Month: August 2025

My copies of Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place From the Side of the Road have arrived!

I posted on social media last week about this milestone in my writing career, but one photograph and a couple of lines of text didn’t manage to convey my excitement about getting my copies of my forthcoming book, Walking the Bypass: Notes On Place From the Side of the Road.

When I got home from work last Wednesday, I immediately saw the box on the kitchen table. The contents were obvious even without looking at my publisher’s return address on the shipping label: copies of my book. Ten of them, to be specific–tangible evidence of years of writing and editing. And, of course, walking.

It took an hour or so before I summoned the courage to open the box. This is my first book. I never expected to write, never mind publish, one. Ten years ago, I played a dull-witted university dean in Brian Stockton’s feature-length comedy, The Sabbatical. My character, Dean Vernon, tells the film’s protagonist, James Pittman, a burned-out photography professor who’s afraid he’ll perish if he doesn’t publish, that publishing a book is a big deal, because it means someone thinks so highly of your work that they’re willing to kill trees for it. And here, in this box, is evidence that someone was willing to do that for mine. Walking the Bypass, as my character tells James, has weight and heft. It’s unique and ambitious, too. I hope it finds an audience and has a long life. I’ll do everything I can to help, but as my writer friend Kim Fahner tells me, it’ll find its own way. I trust her, because she knows about writing and publishing: she’s published several books of poetry and a novel, and she’s working on a creative-nonfiction manuscript. Her new book of poems, The Pollination Field, arrived two weeks ago, and now that the summer course I’ve been teaching is finished, I’m looking forward to reading it.

The striking cover design is by Duncan Campbell, one of the last ones he did before he retired from University of Regina Press. I took the photograph: it’s what you see if you’re walking north on the Regina Bypass as it approaches the Highway 1/Ring Road interchange. What the photograph doesn’t convey is the sound of pigeons roosting beneath the overpasses and the loud, hollow banging of trucks hitting the expansion joints of the highway above. For those kinds of details, you’ll need to read the book.

Alex McPhee drew the map that graces the first pages of Walking the Bypass. When my copy of his full-colour map of Saskatchewan arrived, I knew that if I ever needed a map for a publication, I would ask him. His work is beautiful. If you’re not from Regina, and you need a visual guide to where I’m taking you, Alex’s map will help. There are photographs inside the book as well. One of my goals in writing this book was to give its readers a vivid sense of what it’s like to circumnavigate Regina by walking on the shoulder of the new highway that goes around it. I sometimes joke that I walked the Bypass so that you don’t have to–although after you read Walking the Bypass, you might be inspired to follow my example. Like other journeys I’ve made on foot, the one I write about in this book was transformative. It changed the way I think about this place.

Two writers I admire immensely wrote blurbs for the cover. Candace Savage calls Walking the Bypass “original, unsettling, and provocative,” and Louise B. Halfe-Skydancer says that the book “reminds settlers of the need to remember intergenerational responsibility, atonement, and decolonization–words that might describe a path forward.” To have writers of their calibre say such things about something I’ve written–well, it’s overwhelming.

Walking the Bypass: Notes On Place From the Side of the Road will be officially released on October 14. There will be launches in Regina and possibly elsewhere, and I’m looking forward to reading from it in Ontario later this fall. In the meantime, you can preorder it from University of Regina Press, from online retailers, or from your favourite independent bookseller.

39. Duncan McCue, The Shoe Boy: A Trapline Memoir

You might recall the name Duncan McCue. In fact, if you listen to Radio One, you’ll remember him as the host of Cross-Country Checkup, among other shows. He teaches journalism at Carleton University now, but occasionally he fills in for someone on the CBC. The Shoe Boy: A Trapline Memoir is his first book; he’s since published a textbook on decolonizing journalism. It’s a book about how, when McCue was 17 years old, he spent several months on a trapline in northern Quebec with a Cree family. He didn’t speak their language, and he had few skills as a hunter, and the experience was both difficult and life-changing. At the beginning of the book, McCue tells us that it’s been 20 years since that experience, more than half of his life, and “I’m still trying to unpack what I learned there.”

I’ve taught The Shoe Boy: A Trapline Memoir three or four times now in an English course that considers Canadian examples of writing about place, and every time I get something new from it. This time, partly because the course focused on braided forms of creative nonfiction, I paid close attention to the book’s structure, particularly to the way that McCue shifts between his experience on the trapline, and more broadly as a young, urban Anishinaabe man, separated from his community and unable to speak his grandparents’ language, and the context of Cree history, particularly the James Bay Hydroelectric Project and its aftermath. I asked my students to read Nicole Walker’s article on braided essays, as well as Jenna Butler’s more recent expansion of Walker’s argument in an essay published in the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild’s magazine, Freelance, and I was particularly interested in the way that, as Walker and Butler argue, braided memoir structures tend to affect our understanding of the writer’s experience and of the context in which that experience is situated. In The Shoe Boy, we read McCue’s identity confusion–he writes, “I always felt, somehow, I wasn’t Native enough”–against the history of colonialism in northern Québec, and in the process we learn about cultural resistance and resurgence. Resilience, too, although some people hate that word, because both McCue and the people of Chisasibi, including the family he lives with in the bush, adapt to the things they can’t avoid without abandoning what is essential to them.

