Up in Ontario

Reimagining Sudbury's Inco Smelter

I once wrote a story set in Sudbury where the main character loses his job at the Inco smelter and has to deal with how that changed him - his identity being closely tied to his work, his time occupied largely by work, his world defined by his social status as a breadwinner. At one point I considered the story to be part of the manuscript for Up in Ontario, since the main character, William Dubois, also appears as Gill's brother in my novel, but my editor wisely talked me out of including it. In writing about Sudbury I felt like I knew something about the place, since I'd spent many hours imagining it and its characters.

So coming across a post on The Inco Mine in Sudbury, Ontario at the incredible Sprol.com felt like rediscovering a place I had been but couldn't remember. I knew the details but saw them from a new angle, in a new light, with a new perspective.

I also loved to see the Sprol posts on The Earth at Night and The Athabasca Tar Sands. Sprol bills itself as plantary sightseeing and the stories and images illustrate the effect we have on our home, this earth. I remember stories my parents' generation told about seeing the earth for the first time from space - that clean, blue and green sphere beamed back at us from the few astronauts walking on the moon - and how it supposedly spurred on the environmental movement of the day. Let's hope these more localized stories and images can do the same for our generation.