ARIEL GORDON
ARIEL GORDON
Writer. Editor. Enthusiast.

Writer. Editor.
Enthusiast.

 
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About

Ariel Gordon (she/her)

I’m a Treaty 1 territory/Winnipeg-based writer, editor, and enthusiast. My most recent books are Treed: Walking in Canada’s Urban Forests (Wolsak & Wynn, 2019) and TreeTalk (At Bay Press, 2020). I’m the ringleader of Writes of Spring, a National Poetry Month project in collaboration with the Winnipeg International Writers Festival and the Winnipeg Free Press.

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Workshop

Tree-Talking: Nature Writing and Trees

What TreeTalk-ing looks like!

What does it mean to slow down and pay attention to the natural world? What lives there with us? In this creative writing workshop, we will closely observe nature with a particular focus on trees.You will come away from this workshop with new nature-writing techniques to use in your writing practice and a sheaf of new writing. Your work will receive feedback from Ariel and be workshopped with the group.

You will be also invited to contribute to Ariel Gordon’s public poetry project TreeTalk, where she will write poems to one tree on the MISSA campus and invites passersby to add their poems/confessions/ideas.

When: July 24-28, 2023

What: Metchosin International Summer School of the Arts (MISSA) 

Where: Shawnigan Lake School (Shawnigan Lake, BC)

Cost: $830

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Poetry

TreeTalk

Published September 2020 ISBN: 9781988168272

Published September 2020
ISBN: 9781988168272

During the heatwave of July 2017, Ariel Gordon spent two days sitting on the patio of downtown Winnipeg’s Tallest Poppy, writing snippets of poems which she hung from the boulevard tree using paper and string. Passersby were invited to TreeTalk too — their secrets / one-liners / meditations / haiku were also hung from the tree. By the end of the weekend, the elm had a second temporary canopy of leaves: 234 poems, 111 written by Gordon, 107 written by passersby, and 16 from other sources.

Gordon has assembled all these voices into a long/found poem that asks: what does it mean to live in the urban forest? What does it mean to be in relationship with each other but also with the more-than-human? The book also includes pen and ink illustrations by Winnipeg artist Natalie Baird.

“Ariel Gordon, truly the Jane Jacobs of trees and poetry, has charmed a multitude of strangers and passersby to sing small songs to the urban canopy, to whisper their secrets and confessions to a neighbourhood elm tree. The result is TreeTalk, a celebration of the city-dweller’s relationship with trees, but also an elegy to the stress and devastation imposed on urban nature in the course of “growing” and developing a city. In TreeTalk, Ariel Gordon not only re-foliates a tree with poems, she adds a startling and crucial layer of leaves to how we might (re)imagine ourselves coexisting with nature.”

– Sylvia Legris



Quotable

Equal parts reminiscent of the relational ecological work of anthropologist Natasha Myers on High Park in Toronto, or of eco-critic Catriona Sandilands on Point Pelee National park, or BC author Theresa Kishkan’s deep descriptive sensibility for landscape and communing with animals, Gordon’s Treed enriches both the places it is written about and the reader’s attention to the places where we dwell and wander.
— Jaime Yard in The Ormsby Review on Treed
 

Hire me

I am a literary writer and freelance journalist with a BSc in Biology from UWinnipeg and a Bachelor of Journalism from Halifax’s University of King’s College. I also work in publishing as a publicist and event planner.

You can hire me to teach creative writing classes, edit manuscripts, or plan / host events.

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Essays

Treed: Walking in Canada’s
Urban Forests

Published May 2019 ISBN: 9781928088752

Published May 2019
ISBN: 9781928088752

With intimacy and humour award-winning poet Ariel Gordon walks us through the streets of Winnipeg and into the urban forest that is, to her, the city's heart. Along the way she shares with us the lives of these urban trees, from the grackles and cankerworms of the spring, to the flush of mushrooms on stumps in the summer and through to the red-stemmed dogwood of the winter. After grounding us in native elms and ashes, Gordon travels to BC's northern Rockies, to Banff National Park and a cattle farm in rural Manitoba, and helps us to consider what we expect of nature. Whether it is the effects of climate change on the urban forest or foraging in the city, Dutch elm disease in the trees or bats in the walls, Gordon delves into our relationships with the natural world with heart and style. In the end, the essays circle back to the forest, where the weather is always better and where the reader can see how to remake even the trees that are lost.

“The personal is political, but the personal is also trees, urban forests and our own microculture of interaction that speaks to larger histories, spaces, ecologies and cultures. In these charming essays, Ariel Gordon examines with wit, sensitivity and insight the living and breathing environments she finds herself living and breathing in. Rich with detail and engaging anecdote, Treed considers how modern life, writing and family take root in the specifics of geography.” 

—Gary Barwin, author of Yiddish for Pirates