As an aside, I want to recognize the work of Margaret Orr, an artist from Chisasibi whom I met while I was working on my MFA here. Her work at that time examined the drowning of more than 10,000 caribou in 1984, when Hydro Québec released water from a reservoir into the Koksoak and Caniapiscau rivers during the animals’ annual migration. McCue mentions that event in passing, but Orr’s work taught me how deeply traumatic that mass killing was for her community. Hydro Québec, perhaps not surprisingly, refused to accept any responsibility.

The Shoe Boy is deceptively complex, though, because it’s framed by McCue’s career as a journalist, and implies that through the writing process, he comes to understand what is important to him about those months on the trapline. I’m not going to spoil the conclusion he reaches, because I hope you read this short but important book, except to say that I think that his conclusion is legitimate, and that it suggests something about the multiplicity of ways to understand what it means to be an Indigenous person–the same way that there’s more than one way to be a middle-aged môniyâw like me.

38. Trevor Herriot, Towards a Prairie Atonement

Saskatchewan writer Trevor Herriot’s Towards a Prairie Atonement is the third book I’m teaching in my summer course on place writing. It gets a shout out in the book I taught right before this one, Kit Dobson’s Field Notes on Listening, which makes for a nice segue between the two texts. Early in his book, Dobson is trying to explain to the reader why he’s so interested in listening, and he uses Herriot’s book to do that:

I think of this work of listening as part of what Trevor Herriot calls “the work of atonement that stands before all prairie people today.” Atonement for what? Lost opportunities, Herriot suggests. He writes about how prairie grasslands have been destroyed over time by agriculture and private land use systems. He laments the loss of Indigenous ways of managing the land that predated colonization, as well as the loss of Métis land systems that were disrupted in the wake of the Northwest Resistance and the execution of Louis Riel. With those losses came shrinking prairies, loss of habitat and exploitation of the land. All settlers on the Prairies are implicated in this history, which is by no means in the past. So how to atone?

I wish I could take credit for remembering that connection, but discovering it was a happy accident, a lucky bridge for my students that helped to carry them from one book to the next. It’s also an excellent summary of Herriot’s book and the central questions it asks. What is atonement, and how is it possible given the history Herriot and Dobson describe?

Herriot’s epigraph, a quotation from an essay by education professor Cynthia Chambers and Blackfoot Elder and scholar Narcisse Blood, offers one possible answer. “Whether we are indigenous or newcomer, today our tipis are held down by the same peg. Neither is going anywhere,” they write. “The knowledge and the will needed to protect and save these places no longer belongs to one people or one tradition.” The places Chambers and Blood are writing about are sites sacred to the Blackfoot, but Herriot extends that idea to the prairies in general, and what was once the Métis community of Ste. Madeleine on the border betweenSaskatchewan and Manitoba in particular. He describes what he means by “atonement” in his first chapter, “One Tent Peg to Share,” as a coming together, a meeting between two peoples “on level ground,” one where there is “sharing without taking.” He argues that the idea of atonement, expressed in this way, “brings us nearer to the place where we can be at one with the land and with one another across, but with deep respect for, all creaturely, cultural, and racial distinctions.” To atone, for Herriot, would be for settlers to recognize their (our) history of colonization, of extracting everything we can from the land, of pushing Indigenous peoples to the margins. He sees atonement and decolonization as synonyms: “The work of decolonizing, of atonement, begins with the act of recognizing and honouring what was and is native but has been evicted from the land—native plants and animals but the original peoples, cultures, and languages too.”

His second chapter, “On the Sand Plains,” looks at one specific eviction, one that resulted in the Spy Hill-Ellice community pasture. That large area of upland native prairie was, at the time, threatened by the Harper government’s decision to privatize the community pastures that had been managed by the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration since the 1930s. In private hands, those fragments of a disappearing ecosystem, temperate grasslands—the most threatened ecosystem on the planet—would likely be ploughed under, just like almost all of the rest of the grassland that was in this place when settlers began arriving here in the 1880s. But the story of how the Spy Hill-Ellice community pasture came to be is another ugly story of destruction and displacement. In 1937, the people living in the Métis community of Ste. Madeleine, located in part of that community pasture, were informed that they’ld have to leave. A year or so later, workers from the local rural municipality burned their homes and shot their dogs. They’d been left without after the grotesque swindle of Métis land scrip that had been perpetrated by the federal government, and in Ste. Madeleine they had been able to re-establish a way of life based on Métis land use patterns. That chapter brings together the history of the Métis in western Canada and at Ste. Madeleine with a visit to the community’s cemetery with Métis Elder and Michif language teacher Norman Fleury, whose family lived there. Fleury tells the story of Ste. Madeleine to Herriot. It’s a story of loss, of colonial violence, but also one of survival, and Herriot recognizes that both the Métis and the land itself have been deeply injured by colonization by settlers. Atonement would mean recognizing all of that, and then working together to restore the grasslands, wetlands, and rivers to good health, a “good work that would reconcile and bind all of us together,” but one we haven’t talked about. We are responsible to each other and to the land, he argues, and we will find a path forward “between the gravestones, in the unjust narratives of our collective history, and upon the sunlit plains themselves.”

