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In Toronto\'s Junction, Colin Marshall talks to Amy Lavender Harris, geographer at York University and author of\\xa0Imagining Toronto, a study of the city as depicted in its literature. They discuss the psychedelically-illustrated, Toronto-centric poetry of Dennis Lee with which so many Torontonians grew up; how it took her thirty years from her Lee-reading days to come to understand the full scope of Toronto literature;\\xa0In the Skin of a Lion, Michael Ondaatje\'s much-named, little-read novel of city-building; how she first went about creating a university course on Toronto literature; her "personal fetish," the narrative of place; multiculturalism as Toronto\'s foundational myth; why Torontonians\\xa0falsely believe\\xa0the United Nations declared their city the world\'s most diverse; the "eternal haggle" of life\\xa0here; how she\'s come to agree, at least halfway, with the description of the city as "a place where people live, but not where things happen"; why, in Canada, everyone has a hyphen; her non-Canadian-born husband\'s appreciation of the country as one where "people have nothing to declare"; Torontonian manifestations of Stanley Fish\'s "boutique multiculturalism" and Charles Taylor\'s "inspired ad-hocing"; why hating Toronto became such a literary and social tradition; no longer talking about achieving "world class" status as a sign of having achieved it; what about Toronto architecture makes people call it ugly, and why buildings that make people talk have already succeeded; the significance of the ravines in the Torontonian consciousness; 1960\'s suburban satire\\xa0The Torontonians\\xa0and the Canadian "flourishing of cultural production" that would come later that decade; Canada\'s thoroughgoing urbanness against its imaginary self-conception as a rural country; and the important elements of Toronto \\u2014 remaining, vanishing, and gone \\u2014 identified in one particular Dennis Lee poem.

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