Web-based project asks "what is Toronto?"

Flying somewhat under the radar (or at least my radar) until recently is a Toronto-based website put together by writer Susan Crean. Organized around the (ultimately unanswerable) question "what is Toronto?," it features a series of interviews, essays, poems and photographs that explore the nature of this city.

Although the site appears, based on its entries list, to have been around for a while, it's in its infancy as far as user interaction goes. And, as is the case with many websites of this kind, there's no guarantee that it'll ever take off (it helps, however, when you have Margaret Atwood tweeting about you). But it'd be nice to see something like this develop. Despite the limited interaction, the writing on the site is of the highest quality, with entries from Michael Redhill, Yvette Nolan and Crean herself. There's also a limited selection of photographs from Michel Lambeth and poems by Lillian Allen and Archer Pechawis.

Crean notes that she's open to original submissions from readers, which I suspect might just be the thing that the site needs to get a little bit of a kickstart. It'd be fascinating to see additional written and photographic materials because, at present, the project has yet to meet the scope of its founding question. But, it's an intriguing start, and certainly worth a preliminary visit.