Ten Cities: The Past Is Present

Wayne Johnston

tet 2019 · FriesenPress

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Each of us has memories that are born of particular places. When we return to those places we enter a realm where the past engages in dialogue with the present. Our ghosts from the past persist even when the places have changed, our memories have evolved, and we ourselves are not who we once were.

Artist Wayne Johnston explores these themes as he revisits ten cities that had a formative impact on his life. He visits ten sites in each of the cities and records his past and present experiences in prose poetry and drawings.

Come along to cities as diverse as Accra (Ghana), Geneva (Switzerland), Iqaluit (Nunavut), Kathmandu (Nepal), La Paz (Bolivia), London (Ontario), Manhattan (New York), Ottawa (Ontario), Toronto (Ontario) and Zagreb (Croatia). Contemplate how your own life has been formed by the experiencing and re-experiencing of particular places.

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Wayne Johnston is a painter, a performance artist, a writer and a librarian. It is primarily through his career as a librarian that Wayne has had the opportunity to endulge his desire for travel. From setting up a resource centre on wildlife management in the Canadian Arctic to working with refugees and victims of war in Croatia, he feels fortunate to not only travel to some fascinating places but to engage with the local people over extended periods of time. It is through thinking back over these experiences that Wayne realized that he missed those cities like he missed old friends. It gave him the longing to see those cities one more time and to explore how revisiting them would impact the memories that he cherishes.

Wayne currently lives with his wife in Guelph, Ontario and works at the University of Guelph Library.