Island to island

Shani Mootoo in her barn-turned-studio beside her Bloomfield home, where she goes for quiet to paint and write. It is the largest space she has had to work in on her own.

Author and artist Shani Mootoo’s journey to the County

Shani Mootoo was born on an island. She grew up on an island. It’s only fitting that the writer and artist should spend her golden years on a landmass surrounded by water. Which is just what she intends to do, here in the County.

The writer, artist and activist is the author of six books. Her latest, Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab, was nominated for the Scotiabank Giller prize— her third book to receive that nod. She is also a visual artist. Her paintings have been displayed internationally, including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

There is a Canadian tradition of appropriating writers who have moved to this country from elsewhere. Although Shani is a Canadian writer, she was born in Dublin in 1957, and raised in Trinidad. She immigrated to Vancouver in her mid-20s, and lived there for 25 years, producing both writing and visual art.

“I felt like I was living on the edge of something that was extraordinarily beautiful, and you could drown in the sweetness of the place. It was really, really seductive,” Shani says of her time in Vancouver. “I was extremely productive in BC, but I also felt that I wanted to be challenged more—challenged by ideas, challenged by an environment that was not as hospitable.”

Slowly, Shani moved eastward across the continent, first to Edmonton, then Toronto. Although Shani found the city stimulating, it was a little too much so. She says there is a constant noise in a city that is not just in the ears, but in the eyes and the brain, and the noise taints her work and her ideas. In 2012, that is what drove her—literally—to the County.

“I was really missing another kind of beauty, a sort of natural beauty. So we went for a drive one day, in February. Decided to go looking for BC in Ontario. I’d been here a couple times before. I’d been here for the writer’s festival and I just loved it,” says Shani. “I was feeling a little housebound, and I decided to go for a drive. My partner and I. It was cold. There was hardly any snow on the ground, just a little light fluff. And oh, it was so beautiful, so peaceful. And within two days we made an offer on a house.”

While she misses city life, Shani says it’s better to miss the city and go visit, than to live there and miss a place like this. Living in Toronto, she allowed herself to be consumed by the possibilities of the city; shows, activist movements, readings; but in the quiet of the County, a city is no longer restricted to one place—if she wants to visit a city, it could as well be Rome or Bangkok as Toronto.

Shani and her partner, also a writer, came here for the contemplative nature of rural living. But they are not as isolated as they thought they would be, to Shani’s delight.

“We’ve made really good friends here. And lots of friends. And sometimes it’s a struggle to be able to just say, no let’s stay home tonight. This week alone we got five invitations for dinner, every single night. And I had to say to some friends, can we do it in the next few days? I just want to stay home tonight,” says Shani. Feeling suffocated by a constant stream of self-promotion in Toronto, the conversations she’s had here are a welcome change. “Here, it’s just so delightful. I mean, what we end up doing is talking about stuff like, oh where did you get your chicken this week?”

Perhaps the closeness of people in the County reflects her love for creating and displaying art, so different from the overwhelming universality of publishing her writing.

“The audience is smaller than writing. You publish something in a mainstream press and the distribution is huge,” says Shani, “whereas oftentimes, people have to go to a gallery. And the people who go to the gallery, they’re a very particular kind of person. The people who come to a reading, and to books—everybody. Anybody. People who are very different than you.”

Shani finds the mix of people, the openness and quiet of the place and the beauty of the water conducive to creating her work. She is currently working on three different projects in the barn-turned-studio on her property. And while she feels that now, after having turned out two novels without a break, is a time for contemplation, she will never stop working. To Shani, there is no such thing as retirement.

“I have this sense that sleeping was a very, very poor part of our design—the need to sleep. It’s like, the world’s carrying on, and you’ve got your eyes closed and your brain has gone so quiet, and life is going on and you don’t know what’s going on around you. And I find that’s a real problem. I want to be awake all the time,” says Shani. “See, I don’t want to miss anything. Retiring, it’s the same thing. That’s how I imagine it, anyway.”