The relationship of writing to the land on which it is written, and the pursuant questions relating to the existence and nature of national or regional literatures, are mostly the stuff of theory. Is there such a thing as an English literature? And if so, in what ways does it differ from Canadian literature, or Prairie literature? Interesting fodder for academic journals, and maybe the more ambitious book clubs.
Far more viscerally interesting, however, and almost certainly one of the first steps to be taken before launching into any more orotund investigations, is the relationship of one person to one bit of land. This is the stuff of novels, of poetry, and of Phil Jenkins's An Acre of Time, the author's very personal history of a single acre of Ottawa land from the beginning of time to 1996.
"Leave where you are and come stand beside me," Jenkins begins his handsomely designed book, seeking to weave his readers into a narrative that connects his acre, its first inhabitants, its first human invaders, their European successors, and a great deal of history, both national and personal. "Every story has its borders," he continues, "the borders of this story are the four sides of the acre I'm standing on, a single page from the book of land."
Jenkins is a books columnist with the Ottawa Citizen, and the author of one previous book, Fields of Vision, about Canadian farming families. Which is to say he knows how to read, and, as it happens, how to write. His sense of humour makes these pages eminently readable and sometimes uproarious. Jenkins is very much in touch with his verbal self, and is clearly of the opinion that writing, whatever else it seeks to do, should entertain.
He entertains not only with his cute turns of phrase (he describes some of his acre's first inhabitants as "primitive evolutionary life-doodles"; of the name European explorers first bestowed on the Natives they found here when they thought they'd reached India, he writes, "Until recently the natives went along with the misnomer, presumably grateful that Columbus hadn't been aiming for Turkey"), but with a sizeable and liberally distributed store of facts and figures primed and ready for launch at your next cocktail party: Jenkins's rough translation of the word "Huron", for example, which he explains was the fourteenth-century French word for "unkempt low-life" (I've been able to find no corroboration for this, but it sounds good), or that London banned the burning of coal as early as 1307 to try to control the already unpleasant pollution.
The book, obviously, does not restrain itself from flinging itself further afield than that single acre in Ottawa's LeBreton Flats, just a couple of minutes downriver from Parliament Hill. Which is all to the good. But the lack of restraint does not end there. Jenkins also allows himself some truly egregious verbal faux pas. "From one fiery acorn, a tree of fire grew and put a thousand acres of the city in the shade"; "progress is a train with no reverse gear"; "Ottawa was the spot on Canada's chest where the medal of capital city should be pinned"; "they wanted to get production costs, like a well-trained dog, to lie down and stay." The list could be considerably longer.
One of the book's major flaws, aside from some rather awkward attempts to include bits of his own history into the history of the acre, is that Jenkins works from the unfortunate premise that humanity is unnatural. It's a common assumption: elephants stripping the bark from forests of trees is natural, people killing chunks of forest is unnatural. He goes a step further, as many do, and allows various Native tribes to run each other out of town, but excoriates Europeans for doing the same thing. In most instances, these would be unfortunate mental shortcuts, but Jenkins founds his entire study and his numerous exonerations and musing asides on them, and in so doing, taints the whole.
Greg Curnoe's odd and not-so-attractively bound book, which takes on the same project from a different angle, works from the same basic premises, if Frank Davey's Editor's Note, which provides the only context to this unfinished work, is to be believed.
Unlike Jenkins's often thoroughly engaging narrative, Curnoe, the late London, Ontario artist, created from his much lengthier study of his own strip of land (on which his house at 38 Weston Road in London sits) a list of significant names, dates, and the occasional brutally curtailed anecdote.
Starting in 8600 B.C. and ending December 12th, 1991, just months before Curnoe was killed in a cycling accident, the entries, rarely longer than a hundred words, reflect every bit of information Curnoe was able to uncover about his piece of property. A typical item reads "after 1400: Large scale conflict occurs between the Neutral Nation and the Western Basin culture. (Trigger, Natives and Newcomers, p. 107)." Dry reading, to be sure, and certainly more successful as notes toward a study, as a reference book, or as a textual-historical collage, than for the reading pleasure it might provide, though the occasional personal note-a brief mention towards the end of the chronology of a piece of an artefact dug up by the artist's young son Galen, for example-does shine.
The chief value and prime attraction of both these minute studies is their intimacy, and the background portraits they paint of their authors. Curnoe takes the more experimental route, but both books are quite patently the result of personal, part-time, amateur investigations, a pastime turned into a book for anyone who might be interested. And though neither fully realizes the potential of the idea, each will be of special interest to Ottawans and Londoners, and both are fine for dipping, or a few evenings' desultory entertainment. 

Bert Archer is a Toronto writer.