The Garden of Eden & Ivan
Long an inspiration for local writers, East Van isn’t what it used to be
BY Ron Nurwisah
Photography by Christopher Grabowski
If there has been a constant in Canadian literature, it has been place. Chalk it up to our history of explorers, pioneers and immigrants; the examples are everywhere. East coasters have writers like Wayne Johnston and Alistair MacLeod. Anyone writing about anglophone Montreal has to contend with the ghost of Mordecai Richler. An author wanting to write about certain neighbourhoods in Toronto might run into literary reminders by Michael Ondaatje and Margaret Atwood.
A relatively young city, Vancouver is a place still creating its myths, literary or otherwise. Douglas Coupland is the writer most often identified with Vancouver, but there’s more to Vancouver than a city of glass towers, scenic beaches and ski hills. Now two writers want to bring a grittier side of Vancouver into the CanLit spotlight. One that’s often at odds with the marketing copy of tourism guides and postcard-perfect images sold at airport lounges.
After living for 12 years in a cheap, rented house in Vancouver’s east side, bad luck caught up with Ivan E. Coyote, author of the story collection, Loose End. In what would’ve been a traumatic experience for anyone, the storyteller saw her house and most of her worldly possessions destroyed by a fire. Coyote lost family photos, love letters and a laptop full of her writing.
“My landlord tried to cash my rent cheque five days later, and then the junkies broke in and looted my burnt-out things,” she says. It was enough to drive Coyote, a fixture in East Van’s literary scene, to Amsterdam and then up to Squamish, British Columbia. But something about East Vancouver called her back.
Fellow BC author Eden Robinson can identify with the feeling. Although she lives in Kitamaat Village, farther along the BC coast, Robinson—who recently released her third fiction book, Blood Sports—has many ties to the neighbourhood. She remembers visiting her grandmother, who lived in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side when Robinson was a child, and much of her extended family still lives in Vancouver. While studying at UBC, Robinson even lived on Commercial Drive—East Van’s, if not the city’s, most vibrant neighbourhood. And it was in East Van that she wrote much of her Giller-nominated first novel, Monkey Beach.
Both women and their writings are radically different. The one thing that they share is a fierce love for East Van, a neighbourhood that has nurtured them, fed their art, and figures prominently in both their recent works.
Lauded for her previous Yukon-influenced work, One Man’s Trash, Coyote crafts short intense autobiographical observations of urban life in East Van. Her new story collection, Loose End, draws on everything from the banter at her neighbourhood bar to the difficulties she faces being a lesbian in a supposedly open and tolerant city. Robinson’s Blood Sports picks up on one of the characters from her first book of short stories, Traplines, and is set around Commercial Drive and the Downtown East Side. It tells the dark and violent tale of Tom, a young father trying to escape the influence of his drug-dealing cousin, Jeremy.
For Robinson, the decision to set Blood Sports in Vancouver’s east side was a personal and pragmatic one. Protagonist Tom had haunted her from the very beginning of her writing career, sometimes even derailing other writing projects; she felt that the character’s story needed to be told. She also felt the Vancouver she knew and loved wasn’t being written about. “I just didn’t see a lot of the Vancouver I know being represented,” Robinson says. “These were the people that I knew. I knew them very well, I lived with them for 10 years.” These characters are imperfect, working hard to get by and occasionally embroiled in very unfortunate situations.
“I also wanted to set it in a place that I loved. It’s not glowing, but it’s there, it’s present,” she adds.
It’s hard to see that love through all the blood and violence in Robinson’s novel, but it does come through clearly in her descriptions of Commercial Drive as a “coffee-freak’s paradise,” or “the postcard view of downtown and Grouse Mountain” from Grandview Park—that neighbourhood’s most popular patch of green space.
Ivan E. Coyote’s love of East Van is much easier to see. There’s the moving recollection of her apartment being gutted by fire and the many, many helping hands that pulled her through the next few days. The FedEx woman even lent Coyote her only house keys so she could have a place to recover. “[The FedEx woman said] don’t worry about it. She could crawl through the dog door,” Coyote writes in Loose End.
This is what Coyote wasn’t able to find easily anywhere else and especially not when she moved to Squamish for a few short months. “There was no sidewalk culture…. Nobody knew or cared who I was. I missed walking to the bank and people asking how I was or saying hi to people I know,” she says. “I missed the hockey games we had on Sunday, the unintentional community. I had to go out of my way to see anyone I knew. I missed the whole deal.”
In the end, Coyote moved back to East Van. In a way, as she explains, East Van has those unique qualities that all ideal neighbourhoods have, that sense of community, of place and belonging. “There’s this kind of small-town feel to my work. I have that when I write about the Yukon and I think I transpose that when it comes to Vancouver. Big cities really aren’t big cities, they’re just small towns all crunched up together.”
Yet when she moved back, she noticed her neighbourhood was slowly changing. Gentrification, it seemed, was slowly making inroads into East Van. “It happens but you don’t notice until it starts to affect your life. It’s a double-edged sword. Some of those houses were really run down and it wasn’t until the yuppies moved in and started to give everything the Kitsilano facelift that I noticed.”
It’s a trend that’s affecting formerly “undesirable” neighbourhoods all over the city. When her grandmother first moved to Vancouver, she lived in residential hotels in the Downtown East Side. Robinson remembers how the area was slowly ravaged by drugs. “I remember vividly how much that part of Vancouver changed after Expo [1986]. It wasn’t safe to run around as a little kid anymore,” she adds. But that pendulum is swinging in the other direction and even the Downtown East Side is seeing new condo developments.
Some would see it as an improvement and point to a decrease in intravenous drug use, a decrease in property crime and rising property rates as a good thing. But is it? No one should have to live next to a crack den or worry about whether their burnt-out apartment will be looted. But what does one stand to lose?
The near future will only add to the pressure on East Van and its many neighbourhoods. In Blood Sports, Robinson very briefly points out the Starbucks and “upscale junk stores” that service new condo-dwellers who have moved into the area. It’s a demographic shift that’s making the Drive look more like other condo-saturated neighbourhoods, like Yaletown, the West End or Coal Harbour, neighbourhoods that civic boosters hold up as the ideal Vancouver. “There’s a lot of the picture perfect Vancouver and I think it’s just going to be worse with the Olympics,” Robinson says.
For Coyote, the effects are a little more direct. After the fire, she had a tough time finding an affordable apartment. “Eventually it’s going to be too expensive for the people who built this neighbourhood to live here,” she adds. If that happens, then the city will have lost a place that has been an inspiration for these two writers and so many others.
