Derrick Stacey Denholm has spent twenty-five years as a forestry field worker, planting trees, marking cutblock boundaries and timber-cruising. In Ground-Truthing, he combines this experience with his perspective as a poet and artist to guide us through the tangle of social, ecological and economic slash piles that dominate BC’s North Coast. Scientists, poets, loggers, activists, mushroom hunters–Ground-Truthing explores this diverse terrain of communities and cultures in its search for an answer to one of our most urgent questions: How can we work productively and participate ethically in a life that maintains respect for the wild, not only in the rain-soaked forests of BC’s North Coast, but everywhere?

Born on the BC coast, Derrick Stacey Denholm has spent most of the last twenty years living and working in northern and coastal forests. Having come out of the trees just long enough to complete a bachelor and a masters in English, his literary work concerns respect for the wild, social and environmental justice, and the problems of ongoing industrialization within Indigenous lands. Denhlm won the 2011 Barry McKinnon Chapbook Award for Dead Salmon Dialectics, which was published in full form by Caitlin Press in 2014. Denholm also has poetry, prose, and visual art published in Canadian Literature, the Capilano Review, CV2, Dreamland, Drunken Boat, filling Station, The Goose, and ::stonestone::.

Derrick Stacey Denholm's profile page

While emphasizing the ‘local, wild, and Indigenous,’ Denholm’s work is planetary in its scope—a book that will be read and studied widely.

Northword magazine