Free The World More Full of Weeping by Robert J. Wiersema

all I can ask for. I don’t get hung
up on the language of a story or novel; in fact, I prefer that
the language be as transparent as possible, not drawing
attention to itself and, more importantly, not drawing
attention away from the story and the characters.
    When
people
started
asking
me
about
Before
I
Wake, though, I realized that I also wrote — completely
unbeknownst to myself — with a considerable emphasis
on the novel’s sense of place. To such a point that people,
especially readers in Victoria, were singling out that aspect
of the book for special emphasis.
    And there was always one question that came up, over
and over again: why Victoria? Why had I chosen to set the
novel in Victoria?
    The answer I tended to give might have seemed flip to
those asking the question, but it wasn’t, really. It was the
only answer I could honestly give: I set Before I Wake in
Victoria because that’s where it happened.
    No, not literally — this is fiction, after all. But it’s where
the novel happened in my head. And once the geographic
specificity was pointed out to me, it made perfect sense.
    I’ve always been a believer in something I’ve come to
call “personal geography” (or, if I’m feeling lofty, “psychic
geography”). There may be some arcane science that goes
by that term, but I use it to refer to the way we reflexively
and subconsciously build maps in our own head.
    Note the plural: maps.
    Take me, for instance. Anyone can log into GoogleMaps
and pull up a map of Victoria and have a pretty clear, if
abstract, sense of how the city is laid out. That’s cartography.
At a personal level, though: I’ve lived in Victoria for more
than twenty years now; there are parts of the city I know
very well, and parts that are a complete mystery. My
personal map of the city, therefore, has incredibly detailed
portions (downtown, Fernwood), and some areas that are
barely more detailed than a street-map (Oak Bay, Gordon
Head).
    Picture one of those old encyclopedias, with the sections
of transparencies to illustrate, say, human anatomy.
    The cartographic map of Victoria is the base sheet,
carefully labelled, and filed with the National Geographic
or whatever society keeps track of these things, all grids
and conspicuous landmarks (the Legislature, the Empress
Hotel). Personal geography is the stack of transparent sheets
that overlay that base sheet. The first one is knowledge: the
sheet slides into place and certain areas of town go dark,
and others become cluttered with landmarks.
    And the next level, the next transparency sheet, is
experience. In those bright, landmark-dotted areas of the
map, there start to appear footnotes, memories. Beacon
Hill Park where, during Luminara, I walked around in the
gathering dark smoking a cigar and being part of a family-friendly group hallucination as powerful as any drug I’ve
ever taken. The corner of Government and Yates, where I
spent seven years working in a bookstore and where there’s
a Starbucks now (a Starbucks where my best friend — and
former co-worker — and I insist on having a coffee whenever
he’s in town from Toronto, a bit of Venti-sized gravedancing). The various stores — Munro’s Books, Curious
Comics — where I’ve spent too much time and money over
the years. And then there are the missing places, sites that
have disappeared but still occupy the personal map: that
building will always be A&B Sound to me, no matter who
takes it over. That building was the glass-blowing studio
where Xander spent so many enthralled hours before they
closed up shop. The restaurant where I interviewed Susan
Musgrave, that’s now a different restaurant where I’ve never
been. The first bar I ever went to when I was legal, which is
now a strip club, where I . . . nevermind. Ad infinitum.
    This isn’t a radical thought at all: everyone has their
own personal geography of the places they