Writing by Ken Wilson, author of Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road (University of Regina Press, 2025) and Walking Well: Trails, Paths, Pilgrimages (forthcoming from Wolsak & Wynn in October 2026)
I picked up a copy of John Burnside’s Black Cat Bone because it’s referred to in Pat Collins’s film Silence, and I was curious. Even though he published five novels, seventeen books of poetry, and three works of nonfiction, our library has nothing by him. Perhaps he’s not well known, despite having won many prizes, including the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award. I loved this book, though, and I’m not sorry to have it in my collection.
There’s no wifi on this flight, so I was unable to translate the many quotations here (in German, Italian, and French), or check a dictionary for definitions of the often abstruse, archaic vocabulary. That’s fine, because it forced me to focus on the sound of the poems and their surprising images. I’ll admit that I don’t know what’s happening in at least half of the poems here, and that doesn’t matter. The multiple languages point to the importance of sound as much as sense, and I didn’t sense that Burnside was showing off his erudition.
I couldn’t even be certain where the poems are situated. Some refer to North American things (cottonwoods, lodgepole pines), others to things I associate with Scotland (hedgehogs, kirks). The latter isn’t surprising, since Burnside taught at the University of St. Andrews until he died two years ago. Even the time when the poems are set isn’t always clear. The long poem that begins the book, “The Fair Chase,” for instance, seems to be set in the quasi-medieval world of some fantasy writing, except for the presence of firearms and the words “rotting tyres.” Those details don’t matter as much as the repeated figures and themes: lost love, death, mysterious shadows doubling the poems’ speakers, snow and winter. The book works by feeling rather than facts. I like that, selfishly, because I need more of it in my own writing.
I loved this, so much that I don’t completely trust my judgment. Perhaps a poet friend will let me know whether Burnside is as good as I think he is.
I finished rereading Kit Dobson’s wonderful Field Notes on Listening on the flight (appropriately) to Calgary. I wrote about it last year, and I stand by everything I said then. In fact, I may have been stinting with my praise. I’ll be talking to Kit next Wednesday at walk-listen-create’s writer’s salon; you can join us by registering here.
My review of Jaclyn Desforges’s new book of stories, Weird Babies, is now up at The Miramichi Reader. Read the review, but more importantly, read Weird Babies.
I picked up a copy of Kit Dobson’s Malled: Deciphering Shopping in Canada because I’m interviewing him for a Walk-Listen-Create event in a couple of weeks (details about this event are here). Our conversation will focus on his book Field Notes on Listening (which I’ve blogged about here), but I wanted to prepare more thoroughly by reading some of Dobson’s other books. That’s not a simple task, because he’s a prolific scholar, creative-nonfiction writer, and most recently novelist (check out his daunting faculty profile at the University of Calgary, where he’s taught since 2021), and I don’t have time to read everything he’s written, even if my instincts and training tell me that level of research is required. But Field Notes on Listening is a book about place, I told myself, and malls are places, so maybe there’s enough overlap to make Malled worth reading.
And it is, even though it’s almost 10 years old now, and the world of retail has changed, especially since the pandemic. That’s not a criticism; in fact, the book notes how shopping endlessly reinvents itself. Malled is my favourite kind of scholarly writing. It is reflective. Dobson thinks about his relationship to malls (and shopping more generally), and adjusts some of his thinking about them. Like many of us, at the outset he’s suspicious (to say the least) about the ecological and social effects of shopping, but his investigation takes him to a somewhat more nuanced place. As the book ends, he’s still concerned about those impacts—as someone at the Walmart in Whitehorse tells him, the stuff we buy is only making a temporary stop with us on its way to the landfill—but he acknowledges the possibility that malls contain possibilities for community and even for resistance. Watching someone reconsider their ideas is a rarity; most writers stay wedded to a thesis. That reconsideration, that degree of reflection and acknowledgment that other possible interpretations exist, is refreshing. That’s what this book provides.
It also introduced me to writers and artists I didn’t know or had forgotten about: Heather Spears’s poetry about the West Edmonton Mall and Roy Miki’s Mannequin Rising in the former category, Gary Burns’s film waydowntown in the latter. It also brought me up to date about places I used to know, like Toronto, while making me curious about places I don’t know much about, like that Walmart in Whitehorse or the mall in the old Montreal Forum. I was also struck by the argument that as private spaces, shopping malls are an extension of the enclosure movements of previous centuries, through which public lands were privatized. That makes sense to me.
I started reading Malled while staying on the southern edge of Red Deer, Alberta, in a hotel squeezed between a freeway and a massive series of power centres, the new form of retail design that seems to be replacing malls, partly because they enable consumers to avoid walking anywhere. I wonder what Dobson would say about that. Maybe I’ll ask him on September 2nd.
