B: So living in the North in a small town, particularly when you talk to the sophisticates (laugh) in places like Vancouver, often raises questions: why would you stay in the place? What I've admired about you is your defence of the life here, despite its difficulty. G: Lately I've begun to miss the very obvious things like movies. It used to be that if a movie came out you'd see it eventually--it would come back as a rerun in a neighbourhood movie house or repertoire house. Now, I didn't see Mel Gibson and Glenn Close in Hamlet and I'll never see it. It's possible that I might look at it on video but ... really it's lost to me. A movie came out last week and as I'm going to Moscow next week--it was a movie from Moscow called Taxi Blues--it came to the Ridge Theatre in Vancouver. It got 4 stars. The reviewer Elizabeth Aird gave it 4 stars. I thought it'll stay at least 2 weeks but it was gone in a week. It's gone, so I'm beginning to miss the obvious things:movies, maybe the occasional concert , but other than that there's no particular reason to choose Vancouver over Terrace unless you happen to like being in a big city, you like the congestion, the pollution. People are no less sophisticated or more sophisticated in either place--there is just the same tremendous variety of people in Terrace as there is in Vancouver so I don't see the point. B: In Terrace you did things that you might not have done in Vancouver like running for the school board, and getting to know a community on all of its various levels, and meeting people you wouldn't have met in a larger city--people of all different backgrounds and interests... G: That's true. B: People who also accept you as a writer: "George writes poetry" [laugh] without any prejudice. G: And also being at the college which is so small that each of the departments consists of one instructor, and so having faculty meetings where the general conversation is not about literature or psychology or whatever, but it's about the entire world of intellectual and scientific discourse, and so you're talking to biologists about geomorphology or a psychologist about things in his field. B: I think too that one of the major things poets have to deal with is the whole idea of place--it seems cliché now but G: Yes. B: I wonder about the city poets. I don't envy them having to deal with a place that is, or seems so accelerated. G: I think it's more accelerated in the small towns. There's less to sweep away. The cities have larger structures--institutional structures, networks of like--minded people who retain conservative or liberal values--whole shopping streets that may be held together by one ethnic community or by the counter culture like Commercial Drive that are a lot harder to sweep away than what little remains in a small town. When the mall comes to the small town--Terrace was lucky because the mall is so close to the downtown shopping district. The older downtown was able to survive, but I've heard that has not happened in other communities like Williams Lake. B: So much of the power structure seems invisible, even in the small towns. But living in a smaller place you might personally know the mayor, the aldermen etc. My neighbour for