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.

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 the Winnipeg International Writers Festival that appears in the Winnipeg Free Press. Her previous work of nonfiction, Treed: Walking in Canada’s Urban Forests, was shortlisted for the Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award. Gordon’s essay “Red River Mudlark” was second-place winner of the 2022 Kloppenburg Hybrid Grain Contest in Grain Magazine and other work appeared recently in FreeFall, Columba Poetry, Canthius and Canadian Notes & Queries. Gordon’s fourth collection of poetry, Siteseeing: Writing nature & climate across the prairies, was written in collaboration with Saskatchewan poet Brenda Schmidt and appeared in fall 2023.

Ariel Gordon's profile page

Brenda Schmidt, is a writer, visual artist, naturalist and active blogger based in Creighton, a mining town on the Canadian Shield in northern Saskatchewan. Brenda grew up on a farm in the Coteau Hills of southwest Saskatchewan. She has a BA in English, from the University of Waterloo. Schmidt is the author of three previous books of poetry, A Haunting Sun (Thistledown Press, 2001), More Than Three Feet Of Ice (Thistledown Press, 2005) and Cantos from Wolverine Creek (Hagios Press, 2008). Her cross-genre book of essays and letter fragments, Flight Calls, is forthcoming from Kalamalka Press in 2012 as part of the Mackie Lecture and Reading Series. Brenda was finalist for the Saskatchewan Book Award for Poetry in 2001, winner of the Alfred G. Bailey Prize for Poetry in 2003 and a finalist for the CBC Literary Award for poetry on four occasions.

Brenda Schmidt's profile page

"City and country, Ariel Gordon and Brenda Schmidt voice the extraordinary in the ordinary." – Trevor Herriot, author of Towards a Prairie Atonement

“When future generations ask what it was like to live through the 2020s pandemic, this poetic correspondence [that] cawed, roared and hooted from either side of an impassable prairie must absolutely be pressed into their hands.” – Joanna Lilley, author of Endlings

“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

“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