Writer. Editor.
Enthusiast.

Poetry

Siteseeing

Writing Nature and Climate Across the Prairies

February 2021 to March 2022 was a period of great reflection for two of Canada’s most celebrated poets. Ariel Gordon and Brenda Schmidt wrote collaborative poetry, formatted like a call and response. Ariel intended to write about urban Manitoba, the city and its trees, and Brenda was to write about rural Saskatchewan and birds. Over the course of the year, the matter of place took over and the intentions branched and flew apart. The poets wrote about the natural world and people making their way through it all. They wrote home as they found it, observing climate as it manifested in drought-stressed trees and stunted crops covered in grasshoppers, in wildfires and wildfire smoke hanging over the prairies. Survival, struggle, keen naturalist perception, and endless wit, bring forward the idea of hope, rejuvenation, and the generative power of community.

“Siteseeing poses an urgent question: what does it mean to be a steward of the contemporary world? Its wry observations of the interrupted rhythms of nature (in both urban and rural lives) do not demonize technology, but rely on computer and camera to record losses, focusing on repurposing and adaptation. Hunting as coyote and badger, the authors offer a radical lens through which to really see—and thus value—the world, howling and growling, desperate for regeneration.”

— Beatriz Hausner, Barbara Langhorst, and Hoa Ngyuen, 2024 poetry jurors, Saskatchewan Book Awards

“City and country, Ariel Gordon and Brenda Schmidt voice the extraordinary in the ordinary — the blackbird singing backup to a front-end loader, the garden waiting for rain —as the world slouches toward apparent apocalypse. These poems will have you wondering if it is okay to laugh when we should be crying. (And, yes, it is.)”

— Trevor Herriot, author of Towards a Prairie Atonement and Grass, Sky, Song

Quotable

“In this heart-to-heart conversation, poets Ariel Gordon and Brenda Schmidt document the broken beauty of a world in crisis. Rooted in place and powered by precise observation, these generous poems will speak to you wherever you do your own siteseeing.”

— Candace Savage, author of A Geography of Blood: Unearthing history in a prairie landscape

“This thoroughly beguiling dialogue makes ‘nature poetry’ freshly compelling. We are given a year-full of creatures, plants, weather, observantly described at a time of change—drought and flooding, dying elms, viruses, cellphone technology. Yet we are not made glum or panicked. The book makes us care. We’re all in this together, coyotes, songbirds, tractors and a wild turkey roosting in a city tree.”

— Alice Major, author of Welcome to the Anthropocene

Essays

Fungal

Foraging in the Urban Forest

Fungal is a wide-ranging collection from Ariel Gordon where she explores her fascination with all mushrooms, not just those you can eat. In these engaging essays she takes the reader through ditches and puddles in search of morels, through the hallways of a mushroom factory, down city sidewalks and beside riverbanks as she considers things found and fungal. Along the way there are entertaining stories of the perils of mushroom identification, including mailed mushrooms that have liquefied, or terrifying thoughts of Canadian geese being fed hallucinogenic mushrooms as well as thoughtful analysis of the ways mushrooms knit our ecosystems together and the ways we knit our lives and communities together. Smart, funny and poetic, Gordon moves seamlessly from the natural world to the personal in these essays, examining the interconnectedness of all things and delighting in the rich variety of the world around her.

“Fungal is a perfect companion for anyone curious about not only mushrooms but the complexities of ecosystems of all kinds, natural and human-made. Every page is animated by wild energy and muddy joy. How lucky we are to have this excellent forager’s guide not only to mushrooms and their possibilities (culinary, medicinal, psychotropic) but also to big ideas, to happiness and to community.”

— Theresa Kishkan, author of Blue Portugal and Other Essays