Tuesday night I attended a night paying tribute to 30 years of the bookstore Pages on Queen Street, downtown Toronto. It was a surprisingly enjoyable evening, considering that there were 15 speakers (including me!). There's a sense you get of the history of a place as well as the way people and places intertwine and take on new and important meanings for random strangers. It's the way community is created and the way culture happens. For me, Pages was one of the first places to prominently stock my magazine Broken Pencil. And it was one of the first places to carry my books. If I hadn't had that support, maybe I would have given up a long time ago? Who knows. Anyway, just wanted to put that out there especially in light of various attacks on cultural institutions currently going on by the Canadian government in power (hopefully not for too much longer). The truth of the matter is that culture is fragile and little things make a big difference. The money doled out to artists is a pittance, but it's a pittance that matters the way seeing my book in the window of a bookstore for the first time mattered.