Autofiction

Did you catch the story with the cat and the toboggan? It’s about a frisky feline who, despite his owner’s warnings, ventures outdoors during a snowstorm. He slips off a fence and lands on a sled, which begins to slide — indeed, “the sled was now taking the cat for a ride.” The fast and furry‑ous protagonist of Jill Nogales’s children’s poem “Macks and the Slippery Sled” nearly bonks into the neighbour’s St. Bernard, then zooms down the boulevard. He fishtails “on a patch of ice” before “spinning round a snowman twice.” Late last year, commuters could have gotten their hands on this delightful verse for free with the press of a button.

In downtown Toronto, on the south side of the pedestrian bridge that connects One York to WaterPark Place, sits a black, cylindrical kiosk and, beside it, a placard that invites hurried passersby to “take a short adventure.” Since 2019, the ATM-style Short Story Dispenser has been distributing on‑demand literature — printed on long strips like supermarket receipts — that takes either one, three, or five minutes to read. If you passed it en route to the food court at Queen’s Quay and Bay Street recently, you might have also sampled writing by the American activist and poet Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Her five-minute piece, “Anarchy Alley,” from 1895, is an immersive portrait of a New Orleans neighbourhood where “the tramp” idles unbothered, bohemians down beer in saloons, labourers organize, and “special minions of the law” patrol. If you travelled the PATH near Harbourfront over the holidays and happened to stop, you might have shed a tear over Robin Blasberg’s “Liturgy of Light,” in which a suburban father grows too old to put up his trademark festive display.

The machine has churned out more than 42,000 stories. Recent data shows anywhere from eighty to 175 are generated every week — about twenty-five a day. Through an online portal, Oxford Properties Group, which operates WaterPark Place, can curate its literary offerings by mood, genre, and theme. Word on the street is that upcoming chronicles will revolve around Pride, Women’s History Month, and Halloween, among other topics and events. Besides picking the content, the team also keeps the machine topped up with recyclable, certified FSC and BPA-free paper.

The mastermind behind the idea is Short Édition, a French publishing house aimed at offering “a gentle, shared moment of literary delight.” In October 2015, the first dispensers appeared in Grenoble, France, where locals read 10,000 stories in a single month — a quarter of what Torontonians have printed over seven years. The co-founders Christophe Sibieude and Quentin Pleplé told The New Yorker in 2016 that they hoped the story distributors would “make their way across the globe.” They didn’t have to wait long. That same year, the film director Francis Ford Coppola made them an offer they couldn’t refuse. He installed North America’s first machine in his San Francisco restaurant, Café Zoetrope, and invested in the company — which refers to him as “Our Godfather.” Then Columbus City Schools in Ohio signed on, as did libraries up I‑71 in Akron and in Wichita, Kansas.

Short Édition aims to keep circulating original pieces that “captivate the lollygaggers” and “indulge the eccentric.” It also showcases previously published work. In both instances, authors receive an advance and royalties on a yearly basis. The press has made its whole catalogue available (for free) on a companion website. Here the delights include S. L. Harris’s “Moonmouse,” in which a fourteen-year-old boy hunts invasive vermin on humanity’s new lunar home, and Andrea Goyan’s “My Dead-End Job,” where a big-box store greeter helps Cleopatra buy 144 rolls of toilet paper.

While the texts — sometimes sombre, often humorous — can be viewed online, nothing beats the excitement of unfurling the coiled roll like a grand proclamation. There’s something wonderful about worlds you had not expected to discover that day, and there’s nostalgia about the printed material itself, which is reminiscent of old pulp novels meant for the masses. However, when I visited the dispenser on a recent Wednesday afternoon, nearly 250 prospective readers cruised by the curious contraption with not one interest piqued. Most people were glued to literature’s greatest adversary: the smartphone. “The paper format provides a break from omnipresent screens,” Sibieude said a decade ago. Alas, the battle continues.

On the front lines, though, some 600 kiosks have spat out more than 5.6 million stories worldwide — from South Africa to Qatar, from India to New Zealand. We have seven other machines here in Canada: at Vancouver General Hospital (117 Blackmore Pavilion); the Central Library, in Calgary; the Edmonton International Airport (gate 60); the Halton Hills Public Library, in Georgetown, Ontario; the Bramalea City Centre mall, in nearby Brampton; and the office of an events business and the Monsieur Jean Hotel in Quebec City.

As for that little rascal Macks, he flew down a hill and “took a nasty spill.” Nogales’s poem ends with him cozying up on his owner’s lap and taking a well-deserved nap. There are many more amusing stories where that came from, so be sure to catch the next adventure. We all have one, three, or five minutes to spare.