Quick Hits: Project Bookmark

Project Bookmark Canada is a fascinating initiative to place poems and stories in the exact physical location where they take place. A passage from Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion was placed at the Bloor Street Viaduct here in Toronto, for example. The exercise raises a number of interesting questions regarding fiction and reality, and how fiction can shape our sense of place. It reminds me a bit of how avid filmgoers will sometimes make pilgrimages to places where a scene was filmed. Although New Zealand is not actually Tolkien's Middle Earth, there is something that makes that fantastical realm seem more real upon discovering these somewhat other-worldly landscapes here in our own world.