Writing by Ken Wilson, author of Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road
Author: Ken Wilson
PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of English and Creative Writing, University of Regina. My book, Walking the Bypass: Notes On Place From the Side of the Road, is forthcoming from University of Regina Press October 14, 2025. Preorder your copy at https://uofrpress.ca/Books/W/Walking-the-Bypass.
Holloway has been on my shelf for years. Like Simon Armitage’s Blossomise, it’s a chapbook, more or less, published by Faber and Faber, with illustrations by Stanley Donwood. Its brevity, and the thought that it would fit into my carry-on bag on this trip to Ontario, prompted me to bring it with me.
A holloway is a path, worn into soft bedrock by “centuries of foot-fall, hoof-hit, wheel-roll & rain-run.” They’re unique to the UK and other parts of Europe. As Macfarlane (and perhaps Richards as well—it’s a collaboration, the result of multiple voices coming together) tell us,
They are landmarks that speak of habit rather than of suddenness. Like creases in the hand, or the wear on the stone sill of a doorstep or stair, they are the result of repeated human actions. Their age chastens without crushing. They relate to the other old paths & tracks in the landscape—ways that still connect place to place & person to person.
The paragraph that follows is a list of words that denote holloways of various kinds and suggest their literal qualities and the intimations of the occult that they carry. The chapbook explores both through brief accounts of the history of these paths, the experiences of others who have walked them (notably the poet Edward Thomas), and the authors’ own odd encounters with mist and fog during their excursions to South Dorset’s holloways. Macfarlane’s twin fascinations—landscape and language—are on display here, as elsewhere in his writing.
The notion of collective authorship is reinforced by the insertion of italicized text, sometimes historical (the language is obviously from earlier centuries), sometimes quotations from Thomas’s poetry, sometimes impossible to identify: found text, dialogue, I don’t know. The effect is a layering of past and present, literal and magical, which is the point being made about these odd, ancient paths.
Two journeys are related in Holloway. In the first, Macfarlane and his friend, the writer Roger Deakin, explore the Chideock Valley’s holloways using Geoffrey Household’s 1937 novel Rogue Male as a guidebook, a charming bit of rural psychogeography. In the second, Macfarlane, Donwood, and Richards return to the area five years after Deakin’s untimely death. I found myself envying the playfulness of these visits, the joy the men have together, as well as the language in which their experiences are evoked, which shifts from prose to prose poetry to poetry.
Macfarlane writes about holloways in The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, and I wondered if there would be a lot of crossover between this chapbook and that longer study, but I didn’t notice much, although I didn’t bring The Old Ways along to check. Would it matter? Not to me. I loved the writing in this chapbook. I’m glad I finally got around to reading it. Maybe someday I’ll get to see a Holloway for myself.
I started reading Victoria Hetherington’s The Friend Machine: On the Trail of AI Companionship, the day I heard about the chatbot Grok, installed in an Ontario woman’s Tesla, asking a child to send it nudes. Since the public debut of ChatGPT in November 2022, generative AI has been the bane of my teaching; so many of my students have decided to let a chatbot generate text instead of actually doing the work of thinking and reading and writing, and it’s been discouraging to watch that process happen. It can’t be good for us to offload basic cognitive skills, I told myself; without practicing those skills, we’re likely to lose them. That’s what my intuition told me, and yes, indeed, that’s what researchers are telling us. But there’s another way people use generative AI: as a friend, a therapist, even a lover. As a companion, in other words. That idea gives me the creeps, and I’ve been surprised to hear intelligent people whom I respect talking about using ChatGPT or Claude or some other generative AI product as a therapist. Do you really want to tell Open AI or Anthropic all of your secrets? I want to ask them. Do you really think that’s a good idea? I hadn’t thought about generative AI as a lover or a friend, though–not really. Not until I read this book.
The Friend Machine is the product of about 16 months of researching AI companionship: talking to experts, following online discussions, interviewing people about their AI friends/lovers/whatevers. At the outset, Hetherington is open to the possibilities of the technology, partly because as someone who experienced social isolation in childhood and adolescence, she understands how a digital companion might be a draw for some people. It might even be helpful for those of us who are on the spectrum, for instance, or who experience mood disorders. I’m a lot more skeptical, but I decided I would follow Hetherington’s curiosity to see where it led.
