Nightowls & Newborns, Day 4

Day four was a travel day, Edmonton to Saskatoon to Regina. Since this was definitely an eight plus hour drive, there was no time for rambles, urban or otherwise.

We mostly packed up, put our bags in the car, and drove. We didn’t even stop to eat, having enough accumulated foodstuffs that we managed to feed/water ourselves while driving.

More accurately, while alternately driving.



More MORE accurately, we actually stopped TWICE, once by the side of the road to talk to a reporter from the Prince Albert Daily Herald on my cell. And then we stopped in Saskatoon, at a Starbucks, to email him photos to use in the article.

But it was mostly a road day where there was more rain and more sun, par for the course on our travel days so far. And at the end of the 900 or so kilometers, we descended on Tracy, who had a dinner out planned.

Our next event is a reading at Luther College Thursday, where we’ll be aping a recent performance by Brenda Schmidt and Luther College prof and poet Gerry Hill by alternating poems. Each poem is supposed to respond to some aspect of the poem that preceded it.

Kerry won’t tell me what poem she’s starting with, so I’ve been re-reading hers and mine and trying to pre-think connections.



But I’m most interested in the spontaneous connections, so I refrained from overthinking it and finished up the anthology of birth stories I’m reviewing next for the Winnipeg Free Press.

Very apt reading, given the subject, especially as I haven’t yet written my own birth story. I’ve written pregnancy and newborn baby and even toddler but not birth. I might try getting it down over the next few months, just to see the shape of it on paper, but we’ll see…

And, yet again, I read the entire chapbook aloud while driving. It’s become a tour ritual, as is the performance of Eight months: the peanut gallery.