The Space Between Us: Commentaries on a Divided Culture is the public face of conversations — arguments, really — between a small-c conservative with anarchist leanings and a centre-left progressive who thinks bureaucracies sometimes get a bad rap. We’ve spent the two-plus decades of our marriage hashing out differences in ways that have greatly deepened understanding and, sometimes, produced agreement between us. We perceive in our increasingly ideological, increasingly divided culture an inability to communicate across difference—an inability that has put western societies in some peril. At a time when neofascist and ultraleft movements seem nearly aligned in their efforts to undermine liberal democracies, we think it’s time for the Centre to hold.
Peter Fruchter is a retired lawyer and Humanities lecturer who was born in Ceausescu’s Romania and grew up in Golda Meir’s Israel before emigrating to Canada as an adolescent. He has published poetry, essays and commentary in Burning Ambitions, Reading Toronto, GreenTOpia, and Hagar: Studies in Culture, Polity and Identities.
Amy Lavender Harris is a Toronto-born geographer whose work focuses on culture and identity in the contemporary city. She is the author of Imagining Toronto (Mansfield Press, 2010). Imagining Toronto won the Heritage Toronto Award and was shortlisted for the Gabrielle Roy Prize in Canadian Literary Criticism. Her work has also appeared in the Literary Review of Canada, Canadian Notes & Queries, Spacing Magazine and The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space, among numerous other publications. She is co-curator of Toronto Gone Wild, an exhibit exploring the city’s natural side, opening in April 2024 at the Myseum of Toronto.
Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and website. Never miss an update.
To find out more about the company that provides the tech for this newsletter, visit Substack.com.