My concerns about the risk of giving predatory corporations all kinds of personal data are justified. Even if the corporation doesn’t do something terrible with that information, others might. In October 2024, for instance, hackers broke into the database of Muah.AI, which provides its customers with sexual chatbots, and stole a massive amount of information about users’ interactions with them, data that included the names and emails of the people who trusted that service to maintain their confidentiality. Imagine the possibilities for blackmail. There’s nothing that says something similar couldn’t happen with other services, or that when companies go broke or sell off parts of their operations or merge with other corporations peoples’ data might not end up anywhere. Imagine if records of your conversations with your therapist ended up floating around the internet, available to the highest bidder. How would that sit with you?
But that’s not the only potentially destructive aspect of this use of generative AI. It could be addictive, with companies creating scripts that encourage customers to spend more and more on their digital lovers or friends. It could be creating a generation of people who can’t engage with other flesh-and-blood humans. It could be creating more and more incels–the involuntary celibates (mostly young men) who are enraged about their loneliness. There are many negative possibilities. Yes, Hetherington notes, there are people for whom AI companions could be helpful, but for many others, the constant sycophancy causes a form of psychosis. Some people might abuse their AI companions, or create ones in the form of children in order to practice a kind of digital pedophilia, and that behaviour might not just stay online.
Her early experiences enable Hetherington to empathize with people who are drawn to AI companions:
My heart breaks to think of the teenagers falling in love with brightly rendered, iconic characters from books and films, dragging these children into hours-long vortexes and saying their *names* to them, saying they *love* them. If I had been born just twenty years later, I wouldn’t have had a chance; I’d probably have slipped into the vortex forever and long ago, having married a werewolf companion in a dark moody wedding in a forest surrounded by centaurs wiping away tears, chasing our children around digital space and teaching them about trials they’d undergo each full moon. I’d likely bat away the weakening concern and lowered expectations of my immediate family, with any other social connections having withered on the vine before I’d left preadolescence.
I can’t imagine such a life. It feels impoverished to me: a life without human touch, without the friction relationships with other humans gives us. We need that friction to grow, to learn, to become better people. Yes, I know that Jean-Paul Sartre, or a character in his play No Exit, says that hell is other people, but we need that form of hell. Without it, as Hetherington notes, the parts of our brain that are responsible for interpersonal connections don’t develop. “The cybernated ocean is indeed empty, vast, and thin,” she tells us.
I find all of this terrifying, and by the end of her book, Hetherington does, too, although she also remains curious about where the technology will go, asking questions rather than making pronouncements, even if I sense those questions are primarily rhetorical. As our offline communities and relationships degrade, we begin to forget what healthy connections are like. “And what else do we forget when we talk to machines?” she asks:
Do we forget what’s special about being human, about real conversation, about love, about empathy? Are we seduced by these in-app images of ourselves: young, blonde, bearing passing resemblance to our real faces, held tightly by our companion peering over our shoulders?
I think we are likely to forget those things, and many others. After all, our new tech overlords tell us, repeatedly, that empathy is a bug in our software, not the thing that makes us human, that has allowed our species to flourish. A world without empathy, a world of wealthy and selfish men pushing virtual companionship on us the way they’re pushing generative AI tools that replace thinking and communicating–that’s not something I would want to be part of. Read The Friend Machine if you want to be shocked at where we’re going, and indeed where we are right now.
I don’t know a lot about Simon Armitage, but I loved his memoir, Walking Home: A Poet’s Journey, and I know he’s the UK’s poet laureate and a professor of poetry at the University of Leeds. A poem from this book was assigned reading in a writing workshop I’m participating in, led by Yvonne Blomer, whose poetry I’ve written about here, and I was intrigued enough to order a copy.
It’s a short book—almost a chapbook, really—of lyric poems and haiku, interspersed with illustrations—woodcuts or linocuts—by Angela Harding. As an object, it’s beautiful, and the poems, all of which consider trees blossoming in the spring, are lovely, rich in surprising metaphors and in music. In “Blossom: a CV,” for instance, the act of blossoming is equated with fruit farming, generating electricity with solar panels, dancing ballet, climbing mountains, and performing magic.
Why write a book about blossoming trees? The UK Is losing its orchards and fruit trees, with predictable ecological consequences but also less tangible ones for people, who need the “awakening of the spirit” blossoms provide after a long, dreary winter. “Blossom insists that we take notice, it demands our attention, but in its melancholy transience blossom also tells us something about the cycle of life, being a metaphor for our own finite existence and the idea that ‘nought may endure but Mutability,’ as Shelley put it,” Armitage writes in his author’s note. “We need to observe and experience more things like blossom, not less. We need to connect.” Yes, we do, and perhaps poems like these will encourage that sort of engagement. Or perhaps poetry can provide an alternative form of connection—to words instead of things, or perhaps words on their way to things. And yes, maybe quoting Shelley makes Armitage a Romantic—or maybe Shelley, like other poets, has something to tell us. Armitage does. Let’s listen.
