By the time illustrator Daniel Innes finished his very Toronto book, the city had already changed

Leading up to Canada Reads, CBC Arts is bringing you daily essays about where this year's authors write for our series Where I Write. This edition features Denison Avenue author Daniel Innes.

Denison Avenue is very much a Toronto book. But it never would have come to be if writer Christina Wong and I hadn't lived in the same neighbourhood — the same special place where our book takes place.

I had been renting in Toronto's Chinatown for most of the 2000s, but I was very lucky to find a loft on Spadina Avenue in 2010 (and I feel even luckier today, considering the building still hasn't been sold to developers). That studio apartment is where I illustrated our project.

The Spadina-Dundas Chinatown and Kensington Market neighbourhoods of Toronto have always been in transition. You could really feel this strong "make it work" DIY attitude. The mix of people, cultures and positive energy made it feel very welcoming. 

Denison Avenue is a double-sided book about a 70-year-old Chinese Canadian woman named Wong Cho Sum. Christina's half of the book is a novel, and my half is a visual guide, inviting readers to walk through our neighbourhood as Cho Sum does in the novel. My pages are split into "then" and "now," with the "now" locations dated roughly around the time the pages were being drawn (2019-2021). Even as I write this, however, many of the "now" locations have changed, making the book something like a time capsule. 

Walking around the neighbourhood and taking photos of the locations was fun at first. I love working on a big project. But it became very sad very quickly. So many places special to me had disappeared. I felt that it was important to document them. I knew the drawings I was making couldn't capture the energy of a place, but I hoped it would at least incite some positive memories.

For me, drawing the pages was a grieving process. The Toronto I had loved — the neighbourhoods of Chinatown and Kensington Market — had changed rapidly, and its energy was completely different from when I first started coming downtown to see and play live music in the mid-'90s. Once I finished my half of the book, I felt like my mourning was complete and I had some closure. Our book launch at Sneaky Dee's was set up as a funeral for Chinatown and Kensington Market. 

In March, all of the location illustrations from Denison Avenue will be on display at The Beguiling at 319 College St. All 80 pages will be for sale, with 100 per cent of the proceeds donated to the Fort York Food Bank. I'm very grateful for all the positive attention from the book; it's enabled me to organize this fundraiser at a time when so many people rely on the food bank.  

Now, my time is split between Toronto and a property in rural Hyōgo, Japan. 

I have a studio in a previously abandoned farmhouse, with a big overgrown garden, beside a temple. I'm in the process of setting up a non-profit artist residency there. Although lately, I mostly spend my days writing and drawing down by the river.

Read this year's Where I Write essays every day this week on CBC Arts and tune in to Canada Reads March 4th-7th, 2024.