A Walk on the Benjamin Park Trans Canada Trail with Tanis MacDonald
My walk with poet, essayist and newly retired English professor Tanis MacDonald was a masterclass in paying attention to details and place. When I arrived at the Benjamin Park section of the Trans Canada Trail, MacDonald already had something to show me.
“Look,” MacDonald said. “Bug sex. I thought it was one, but it’s two.”
On the green leaf attached to a fence were indeed two beetles with red markings, working to ensure the propagation of their species.
Setting out on this trail where MacDonald promised to show me all the “weird bits,” we spotted bees, the elegant curl of a vine and an unexpected cluster of mushrooms worthy of photographing.
“I like to get outside and walk around and look at shit,” MacDonald said. “[Walking is] a good art practice. Because you have to practice noticing.”
She grew up on the prairies in Manitoba, where she walked regularly with her mother.
The habit continued when MacDonald was a student in Toronto as she often saved the transit fare and chose to walk instead. Walking provided cheap entertainment and became a tool to get to know a place and inspire creativity.
“I didn’t do a degree in Creative Writing,” MacDonald said. “There was no such thing when I was an undergrad.”
She found her way to writing through a poet’s workshop run by Susan Ioannou out of the University of Toronto, a workshop that was revelatory for MacDonald. She took the workshop three times, then sought out guidance and community in other writing classes.
When MacDonald moved to Victoria for school a few years later, she connected with the poetry scene there and began going to regular readings, eventually landing a feature performance spot. In 1996, she won a chapbook competition, and her first full-length book of poetry, Holding Ground, was published in 2000.
In 2006, MacDonald joined the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University as a professor and taught academic courses.
“In about 2013…the department said that they wanted to offer more creative writing courses,” MacDonald said. “I said I would design a creative writing minor and concentration.”
Although MacDonald began her writing career as a poet, eventually she felt the pull of another form of written expression, creative nonfiction.
“I had a very long apprenticeship in poetry,” MacDonald said. “Then in scholarly writing. And…the creative nonfiction came together when I thought, ‘Isn’t there some place that these two discourses meet in the middle?’”
The place they met provided material for two books of essays: Out Of Line: Daring to Be an Artist Outside the Big City, published in 2018, and Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female, published in 2022.
“I think a lot about my place in the world,” MacDonald said. “My literal space that I take up, and what happens when you pass through a space and do it repeatedly.”
For MacDonald, community is at the core of her writing practice. From the beginning MacDonald has sought out the company
of other writers, joining and forming writing groups with diverse memberships to give and receive feedback.
“It’s not enough to say it’s good,” MacDonald said. “You have to
say what you like, because that’s how people know what to keep and what to change…what can I pull off…how can we break this apart…what’s risky and what isn’t.”
The trail offered us community as well, signs of the people nearby that MacDonald was quick to notice. A birdhouse in the tree. A bridge made from slabs of stone to allow for a dry crossing. And the community art project Squeak the Sneak; a serpent made of painted rocks that anyone could contribute to.
Walking has provided more than inspiration and a sense of place for MacDonald. It also provided healing assistance when she struggled with mental health challenges during the pandemic.
“[My doctor] prescribed me some medication, and she
also prescribed me a walk,” MacDonald said. “It was mainly to understand that I was not living in a bubble where I would die. I was living in a much broader universe.”
This September, MacDonald will not be heading back to the university classroom to teach. She retired on July 1, and in addition to multiple writing projects, including a full-length book of poetry titled Tall, Grass, Girl, coming out next year, MacDonald is branching out artistically.
She has been taking classes at the Button Factory in painting and linocut. She is looking to expand her bird watching and
is working on ideas for a new podcast. And she will continue to walk the trails of Waterloo Region, paying careful attention to the weird bits.
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