Siteseeing: Writing Nature and Climate Across the Prairies

by Ariel Gordon, Brenda Schmidt (illustrator)

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.

178 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 29, 2023

About the author

Ariel Gordon (she/her) is a Winnipeg/Treaty 1 territory-based writer, editor, and enthusiast. She is the ringleader of Writes of Spring, a National Poetry Month project with Plume Winnipeg that appears in the Winnipeg Free Press. She is the author of seven books, the most recent of which are the essay collection Fungal: Foraging in the Urban Forest (Wolsak & Wynn, 2024) and the epistolary spec-fic novel Blood Letters, co-authored with graphic novelist GMB Chomichuk (Great Plains Press, 2025). Her work appeared in Best Canadian Essays 2025, edited by Emily Urquhart, and will be in Best Canadian Poetry 2026, edited by Mary Dalton.