The third chapter of Towards a Prairie Atonement argues that one way we could move forward together would be to consider the value of Métis land practices as a way out of the sterile binary of private property versus the public good. Those practices were based in a “sense of responsibility to the shared well-being of the earth,” and the Spy Hill-Ellice community pasture could become a place where “a remnant of the Métis commonwealth” could be restored. Perhaps, he concludes, “somewhere ahead, where the land rises to meet the pipit song that falls from summer skies, there might yet be a place, a sandy plain, where we, sharing one tent peg, can meet and see how the prairie might bring us together.” In the ten years since Herriot’s visit to the cemetery at Ste. Madeleine, we have made little progress towards the atonement he describes, but that doesn’t mean we couldn’t start now.

The book concludes with a short afterword, written by Norman Fleury, who notes that Herriot’s questions made him uneasy at first, but that he can see that some good has come out of their connection. He also emphasizes, rightly, that the Métis are survivors. “We were good caretakers of the land,” he writes. “We were the stewards. We still are.” 

This is a lovely book, poetic and powerful, and it is no less urgent in its call to change the way we connect to the land than when it was published in 2016. The work of atonement remains essential. The realities of climate change, habitat destruction, and human displacement, tangible in the wildfire smoke drifting south, the ongoing destruction of the grassland, and the continuing calls for justice by Indigenous Peoples, demand our attention. We ignore them at our peril, here and elsewhere–and the place to begin will be with the recognition that our tents share a single peg, that we are linked by our presence here, despite our terrible history, and that we need to move forward together.

37. Kit Dobson, Field Notes on Listening

Like Jenna Butler’s Revery: A Year of Bees, I’m teaching Kit Dobson’s Field Notes on Listening this summer, and rereading it in preparation for last week’s classes was a revelation: I had forgotten it was so good. The book is structured like a musical composition, with three movements bracketed by a prelude and a coda, . The prelude and coda present a sonic history, in 100 fragments, of the first months 2020, when Dobson was working on this book. Those sounds are arranged chronologically, so that the prelude ends with the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the coda explores the sounds and, more importantly, the silences of that experience.

Where the prelude and coda present sounds in an impressionistic way, the book’s three movements constitute a long braided essay that considers the links between listening and the land. Field Notes on Listening, Dobson writes in what constitutes the book’s thesis statement, argues “that listening, or a lack thereof, has become a social and environmental problem,” and that “listening to landscapes, and doing so with dedication over a long period of time, is one path through this thicket.” Such listening is deeply political, “an act of defiance,” since “[w]hat remains unheard remains unacknowledged.” For Dobson, learning to listen has been energizing; it has allowed him to make connections and identify patterns.

The process of learning to listen to the land, Dobson argues, is open-ended and unfinished, but the twin themes he identifies at the outset, listening and land, pull the deliberately fragmentary text together. In fact, the sounds presented in the prelude and coda, which convey the effects of climate change, genocide, populism, and human separation and community, are amplified in those three movements. Sometimes, as with “the grinding of celestial music just past the bounds of hearing” in the night sky, those sounds are metaphorical; mostly, though, they are literal. They include the music he loves (the Beatles, Jeremy Dutcher, Leonard Cohen, Glenn Gould’s version of Bach’s Goldberg Variations), weather forecasts celebrating unusually warm winter temperatures, the sounds of family stories, the muffling silence of fresh snow, the crunch and rumble of equipment at a landfill, the cheers of protestors greeting Greta Thunberg outside Alberta’s Legislature, the “glomp glomp glomp” of tires rumbling over knots in the wooden deck of the bridge across the Athabasca River in his parents’ home town, the sounds recorded in his grandmother’s master’s thesis. Listening to all of these sounds, cataloguing them, becomes analagous to reading, to bearing witness to the world, to communicating. 

It’s worth mentioning the quality of Dobson’s writing. In her review of Field Notes on Listening, Calgary poet Micheline Maylor notes that while Dobson isn’t himself a poet, his prose has a “lyrical and poetic heft.” Another reviewer, Bill Arnott, argues that Dobson’s “passion for poetry comes through in this writer’s elegant, metered prose.” They are both absolutely right: the writing in this book is beautiful, its language sonorous and vivid. Dobson’s careful, lyrical prose brings the sounds he hears, and the arguments he makes, alive to his readers. Read this book, then, but take care: it might change the way you relate to the world you inhabit.