My middle-school used to take us on field trips to the Spaced Out Library, the Toronto Public Library's science fiction reference collection founded by legendary author, critic, editor and activist Judith Merril, who emigrated to Canada after witnessing the police brutality at the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention.
Merril served as author-in-residence at the Spaced Out, and she mentored writers like me, reading our manuscripts and giving us advice, and, eventually putting us together in long-running peer workshops that meet even to this day.
She also used to introduce Doctor Who every week on TVO, a public TV station, giving the episodes wider context in the long sweep of science fiction ideas.
The Toronto Star has published a long profile of Judy and her life, with details of how the Spaced Out (now called the Merril Collection, with a brand new head librarian, and the largest sf collection of any public library in the world) had its origins in Rochdale, "the 18-storey hippie haven," where the collection was launched to coincide with a festival Judy organised to commemorate the 1969 moon-landing.
The profile touches on many of the ways that Judy changed the face of Toronto, from the Toronto Hydra parties she started (a once-a-month gathering for everyone in the sf industry that turned us into a community) to the Tesseracts anthology series she created (I once got to co-edit a volume!) to the Hugo-award-winning memoir she co-wrote with her grandaughter Emily Pohl-Weary, a