Another encounter at the Writer’s Festival: Jim McIntosh, many years retired from his wonderful used bookstore on Cordova. Colophon: one of the great “ghost bookshops” that can only now be browsed in memory. Black Sparrow books were his particular passion, and I always managed to find an obscure Beat-related title there, or two.

If I could look as good as he does at his age — if I could even reach his age — I would be happy. Thinner now, his shoulders a bit more bent by the years, the beard more snow than salt against his face. His eyes are bright, though, and his memory is as sharp as ever. “Are you still reading Fielding Dawson?” he asks me as we stand chatting at the end of Saturday’s Poetry Bash. Remembering one customer from the hundreds who had trudged up the narrow, rubber-treaded stairs to the second floor and lost themselves within his shelves a while.

I say that yes, I am, or was until his recent death, although his last two books had somehow slipped past me undetected; the lack of a good bookstore, I suggest. Standing there among the ghostly busts of dead Canadian writers we mourn the thinning ranks of the Beats and Beat-compatriots.

It was Fee Dawson’s liveliness that grabbed me when I read his work, his energy and enthusiasm. You could tell that he was writing about things that mattered to him: the words had a pulse, the people were real. The Greatest Story Ever Told: the story of his loss of virginity, in Kirkwood, Missouri, way back in April 1947. A Transformation he’d subtitled it, and you knew from reading it that it had been, and that he’d never forgotten how it felt to be so knotted up, so thrilled, heart hammering, legs trembling, confused.

It had all been there on the page: written from the heart, young Fee Dawson’s heart, a heart that is stilled now and forever. And there the book had been upon the shelf of that ghost bookstore, long ago now, when I’d found it waiting for me.

But I can pull it from my own shelf now, and, rereading it, relive the story. Can bring Fee Dawson back to life. I can be there once again in young Fee Dawson’s desk at school, and again along with him I can feel my “senses so alert I almost felt star touched”.

It is a kind of immortality, then: a book. And so it is we write — all of us — against oblivion; against forgetting.