To mark the 10th anniversary of the Toronto Life summer fiction issue, we gathered a panel of Toronto writers, all of whom, at one point or another, have been featured in our pages: Sheila Heti, Andrew Pyper and Shyam Selvadurai. The trio spoke with editor Mark Pupo about what defines a Toronto literary style, the death of reading, and what Canadian writers talk about at parties. Here is part one of their conversation.

Mark Pupo: With regard to fiction, would you say there is such a thing as a Toronto style?

Shyam Selvadurai: I’m working on an anthology, and I’m reading up on other urban fiction in Canada. And some other cities have a much clearer presence in the world. Like Vancouver, for instance. It has writers like Nancy Lee, Timothy Taylor, Madeline Thien, or older ones like George Bowering. The mountains and the sea—or the east end, which is so awful—are so strongly present. The fiction in Winnipeg, for its part, is so dominated by class lines, the train yards and so on. But Toronto is just so amorphous. Everybody does their own little thing.

Andrew Pyper: I agree. If anything, I think there’s a reluctance in our fiction to engage Toronto directly as a place. There are plenty of exceptions to this, so I have to footnote this generalization. But there’s almost an apologetic reflex to set stories elsewhere so as to not upset fellow Canadians—“Oh, here we go, not Toronto again.” I’m writing a novel right now that’s set in Toronto—and no one’s going to stop me, damn it—but I’m aware of that being a factor. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone said, with an eye roll, “Oh, a Toronto novel,” whereas I don’t think someone would have that same cynicism with regard to a Vancouver novel.

MP: Is it hard for people to decide on Toronto’s character? If you’re writing a novel about Montreal, you kind of already know what the character of the city is.

Sheila Heti: I find it kind of comical to write about Toronto. I started something that was set in Toronto and I wrote three chapters. Everything about Toronto seemed so humorous to me, because it’s not an easily mythologized place. To set a story here seemed so absurd and beautiful.

MP: Did you finish it?

SH: No, I ended up throwing it out. [laughs] But not because it was about Toronto. In terms of a style, I think most people are happy to do their own thing. I’ve never been part of any conversation in which people seemed to think that there had to be some coming-together of the writers. I don’t think that’s what writing is. Everybody is in their own room, doing their own thing. And at parties, no one really talks about books.

MP: What do they talk about?

SS: Who got the biggest advance... How are you going to make your rent this month... But I think you’re right, Andrew, there is that who-do-you-think-you-are kind of thing when it comes to Toronto. It is hard to contemplate—if you’ve had success writing about elsewhere—writing about Toronto.

AP: I happened upon an interview with Timothy Taylor, whose novels are set in Vancouver, and he was talking about this topic of place. I’m not picking on him, but he said something like, Toronto looks inward, while Vancouver looks outward. That’s what, in his view, makes Vancouver interesting. I think he stated what's regarded out there as a truism, but the truism is false. I think Toronto is always looking outward; it’s almost embarrassed to look inward. It’s self-conscious about its “bigness,” its “richness,” and whatever else it’s number one at. I think we do look outside and travel outside. We can’t wait to set a book anywhere but here.

MP: Is that the Toronto style then? Writing about elsewhere?

AP: I don’t know about that. Maybe it’s just a personal anxiety of mine, but there’s that feeling of, “This is going to be a problematic topic.” It is prickly, given Toronto’s position in the Canadian urban hierarchy.

SH: But you sell books outside of Canada, right? Why worry so much about Canada?

AP: Because this is where you take the first line of crap.

SH: Yeah, I guess.

AP: If you get slammed in Amsterdam, it ruins fewer hours of the day than getting slammed closer to home. You’re more likely to meet these people. You’re more likely to give a reading in Winnipeg where someone accuses you of something based on a Canadian issue. When you publish elsewhere, people aren’t aware of these issues, and it’s a great liberty.

SS: It’s also your home, and you want to be accepted at home more than anywhere else.

