Broken Pencil Issue 25
With one foot in the gutter, Suzanne Alyssa Andrew talks to Neko Case, the Constantines, Shary Boyle, Marc Bell, Doretta Lau, Alissa York and Andrew Kaufman about touring, moving, house-hopping and couch-surfing.
The first night in a new apartment is always the worst. Every creak and groan reverberates. You eventually fall asleep only to wake up to a strange room and momentary confusion. In a new city, you fold and unfold your map so many times you have to tape it - and yet you still get lost. You gradually figure out where to buy your groceries, do your laundry and purchase art supplies, but you keep getting bad haircuts.
Visual artist Shary Boyle has moved and travelled around the world almost constantly for a decade. She grew up in Scarborough, then moved to downtown Toronto when she was 17. Although she keeps returning to Toronto, she’s lived in Thailand, Yukon’s Dawson City, Amsterdam, the tiny community of Avondale in Nova Scotia, Berlin, Seattle, Los Angeles, Sackville, Chicago and Winnipeg, with repeated excursions to Paris, Halifax, Montreal and New York. Boyle tends to stay in many cities briefly. "I don’t want to travel as much as transplant myself to a foreign environment and work there," she says.
Moving is a disorienting, stressful and often frustrating process, but Canadians move all the time. According to Statistics Canada, 11.7 million of us, a full 42 per cent of the entire population, moved between 1996 and 2001. Most of us either moved around the block or to other cities and provinces - only three per cent of us left the country altogether. Unsurprisingly, the younger you are, the more likely you are to move - half of 15- to 29-year-olds and 40 per cent of thirtysomethings moved in those five years.
For Boyle, moving has been both important and positive, since it’s kept her from becoming stagnant. "I felt like in order to keep feeling alive or feeling present I had to disrupt my environment," she says, explaining why she’s moved so frequently. "Because of that, my work would go through a change as well, because it was never allowed to settle into some kind of consistent reoccurring pattern.
Home Expansive Home
Writer Pico Iyer talks about the growing impermanence of people’s lives in his book The Global Soul. Born in England of Indian parents, Iyer grew up in America, now lives in Japan and laments his rootlessness and lack of belonging. Iyer considers himself a citizen of the world instead of feeling at home in any one city or country.
Although most Canadian artists move to work or explore, many can also blame economics for their lack of a permanent home. Unlike their salaried neighbours with pensions and mortgages, the 3.7 per cent of Canadians working in arts and culture rely on multiple jobs, on again/off again employment, freelance and contract work. With a well-below-average income of $28,000 a year, few can afford to buy housing. Artists are free to move. And sometimes the creative life necessitates it.
Home means a different thing when you’ve lived in 10 different cities in just as many years. Alissa York (Athabaska, Victoria, Saskatoon, Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Whitehorse and Winnipeg), author of Mercy and Any Given Power, has a long story to tell every time someone asks her where she’s from. "I always have to answer that question in parts," she says. "I generally say I was born in Northern Alberta and I mostly grew up in Victoria until I was 17 when I left, because to say Victoria, to me just feels like part of the story."
York spent many years playing urban hopscotch, skipping from city to city and reversing back again to some locations several times over. While she says she now feels comfortable in Winnipeg, she admits, "The longer I’m in one place, the more I crave a new place." Her wanderlust has been a result of a long search for a home, a quest she attributes to her parents, who originally hailed from Australia. When your parents are immigrants from another country, "you think that finding a life has to do with finding a place to have that life," she says.
In her novel Mercy, York illustrates the lure of the small town. Her character, shopkeeper Thomas Rose, describes how he found what he was looking for by moving, observing the moment when, at the end of the day, the barber across the street turns to see him and waves: "It’s a small thing. The kind of thing Thomas was dying for when he landed in Mercy, Manitoba, determined to call it home."
Artists who constantly move are expanding notions of a strict geographic notion of what home is, changing it from a place to a process. Shary Boyle describes an odyssey, "I think we all have the idea that there’s a perfect place or a perfect person and when we find them we’re going to know it. It’s a very seductive myth." Like getting the most out of a short-term relationship, when Boyle moves somewhere temporarily, she always sets up a living situation and a studio right away. "I usually get a bicycle and figure out cooking and where to shop," she says, explaining it’s important to feel at home wherever she is. "I really like the idea of transplanting and trying to integrate."
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For musicians living the nomadic touring life and facing a new city every day, putting down even shallow roots is impossible. Home is instead reduced to a fondness for where you live when you’re not touring, an idea of where you are at the moment and one or two objects that ground you.
Y’alternative chanteuse Neko Case (Virginia, Tacoma, Seattle, Vancouver and Chicago) began her musical career in Vancouver but moved when her visa ran out. "I live in Chicago, and I love it, but I’m away a lot of the time," she says via e-mail. "My dog and my van are the two things that make me feel most at home." Nevertheless, she still calls Tacoma her hometown because she says that’s where she "learned how to be an adult." In fact, like all good hometowns should, Case admits Tacoma still breaks her heart, "It’s such an underdog city someone has to love it." Pieces of what Case considers home inevitably end up in her music, but nowhere is it as wistful as in "Thrice All American" on her album Furnace Room Lullaby. Singing in defence of Tacoma, she describes it as a dark and run down "dusty old jewel" where she found her "passion for life."
Steve Lambke (Cambridge, Guelph, Ottawa, Toronto), guitarist for the Constantines says after a year of touring more than his band has ever toured before, he feels like he lives in the band van and he’s increasingly conflicted over what home means. "Home is having a place to lay my head," he says. "My home is on the road and in Toronto, but it’s hard to reconcile both." To cope, Lambke says he’s learned it’s important to have "a sense of where you’re coming from." For The Constantines, that’s Guelph, Ontario, the medium-sized, low-key community where the band first started out. According to Lambke, that was ideal - the band would practise and have shows in the same basement, and the growing media attention wasn’t distracting. But one by one, each of the band members moved to Toronto, where they were playing more frequently and where their record label, Three Gut Records is.
