I’ve lived within a 15-minute drive of West Edmonton Mall for more than thirty years. With 800+ stores as a backdrop, I grew from a teenage mallrat to a mom doing the back-to-school shopping. I had my first kiss in a photo booth near the mini golf course, and shopped for a wedding dress in the wedding district (upstairs, Phase I) 15 years later. In 2002, I watched Canada win gold* on a TV in Vision Electronics while on a break from my job in Galaxyland (formerly Fantasyland, long story) and in peak 2022 fashion, I got stuck inside a drugstore during a lockdown drill while waiting for a COVID shot. 

Still, I sometimes forget that this is what Edmonton is known for. Not Oilers hockey, not the river valley, not the time we tried to make “Take a risk, it’s the most Edmonton thing you can do” happen, but a building that we just call “the mall.” It makes me think: Really? Her?

Big Mall is a deeply researched and deeply personal book that says yes, her. Kate Black breaks down why malls exist in the first place, how they proliferated, why they’re dying, and what it all means, through the lens of someone who grew up in the shadow of the world’s one-time biggest. 

When I pre-ordered Big Mall from Glass Bookshop (RIP), I thought it was either going to be a microhistory (think Salt: A World History or anything by Mary Roach), or one of those books where the author immerses themselves in a subject for a period of time (think The Year of Living Biblically or any title that starts with “The Year of”)** 

I was excited to read a standard history of WEM, but Big Mall is so much more. Broken into sections like “Space”, “Youth”, “Animals” and “Accidents”, Black takes the parts of the mall that mean the most to her, and makes them mean something to the reader. She’s an animal lover, so she writes about the unsavoury history of WEM’s dolphins. She grew up fairly sheltered, so she revisits the tragedy of Nina Courtepatte and other young Indigenous women who were lured from WEM and murdered with new empathy. She’s extremely online, so she unpacks the recent “liminal space” or “backrooms” online microtrend, and how influencer culture intersects with malls.

The common threads in Big Mall are colonization, resource extraction, and land development. Black shows how these forces make it possible for malls to exist, and why they fade away when the resources run dry, leaving communities in the lurch. This is especially relevant in Edmonton, where WEM has long been a destination for oilfield workers on days off. Friends just a few years older than me remember when the land between 170 and 178 Streets was a field where you could catch frogs. Today, Black describes the eerie experience of seeing orange wildfire skies through the glass dome over the Ice Palace***. 

The few negative feelings I have about Big Mall are uncharitable, but in keeping with Black’s sometimes-confessional tone, I’ll admit that I felt a little “she doesn’t even go here” at times. Black never worked at the mall, hasn’t stayed at the Fantasyland hotel, and didn’t like riding the Mindbender roller coaster. She didn’t cover some aspects of WEM history that I was hoping to read about (e.g. WEM’s nightclub heyday) or cover malls in pop culture (e.g. cult classic film Mall Rats) At least part of that is because she’s probably 15 years younger than me and we simply grew up in different versions of WEM. But really, am I going to gatekeep West Edmonton Mall? From anyone, let alone someone who wrote an astonishingly ambitious and insightful book about it?

There will always be more to say about the mall. As someone with a lot of mall feelings, that can only be a good thing.

Kate Black was kind enough to answer a few Big Mall questions. You can and should find her on Instagram.

Reading in Bed: I love how Big Mall weaves together the history of malls, the significance of WEM, and your own experiences. Did you know from the start that you wanted to write from all of these perspectives, or did you start with one and add the others later?

Kate Black: I was surprised both by how much I ended up in the book and by how broad the scope of the book became. I initially just wanted to write a social history of West Edmonton Mall, but knew I would have to turn the scope slightly beyond that to make sure the book also appealed to people who aren’t from Edmonton. (Can you imagine??) I think this is where the rabbit hole opened for me. For example, I would start writing a chapter about the dolphins in West Ed, which would lead me to learning about other past and present examples of animals living in malls. To connect these examples, I found myself thinking more existentially about deeper topics: anthropocentrism and what motivates people to keep animals in captivity and if there’s any similar logic between that motivation and the motivation to construct and visit shopping malls. These questions are really broad and societal but also so bound up in our own intimate experiences. I felt like the only true way to answer them was to implicate myself. Like, what do I think and feel about animals living in captivity? And why does it make me feel good and bad, just like shopping does? I think everyone is going to have a different answer to those questions. The most honest way to write, I think, is to interrogate my own memories and contradictory/weird/messy thoughts about this stuff and hope readers find recognition in the places where we overlap.

RIB: You obviously did a lot of research for this book, e.g. into academic studies, and the news record of significant events. Did you do any field research in WEM? Spend time observing the regulars in the food court, or interviewing employees? 

KB: I definitely considered interviews! I’ve worked as a journalist before and I like interviewing people. This taught me, though, that I’m a people-pleaser at heart — I find it hard not to flatten my own thinking into the opinions of the people I’ve interviewed (which, I think, means that I’m not a very good journalist). I have to work hard at solidifying my own perspective. I also got overwhelmed when trying to think of who to interview and the dozens of people I would inevitably leave out who would be angry at me. Just relying on the public record and my own experiences felt the most clean.

It’s funny — I visited the mall a few times while writing the book in an attempt to do “field research,” but it always felt kind of phony. I was like, “what am I doing here?” I know what West Edmonton Mall looks and sounds and smells like! After that, I intentionally didn’t include that much scenic detail about malls in the book because I realized that readers probably felt the same. We all go to malls and can conjure them in our mind without much help. I think the more interesting thing to write and read is taking that mental image and asking ourselves how it came to be and what it all means.

RIB: Do you have more to say about malls, or did this get it out of your system? Did anything get cut from the final draft that you might expand on later?

KB: I’ve really enjoyed talking to people about malls since the book has come out, but it also makes me feel like the book’s incomplete. There’s genuinely so much to say about malls! One thing that I wish I explored more in the book is the experience of working in a mall. It reminds me of a hospital, in that there’s so many different types of labour (and exploitation) within this one building and how all these people can technically have the same workplace with entirely different experiences of labour and relationships to the means of their labour. A huge chunk of my working life has been in retail, but I’ve never actually worked in a mall, so I don’t feel like I’m the best person to write about this stuff. If someone out there is reading this and feels inspired, please write about it!

RIB: Do you have any WEM hacks? Secret parking spots that aren’t busy, best entrances to start at, convenient bathrooms?

KB: I used to park at the Zellers entrance, which I think is now the BuyBuyBaby entrance? I’ve also had luck with parking near Simon’s. I don’t think it’s possible to find a not-gross bathroom, but my go-to is the one near Eveline Charles. Get there in the morning and wrap up your shopping by 2 p.m. That’s when happy hour starts at Earl’s on BRBN St.!

RIB: What’s your taste in fiction like? Last great novel you read?

I’m big into all the contemporary autofiction girlies! Sheila Heti, Elif Batuman, Rachel Cusk. My latest novel recc, Julia by Sandra Newman, is totally different, though. It’s 1984 retold through the perspective of Winston’s lover. It stands on its own as a great novel, but adds so much depth to the original novel through considering the gendered experience of dystopia.

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*This goes without saying, but for international readers, I mean Olympic gold in men’s hockey.

**Writers have taken on such challenges in WEM, just not in book length. You can read one account here.

***I also learned, not from the book but from an internet rabbit hole I fell into, that Gary Hanson, one-time General Manager of WEM who named an ill-fated dolphin after himself in the 1980s, is now Executive Director for an attractions company in Saudi Arabia, which almost too apt.