Siteseeing : Writing Nature & Climate Across the Prairies

February 2021 to March 2022 was a period of great reflection for two of Canadabs 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.

ARIEL GORDON (she/her) is a Winnipeg/Treaty 1 territory-based a writer, editor, and enthusiast. She is the ringleader of Writes of Spring, a National Poetry Month project with the Winnipeg International Writers Festival that appears in the Winnipeg Free Press. Her first two collections of poetry won the Lansdowne Prize for Poetry. Her most recent books are the essay collection Treed: Walking in Canada's Urban Forests (Wolsak & Wynn, 2019) and the first book in the public poetry project TreeTalk (At Bay Press, 2020), which was nominated for three Manitoba Book Awards. In 2022, her work appeared in Canadian Notes and Queries, Canthius, periodicities, and the Quarantine Review.

Brenda Schmidt was the seventh Saskatchewan Poet Laureate. Author of five books of poetry and a book of essays, her work has been nominated for Saskatchewan Book Awards, received the Alfred G. Bailey Prize for Poetry, and is included in The Best of the Best Canadian Poetry in English: Tenth Anniversary Edition. Over the years she has served on the board of directors of the Saskatchewan Writersb Guild and Sage Hill Writing, and more recently as poetry editor for Grain. She gardens on a dry hillside in central west Saskatchewan in Treaty 6 territory, and has several rain barrels.