Contributor’s Corner
Bill Arnott’s Beat I ’m author, poet, songwriter Bill Arnott and I’m excited to be part of NRM, a magazine I love. Bill Arnott’s Beat is a series of insights and a laugh or two experienced during my travels—book tour readings and performances at mixed-media and literary events everywhere. I’m usually on Canada’s west coast but with the reach of our creative community, I feel we all live just around the corner. For an introduction, a bit of background. There’s a stylized map on our living room wall. A simple piece of art with an eco feel—reclaimed wood, splashed with paint, a quasi-Rorschach test by a local artist.
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We found it at an open-air craft fair one evening on North Vancouver’s gentrifying waterfront. Across the inlet lies the CBD, working port and cruise ship berths alongside a convention centre. We live nearby. I handed over three twenties and carried away the awkward piece of lumber, a Three Stooges sketch waiting to unfold. Since then it’s been a touchstone—at times in storage, now displayed on the solitary bit of wall in our highrise studio apartment in Vancouver’s Yaletown. If you don’t know the area, let me offer up comparables relative to NRM’s publication hubs (New York, London, Hong
Kong, Philippines). If you’re in the US, think Portland Oregon’s Pearl District—a hundred-and-fifty-year-old rail terminus developed twenty-five years ago into restopub, craft-beer, hipster-beard landscape adjacent to polluted and beautiful waterfront. If you’re in the UK, think London’s Canary Wharf, thirty years ago, before over-leveraged Canadians spruced it up. In China? I’d liken it to a small scale, architecturally challenged Shanghai Bund. And if you’re in the Philippines, imagine fewer islands, four seasons, and less interesting cuisine. That’s my neighbourhood—my home, most of the time.
