Adam Bunch's Toronto isn't Boring - It's Deadly

We've all heard of a life story, but what about a death story? Just in time for the spookiest season, Adam Bunch's The Toronto Book of the Dead (Dundurn Press) offers a unique portal to the history of Toronto: through the city's strangest, shadowiest, most memorable moments of demise. 

With a foreword by acclaimed journalist Shawn Micallef, The Toronto Book of the Dead is a quintessentially Toronto book with a twist. Bunch covers war and disease, duels to the death and executions, challenging the idea of peaceful, sleepy Toronto - now or then. From a Victorian baseball darling to a murdered lighthouse keeper, Toronto is the resting place of countless people who led interesting lives and suffered even more interesting deaths.

We're nervously welcoming Adam to Open Book today (what was that noise? Is someone sneaking up on us? We're a little jumpy after The Toronto Book of the Dead) so he can take our Lucky Seven questionnaire. 

He tells us about his Toronto Dreams Project and how it led to this book, how having internet access while writing can be a boon rather than a distraction, and his own favourite histories of Toronto as a reader. 

Open Book:

Tell us about your new book and how it came to be.

Adam Bunch:

The Toronto Book of the Dead tells the history of the city through the stories of some of its most remarkable deaths. Every chapter is a morbid true tale, covering everything from a 700 year-old Wendat burial mound in Scarborough to a lawyer accidentally throwing himself out the window of a towering downtown skyscraper.

I’ve been writing about the history of the city for a while now. It started with my Toronto Dreams Project: I write fictional dreams about figures from the city’s past, print them on custom-designed postcards, and then leave them to be found in public places related to that person’s life. And in time, that fictional project led to writing more and more about the city’s true history, including a column for Spacing magazine.

The idea of building a history of the city around death came gradually. As I wrote more and more about the history of Toronto, it started to dawn on me: every story ends the same way. And so, death gave me a way to talk about a broad range of topics and time periods, while also being something that everyone can relate to. Plus, it gave me the chance to talk about history in what is (hopefully!) an engagingly macabre way.

OB:

Is there a question that is central to your book, thematically? And if so, did you know the question when you started writing or did it emerge from the writing process?

AB:

I knew, of course, that the central theme of the book was always going to be death and its relationship to the history of the city. But as I wrote, the idea crystallized. Toronto, like every city, is a city of the dead. Everything around us — our buildings, our roads, our traditions — are the result of the collective efforts of the people who have lived and died here for hundreds, even thousands, of years. So understanding the dead helps us to understand our city and ourselves. Their stories are our stories.

OB:

Did this project change significantly from when you first starting working on it to the final version? How long did the project take from start to finish?

AB:

From the first meeting with my publisher to the day the book hit the shelves was about two years. But some of the chapters are revised or refreshed versions of stories that I first started writing and researching as long as seven years ago, when I first launched the Toronto Dreams Project.

The book did evolve over that time — though mostly in relatively small ways. A few chapters got dropped, and a few others shifted their focus. I’d originally planned to write much more, for instance, about Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King’s infamous interest in the occult — but in the end, I was even more fascinated by one of his professors at the University of Toronto. Professor James Mavor was a skeptic who debunked the most famous medium in the city at the end of the First World War, attending one of his séances and calling him out on the front page of the Toronto Daily Star.

OB:

What do you need in order to write – in terms of space, food, rituals, writing instruments?

AB:

An internet connection! That’s by far the most important thing. I’m constantly researching while I write: exploring tangents, double-checking facts… And for that same reason, being surrounded by other books about the history of Toronto is important, too. I pretty much only ever write at home or at the library so that I’m never far from my sources.

One of my regular rituals is also to head out into the city as often as possible: to visit the places I’m writing about, to soak in their geography and imagine what they were like decades, or centuries, ago.

OB:

What do you do if you're feeling discouraged during the writing process? Do you have a method of coping with the difficult points in your projects?

AB:

I’m always working on a few stories or chapters at once — or even a few entirely different projects. So when I start to feel like I’m hitting a roadblock, or feeling discouraged, I’m usually able to switch to working on something else for a while, something I’m feeling more inspired by at the moment, and then come back to the first story feeling refreshed, or having been able to work through the problem in the back of my mind in the meantime.

As long as there’s not a deadline looming. If there’s a deadline looming, I’m screwed.

OB:

What defines a great book, in your opinion? Tell us about one or two books you consider to be truly great books.

AB:

When it comes to books about the history of Toronto, the ones I enjoy the most are the ones that use engaging stories as an opportunity to share a new perspective on the history of this place.

Two of the greats that leap to mind are about Toronto music scenes. Stuart Henderson’s Making A Scene is about Yorkville in the 1960s, which produced world-famous musicians like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. But instead of simply sharing anecdotes about celebrities, his book looks at the deeper currents that were driving the culture of the neighbourhood and its contentious relationship with the rest of the city.

Liz Worth’s Treat Me Like Dirt explores another controversial scene that appeared just a few years later: it’s an oral history of the Toronto punk scene in the late 1970s. A city that had just driven the hippies out of Yorkville wasn’t exactly keen to embrace an even more radical scene, filled with theatrically violent bands like the Viletones and unapologetically political acts like the Curse.

The two books take different approaches to similar subjects, but both unearth the kind of stories that prove Toronto’s history is much more gritty and interesting than some people give it credit for. And they both explore the way in which countercultures with very difficult — and sometime even confrontational — relationships with rest of Toronto can still change the city around them. Both books were vital sources for chapters in The Toronto Book of the Dead.

OB:

What are you working on now?

AB:

Now that the book is done, I’m looking forward to spending more time on the Toronto Dreams Project again. It’s been a while since I’ve written a new dream, and I have a few that I’m getting close to finishing. I’ve also been able to get back to publishing new posts for Spacing and for my own Toronto Dreams Project Historical Ephemera Blog — writing about whatever stories I happen to get interested in, which feels pretty liberating after spending two years focused on death.

____________________________

Adam Bunch is the creator of the Toronto Dreams Project, and has written about the history of the city for Spacing Magazine, Torontoist, and the Huffington Post. In 2012, he earned an honourable mention for a Governor General’s History Award. Adam lives in Toronto.