North America Chevron. Canada Chevron. Ontario Chevron. Toronto Chevron. From the romantically disheveled basement of an indie bookstore in Toronto , Claire Foster tells me, on a zoom call, that she's long felt a desire to live outside of the United States.
This feeling first led the Ohio native to Paris , where she taught at a local high school, and then to Toronto in to pursue her Masters in English with a fitting focus on Diaspora and Transnational Studies. It's designed to beβparticularly when it comes to the bureaucratic matters of visas and taxes. But for Foster, sticking with the discomfort of building a life aslant of America has led to a fulfilling career, good friends, and lots of storiesβwhether to be read, translated, or experienced for herself.
After graduating, I applied for a bookseller job here at the bookstore and started working here in , and then in I also became their events manager. It was a funny time to begin events, obviously, because two months after that everything shut down. But I continued working here and then about two years ago, I also took on the role of General Manager.
So now I'm the manager and events person at the flagship store; there are three Type Books locations in Toronto. I had also lived in France for a year during my undergrad, and loved it I continue to love France. So I already had an ongoing interest in living abroad, which led me to Toronto because I wanted to write in English and pursue graduate school in English. I also wanted to continue to live out of the US because I had become really interested in living sort of aslantβslightly on the outside, at a distance far from home.
Of course, the distance between America and Canada is much smaller than the distance between America and France. But yeah, another reason is that grad school costs way less in Canada, even factoring in a higher international student fee. It was also only a one-year program, so that was important. And then at that time, Trump was in office for the first time. I didn't know that he would be in office again, but I didn't want to live in the country.
