Poetry — I
Brandy Fedoruk and Rebecca Ann Dolen of The Regional Assembly of Text and its lowercase reading room.
Inspiration often comes when you least expect it.
Somewhere in my family history someone bought an Oliver typewriter. It is the size of a dozen laptops stacked atop one another and weighs enough to leave thin slices in my fingers when I move it from place to place. When I try to type with it, the tape bunches and the keys stick, splaying in every direction but the one that will leave an impression on paper. I don’t usually try to type with it. I usually just look at it and have it out on a shelf like decoration. A decoration that connects me to family members I never met and to a time in which screens didn’t exist.
When I walk into The Regional Assembly of Text on Main Street, the shop is full of many such typewriters. They are all making an awful lot of noise at once. The shop’s owners, Brandy Fedoruk and Rebecca Ann Dolen, don’t seem to mind. “Your Oliver probably just needs to be cleaned,” Brandy assures me over the din of their weekly, free letter writing event. Being from the planned obsolescence generation, I’d assumed it was broken forever but Brandy shakes her head. “Nope.”
“But can you even get ribbons for them anymore?”
She motions to the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet behind her. “Yup.”
It was the typewriters in the window of the shop that first beckoned me inside Regional Assembly of Text, but the tiny nook tucked into the back of the shop was what kept me there far longer than I’d anticipated. The lowercase reading room, a 9 by 3 foot room fitted with a reading bench and cushions, is a museum of sorts. Shelves stretch across one end and creep along the wall, each crammed full with zines and self-published booklets, a home for projects that might not otherwise have found a home. The tiniest are the size of a quarter and the span of subject matter is broad: poetry to picture books to politics and back.
“You don’t mind if people just park themselves in there to read?” I ask.
“No,” replies Brandy as Rebecca administers to the latecomers hoping to get a place at one of the many typewriters and sets them up with free supplies. “When we started this place twelve years ago we wanted to offer a few free things.” She nods out into the shop. “The letter writing night was one. The nook is another. And anyway, the way it’s laid out, the seating area is at the back, out of sight. We’re probably not even going to notice if someone’s in there for ages reading.”
It’s hard for me to process the idea of a business in this red-hot real estate zone being willing to offer anything for free, let alone managing to do it for twelve years. Especially when it’s a boutique stationery store in a digital world. I mention this and Brandy waves beyond the row of filing cabinets behind the till. “Well, there’s a whole other wholesale side to our business. Having the two streams of income allows us a bit of freedom.”
It’s a freedom many businesses on Main Street don’t have. Rebecca joins us once all the customers are busy typing. “Part of the problem is the size of the spaces that are being created. If you look at these big developments like the one on Main and 25th, the retail areas are enormous. No independent shop is going to be able to afford the rent on that, so instead, you get a Sleep Country. It’s so silly. Nobody’s going to be walking down Main Street, see Sleep Country, and just pop in for a mattress. Those big shops could be five or six small ones that actually cater to the customers you find in this area.”
I’m only a handful of days into my interviews when I speak to Brandy and Rebecca and already I feel like I’m in an echo chamber. Chris Brayshaw of Pulpfiction Books talked about the inaccessibility of affordable commercial spaces. Jesse Cooper of Our Community Bikes complained of similar hurdles. Elisa Thorn and I spent the good part of an hour discussing spaces and the public’s access to them. Over and over it’s one word I’m hearing: SPACES.
I walk home in the rain past the development Rebecca mentioned, and I imagine a dozen independent shops there instead of one corporate giant. I pass another new development at 33rd and Main, its massive retail space occupied by a single Rexall pharmacy. As I pass into the residential stretch of Main my mind turns to the south end of Cambie Street, once very similar to this section of Main, but now with entire blocks hidden behind developers’ fences. In several years there will be towers on either side of the street with shop fronts at their bases.
The moment I’m home I sit down at the computer to learn more about Phase 3 of the Cambie Corridor Planning Program, and realize there’s still room for local voices in the charting of that new territory.
