A Dream in the Life of a book nerd
When I was a kid, there was a little café down the street from our house called The Cinnamon Inn. I can barely remember it. I remember red and black tiles on the floor, maybe. I remember I had a very hard time saying Cinnamon Inn—the ladies at the counter got a kick out of this lil guy trying to say it. I remember walking there with my mom. I remember being excited to go there, every time Mom mentioned it.
It closed, inevitably, and was replaced with another café called The LB Café. I remember even less about this place for some reason. I think the sign was green?
This one didn’t last long before moving over to the Golden Mile Mall, and then a flower shop moved in, maybe? It was a fancy second-hand clothing shop for a while. Then a hair salon. I think it’s still a hair salon. It was part of a strip mall on Hill Avenue in the middle of Old Lakeview that housed a laundry mat at one point, a hardware store, a place called The Shoe Shoppe, a drug store (still there), and various restaurants—Regina’s original Houston Pizza has been there since 1970. A grocery store—once called Tomboy, now called Lakeview Fine Foods—has been there since before I was born. There was even a place called Hill Street News, which was a record & magazine & bookshop, at one point.
I loved visiting these places. I still love visiting these places. There’s something about walking into a building, built in the late 50s/early 60s, and knowing that there’s been a long line of indie shops operating there for nearly 3/4s of a century that takes you back to another time. A shit time for many people, no doubt (let us not pretend the 50s/60s were any sort of Romantic times), but also a time that was markedly slower, where indie shops felt real, where neighbors and friends and shop owners could connect and visit and gossip—and then buy stuff, or maybe not buy stuff. A time before online shopping was the norm, even before big box stores fled the malls into the suburbs and made us all spread out, a group of faceless consumers all rushing to-n-fro to find the best deals—so we could buy stuff.
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There’s a particular kind of daydream I’ve been having for most of my adult life. I used to daydream about living in one of the little apartments above one these shops. In fact: I still get very jealous of my one friend who tells stories of her time living above The Red Ox (on Tatanga Ave) and trying to sleep while the regulars were singing karaoke down below. Or of the characters in books or films who live above their shops, who just have to roll out of bed and down the stairs to start their workday. I don’t know when the dream shifted from living above a shop to actually working in or operating a shop, but I remember writing a bit in a story in one of my early creative writing classes—so this would be 2008 or 2009—in which a character had a café/bookshop and all the drinks were named for authors—a London Fog might be a Charles Dickens, for instance—and even in the current novel I’m writing, a pair of characters open a lil shop together.
All this to say: I like indie shops, and I think I always have.
For a long time, this was just a dream, more of a fiction I’d try to fit into my stories, maybe? This shop was just a place I went to when I needed to, I guess. Sometimes it was a coffee shop; sometimes it was a burger joint; for a while, it was a pirate supply store with a publishing house in the back that also offered after-school homework help for those who needed it (stole this idea straight from Nínive Calegari & Dave Eggers at McSweeney’s). But if I’m honest, the only shop I was ever going to open is a bookshop.
I love bookshops. And I always have. I try to find a bookshop in every city or town or hamlet I go to. If I don’t live there, and I’m visiting, one of the first things I do is find the indie bookshops (and more recently: libraries). I’m a middlevert, so the introvert in me loves that you can walk into a bookshop, and (if you give off the right vibe) the clerk will just leave you alone and let you browse. I have spent more hours than I could count in bookshops in cities and towns wherever I’ve gone. Even here in town, walking around Chapters (because it’s the only one!) has been one of my favourite past-times for years. But the extrovert in me also loves that you know—especially if it’s an indie shop—you know those clerks will also drop everything they’re doing to chat about books if you need them to. A good bookshop feels like a magical place to me, because it seems everyone there knows exactly what you want, whether its solitary wandering through the stacks or its lively conversation about the values of Romance as a genre.
So when Regina lost its last independent new bookshop (never forget: we have two exceptional indie used shops) in 2024, Chantelle and I started having a different kind of conversation, the kind that leads to a second convo, then a third, then one that ends with Chantelle opening a spreadsheet and the two of us trying to figure out how to do it for real.
And here we are.
I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately, as I typically do when I feel like I don’t know anything, and I’ve found that I’m much less interested in the mechanics of running a business than I am in the meaning of running a bookshop (of course, we need to figure out the mechanics, and believe me: We’re figurin’!). I was surprised to find as many books on the topic as I did, when I went searching for it. Turns out: booksellers have seemingly always been a passionate bunch, and as they deal in words, many have written some down. Add to that all the research that’s been happening since the 80’s about the benefits of viable “Third Places,” on top of that, all the current research trying to understand the 21st century’s “loneliness epidemic”—before, but particularly during and after the Covid lockdowns—and I’ve been thoroughly convinced that The Black Bird Commons and other places like it are exactly what a city like Regina needs, even if it is something I’ve personally wanted to do for a long time.
Which is to say: I think we’ve sort of stumbled into something that could turn out to be very cool, impactful, and even important for the city.
Sociologist, Ray Oldenburg, wrote about what he called “third places”—not home, not work, but the informal gathering spaces that stitch communities together. The pub. The barbershop. The café. The places where you show up without an agenda and leave having talked to someone you didn’t expect to talk to. His argument, made in 1989 and somehow seeming even more urgent now, is that the erosion of third places is making us lonelier, more isolated, less capable of the small acts of civic life that hold a neighbourhood together.
Bookshops, it turns out, have always been this. Long before Oldenburg gave it a name, booksellers were hosting the conversations that mattered—philosophical, political, literary, social. The bookshop as a great good place is not a new idea but seems to be one of the oldest ideas of our Western culture. The more I read, the more I find that the research suggests bookshops are actually important, and not just for the nerds who frequent them. Communities with independent bookshops show measurable increases in foot traffic and surrounding business revenue, increases in neighbourhood pride, community connectedness, and even a feeling of personal stewardship and responsibility toward one’s neighbors. A bookshop (as well as other well-functioning 3rd places) seems to push forward a genuine sense that a place—a city or community or neighborhood, or even just the street it’s on—is worth caring for. A thriving bookshop signals that a community believes in itself, in its own inner life, and that that same community is more willing to get out and meet and work with and care about their neighbors—familiar and foreign alike—in ways that strengthen the larger community as a whole. And: it seems to lift the surrounding neighborhoods and businesses up along with it as it does so.
This is what I think I’m most excited for now that The Commons is really moving forward:
If it works—if The Black Bird Commons becomes something more than just a retail operation (though we do need to pay our bills and would prefer to do so without relentless existential dread) but something that functions as proof that this city that I’ve lived in for most of my entire life has an inner life worth tending—I think I’ll be more proud of this than nearly anything I’ve ever done before.
Here’s hoping we’re chatting in and around and about The Black Bird Commons for many years to come
P.S. The daydream has a possession date now. More on that soon. Join our Mailing List for updates.
P.P.S. Go vote on which Book Clubs we should run. And/Or Request a book if ya wanta.
