Finding ourselves in a state of return, we tend to imagine or cling to familiar guideposts to situate ourselves within the narrative. We may see the City’s ghosts, which at times take on the shape of a darkened shadow cast down by a crumbling building, and yet at other times could appear as warm light itself, passing over the red and ivied brick. This is the point that Jay Quint’s Village Dreams expands from. Following a return to Montreal after what he believes to be a “Grand Failure” of his personal writing project, Quint is reminded of a Village cafe, and decides to revisit it. From there, he feels the lost touch of inspiration again, begins to be led down new paths by the city itself, and returns to the Village the following Saturday to repeat the gesture. 

As the reader trails alongside the author’s interior and exterior wanderings, we turn an ear towards the flâneur’s footfalls, allow ourselves to be guided on impulse along with him to a place where physical spaces open up to reveal where personal and political landscapes have formed. We are invited into the lush greens of Sainte-Rose, to lie down on a fresh patch of sunned grass. Village Dreams offers a space to read as a way of dreaming, waking up, and falling into dreams again. In this meditative, trance-like essay, presented through a unique form, incorporating the exploration of Montreal’s gay village in the summer, Quint presents his personal canon of queer writers and influential cultural critics alongside visual images of the Village using QR codes scattered throughout, creating a tangled picture of the past and present. A web-like return, which in turn recontextualizes the city’s spaces through their shared histories and living memory. 

Village Dreams has a sharp focus on place, and especially the fringes. It asks: who is showing up, declaring themselves here, documenting how arrival transforms the places we inhabit? Quint is both exacting and tender in his observations of sprawling subject matter: spanning from the Beats, to camp, the hippies and the New Left movement, sixties idealistic kitsch and seventies informal urbanism. Quoting Didion – “So many encounters in those years were devoid of any logic save that of the dreamwork” – he disassembles any illusionary presentism we might come to expect in leftist discussions of the counterculture movements in the 1960s, while at the same time drawing our attention to the continuity and persistence of bohemian living in the modern day. Quint reminds us, “it was during this critical transitional period… that The Villages emerged.” Neither truly utopian nor pessimistic, Village Dreams records in an almost diaristic method, and the reader is immersed in the specificity of Quint’s world, even when the spell is broken.

In one moment, interrupted by a group of university protesters, Quint comments “that today’s degraded version of hipsterism has turned political in its intersection with an equally degraded student activism, is evident – that Saturday in The Village being just another manifestation of it I would have preferred to be nowhere near.” And yet in another, he retraces his steps in order to compliment, and pay a visit to, the eccentric home of Monsieur Leo, a Village queen whose meeting he feels “was a reward for my own small deviation from the norm.” Just as one might reach their breaking point, frustrated with the world around them and their own place in it, the City might reveal – a street like Sainte-Rose, the friendly face of Monsieur Leo, the sense of inspiration towards something yet to come.mRb