer-in-residence program in which any person– any member of the public at all– can consult with a professional writer.

The city of Edmonton, the capital of Alberta, has a population a little less than my Orlando. For a remote region not so far removed from the glacier that once scraped its landscape flat, Edmonton is astonishingly sophisticated. That might seem surprising to some, but I have a theory or two why.

(For those of us who have a fuzzy sense of Canadian geography, think North Montana. For those of us with fuzzy American geography, think, um, North, North, North Las Vegas.)

Like Orlando, Edmonton has both a respected university and college. Our Rollins College, with its neo-classical southern architecture, is an older, well-established school with a prettier campus, whereas Edmonton’s Grant MacEwan College (which sponsors the aforementioned writer-in-resident program), its city campus distinguished by clusters of outer-space alien communication towers, is better integrated within the community, as is Edmonton’s University of Alberta.

Unfortunately for us, our University of Central Florida is isolated, its campus hardly a part of the community. Such a venue may have advantages for the school, but its major disadvantage is that Orlando has little sense of being a college town. If it weren’t for UCF sports, the city would barely be aware the school existed.

In contrast, Columbus, Ohio, Princeton, New Jersey, Boston, Massachusetts, and even the small town of Terre Haute, Indiana have a strong sense of college and community that is missing in some other collegiate centers. A college town has a ‘feel’ to it, a vibrancy and optimism unlike any other place. Edmonton’s Old Strathcona has that feeling– the odd little shops, the coffee houses and theatres, the history and the architecture. (Of interest to Criminal Brief readers, one used bookstore, The Wee Book Inn, has one cat and a couple of hundred vintage Ellery Queen, Alfred Hitchcock, and Mike Shayne Mystery Magazines on its shelves (and early Playboys, not that I peeked, much.))

Yes, Orlando has great museums, a fledgling opera company, and a decent ballet, but community support is minimal. Thirty years ago, Orlando had a symphony that struggled with an apathetic audience, an acoustically poor auditorium, a lack of funding (PESO, to those who remember it), and a fundamental confusion between entertainment and art. Locals shrugged, saying if you really had to insist upon a good symphony, you could always drive to hear the LSO in Daytona or Miami, but in the meantime, Jimmy Buffet‘s appearing at Florida Festival and that’s real music.

And therein, I think explains why Edmonton has such a surprising sophistication. Wild Rose County’s isolation is apparent from the air; you could almost imagine a science fiction world with it being the only civilization on the planet. Unlike Florida, residents can’t drive an hour to hear a neighboring town’s symphony. They can’t take an afternoon jaunt to visit St.Petersburg’s Dalí museum. Edmonton is on its own, a defiant outpost in the frozen North that embraces its own worth within an international cultural view.

Yet, the people don’t feel insulated at all. European cheese shops, Japanese sushi bars, Irish pubs, Russian coffee houses, French restaurants, and American fast food only hint at the broader palate, that of literature, art, and music. Members of the world-class choral group, the Richard Eaton Singers, actually pay a $250 membership fee just to belong to it, a token of their commitment, their gift to the city.

Their town isn’t limited to its own symphony and theatre companies. In any given week, they may sponsor André Rieu at their Coliseum or a guest conductor from the Boston Pops at the Symphony‘s beautiful Winspear Centre. (What they don’t have is legroom– non-orchestra seating seems to have been designed for an average height of a leprechaun, not for those of us who exceed six feet.)

To be fair, Edmonton demonstrates a sense of frivolity with its own vacation package theme park, the West Edmonton Mall, which claims to be the 8th wonder of the world. At 5.3 million square feet (50 hectares, 123 acres, 48 city blocks), it’s easily the largest mall in the known solar system. Under one roof, WEM houses a pair of submarines and a pirate ship lagoon, a sea life cavern, an amusement park with the world’s largest indoor roller coaster (intertwined with a second, rotating coaster), a haunted castle, a dinner theatre, a casino, a paintball gallery, a not-so-miniature golf course, an iMax 3-D theatre (and of course a cineplex), a skateboard facility, an olympic skating rink, and a stunning wave-pool water park that could have been lifted directly out of Florida.

On the other hand, a homogeneous cultural landscape isn’t desirable either. Sensible cities thrive upon their differences. Disney, Universal, and SeaWorld provide a friendly destination for visitors from anywhere in the world for, as they say, children of all ages (which includes me). I love Winter Park’s Morse Museum and I enjoy the Orlando Science Center. I like walking that funky little chain of neighborhood parks between downtown and Bumby, and jogging around the Ben White Raceway. But I also like a city that loves the arts.

In the dead of winter, Orlando definitely has the advantage. Unlike JFK, LAX, and Orlando’s MCO, most major Canadian airport codes start with Y, such as YEG for Edmonton. Privately, I suspect Y is short for “Why?” I picture a long ago January when a waggish government official, freezing his buns off while dreaming about Florida, began muttering, “Why Edmonton!”

I think I know why. All that geographic isolation combined with artistic creativity and a thirst for knowledge vis-à-vis the world at large, make for one hell of a creative, artistic marinade– and for us authors, an ideal writing environment.