Paul Kane High School graduate and National Magazine Award winner Kate Black is set to publish her first book, Big Mall: Shopping for Meaning, next month.
Black, who now lives and works in Vancouver, has been published in numerous outlets, such as The Globe & Mail, Maisonneuve, The Walrus, Alberta Views, and the Gateway — the University of Alberta's student newspaper.
Big Mall, which is part history, part memoir, and part cultural critique, is being published through Coach House Books on Feb. 13.
In an interview, Black said she first got the idea for what turned out to be Big Mall nearly six years ago, while she was a creative writing Master's student at the University of British Columbia.
“When you grow up in Edmonton or St. Albert or the surrounding area, you're just surrounded by so many mysteries and stories and urban legends about West Edmonton Mall,” she said. “We all have so many formative memories there like birthday parties, or maybe it's the first time you went on a date, or some people have had very scary things happen to them at the mall.”
“I thought it was interesting that no one's really given West Edmonton Mall a literary treatment; so not just a book about facts about what's happened there but really doing what literature does well, which is ask what does this all mean? What's happened here and what meaning are we supposed to make of it?”
The book weaves through many aspects of West Edmonton Mall, and malls in general, ranging from the history of shopping centres and their inventor Victor Gruen; the mall's duality as both a place where people can go to reinvent themselves but also to be anonymous; the phenomenon of mall suicides, accidents, and violence; and how, she argues, malls can be a surprising, and necessary, place of hope for those disillusioned by capitalism.
“Malls represent human potential, for better or for worse,” Black said. “In some ways, it shows how terrifying the human mind can be or how terrible the consequences of the human mind can be.”
“But in another sense malls show what's possible in a really positive and spiritual or hopeful way because malls are inherently a social space.”
Connecting all the different ideas that are pondered and poked in Big Mall is Black's memoir aspect of the book, in that she shares the formative moments she experienced in West Edmonton Mall, and how the mall changed from being a beacon of excitement in her youth to being a beacon of guilt-filled bliss as she came of age.
“I feel elated a lot of the time when I go to the mall, I feel ecstatic,” she said. “But [there's] anxiety that's tied up in that as well, like the physical anxiety of being surrounded by so many people, and then the more abstract anxiety of experiencing all these materials floating around us and knowing we live on a finite planet, we don't have the resources to support this level of consumption.”
Black said that abstract anxiety she feels reached a tipping point around the time she started writing the book, which led her to realize that she could either go on feeling immense despair about malls and the world around her in general, or she could choose to have and find hope in the mall by reckoning with the idea that the mall can symbolize both immense exploitation, and innate human connection.
“I find hope in the mall in the fact that it shows evidence that people at the end of the day do care about each other and people seek out experiences where they make meaning with one another,” she said. In the book, Black summarizes this point by using the 2012 collapse of the Algo Centre Mall in Elliot Lake, Ontario, to infer the following point: “If a mall can collapse, it means that things won't be this way forever.”
When not dissecting what the mall, any mall, symbolizes and embodies, Black also presents a thorough historical account sure to teach any reader some information they didn't know before.
For example, Black found that on his deathbed, Victor Gruen, the inventor of the shopping mall concept, actually regretted what he created. Or that besides being home to dolphins until 2004, West Edmonton Mall also housed tigers, black bears, chimpanzees, and other unexpected animals at one point or another in its nearly 45-year history.
Although the book will be available in stores on and after Feb. 13, Glass Bookshop in Edmonton will be hosting a launch event for Big Mall in late March. More details of the event are still to come.
