I’d forgotten about the moss. When I was out on for walk in Vancouver earlier this month, I nearly stumbled over a tree’s moss-covered roots knuckling out of the sidewalk. I looked up to see more moss growing on a wall and around the rocks in a garden. I’d had been years since I’d visited Vancouver, but how could I have forgotten the damp? 

Much else I remembered clearly. The cherry trees were in bloom during my visit, pink and white against the blue spring sky. Some of the trunks were more gnarled than any I remembered, the trees grown old and arthritic. Under them, the rhododendrons were coming loudly into bloom, big red, white and rose trumpets. The daffodils were almost past, but the azaleas had started to open their pastels, a lighter version of the violets in my garden in Toronto that were nowhere near blooming.

I’d flown to the Coast for a week to visit friends, and was thrown into a meditation on landscape: how important setting is to what I write. How I need deeply-felt and thoroughly-observed surroundings into which I can drop my characters before I can start writing. How I suggest that emerging writers make sure of their settings before they get underway, rather than relying on dialogue and action alone to carry readers forward. Both speech and movement interact with location in subtle ways, and the interactions can take you in surprising directions because of a setting’s specific demands. 

What has to happen in a particular forest lapped by the ocean? An exact bar with low ceilings and country music played too loud? A tunnel packed with transport trucks or an industrial street that frightened you the time you went back to your car and found the place deserted? You’ve got to stretch your imagination when you’re hemmed in by specifics, and this can help you find unexpected ways forward. When, of course, what we seek in a story is the unexpected, even if it’s a turn of phrase, or a sudden memory shaken loose by the sight of a woman wearing a fringed jacket in a bar.

I was born in Vancouver, and when I landed there in mid-April, it had been years since I’d been back. I left town when I was 21, planning to adventure around the world and come home in a couple of years. Then… life. I’ve never lived there again, although I used to go back frequently while my mother was still alive. Now it was more a dozen years since her will made it through probate and I hadn’t been back since. Yet I kept writing about it. My latest novel, Far Creek Road, takes place in a fictionalized suburb of Vancouver. I often write short stories set on the coast, and one time I transplanted a childhood experience in a North Vancouver rockery to Toronto, which give me an earlier novel, The Corner Garden. 

Driving in from the Vancouver airport, I saw how greatly the city had changed since my last visit. Also how it hadn’t. Out the car window, I saw that developers had thrown up long lines of apartment buildings along major streets like Cambie without putting stores on the main floor, so people who live in them have a hike to do their shopping, or just to hang out. I know someone who recently moved home to Vancouver, and she told me she no longer has a coffee shop a 10-minute walk from her house, which she’d got used to in Toronto. During my time there, I felt the city hadn’t given much thought to zoning local neighbourhoods where people could shop and socialize, meaning that Vancouver has the same slightly empty feel it had when I was a kid. People relied on cars back then when they did their shopping. My parents drove everywhere, and I used my babysitting money to buy a $400 rust bucket the moment I turned 16, driving it over town to university. Many people still seem to do that, so the sidewalks out the window struck me as a little quiet. Life felt slow. 

The sight plunged me into nostalgia. Oh! I’ve come home! That warmth in your chest and the base of your throat, the bright feeling in your eyes. Yet I didn’t just feel it. I also asked myself how I could use the sensation in a future piece of writing. Because here’s the thing. Writers don’t just need a specific setting for their work, whether it’s a country bar or deserted street. We need one that hits us hard, and have to pay attention when we stumble across it. Novelist Graham Greene said writers have to have a chip of ice in their hearts. He wrote that on his father’s deathbed, he made note of details he might use one day, knowing they would elevate his work.

I already know I feel deeply about Vancouver, and that it will probably show up in my writing again. Yet here’s the trick: you have to notice when you have this feeling about someplace new, a strong sense of connection and curiosity, something like nostalgia for a place you’ve never been. I’ve talked to a couple of talent scouts over the years about how they recognized rising stars when they heard them. The legendary A&R man John Hammond spotted the 17-year-old Billie Holliday in the 1930s and helped Lady Day get her first contract. Over the years, he signed Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen to CBS Records. Hammond told me that he heard a bell go off inside the first time he saw each of them perform. Nothing more than that. He couldn’t describe it. A bell. But I’ve come to listen for the ping myself, and to learn to distinguish it amid all the ambient noise. 

The ping isn’t always there. I love going to Montreal, but I’ve never set any writing in Quebec. I lived outside Boston for almost a year, and it’s never made it into my books. But I can still remember feeling this strongly about Scotland years ago when I was backpacking around Europe, a 22-year-old who’d just left Vancouver and thought she’d go back. My mother’s family was Scottish, and I’ve always known there’s a book waiting for me there. Lately, I’ve had the sense its time is coming. I have to go back, and I’ll get a novel out of it.

Meanwhile, there I was on the coast, visiting both Vancouver and Pender Island. On Pender, the first short drive through a forest of cedar, firs and salal brought me back to my childhood, to the forest I wrote about in Far Creek Road. When I got out of the car at my great friends’ house, a raven cronked loudly. You hear ravens in Toronto, but not often, nor are there as many crows as you see on the coast, flying through the woods on Pender, hopping down the sidewalk in Vancouver. From a hilltop on Pender, I would soon hear a pair of bald eagles exchange their surprisingly weak high-pitched cries. Walking along the shore, I would feel the wind blow cold off the ocean. Mount Baker rose across the water, brilliant with snow. 

I was surprised to see so few arbutus trees, far fewer than I remembered. My friend told me a blight had run down the coast, leaving me to mourn those peeling ochre trunks. Yet we saw a few arbutus on Pender while taking a walk on Roes Islet. Banks of white faun lilies bloomed nearby, and chocolate lilies were coming into bud. Over on Brooks Point, a pair of yellow-rumped warblers flitted along the beach from log to log. I’ll write about this, I kept thinking. About returning. About orange, yellow and green, green, green under the bluest of skies.

My dear friends in Vancouver were very good to me as well. One friend and I had dinner with her women’s group in the Boathouse on Kits Beach, looking out at the freighters lying at anchor, sunset tinting the sea brilliant orange, more orange. We walked past Vancouver General Hospital, where I was born, and where my friend’s daughter is now a nurse on the emergency ward, as my mother was so many years before. I made several trips to Granville Market, which I still remember as an industrial landscape of warehouses, home to Sweeney Cooperage, and pungent with sawdust and the stink of diesel. Now kayakers paddled past the seawall at low tide, and in place of the lumbering old buses, I caught the Skytrain to a stop near Main Street, meeting my niece for lunch on a sunny patio. It used to be so rough on Main that my parents wouldn’t let me get out of the car on the rare occasions we went there. They’re good people, most of ’em, my father would say, nodding at the folks slumped on the street. But those poor guys, they’ve had it hard.

A palimpsest of memories and experiences, so many that I spent my first three days back in Toronto scribbling in my journal. Artisanal chocolates on Pender made with local honey. A man up Oaks Bluff so scared of heights he clutched the bench as he walked around it to sit down, hand over hand, legs not working so well. A thousand or more Bonaparte’s gulls, a great flock we saw from the ferry, so many birds flying past us with their black heads and wings bent like terns. I did reading at my friends’ house in Vancouver from my Vancouver novel thinking there will be another one. Scribble scribble, landscape. Scribble scribble, the constraints and the freedom it brings. Scribble scribble scribble, what it means to come home.