Why I Moved: To Build a Life Among Books in Toronto
This Q&A about moving to Canada from the US is part of Why I Moved, a recurring series about Americans building a life abroad.
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 2018 to pursue her Masters in English (with a fitting focus on Diaspora and Transnational Studies). “I had become really interested in living sort of aslant—slightly on the outside, at a distance far from home,” she tells Condé Nast Traveler. “I feel that a big part of my politics of living is to do the inconvenient thing of staying in a place that you're not from.”
Building a life abroad, with people who are from a different place than you, “provides a texture to every baseline experience,” says Foster, who is a French literary translator and the general manager of Type Books' flagship store. Of course, “immigration is always going to be hard,” she adds. It's designed to be—particularly 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 stories—whether to be read, translated, or experienced for herself.
Where did you move to, and why this place?
PROFILE
NAME: Claire Foster
LOCATION: Toronto, Canada
JOB: Bookstore manager and translator
DATE OF MOVE: 2018
FROM WHERE? Cincinnati, Ohio
“I moved here in 2018 to begin a Master's in English at the University of Toronto. After graduating, I applied for a bookseller job here at the bookstore and started working here in 2019, and then in 2020 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.”
What prompted you to move out of the US?
"I was already living outside of the US—in Paris—when I decided to move to Toronto. That's where I moved after undergrad, which I did at Skidmore College in Upstate New York. I’m originally from Cincinnati, Ohio but moved to Paris to teach English, which basically involved talking to different high-school students about American culture and politics. 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 aslant—slightly 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."
Writer Hannah Kirshner first moved to Yamanaka Onsen to better understand its craft culture. Almost 10 years later, she’s found a community and made a home.
Did you move alone or with a partner, family, or friends?
“I moved here with a partner. We're not together anymore, but we lived in the same apartment, and we both came here for the same grad school, so we were navigating the same things. We found our apartment when we were staying at an Airbnb in the city, and we were completely petrified of the process, because the housing market in Toronto is pretty much mythic in the bad reputation it had, and maintains now, of apartments being scarce and expensive. It can be scary, especially if you don't know anyone in the city, and we were the only people that the other knew in Toronto. We took one of the first places that we saw, which was a pretty basic apartment in a building, and we lived there for four years.”
Give us a top-level explanation of the process of moving.
“Fortunately, it was very easy to get here, because it was through a university. When you’re obtaining a student permit, you have the university backing you and helping you. I also had a mother helping me, so that, you know, made it a little easier. From there, I got a work permit and then a work permit extension. I'm now—I think—a few weeks away from getting a permanent residency card in the mail. So, fingers crossed.”
What was the biggest challenge to moving or navigating your new life?
“The most stressful things are all related to bureaucracy—so immigration and taxes. Immigration is always going to be hard. Everything about moving to a place where you're not from, even if it’s just to a different state, or even if it's to a country that's mostly Anglophone like Canada, everything is made to be hard. You're meant to sort of stay where you are, and stay in your lane, in your country. If moving is something that you're motivated to do—for reasons that relate to either politics or intellectual interest or love or whatever it is that you are pursuing—it's worth staying with the difficulty of immigration. I feel that a big part of my politics of living is just continuing to do the inconvenient thing of staying in a place that you're not from. And I think it's a really worthwhile thing to do.”
Claire Foster
How did the nature of your work contribute to your decision to move abroad?
“I didn't have a career at all when I moved here, because I was a student. So my staying abroad has had everything to do with the fact that I found my work and my intellectual path here in Toronto. I didn’t expect my job at the bookstore to last over five years, but it has become a career I really enjoy. I love being a bookseller, and I love the experience of running a bookstore, and I also translate French on the side—I had done a bit of that when I was in Paris, too.”
How did you build community or meet new people?
“Through the bookstore events, I get to meet a lot of authors and translators. So there is this great community of people doing the sort of word work that I'm doing that has been granted me through my job. It took a few years, but just completely because I've stayed with this job for so long I’ve been able to develop relationships with really interesting people. I have a lot of friends who started out as customers at the bookstore and I have developed close relationships with other people in the community who are coming here to read, or do events, or pitch us projects.”
What was it like adapting to a new culture?
“There was honestly nothing that was too difficult to adapt to here. Toronto is a pretty international city. I think there's a statistic that says like 50% of the people who live in Toronto were not born in Canada. Even though it's a very international city, a lot of the people that I've become friends with are all from here, and it's just interesting not to be among them. My graduate degree was in English, but the focus was Transnational and Diaspora Studies. So I am very invested in thinking about international communities in various places. It's interesting to be around people who are all from one place, and to be from a different place. It provides a texture to every baseline experience. And this is true of being in Canada and true of being in France. There's always some other layer—and it's not necessarily a layer that's hard to decipher, but it does sort of provide a level of interestingness to everything that does not exist when you're living in your own country.”
As a child of immigrants, writer Mennlay Golokeh Aggrey acknowledges the privilege of being an American living abroad.
Give us a brief description of your typical weekday or weekend.
"I work at the bookstore full-time, and my version of Friday is Saturday. Saturday is the best day to be at the bookstore. I work there all day and it's really lovely because that's of course when a lot of my friends and community people with day jobs are coming in to shop. There’s no paperwork to do or deliveries to handle because it's the weekend—so it's a day to, like, wear a dress and move around the bookstore and just talk to people, which is the best. And then when I'm not at the bookstore, I'm still answering emails, and I also do our social media. My days off involve the other parts of my life, which is reading and preparing for perhaps an interview—because I do a lot of events at the store and get to ask a lot of people questions—so there's prep work that's involved that I tend to do on weekends. And then I also translate and read. So, I mean that translates to not a lot of free time, which is probably true. But there's always stuff to do."
What’s the one thing you wish you had known before moving?
“I didn't know that Toronto was like, strictly in my opinion, a sort of aggressively ugly city. Especially just coming from Paris, which I think is the most beautiful place. I hadn't really spent a lot of time in Toronto before moving here. I had basically just driven through the city, and I knew the statistic that it's like the fourth largest city in North America in terms of population, which includes, of course, the entire strata of all of the outside places. So I will say I did expect, like a city. But the thing about Toronto that people who live in Toronto really love, and I really don't love, is that even downtown there are a lot of streets that look like a residential street in a suburb. Like even when you're in the city center, there's a ton of houses. And this is also sort of the reason for the apartment shortage, like the way apartments are split up into these residential houses is really strange and results in a lot of weirdly used space—like a lot of space is yards. You know, I wasn't expecting to see yards moving to a big city. I like to feel like I'm in a city and this is one thing about Toronto that I continue to not really like, but it's fine. I've gotten less nasty towards it.”
Do you ever think of moving back to the US? Why or why not?
“I had kept for a very long time the idea of New York City as like the only place I would ever move to in the US. It's where I have a lot of friends, so for a while, I held New York as a maybe someday place, but I sort of abandoned that two years ago. The only place I think about moving to now is France, and that remains a big thought. But, yeah, I just don't like being in America very much. Even when I'm in New York, I'm freaked out by, like, certain American things like an icon of ‘no handguns’ in a grocery store. And then, just like certain loudnesses and sort of America myopia mindsets that exist as much in Brooklyn as they do somewhere in Ohio. So I sort of stopped thinking about the States. But I will say, who knows? There's a reason I'm keeping my passport and not trying to make it Canadian. Of course, it's always good to have the option. But generally no—though I do think about moving to France a lot.”
Originally Appeared on Condé Nast Traveler
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