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The truth is the idea for teaching the Edmonton course was seeded in something I did a few years ago. I taught a course on Los Angeles at the millennium with a colleague of mine. There’s all this work on L.A. and I thought, you know, it’s world-class city and people will be really interested in it.

Two years after that I found myself living for 6 months in Honolulu, which of course was awful, but somebody had to do it and I’m glad it was me. So I was living in Honolulu, trying to get to know the city, reading things that people had written about it.

There was something about the combination of the L.A. and Honolulu experiences that made me realize, sometime in the winter of 2002-03, that Edmonton being off the charts was kind of ridiculous. I’m always reading about these other cities, thinking about their qualities and Edmonton’s qualities, and one day I thought, "Why not teach a course on this city?" So I proposed the course and the English department at the University of Alberta was good enough to find a way to offer it the following year.

One of the things that’s amazing about teaching the course is that the students who come are really curious. They’re engaged. As the university becomes more international, the students I get have less native knowledge, let’s say, of a city. But my students have a lot of curiosity, whether they’re from Old Strathcona or Leduc or St. Albert or wherever they’re from.

In the olden days, about 5 years ago, it was mostly Edmontonians who took the course. This year, I had an exchange student from Germany and a lot more people from outlying communities and elsewhere in Alberta. I even had several Calgarians, all of whom wanted to know the same thing: when is the Calgary course going to be offered? That responsibility, though, is on somebody else.