The Jane Day Reader: My Runaway Fave

Monday, January 16, 2017

My Runaway Fave

On a bleak day in early January, I asked people on Facebook for their favourite nature-y spots. There was a twister of suggestions and counter-suggestions that continued over the next several days.

In the end, I compiled a list of all their suggestions because I wanted to remember them but also because I thought some of you might also need nature-y suggestions.

From Clearwater Lake Provincial Park, July 2016.

So here goes:

From Riding Mountain National Park, July 2015.

MANITOBA

William Lake Provincial Park in southwestern Manitoba.—writer Julie Kentner

Have you spent time in Whiteshell PP? It has lots of hiking and biking trails, and accessible canoe routes. The tunnels on Caddy Lake canoe route are worth the trip. —writer Donna Besel

SASKATCHEWAN

Camp Shekinah outside Waldheim, SK (north and a bit west of Saskatoon) is my favourite place in the world. It's also very close to Batoche and Duck Lake, so you could immerse yourself in the Riel Rebellion history. —writer Lynne Pieper Martin

Crooked Lake Provincial Park in the Qu'Appelle Valley is sweet. And the back roads are wonderful —poet Bernadette Wagner

Cypress Hills Interprovincial Park and Area

You can drive down from Cypress Hills to Havre, Montana, on the Milk River. I think there are more badlands along the Milk. Also, just south of Havre are the Bearpaw Mountains, where Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce finally ended their 1500 mile flight to Canada from eastern Washington. —novelist Bob Armstrong

You can also hit Grasslands National Park on the way to Cypress. It's a complete "wilderness" park for the prairies (no development; no camping within sight of any road (but you can camp there), pack in everything you need and pack it out again, some incredible landscapes and tons of archaeological features to see right on the surface. And lots of snakes. —archaeologist Jordi Malasiuk

Cypress hills in S Sakatchewan is amazing...and you can go to Eastend, SK, to see the TRex museum at the same time. And apply to write at the Stegner house while you're at it! Nearby is The Old Man On His Back tall grass prairie reserve which used to be the Butala ranch. Would love to see that as well.—novelist Erna Buffie

I've been to Cypress Hills. Went for an amazing horse ride.—poet Ashlyn Haglund

Cypress Hills is great, and especially the road between the two provinces, if it isn't muddy. You go by a couple of historic battle sites.—scholar Jason Wiens

ALBERTA

Waterton Lakes National Park in SW Alberta. You can take the International Peace Boat across Waterton Lake to the US side, without a passport, even! It's my favourite place in the world (on a non-windy day!). You could do Cypress Hills and Elkwater for a few days, then zip across to Waterton within a couple of hours! And between the two is Sweet Grass, MT, which is an special eco-system and spiritual site. —writer Lori D. Roadhouse Haney

Yes, Waterton! Especially in that period of the Wildflower Festival.—poet Alice Major

REST OF CANADA/US

How about Yukon! Tombstone Territorial Park… —Poet Joanna Lilley

Yukon. Just for the midnight sun.—artist Grant Guy

Cape Breton Highlands Nat'l Park. —editor Jill Wilson

Gros Morne. Like Iceland in Newfoundland.—textile artist Cara Hehir Winsor

Gros Morne rules. Best geological tours in Canada too!—Julie Rak

Also, the small amount of Ontario’s Silvia Grinnell I got to see is, well, a whole different landscape.—union organizer Craig Saunders

Silvia Grinnell is southwest of Sudbury—it's on my to-do list too, it was a favourite Group of Seven location.—Bob Armstrong

Parc Forillon in Gaspésie (sea and hills, seals and bears).—poet Bertrand Nayet

Yoho if you haven't. It's my runaway fave.—Julie Rak

Kootenay or Yoho for mountains/glaciers/waterfalls. Theodore Roosevelt National Park (North Dakota) for badlands and grasslands— they have a 100 mile mountain biking trail connecting the north and south units of the park travelling through national grasslands. West coast rainforests on Vancouver Island for big honkin' trees. (Check out Avatar Grove near Port Renfrew at the southern end of the West Coast Trail). Pukaskwa National Park or Sleeping Giant Provincial Park for the rugged coast of Lake Superior. Forgot to mention Mount Robson and Mount Assiniboine—the two most beautiful big mountains I've ever hiked to. Each is a long backpack in with multiple day hiking areas once you're at the basecamp at the mountain.—Bob Armstrong

You could go to Yellowstone before it blows up, too.—Lori D. Roadhouse Haney

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Praise for GUSH

"GUSH is a letter to the world declaring that feminists everywhere are ready to take back the period and claim it for ourselves." —Courtney Dickson in Herizons.

"I expect GUSH will be nonetheless passed around classrooms, as well as book clubs, women’s centres, office towers and break rooms. And I hope this sharing and the conversations that no doubt ensue are not hushed and tittering. I hope teachers, counsellors, parents and partners bookmark pages, highlight passages and display the book on prominent shelves." —Katherine J. Barrett in Understorey.

"We love GUSH!"—Open Sesame Bookstore, Kitchener.

