by Jenna Butler

Alberta’s literary landscape, in spite of the understandable publishing bottlenecks of the pandemic, has never been more rich or more diverse—though there is still far to go! Among the collections released over the past several years are a growing number of books that delve into environmental concerns and the climate crisis, in addition to tackling powerful issues of identity and community linked to place. Albertan writers in all genres are telling tough, timely stories about connection with, or disconnection from, the land.

One of the delights of being a poet is believing that poetry belongs everywhere, and so I’ll interlace poetry with other genres here. One of the most thought-provoking texts about place that I’ve encountered over the past ten years has to be Marilyn Dumont’s The Pemmican Eaters (ECW Press, 2015). Rooted in the Métis diaspora moving westward from the Red River, Dumont’s book celebrates vivid narratives of Métis culture and resilience in the aftermath of the Riel Resistance. She rejects cultural silencing and delves into the ways in which the land informs Métis beadwork, music, dance, and storytelling. Dumont, a writer and professor based in Amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton), anchors the end of the collection firmly there, interrogating the city’s attempted erasure of the Indigenous peoples who have long called the area home, and looking at the ways in which cultural genocide seeks to erase deep, specific knowledge of the land. In its final section, The Pemmican Eaters speaks to a remapping of the city that unpacks colonial naming to reclaim Indigenous stories, histories, and connections to land.

I’ll set Kit Dobson’s newly released Field Notes on Listening (Wolsak and Wynn, 2022) side by side with Dumont’s book, as I’m curious about the potential dialogues between the two. In Field Notes, Dobson, an editor, writer, and professor based in Mohkinstsis (Calgary) finds himself questioning his own relationship to place. As a father of young children, he wonders whether he has been able to instill in his family a sense of connection to, and curiosity about, the land. Through the enforced isolation and silence of the pandemic, he finds himself considering his grandparents’ farm in northern Alberta and the rich sense of place he developed as a child when he was with them on that land. Dobson’s questions about disconnection from place, and whether it is possible, through a sort of land-first listening, to find a way back into relationship with place, have a wide-reaching resonance that offer a wonderful counterpoint to Marilyn Dumont’s book.

Similarly, Amy Kaler, in her book Until Further Notice: A Year in Pandemic Time (University of Alberta Press, 2022) finds herself shut out of her own daily life and routines during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a professor of sociology and a writer in Amiskwacîwâskahikan, she turns a critical lens on her own life and that of the city she calls home. She interrogates her frustrated desires to travel and to be elsewhere, in places perhaps considered to be more cultured, more artistic. What strikes me about this book is the powerful way in which the pandemic calls Kaler back to be where she is now. Housebound in isolation, she connects to Mill Creek Ravine and the river valley near her home, recognizing all over again the way in which the more-than-human world keeps human beings in scale. Though Kaler, on first glance, might not appear to be an environmental writer, Until Further Notice explores a phenomenon unique to recent memory: the mass reconnection of many urban people with the land around them that city life had divorced them from.

There’s a different sort of reconnection to the land taking place in Bertrand Bickersteth’s brilliant A Response of Weeds: A Misplacement of Black Poetics on the Prairies (NeWest Press, 2020). Bickersteth, a writer living in Mohkinstsis who teaches at Olds College, delves deep into the rich—and purposefully obscured—history of Black pioneers on the prairies. In poems that examine Black resilience, strength, community, and struggle, he brings to light the long history of Black communities in Alberta and the erasure they faced (and continue to face) by white colonial institutions and by the farmers and ranchers they worked beside. Bickersteth’s book chronicles a long and nuanced story of displacement and belonging, of finding a way to enter into relationship with the land, even as that same relationship and sense of agency are denied.

Trina Moyles also explores what it means to enter into relationship to place in her memoir Lookout: Love, Solitude, and Searching for Wildfire in the Boreal Forest (Penguin Random House, 2021). As a young writer struggling to ground herself after her relationship fails overseas, Moyles finds solace, community, and purpose as a fire lookout in northern Alberta over a series of summers. As she learns to navigate the rigours of tower life, she enters into a profound relationship with the land around her, the place she is very literally watching over during her long days up in the cupola. Scanning for smoke also serves as a way of watching closely, of slowing her human preoccupations to the pace of the land around her, and of entering into the rich life of the boreal forest. Moyles is originally from Treaty 8 territory, the Peace Country of northern Alberta, and after years of working abroad, life in the fire tower is a sort of homecoming to a land she realizes she has always deeply loved.

The Alberta literary landscape is alive with texts that speak to our relationship to the land. Respected established writers such as Kevin Van Tighem, Sid Marty, Karsten Heuer, Andrew Nikiforuk, Kevin Timoney, and Fred Stenson offer decades of rich and thoughtful books about the lands, people, and environmental frictions of the province. Brilliant newer writers such as Billy-Ray Belcourt, Joshua Whitehead, Norma Dunning, Connor Kerr, Matthew James Weigel, and Moni Brar weave in diverse and intelligent voices from a variety of backgrounds, identities, and disciplines that speak to the challenges and barriers of living in right relationship to place. There’s a wealth of superb texts out there, and I encourage you to engage with stories of place in multiple genres and from the entire spectrum of voices writing in Alberta today.