Month: May 2026

La Sagrada Familia and 24. Gillian Jerome, Nevertheless: Walking Poems

Here’s something new: a walk paired with a book. I’ve never done this before.

La Familia Sagrada: does that count as a walk? Does it matter? I walked there; I walked around while I was there, listening to the audio guide; I’ll be walking back. Good enough for me.

What an incredible cathedral; what a testament to faith and human creativity and the sublime and the beautiful.

Here’s an odd coincidence: while in line for the Passion Tower, a woman behind me looked familiar. Where are you from? we asked each other. Susan lives in Saskatoon; we met at my book launch there in January.

I would’ve stayed longer, but I slept in (jet lag, I guess) and had trouble getting organized, and so I missed breakfast. By two in the afternoon, my stomach was making those noises and I had a headache. Time to find lunch.

Then, lunch: inexpensive and delicious—grilled vegetables, local garlic sausage, Greek yogurt with honey. And Gillian Jerome’s book, Nevertheless: Walking Poems.

I’ve been looking for things I might be able to teach in a course about walking and writing next winter, and before I left for Spain, I threw this book into my bag. I enjoyed it, particularly the way Jerome talks back to solitary, male walkers (Rilke, Rousseau) and instead sees walking as a way to connect with others. Not just the people she’s walking with: also passersby, people sitting or lying down whom she sees, people she remembers. She also realizes her links to the places where she’s walking—particularly their histories, but also their futures as the Anthropocene thunders onward. Jerome is a gardener, too; I included the photo I took of the lavender outside Sagrada Família because that’s one of the flowers she grows in her Vancouver yard. Caring for plants is another way to recognize our connections to the places where we live. So too, I just realized, is writing about them.

I don’t think Jerome would mind if I shared this lovely sonnet, “Poem for Autumn,” which I’m too lazy to type out, and since AI bots visit this blog daily, scraping text to feed themselves, it’s probably better to present it this way:

Lunch is finished. Time to pay up and return to my wandering.

23. Sadiqa de Meijer, Qaf’s People

Sadiqa de Meijer’s new book of poetry, Qaf’s People, deserves more attention than a man tired after a long day of travelling eating tapas and drinking beer at a restaurant in a square just off la Rambla in Barcelona can provide. I tried not to get grease on the pages; I think I succeeded. But the great thing about books is that they can be reread when one has more time and attention to give them. As I will be rereading this one.

These poems are beautiful and surprising. They are deeply personal; Qaf, a place in Iranian and Arab mythology, here comes to represent the home of people who are mixed, who have complicated cultural backgrounds, who might not resemble their parents, who receive racist abuse from people who look like their caregivers. That’s de Meijer’s experience, and her family, her personal history, is explored in this book. The poems are brave, too, but not because they’re personal. I can’t imagine writing poems with the syntax and line breaks displayed here. The boldness and inventiveness are remarkable. The women at the next table must’ve wondered why that North American kept saying “wow” throughout his dinner.

I’m a huge fan of de Meijer’s writing. This book increases my admiration for her work.

22. George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo

I started reading George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo a few months back, but during the semester I find it almost impossible to read for pleasure. If I read all day, I don’t want to open a book when I get home. But the semester is over, and I’m flying to Spain for a workshop on walking art, and when I travel, I spend the dead time in airports and aircraft with a book. My bags end up heavier than I’d like, because they’re full of books. Yes, I could load them all onto my phone, and I do have quite a few on this device, but it’s not the same. When I get to Barcelona, I’ll probably mail home the ones I’ve finished. Including this one, which I started this morning and could not put down.

What an astonishing novel. Lincoln in the Bardo is like nothing I’ve ever read. The impossible imagination required to come up with the premise, never mind the ability to realize it and the astonishing research it required—I am flabbergasted.

It’s hard to describe the story without spoiling it, but I’ll try. Lincoln in the Bardo takes place over one night in 1862: the night after the funeral of Lincoln’s son, Willie, who died of typhoid fever. Lincoln is one of the characters, but we only see him indirectly, through quotations from histories and biographies (some actual, and some, I think, invented, but I could be wrong about that), and through the words of the ghosts trapped in the cemetery, unwilling to accept they’re dead and refusing to make their journeys to the spirit world. Willie is one of them. He wants to remain close to his father, to continue to experience his love. And Lincoln’s love for his children knows no limits.

It’s the lowest point of Lincoln’s life—Willie is dead, the Civil War is going badly, he’s facing tremendous criticism for the intensifying combat and the resulting casualties—but the resident spirits are having their own crises, too. Saunders is a Buddhist—I first heard of him when he appeared on Dan Harris’s meditation podcast, 10% Happier—and the book takes the ideas of non-attachment and the inevitability of suffering seriously. By clinging to life—their own, for the spirits, and Willie’s, for Lincoln—all the characters are increasing their pain. Only by accepting the impermanence of everything can suffering become manageable. “At the core of each lay suffering; our eventual end, the many losses we must experience on the way to that end,” one of the ghosts realizes, noting that it’s our nature to be “suffering, limited beings.” That seems accurate, even if it’s kind of a downer.

But Lincoln in the Bardo isn’t a Buddhist tract. By the end of, I cared deeply for all these odd characters, and found myself moved by what happens to them. It’s astonishing, given the number of characters (a note at the back says that the audiobook required 166 actors) and the strangeness of its structure. You might think that the filters between us and the characters—the fragments of history and (maybe) firsthand accounts, many of which disagree with each other; the oddness of the ghosts; the way Lincoln is presented through both halves of the narrative; the rendering of mid-nineteenth century English, in its formality and sometimes tortured orthography—might limit the novel’s emotional intensity, but they don’t.

No wonder this book won the Man Booker Prize. I can’t wait to read more from George Saunders.

Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road wins a Saskatchewan Book Award!

Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road, took home the best nonfiction book award at last night’s Saskatchewan Book Awards. I was happy enough to be nominated; winning is incredible.

Links to an online retailer in the UK and the US and Canadian distributors are on my other site, if you’re interested in getting a copy. It’s also available in stores.