Praise for Stowaways

Winner of the 2015 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry / Prix Lansdowne de Poesie at the Manitoba Book Awards.

"Stowaways is well imagined and well crafted, each poem tight, the poet’s attention evident. From wildlife to the clutter of the everyday to “how-to” offerings, the reader is charmed and enticed by the poet’s light touch and sure pen. Images jump out at us, grab us by the throat, leave us gasping. Ariel Gordon’s second collection is as strong as the parts of its sum.” —Margaret Michele Cook, Katia Grubisic, and Paul Savoie, judges of the 2015 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry.

"Stowaways is a clever and often hilarious collection with its
occasional tenderness let slip amidst a clearly unromantic stance and matter-of-fact prairie landscape. With its freshness of metaphor and crazy juxtapositions, its ironic and often comic twists in narrative, Stowaways is a collection that will hold readers' eyes and play with their wits to the end."—Gillian Harding-Russell, The Goose.

"Though the cover copy promises poems that are 'smart and gorgeously funny' — and they do have those qualities — Ariel Gordon’s voice is more than that. Sometimes within a single poem, she gives us laugh-out-loud humour followed by a poignant smack across the head." —Kimmy Beach, Canadian Poetries.

"Adept and assured, Stowaways swaggers." —Jonathan Ball, Winnipeg Free Press.

"The poems in this collection grapple with both the wild and the mundane, the animalistic nature of nature and relentless responsibilities of parenthood." —Mark Sampson, Free Range Reading.

"Ariel Gordon’s Stowaways offers a scrapbook of extraordinary everydayness. Its poems decoupage tender snapshots beside snappy comebacks. Fairy tale moments foment against ailing skin. Sly instructions for loving smash into slovenly destructions of living. A beautiful, gluey mess of memory, decay, and dreams!" —Kevin Mcpherson Eckhoff

"In the closing poem of Stowaways, the surviving pilot of the first fatal plane crash in recorded history receives a small box of debris from the calamity, 'to amuse him in his convalescence.' What a fitting figure for this collection's loopy juxtapositions and serious surprises. The world in Ariel Gordon's poems is one in which everything and everyone, from a sleep-starved human mother to a miscegenational beluga, is simultaneously endangered and dangerous. If Gordon understands our vulnerability, how 'skin is a thin shield,' that even a birthday balloon, drifting from the back seat is 'a kiss with teeth,' she vividly reminds us that those teeth are ours: 'If I had had twins,' says the new mother in "Primpara," "I would have eaten one.' These are nervy poems that refuse to behave themselves. They are something to celebrate." —Julie Bruck

Praise for Hump

Winner of the 2011 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry / Prix Lansdowne de Poesie at the Manitoba Book Awards.

"The focus of Hump is the rich experience of motherhood and marriage on the one hand, and of city life in the integrated context of the natural world, which is everywhere engaging, fierce, beautiful, and unstoppable. This is capable, exuberant writing, at once passionate and meticulous. Hump is a worthy first book indeed." —Michael Harris, Kenneth Meadwell, and Serge Patrice Thibodeau, jurors for the 2011 Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry.

“Ariel Gordon is superbly, supremely, a poet of the body. She finds words for the physicality of the forest, of the garden, of pregnancy. Hump speaks the erotics of being alive and being in love with being alive.” —Robert Kroetsch.

"Brimming with finely crafted poems that thrum with life and love, Hump is indeed a very promising debut." —Fiona Timwei Lam, Contemporary Verse 2.

“Not so much sweetness and light, Gordon channels Adrienne Rich's dichotomy of love and frustration with her realism.” —Zanna Joyce, Winnipeg Free Press.

"If you don't know Ariel's work, I can recommend her book Hump, which I keep on my bedside table, along with all my stuff on LOST EXPLORERS and CASTAWAYS and HELLISH SIEGES, as things to pick up and simply open and starting reading anywhere, which is the pretty much the best review a book can get." —Darryl Joel Berger.

"The beauty of this collection is the love of the mother for her child, that relationship that the childfree will never experience. But the beauty is hidden slyly in the gorgeous lines that free themselves when needed from the details of the grime, the blood, the leaking breasts, and the mundane sleeplessness of parenting-turned poetry." —Kimmy Beach, Canadian Poetries

“Hump is gentle and sly, but also as sharp as baby teeth and poison mushrooms. And it’s called Hump.” —Quentin Mills-Fenn, Uptown Magazine.

Origin Story

Why is my name Ariel Gordon and this blog entitled The Jane Day Reader, you ask?

Well, my middle names are Jane and Day, after my grandmothers, Ade Augusta Rooseboom (who was called Day Laban after she married my grandfather and moved to Canada) and Anna Vida Mary Barrett-Hamilton (who became Jane Gordon after her immigration and later marriage).

When I was fourteen, I seriously contemplated using "Jane Day Gordon" or "J.D. Gordon" as my pen name. And then realized that there was no point in having an alternate identity in no-degrees-of-separation Winnipeg.

As a grown-up compromise, I started using 'janeday' as the username for my email and then for the name of this blog, which I started reluctantly and never expected to enjoy...

(I also gave my daughter another version of my grandmothers' names...)