Now the band is bringing out songs about Toronto, like "National Hum" off their album Shine A Light on tour ("Your mayor is raising fences to keep bodies off the Don Valley Parkway send your praises to the mechanics of the state.") Through relocating, the small town group grew up to be a big-city band. After this year’s international tour, the Constantines will be downright worldly.
Temporary Living
Artists are known for producing temporary living arrangements along with their art. From the urban art squats and communes popular in Europe to the original artist work/live loft spaces in North America, artists have built their way into creative living and cheap rent. Artist-in-residence programs remain one of the best deals around (free-accommodations-and-nothing-but-time-to-work-on-your-projects anyone?), but they’re few and far between, often hard to snag. Artist retreats are highly stimulating but can be expensive; many artists resort to the three great pillars of all urban itinerants: couch-surfing, house-sitting and student housing.
Andrew Kaufman (Wingham, Waterloo, Guelph, Halifax, Winnipeg and Toronto), author of All My Friends Are Superheroes, recently turned a couch-surfing experience into art. Like the Kubler Ross stages of loss but illustrated in sofas, Kaufman’s video piece Couch documents the breakdown of a relationship. Each couch he slept on is a metaphor for the breakup phase he was going through. Kaufman describes his experiences couch-surfing as an unusual opportunity to peer into other people’s lives, "You’re forced to interact pretty intimately with people in ways you wouldn’t if you’re at home."
Having experienced temporary living situations, Kaufman now craves a measure of stability. "For me to actually accomplish anything, I have to sit down and get back into a routine to really harvest all that experience," he says. Kaufman likes to get up at the same time every day, get a coffee at his favourite cafe and then return to his desk to find his papers where they were the day before. But when he was in his twenties, Kaufman embodied the transient artist stereotype. Thinking all artists lived like Jack Kerouac, Kaufman created more drama in his life than he did on the page. "I was having really fucked up relationships where it was always drama and calamity," he says. When life is chaotic and you’re living exclusively in the world, you have less time to live in your head and play with ideas, and that, according to Kaufman, makes it difficult to write. "There’s so much stimulus and new stuff coming at you that you just can’t be in a piece of fiction to the extent that you need to finish it."
Because writing a book takes a long effort and focused attention, writers seem to need to plant themselves in one place, at least until a project is done. Doretta Lau (Vancouver, Northern England, London, New York) is another writer who needed additional structure in her life to work seriously on a book. In her case, she chose to go back to school. Lau is pursuing what she describes as "the cliché of moving to New York to be a writer" and is doing her MFA at Columbia University. She is enjoying her temporary living arrangement because it allows her to take more risks. "When you live in a small space like Vancouver and you do something ridiculous there is a possibility that people won’t speak to you again," she says, noting that in London or New York "You can do random things because you know it’s not permanent." She is enjoying the anonymity her writing has in New York, which gives her more freedom to write scathing things. And obviously, living in New York, albeit temporarily, is exciting. "There’s a sense that New York is a place where people just come and go all the time," she says.
Lau’s explored the theme of moving in her fiction - her story "Country Western," which appeared in Andrea Gin’s chapbook 45 Degrees of Separation, provides a confused teenager’s perspective on her family’s move from Toronto to West Vancouver and illustrates a newcomer’s misconceptions. The new girl struts into her new school in a gingham shirt and boot-cut jeans, "a stranger walking calmly into a new town, dust rising behind me, then settling," only to discover she’s not only dressed all wrong, but that "West Van is not the Old West."
Collaborating out of a Suitcase
When you move around, new contacts become an inspiring new source of collaboration. Prior to moving to Vancouver, visual and comic artist Marc Bell (London Ontario, Halifax, Sackville, Montreal, Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver) travelled to the city several times and worked with artist Jason Mclean to put shows together. Similarly, Shary Boyle considers herself a solo artist, but she’s lived in Los Angeles to do live projection drawings for electrogash princess, Peaches, and recently went to Paris to do a live drawing collaboration for charismatic crooner, Feist.
Even when she’s not collaborating directly with other artists, Boyle’s work is always influenced by her adventures in new scenes. In Berlin, where oil painters use raw pigment instead of pre-mixed paint in tubes, Boyle discovered a glow-in-the-dark pigment she used to create a whole series of paintings that later ended up in a Winnipeg exhibition. She has also tended to focus on paintings and drawings small enough to be shipped easily. "The kind of work I make is really dependent on where I’m going and how I can get it out of there," she says.
All artists collaborate with their own collections of memories, taking the mental time machine back and mining their pasts for ideas and feelings that resonate. Whether an artist moves occasionally or constantly, the people and stories connected to a place influence artists’ work later. York was only in Whitehorse briefly, but its impact remains: "The feeling of the place has really shown up in my writing ever since," she says, describing stories set there that she wouldn’t have written otherwise. "It also had the effect of awakening the memories of my early childhood in Northern Alberta," she says. "There’s a layering that happens there."
After the delirium of a new city or apartment has softened into routine, you can look back, wandering through the remembered image of each of the rooms you’ve lived in before, remembering where you hung paintings in hallways and what the view looked like from the windows. Put together, these images are what home is - never just one thing when every different living space, neighbourhood and city mood has made an imprint. But things have not stayed the same, and when (and if) you go back, things will always be different. For those of us who move frequently, memories are the only real homes we live in.
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