No, I’m not sorry I read this powerful and haunting book. It’s not an easy read, and (please consider this a trigger warning, although I don’t intend to go into details) I wouldn’t expect it to be: the subject matter, which includes child sexual abuse, ought to be difficult. If it weren’t, something would be wrong. And the author’s experience is, distressingly, too common. Maybe, if the stigma and silence that surrounds that kind of abuse were to be dispelled, it might happen less frequently, and if that’s the case, You Might Be Sorry You Read This will do important work. Brown clearly understands all of that. In “poetic statement,” she writes,
I write as a refusal to be silenced.
I write to resist shame.
I write as an answer to questions I’m tired of explaining.
I write to put down my side of the story.
I like the way she considers the embodied nature of both our experience and our writing:
We are, each of us, walking-around, knowing beings, holding ideas and memories that show in our gait, in the way we hold our face. A poem is an exercise in bringing forward from the body the sense of a moment–following my breath, the rise of my spine, the sense of my skin as I sit on a rock watching a heron hunt, or in my garden listening to bees in the borage, or as I walk an urban street and smell toast.
Brown is Métis, and some of the poems here consider the effects of Canada’s ongoing colonialism and the way that they have affected her. Those poems are angry, but why wouldn’t they be? “Beneficiaries of a Genocide,” for instance, addresses settler-descendants like me directly. That poem’s speaker demands that settlers identify themselves using that term, something many of us are reluctant to do, especially if we were born here, as I have learned from my students, and it rightly suggests an alternative term: “I don’t imagine you’ll like this term any better. / Beneficiary of a genocide. / But I think it narrows the argument.” “Let us stay in this room where you are now uncomfortable / and I am now unwelcome,” it concludes. “Let us begin with what you call yourselves.” The discomfort such discussions occasion, as I argue in my book, Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road, is unpleasant–of course it it!–but it’s far less painful than living on a road allowance or being sent to a residential school. Let’s try to develop some sense of perspective.
My review of James Cairns’s fine book, In Crisis, On Crisis: Essays in Troubled Times, is now up at the Miramichi Reader. I’m so happy for the opportunity to review books, because it pushes me to read more than I might otherwise. So thanks to Nick and Emma and everyone at the Miramichi Reader for their ongoing commitment to writing in Canada.
I haven’t been reading much for a couple of years, and that’s bothered me–a lot. The reasons aren’t hard to understand. I’ve been working too much and not sleeping enough, which has meant that when I get home, I’m too tired to concentrate. I still don’t get enough shuteye, but my job has eased up a little, and so I’ve been able to get at a few of the new books that have found their way into our house. Yes, even though I’ve struggled to read anything, I’ve still been buying books; I know that doesn’t make any sense, but it’s one of the things writers do.
I ordered Michael Trussler’s 10:10 when it came out last fall. Michael is a colleague and a friend, and I admire his writing. It’s erudite, thoughtful, concerned with the ways we are damaging the planet and ourselves, our horrific histories of genocide, and yet it also takes visual art–Vermeer, Rothko, Brueghel–as a sign of our potential, as a species, to do good things, to make beautiful things. Unlike me, Michael doesn’t seem to struggle to find time or energy to read, if the dense texture of allusions and quotations in 10:10 is any evidence–and it is. I’ve been meaning to read this book for a year, and I was finally motivated to open it when I learned, early yesterday morning, that it has been shortlisted for a Governor-General’s Literary Award. Yes, of course, many worthwhile books don’t get that kind of recognition, and yet I am so happy that Michael’s work is being recognized. He’s been prolific over the past several years, publishing three books of poetry and a memoir since 2021, and I know how much hard work and sacrifice has gone into that productivity. I knew 10:10 was on the shelf at work where I keep poetry, and I brought it home last night. I ended up devouring it in one sitting. It is a wonderful book.
