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.