I read Jenna Butler’s 2020 book Revery: A Year of Bees several years ago, and I was impressed by it—so much, in fact, that when I decided to teach a course on place writing this summer, I decided to include it on the reading list. It’s a sort of sequel to her earlier book of essays, A Profession of Hope: Farming on the Edge of the Grizzly Trail—the same farm, more or less, but this time, the focus is on those tiny domesticated creatures, honeybees, and the wonders they give us: sweet honey and wax for candles and balms. The book, which was nominated for a Governor General’s Award and longlisted for the CBC’s Canada Readscompetition, goes beyond honeybees, though; it thinks about the way we might connect with place through what the anthropologist Tim Ingold calls a “taskscape”—through labour, care, and attention—and the challenges inherent in attempts to make that kind of connection.

Revery: A Year of Bees has two structuring principles. As its subtitle suggests, it follows Butler through the annual cycle of work involved in stewarding a small organic farm and bee yard on the edge of the boreal forest in northern Alberta. At the same time, though, it’s also an excellent example of what writers call a “braided essay”—or, perhaps, more accurately, it’s a braided book of braided essays. The text moves back and forth between personal writing about Butler’s experience and informative writing about beekeeping. As Nicole Walker explains in an essay on braided forms of creative nonfiction, that continual shift in perspective sets up a “tension between two unlike things working against each other” which, through repetition, presses out meaning. Revery: A Year of Bees does exactly that by moving between Butler’s experience and its broader context. As Butler herself has argued in an essay on braided forms of creative nonfiction, that kind of writing allows writers “to tell stories at length that may be crushingly hard, balancing that sustained, clear, and factual telling with moments of beauty or humour.” In fact, towards the end of the book, when Butler explains how working with bees has helped her with the lasting effects of violence and trauma, readers come to see the value in the braided structure she has constructed; it allows us to understand the ways in which personal experience, past and present, affects our work and our relationships, and the ways in which that labour and connection change us. Her description of that trauma, by the way, is both bluntly honest and tactful, something many of us who want to write about our difficult experiences might want to learn from. I certainly could.

Before my students read Revery: A Year of Bees, I asked them to read Robert Macfarlane’s essay “A Counter-Desecration Phrasebook,” published in a collection of poems and essays, Towards Re-Enchantment: Place and Its Meanings, edited by Gareth Evans and Di Robson. There, Macfarlane argues, among other things, that having a specific language of place allows us to see what is valuable and important in the world around us, as well as our connections or relationships to that world, things that modernity, according to Max Weber and Martin Heidegger, has taught us to ignore. Instead of seeing a forest as something special, even enchanted, an ecosystem or a place we might get to know but never fully understand, for instance, Heidegger contends that we now see that forest as a “standing-reserve,” as so many board feet of lumber or tons of fibre for paper or disposable diapers. The forest becomes fungible: we think we translate it from one thing, a living place, to something else, economic activity and profit, without losing anything worth saving. Seeing places in a different way—as something rather than nothing—might help us to avoid destroying or “desecrating” them (note the overtones of the sacred in Macfarlane’s use of that word). Writing like Butler’s encourages us to think the way Macfarlane advocates: to consider our relationships to place and land, to wonder at the ways they exceed our knowledge and understanding, to approach them with respect and awe. That’s part of what makes her writing worth paying attention to.

But that’s not the only reason I admire Revery: A Year of Bees. Butler’s account of how the bees she works with pick up on her emotions, how they respond to her when she’s overwhelmed by her nearly unspeakable emotional and physical traumas, is fascinating. Like horses and dogs, bees sense the moods of the people around them. On her bad days, she can’t approach the bees, which feel threatened by her “cloud of energy.” It’s yet more evidence of our deep connections to the world and its inhabitants, and a sign of the way that forming relationships with the land can heal us. We need to learn those lessons, and Revery: A Year of Bees is a kind and gentle teacher.