The title made me think about time–Timex watches used to always be advertised with the hands showing “10:10,” and that’s true of other analog timepieces as well–and sure enough, the passing of time, and the way it is experienced in simultaneous layers, are both themes here. That simultaneity is hard to evoke in writing, since language tends to be linear (one word, one sentence, following another), but Michael plays with punctuation, enjambment, and textual interruptions of various kinds to suggest the way he might be sitting in his home office, writing, while remembering standing outside the building where Dutch diarist Etty Hillesum, who was murdered in Auschwitz, lived, while also recalling things she wrote about the experience of living in Nazi-occupied Holland. “The Edges of What’s Known?” includes lines from other poems or essays in the book–I’ve learned from Tanis MacDonald not to force genre categories onto hybrid texts, and I’m going to be careful not to make this mistake here–as another way to indicate a slightly different form of simultaneity. But that’s not exactly what 10:10 means. It’s a reference to Edward Kienholz’s large 1965 installation The Beanery, a life-size interior of a bar in which all of the human figures have clock faces, set to ten minutes after ten, where their actual fleshly faces would otherwise be. The title essay/poem, “10:10,” recalls different visits to Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, where Kienholz’s installation is located, in different decades of the author’s life, and it considers how his relationship to visual art has changed over time, as well as its connection, however oblique, to human violence: the war in Vietnam, the Holocaust. It ends with a couple of lines of poetry that interrupt a story about a 2014 visit to the Stedelijk, lines that seem to situate the text right here, in Regina, on a wintery day, far from Amsterdam, and yet on the following page we see a photograph (the author’s photographs appear at key points in this book) of a canal in that European city, “impossibly far from / here–.” Complexity, simultaneity, violence, and visual art as a kind of compensation: it’s all here.
So too are the climate crisis and the extinction event humans are causing, notably in “Solastalgia.” That title refers to Glenn Albrecht’s neologism, a word that combines nostalgia, solace, and desolation, or so I learned in a poetry workshop this week; it’s the sense of loss we experience when a place or ecosystem has been destroyed by human activity. The fragments in that text juxtapose different moments in Michael’s life, all of them suggesting the inexorable and accelerating passage of time, the need to love what remains NOW, because it’s leaving: “Better order now, the sky recommends, restaurant’s closing.”
I could go on about this book, which to be honest deserves a better, more skilled reader of poetry than I am. The winners of the Governor-General’s Literary Awards will be announced in a couple of weeks. I haven’t read the other nominees–that would be a worthwhile project, wouldn’t it?–and so I have no idea how 10:10 compares to them, but I’m happy that yesterday’s news prompted me to bestir myself to read it. Congratulations, Michael–you deserve the recognition.
I haven’t managed to finish a novel in months. I start one, get overwhelmed by work and put it down, then forget what was happening. It’s frustrating. But I finished Melanie Schnell’s The Chorus Beneath Our Feet. It held my attention even with the Jays game going on (visible in the background of my photograph).
I want to put aside the characters for a moment, even though I empathize with Jes, who’s battling multiple traumas while trying to save his sister from a dark fate. And the plot, which is full of surprises. Instead, I want to consider the poetry of the book’s title—the word “chorus.” What an evocative way to describe the fungi, microorganisms, and bones (among other things) beneath the earth’s surface. Did you know that we don’t have much of a clue about what was underneath the surface of the grassland that used to be here in southern Saskatchewan? It was ploughed under before anybody thought to ask. The interrelationships indicated by the word “chorus “—well, the suggestion of harmony, of a hidden music, really appeals to me.
A lot is happening in this novel. The Home Children, trees and fungi, development and corruption, magic (real and imagined), Canada’s participation in the war in Afghanistan: they’re all here, along with allusions to the gothic and to magic realism. I am reluctant to say more, because I don’t want to spoil anything for potential readers, and anyone reading this post is a potential reader of this book. I’m curious, though: what will happen to Mary? Will she be the protagonist of Schnell’s next novel?
So, pick up this novel, and enjoy this funhouse version of Regina. And its inclusion of uncomfortable aspects of the truth of this place.
My post on Canadian books about walking is up on 49th Shelf. I describe my connection to walking as a practice, and briefly consider 11 books on the subject. You can find the post here.
Today marks the official release of Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road. To celebrate, I’ll be on CBC Saskatchewan’s noon-hour program, Blue Sky, as part of a panel discussion about walking. Tune in if you can!
I was told this review was coming, but I had trouble believing it would happen. But here it is: Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road has been reviewed in Harper’s. I’m surprised and grateful my book is getting such thoughtful attention.
If you’re curious to read more, pick up a copy of the October issue of Harper’s. The publisher is taking preorders here, and it will soon be available in better bookstores everywhere.
