Jenner-Brooke Berger, curator of The Allan Street Reading Series and now Toronto-based writer, is occupying the newly relocatedEye Level Gallery for the month. Walking through the doors of the storefront located at 2159 Gottingen Street, one thing is for certain: this isn’t your average art gallery showcase.
The walls are fully bare. In the distance there is a desk with two chairs, for conversations. As our feet echo along the small expanse, a vintage stereo plays the vague strains of Leonard Cohen’s more ostentatious songs of the 1980s from the tape deck.
But these walls won’t be empty for long. As Berger sifts amongst the scraps of paper adorning her workspace, she plans to create 24 broadsheet posters highlighting the selected pieces of fiction from the contributors of the reading series to create an anthology of their time together. Working with the Dawson Street Letterpress Gang, Berger will juxtapose the beautiful fonts that will adorn each of these stories to create a work of art that can be enjoyed aesthetically, as well as for its literary merits.
On the March 30 book launch of the project, the walls will be filled with the bright colours of the words from fellow writers across the community. But for such a talented writer and editor, this isn’t where Berger imagined she’d end up. “When I was in school I never thought I would do writing as a career,” she says.
Originally enrolling in school for a degree in French and Italian, Berger felt like her time wasn’t being spent accordingly. During a summer French immersion program, she discovered that she learned the most when she was fully engaged in a subject. This feeling would be re-examined when she changed degrees to creative writing and dove into storytelling as a career. “What was amazing about my classes was that this was the first time where I was reading my work to other people and hearing theirs, and just feeling what it felt like to have other people’s work filling the space around you.”
Which, in a way, is the goal of The Allan Street Reading Series she hosted from her apartment. The gallery residency is just a magnification of that. “To me,” she says, “Allan Street is more of an idea now than an actual place.” Check out Berger’s progress from noon-5pm Tuesday to Saturday.
This article appears in Mar 17-23, 2011.