It’s with some reluctance that I bid farewell to writing in downtown Kitchener at the public library and at one of my favourite cafes, A Matter of Taste. For the rest of the summer I’ll be writing in a beautiful part of rural PEI, close to beaches, bucolic scenery and Charlottetown’s vibrant summer scene, but there’s something about the closeness and excitement of downtown Kitchener that I’ll miss.

This urban environment has provided inspiration and a useful combination of wireless connections, fine caffeinated beverages, and a quiet place to write. My academic interactions in this neighbourhood are usually virtual and text based, but occasionally I’ll meet one of my advisory committee members here and even while writing this post I bumped into a colleague from the Tri-University PhD program. The stimulus for writing also comes from a closeness with a wide range of people and problems, and they remind me of the larger questions that make up the human experience and the reasons for academic writing. For instance, in the span of an hour I’ve seen homeless people getting hassled by police for sleeping in public, local news crews interviewing street youth and crack addicts, prostitutes getting to work before noon, minors buying cigarettes from patio coffee patrons, and a low speed chase ending in scuffles and arrests on the city’s main street. Nothing brings the city out onto the sidewalks on a sunny fall day like an arrest, and nothing inspires the intellect quite like a crowd.

Other questions are more subtly raised through some of the city’s architecture and its proximity to a range of excellent visual and especially performed art. I’ve been fortunate to see Christopher Plummer as Lear in my favourite Shakespeare play, as well as some diverse music and poetry ranging from spoken word artist Motion to the grey haired and golden penned Leonard Cohen. That magical evening with Cohen was just last night at Centre in the Square, where the 75 year old literary and musical icon performed an astounding 3 hour concert. Of course the small venue sold out in a couple hours, and I only chanced upon the ticket queue because of my regular downtown commute on foot. I could ask for no better departure from living in this exciting community.

When thinking of my upcoming succession of new environments — Kitchener, PEI in the summers, Waterloo this fall/winter, and wherever work and writing take me beyond that — I am reminded of my next conference presentation, a semi-plenary panel on environmental history at the Western Canadian Studies Conference in Edmonton. Our panel will be discussing “settlement” from an environmental history perspective, asking if it should be thought of as “resettlement” or some other term that acknowledges first peoples. My reading in this area has suggested that “settled” is an inaccurate way to think of rural people anyway. Supposedly sedentary farmers were often on the move, especially in the semi-arid Prairies, and were involved in processes of settlement, re-settlement, and de-settlement. Many were simply unsettled. Perhaps the peripatetic lifestyle of an emerging academic lends itself to an understanding of everyday life for rural people, and the new environments on my horizon will help situate my thoughts as I write more broadly about life for newcomers on the Great Plains and Prairies.