Next, I’m going to reread Field Notes on Listening. I’m eager to see what I think about it this time around, partly because I’ve read Malled. It’ll be the third or fourth time I’ve read it, but in my experience, every rereading of any text brings something new. I’m also wondering what Dobson’s other writing is like. Maybe I’ll find out.
When I read a review of Rob Cowen’s The North Road in The Guardian last winter, I knew I had to read it. A study of a highway? On foot? Yes! Of course I was interested. My first book, Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road, covers similar ground (forgive the pun). I immediately ordered a copy, and in July, I finally got down to reading it. I’m happy I did.
The North Road isn’t, as I had imagined, a book about a 400-mile walk following the path of “the North Road,” a historical highway (now the A1 and its variants) which runs from London to Edinburgh and beyond. Cowen isn’t wedded to the idea of walking, although the first half of the book tells the story of a long walk from London to Nottinghamshire, partly alone and partly with a friend, an active-duty soldier, known only as A, who joins Cowen when he is on leave. The rest of the book follows the highway by car. The pandemic is one reason for that change; another is that Cowen journeys at times with very different companion, his mother. That shift in the means of travel didn’t affect my interest in the book (which is a surprise, because I can be rigid about these things), and it becomes the occasion for Cowen’s experiments in genre, which add so much to the book.
Cowen begins with a day spent volunteering at an archaeological site uncovered by an expansion of the A1 in Yorkshire. It’s impossible, he suggests, to dig anywhere in England without uncovering evidence of its history. Roman, neolithic, Bronze Age, modern–it doesn’t matter: bodies, pottery, coins, weapons, the remains of structures (particularly henges) are everywhere. The way people lived, their technologies and burial practices, means they left many traces. That’s true here as well, or at least it was. The areas of native grassland that remain unploughed are full of tipi rings, farmers often collected hundreds of arrow heads and other knapped flint objects, former buffalo jumps were the sites of centuries of bones. The difference, perhaps, is that when the grassland became fields of wheat, the tipi rings and medicine wheels were destroyed, and the bones of the buffalo were shipped away to be turned into china and fertilizer. The arrowheads often end up in boxes in local museums, separated from their context by the plough and their first settler collectors. Similar vandalism happened in England, of course. Victorian archaeologists broke into tombs; many of the stones at Avebury were deliberately shattered by clergymen who believed they were evidence of Satanic worship. But more tangible evidence of the past seems to remain in England, even before those blue medallions began to be installed on any old building where something somewhat interesting took place.
But this book isn’t just about artifacts or material culture. It’s about stories. Like me (and like other walking writers, from Matthew Anderson to Iain Sinclair), Cowen looks for evidence of the past in the pedestrian present, while also learning everything he can about the history and geography of the places he visits. While walking, he keeps an eye out for old coaching inns, since the North Road was, for much of the 18th century, a busy coach route. He tells us when he sees evidence of the road’s earlier Roman incarnation. He tracks the rise and fall of towns and villages as the road was moved or the railway passed (or didn’t pass) them by. But the stories are what make this book come alive: stories about people who grew up or lived or met their endings alongside the North Road, including Margaret Thatcher, the prizefighter Tom Molineaux, the poet John Clare, the murder victim John Barugh. And stories from Cowen’s own life, his struggle to overcome childhood trauma, and stories about his family, who lived in Doncaster (right on the road) before moving down to London. That complex, layered mix of memoir, biography, history, geography, and attention to place, as well as the stories of the difficulties of a long walk, make this book a must-read for anyone interested in such things.
And that leads to Cowen’s shifts in genre, from nonfiction to fiction, where historical evidence is missing or where he wants to get inside those stories. There are two long chapters of fiction here: one about a contemporary (more or less) travelling IT support person, leading a lonely life in hotels and on the motorway, and the other about a woman trying to escape William the Conqueror’s soldiers during the Harrying of the North, a scorched-earth campaign against the Danes and Anglo-Saxons, mostly in Yorkshire, who were rebelling against his rule after the Norman Conquest. To call that campaign “ethnic cleansing” might be anachronistic, but from Cowen’s account, it seems accurate. I don’t know how much his fictional version of events stacks up against the historical record, or if there is much of a historical record of what it was like to be a victim of the Harrying, since a) few of those people could write and b) any documents would’ve been burned along with their homes, but the narrative is so engaging that it doesn’t matter. In that way, The North Road asks us to think about the way fiction and nonfiction blur together, the way that our knowledge is partial, the way that our memories are constructions.
I was amazed by The North Road, and I’m looking forward to reading Cowen’s other books (nonfiction and poetry). I’m not tempted, though, to follow in his footsteps and try to walk from London to Doncaster (or wherever he stopped), mostly because I don’t have the courage for that much trespassing and wild camping (walking beside highways in the UK is more than unpleasant–it’s suicidal, since there are no shoulders). I’m glad he did it, though, and delighted that he wrote this book.
