The older I get the more I appreciate the extent to which success hinges on enthusiasm rather than talent. Writer Sarah Elton is undoubtedly talented but there are loads, LOADS of talented writers out there going nowhere fast. What sets Elton apart is her passion for her subject whether it be local food or local writing: Elton’s passion is place and her place is Toronto.
As the media landscape contracts — magazine closures, newspaper layoffs — Elton, a freelance journalist, is stepping up, not out. She has two new books under her belt, the just-released City of Words, Toronto Through Her Writer’s Eyes (Cormorant) and the upcoming Locavore: From Farmers Fields to Rooftop Gardens, How Canadians are Changing the Way We Eat (due in March from HaperCollins). Elton may be small of stature — five-foot-nothing if my guess is accurate — but she’s an Energizer bunny dashing from CBC headquarters (where she’s a contributor and former producer) to interviews promoting City of Words.
As busy as she is, the writer conveys the sense that there’s nothing she’d rather be doing than squeezing in a quick tour of downtown Toronto while referencing the streets and scenes she has pulled together for her evocative new book.
We meet at Roy Thomson Hall then step around the corner to King and University where Elton gestures to the gleaming bank towers: “One thing I found most remarkable when researching this book was how much romance has been set right here,” she says. “These buildings are not things that I would imagine writers being inspired by and yet they are.”
“One of my favourite poems in the book,” she continues, “is Clifton Joseph’s Footnote To the End of a Love Affair, about heartbreak at the foot of a skyscraper — I just absolutely love it. And then there’s a poem by Raymond Souster called Rainy Evening Downtown that was written decades and decades ago but it’s wonderful and it gives such a tremendous sense of Toronto. In my mind, I picture the heartbreak taking place right there (gestures to corner of King and York streets). I appreciate this strip and see it differently now as a result of the book. And I really do feel that the project has allowed me to engage with my city on a different level.”
MY city. Elton is extremely possessive about Toronto and she’s suitably proud of this literary tribute she’s been able to compile from “novels, original essays, old magazine and newspaper articles, poems, you name it.” One of the pieces she’s especially pleased with is an excerpt from Mazo de la Roche’s autobiography, Ringing the Changes. De la Roche was the Toronto-based author of the Jalna series of novels, which were hugely popular in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. “But the series is not set in Toronto,” notes Elton, “so it gave me nothing to work with. But then I read her autobiography and lo and behold there’s a piece where she writes about growing up on John Street, which is a street I know very well from working at the CBC. She never actually names John Street but I cross referenced my sources and that’s where I decided she was writing about.”
An important part of City of Words is actually the pictures. Photographer Kevin Robbins was given Elton’s manuscript and a year to scour the city, day and night, to craft this magnificent portrait of Toronto. “His photographs are like poems,” says Elton, “they allowed me to see the purpose of this book. When I look at Kevin’s images I see my city in a different way. I’ve seen the CN Tower millions of times in my life and yet he shows it to me in a way that I’ve never seen it before, just as Pier Giorgio di Cicco’s 6 months of the CN tower allows me to view the structure differently. I hope this book will allow people who take our city for granted, to see it in a different light.”
Photos by Christopher Jones
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Passion is a wonderful thing.
I’ve been reading Live with Culture for about a month now and am really enjoying finding out ‘all that’s happening’ in Toronto. It’s a great city!