SH: But there’s only so much you can do. It doesn’t seem likely that you can please people at home, just as one is often a disappointment to one’s family. They know you so personally. Whereas, in the States, say, they don’t know you personally. Maybe it’s the character of Canada. I don’t think Americans have regionalism in that sense. When I read reviews in Canada, often the reviewers are personally offended by what the writer is doing. I don’t really see that when I read American reviews. That seems to be a problem with reviewing in this country as a whole.

AP: When you do detect that offense-taking in a Canadian review, what do you think informs it?

SH: I don’t know. It’s just that Canadian thing about not wanting anyone to be too interesting or too…anything. Anything that’s too anything is too much. [laughs]

SS: Well, I’ve think we’ve hashed this to death, haven’t we? The terrible thing is that this is probably the same conversation that Atwood and Ondaatje had in the ’70s. And here we are, having it again.

AP: I hope so.

SH: You hope so?

AP: Well, then there’d be a beautiful circularity to it.

SH: If there was a circle, as opposed to this jumping in one place. One thing I do want to say about a Toronto style is that it only really makes sense if everybody’s reading the same people. And I don’t think that’s true at all. I’m sure Shyam’s influences and heroes are different from Andrew’s and different from mine. To me, that’s a huge part of the imaginative world I’ve come from—what I’ve read and what I love to read. So it doesn’t make sense that we would all be writing in the same way.

SS: This is a city of writers, sure. There are a lot of writers here, a lot of good writers.

MP: Can you name any young writers who, in 10 years, might be having this conversation again?

AP: I read a first novel that I liked by a guy named Robert McGill. It was called The Mysteries; McClelland and Stewart published it a couple of years ago.

MP: We also published a short story of his in the Toronto Life fiction issue a couple of years back.

AP: Right. I think he’s really good. And he gave me that sense of breadth, a belief that he would go beyond this one book. On the quirkier side, there’s a guy who came to a workshop I taught in Kitchener. He’s from Guelph, but I’m going to make him an honorary Torontonian. His name is Larry Brown, and he’s publishing now, in the Malahat Review and journals like that. He’s just really weird and good. Someone will be thinking of Larry Brown in 10 years.

SS: I would say Anar Ali, who just published a book with Penguin. But Sheila, you’re not of our generation. You’re younger, right?

SH: I’m 29.

SS: You’re 29? Well, I’d say Sheila would be somebody who we'll still be hearing from in 10 years. I think beyond the writing, you’ve contributed culturally to the city. Like Trampoline Hall [the informal lecture/performance series Heti started]. It brings a certain intellectual energy to the young people of the city. And I think that’s something you will be recognized for. But in the Canadian way: retroactively.

SH: It’s a hard question for me. The people who are doing interesting things in their 20s are not necessarily the writers. But rather, the people who organize Manhunt. Or people like Steve Kado and his Photo Tag. People who are doing strange art projects. That’s just more present to me; that’s what I see in the city. I like Darren O’Donnell a lot; he just wrote a book called Social Acupuncture.

MP: Can we talk about the state of publishing more generally? Where is it going? Are things changing at all? Are we still obsessed with the printed form or is everything going to be on-line in the next five years?

AP: I don’t know. I feel that reading as we’ve known it for the last 100 years is less threatened by the e-book, or the Internet or any manifestation of downloading than it is by more disturbing intellectual trends like fewer people reading in general. Or at least fewer reading fiction. And that is a documented fact. Younger people, people under 30, are demographically not reading as much fiction. And perhaps even more disturbing, dramatically fewer men are reading books of fiction. I’m kind of troubled by what that means for an advanced, civilized, literary culture. Does that mean some kind of ghettoization of gender? Or various prejudices coming into play about what it means to read? Like, only certain people read. All that troubles me much more than, uh-oh, somebody downloaded my book. My primary concern is whither reading, never mind whither reading the book.