Calling fellow suburbanites: Did we have the same childhood?

02/11/2012

I'm writing some story-based work on suburbia and I often feel like I'm extremely boring and verbose. I'm hoping that there are a few people out there who also grew up in the suburbs that can read it over to let me know if these are shared experiences. Also, I'm not expecting to write the Odyssey or anything, but I'd love feedback on how engaging it is to read.

Here's a working draft of what is probably the Preface to a short ebook/blog series. Before you can say, "HOLY FOOTNOTES," let me just pre-empt that with an, "I know."

What I don't know, and would love to know is:

if my story bears any resemblance to yours (if so, which parts hit home?)
how engaging or painfully boring it is to read (please be honest - I can take it)
equally important, if you think your mom and dad would want to read it.

Thank you very much! I hope we can have a great discussion in the comments below.
Gracen

Comments

S. Gallagher

02/21/2012 21:56

I stumbled upon this page while looking up youth and suburbia for an English essay. I am university student at Trent University studying English and one of the most frequent tangents we explore in class is the post-modern condition and youth. Funny, but you are doing the history of suburbia in comic form. Many graphic novels also explore a similar theme. Suburbia and its discontents are quite an issue today. It is a catch-22: living in suburbia provides a certain degree of safety, security, and potential wealth, yet, it is unfulfilling. I found myself quite dead in this place. At 18, I had taken a gap year to take care of a sick parent and, despite her recovery, I felt I had little resources to turn to. Whether this was my fault and I could not find an outlit for my emotions and thoughts or it was, simply put, there were few places to actually do this. I find that one of the greatest discontents of suburbia ( and this even goes back decades, to suburbia's early years) is that their is no independent culture or spirit for change and idealism. It is a landscape of quotas, signs, structures, and regulations - a "conveyer belt society," a neologism I use. Suburbia is not for the dying. Not for the sick. Not for those whose desires transcend monetary gain. Suburbia was created for capitalist-consumerist means and, although this is not truly a bad thing, it is not sustainable.

Here are a few good reads, should you get the chance. I will be doing a graduate thesis on suburbia and post-war American poetry and these reads are on my bibliography:

"White Collar"
"White Diapora" - Catherine Jurca
"The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit" - Sloan Wilson
"Ghost World" - Daniel Clowes (an excellent and popular take on suburbia and its discontents, with a surprisingly profound end)
-"Freedom" by Jonathan Franzen
-Roland Barthes provides some interesting criticism on 50s suburbia

You also included Arcade Fire's "Wasted Time." "sprawl ii" is also a good take on a similar issue.

Jess Johansson

03/08/2012 10:31

Hey G!

Sorry I haven't gotten around to reading this until now - I've been stuck in my one cycles of write, review, edit, but I remember saying I would check this out so I hope this can still be helpful. I'm so sorry if this is too late.

First off, I think it's superly duperly well written! I think I fit the general audience of who you might be writing this to, i.e. a suburbaner without any educational background in city planning/urban history/etc, and if I'm not, I still think the lack of jargon in your writing is just great. It was easy to follow, and I think I took a lot away from it. I will look forward to reading the whole darn thing!

I had a bit of a different childhood-neighborhood experience than you. I was born in Markham but my family moved to Newmarket when I was 5 years old. I arrived too late to register for Kindergarten at the neighborhood school, so I was bused to the closest school that would bus me. After that, I went to the french immersion elementary school in town, and then the french immersion high school next door in Aurora - both of which I bused to as well. I never really had a core group of friends in my neighborhood, and I think part of that was the busing away for school, and also possibly because I was older than most of the kids and then turned into their babysitter. When we first moved to Newmarket, it was population 35,000. At 10 years old, all I had to do was walk for 15 minutes, cross Yonge St and I would spend my afternoon at the SPCA, playing with the puppies and kitties, and asking every week if I could volunteer there. They always said no "because I had to be 14 years old", but I never stopped trying (I thought maybe I could trick someone once, ha!). I never did get to volunteer there, because before I turned 14 the land on which the SPCA sat, along with its adjacent forests, was sold to developers. Now the SPCA land is a Metro, Shoppers, Mr. Lube and an A&W. The forest was replaced by housing. Can you turn up the Joni Mitchell, please? With the SPCA gone, I used to spend my weekends wandering around Queen St. in Toronto. Then the VIVA bus came into effect, and I didn't even have to get my mom to drive me to Finch! Things picked up then. We also have a cottage on Lake Simcoe that we would escape to whenever possible.

When I left Newmarket for UoG at age 18, only 13 years after I had first moved there, Newmarket's population was between 65-70,000 people. Now, 6 years after that, it's population is on the brink of 80,000 folks. My parents just moved away from there last year, it's seriously a huge sigh of relief for my whole family that we don't have to go back there!

Kudos to you G for using a positive lens for this project. If you need any more help, just let me know :) Sorry for the lateness, again, and my rambles!