The Icelandic Canadian - 01.08.2006, Síða 42

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THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 60 #2
The Imagined City
By David Arnason and Mhari Mackintosh
Reviewed by Rev. Stefan Jonasson
Published by Turnstone Press, Winnipeg
David Arnason’s name on the cover of
an anthology is the literary equivalent of a
designer label on a pair of jeans - the read-
er can be relatively confident that the book
will draw upon the best of materials and be
arranged with creative flair. The Imagined
City is no exception. David Arnason and
Mhari Mackintosh have assembled a vol-
ume that is, at once, a pleasure to read and
a delight to behold.
The Imagined City grew out of a
course that the editors taught at the
University of Manitoba. “The students in
that course discovered a wonderful array of
writing about the city,” according to
Arnason and Mackintosh, and “looked at
Winnipeg with a fresh eye, and saw what a
fascinating place they inhabited.” This fas-
cination with the city comes alive in the
pages of the book, which presents the
familiar with remarkable freshness and the
more the more obscure with brazen confi-
dence.
In their introduction, which is a liter-
ary gem itself, Arnason and Mackintosh
observe that “great cities are known more
by their representation in art than by their
economic or military greatness.” How
true, no matter what the History Channel
may suggest to the contrary! The amazing
array of authors included in this volume
underscores this point, reminding us of
both the breadth and richness of
Winnipeg’s literary scene from the earliest
years. Few cities of its size can boast of
such a rich store of talent: novelists Carol
Shields and Margaret Laurence, Ralph
Connor and Frederick Philip Grove, poets
Dorothy Livesay and Miriam Waddington,
journalists James H. Gray and Vince Leah,
and social commentators Marshall
McLuhan and Larry Zolf.
Some of the authors included will be
less familiar to some readers. Among these
lesser-known but historically significant
figures are Francis Marion Benyon, a local
journalist and novelist who was a founding
member of the Political Equality League;
Douglas Durkin, a poet and novelist who
taught at Cornell University; poet J.J.
Gunn and novelist E. Jane Taylor, who
wrote under the pen name Jane Rolyat.
The editors are to be commended for
retrieving literary gems from these and
other more obscure writers. In addition to
Winnipeggers themselves, The Imagined
City includes the perspectives of outsiders
and visitors. Among others, Winston
Churchill, Hugh MacLennan and Stephen
Leacock all offer sympathetic portraits of
the city.
The Imagined City is arranged into
seven sections, each one representing a dis-
tinct era or neighbourhood. I found the
first three - “Early Red River,” “Boom
Town Winnipeg” and “The New Century”
- to be especially engaging, offering inter-
esting glimpses into the early years of the
city and its eventual coming of age in the
early twentieth century. Two sections,
“North End Winnipeg” and “City of
Dreadful Night,” deal honestly with the
internal solitudes that are also a part of the
city’s history, while the remaining two,
“World War II and After” and “The New