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

know. My
Victoria is my own, an image shaped from my experiences
and my interests. I can tell you, for example, where every
bookstore — used or new — is downtown, but I haven’t the
faintest idea of where one could buy shoes. I know where
to find the best prices and selection on CDs, but I’d have to
look up a men’s clothing store in the phone book. Or stumble
across it by accident. That’s the “personal” part of personal
geography; we all create our own cities around us.
    But there’s one page of transparency left. And as it
slowly drifts into place, certain points on the map spark
with an electrical current. Places I might not have even
known I knew existed, or attached no particular memory
to, crackle off the page.
    The last transparency sheet? Resonance.
    The funny thing about resonance — in general, I mean —
is that you never know when it’s going to hit, or just how
hard it’s going to hit you. That’s why you can hear a song a
thousand times, but when the circumstances are just right,
the opening notes take you back, body and soul, to being in
a car on the highway, watching a beautiful girl sing along,
knowing with a gut-clenching certainty that there’s more
to this new relationship than meets the eye. That’s why
the smell of baking bread and cinnamon opens a door to a
kitchen full of family, laughing and joking and eating, with
no idea of the sadness that will inevitably come to them.
That’s why the touch of a certain breeze can transport
you to a west shore beach, the feeling of wet socks and
the laughter as a little boy looks for fossils in the rocks,
and that’s why the sound of Glenn Gould playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations will always be the sound of falling in
love. Resonance is the ghosts that haunt us, always present,
whether we’re aware of them in the moment or not.
    Resonance is where, for me, the writing happens,
geographically speaking.
    Take Before I Wake , for example. The novel opens with
a car accident, a hit-and-run, in a crosswalk near Hillside
Mall. That crosswalk was part of the “knowledge”and
“experience” levels of my personal geography: I used it
every morning on my walk to work to cross the six lanes
of traffic separating me from the bookstore. And the cars
would whip through, regardless of who might be in the
process of violating their God-given right to arrive at work
as fast as possible, pedestrians be damned. The close calls,
and the fear, gave that crosswalk resonance. When I needed
a place for the hit-and-run to happen, well, there it was.
    Similarly, Royal Jubilee Hospital. After the accident,
Sherry is taken to RJH, and her parents spend a long
time in the Emergency Room. Been there, done that. RJH
is part of my knowledge, and part of my experience. The
resonance, though, came from a very long afternoon in the
ER when my wife was suffering a kidney stone attack a few
years before I wrote the novel. I channelled the whole thing
into the novel, not just the physical particulars, but the
sense of helplessness that comes, that freakish distending
of time that only occurs in hospital waiting rooms. And the
resonance, it turns out, led me astray: RJH doesn’t treat
children. A little girl hit by a car would have been taken by
ambulance out of town to Victoria General for treatment.
Accuracy be damned, though: it’s the resonance that
matters.
    And now that I’m aware of it, it’s easy to see that that
resonance, and my underlying interest in the physical place
of my writing, has continued. My forthcoming novel, for
example, is also set largely in Victoria. Thus, there’s a musty,
cluttered, antiquarian bookstore en route to downtown
that plays a significant role in the book: Poor Richard’s
may be long gone from the actual map, but it lives on in my
soul and, as Prospero’s Books, in my work. And it’s not just
Victoria: there is a scene in the Astor