Alex, his sister Cecilia, and their two cousins Kate and Sam, land on Toronto Islands in two canoes lashed together like a catamaran after crossing Lake Ontario from Hamilton, where they escaped a disaster of a family reunion. Because Cecilia can't stay awake in boats, and was asleep in the canoes before the escape, she only becomes aware of what happened after the landing. In a rage, she demands to be paddled to mainland Toronto so she can fly back to Montreal. Along the way, over a sleepless 48 hours, they visit many spots around Toronto's shorelines. Throughout the urban-canoe-trip, the trippers get chased multiple times by trespass-police, meet an array of friends, foes and potential romances, and ultimately become entangled in a dragonboat festival, which they leave in a mad dash with a crowd of angry paddlers in pursuit.

Right before the escape, Alex abruptly quits his job and gives up his apartment on the west coast, with the intention of drifting and writing a book about his anticipated adventure. The adventure never goes as he hopes, though, and the urban-canoe-trip ends for him in heartbreak. Following the trip, he moves to Toronto and lives there until 2013, enduring the fallouts of past events and decisions, and a transition from his low-tech life of notebooks and bonfires to a digital life in the city.

The story oscillates between the urban-canoe-trip, Alex's future life in Toronto, and his creative writing, which is always reflective of him and Cecilia and their sibling-relationship. Die Coast Bye Cecilia poses to the reader comparisons between analogue and digital mediums, between social connection and disconnection, between urban-integration and wilderness-isolation, and between life-imagined and life-lived. The characters, settings, scenes and story were all developed and written through the process of free-writing in notebooks, creating a unique style derived from the author's subconscious more than from any conscious planning or ideation. It's a fun, experimental work that will certainly inspire many to sink their own creative ambitions into equally adventurous projects.

Permanence Reviewed is also featured in this book, a philosophical essay presenting the author's perspective on the nature of thought and experience

About the Author

Twenty-five years of a Kerouacian novelist's life had the final outcome of Andrew Malcolm's life's work: the novel Die Coast Bye Cecilia and the philosophical essay Permanence Reviewed. His twenties and thirties were marked with adventures in, not only hitch-hiking, but canoeing and skateboarding, photography and music, and living, working and learning in a great many places between Southern Ontario and Vancouver Island. Combined with a life dedicated to creative writing, his explorations gave him a unique and weathered perspective on the nature of experience. His perspective and explorations are shared through his work with the intention of inspiring others to explore experience through their own comparative contemplations of their internal and external lives.