COMMUNITY, ARTISTS CELEBRATE SCHNEIDER’S CREEK

As brief spurts of rain trickled down, flowing into the rushing streams of water below, people from all around Kitchener and the Lower Doon neighbourhood gathered atop the Old Mill Rd. bridge for the inaugural CreekFest on Saturday, Sept. 13, 2025.   

Put on as a collaboration between The Creek Collective, Reep Green Solutions, Homer Watson House & Gallery and an organizing committee from the Lower Doon neighbourhood,  the event took place at the meeting point between Schneider Creek and the Grand River—just downhill from the annual Homer Watson House Art Fair.  

An array of tents by a variety of arts groups and environmental organizations dotted the length of the bridge, along with free face painting, a bike decorating booth and a community painting activity.  

Performances of all sorts ran throughout the afternoon, from watershed readings by renowned local authors Ellie Anglin and Tanis Macdonald to musical acts by Kaleo and Jesse Thomas. Erika Lui performed both an aerial and ground dance on top of and below the bridge as a response to CHANNEL MIGRATION, a Schneider Creek audiowalk launched by The Creek Collective earlier this year at Open Ears – Festival of Music and Sound.  

The idea for CreekFest came about following a community mural event facilitated in June 2024 by local artists Jackie Bradshaw and Nadine Badran, both of whom are members of Creek Collective.   

Community members were invited to meet above the Schneider Creek tunnel behind Reep House, along Queen St. and Mill St., to partake in an all-ages community mural workshop.   

“It went so successfully, and a lot of people were interested in the work. We liked how it drew people’s attention to the presence of the creek that’s tunneled there,” Geoff Martin, one of the three co-founders of the Creek Collective, said.  

The Creek Collective was founded by Geoff Martin, Sydney Lancaster and Deborah Carruthers.  

The three artists formed The Creek Collective after discovering a common interest in each other’s works in relation to Schneider Creek, and they have since added a variety of local artists to their membership.   

“We aim to spur consideration of the Creek not simply as an exploitable resource or neglected storm sewer but as a community member who is essential to life in Kitchener,” the organization’s website reads.  

“It’s both a neighbourhood block party and also a city watershed festival. [We’re] calling people down to the mouth of the creek to think about where their creeks flow to. It’s Schneider Creek, but the Henry Sturm and Strassburg, Shoemaker and Montgomery and Balzer—those creeks all flow into Schneider Creek. The water that’s travelling under this bridge is coming from 67 per cent of the city,” Martin said.  

Martin credited the Lower Doon community as a key support in organizing the event and especially Ben McCann who is a local resident and one of the co-organizers.   

“The whole idea was to make it not just be about the neighbourhood, but to bring people in from Kitchener into here to learn more about the watershed,” McCann said.   

Conversations for CreekFest 2026 have already begun, according to Martin.  

#creekCollective #creekfest #DeborahCarruthers #ellieAnglin #erikaLui #GeoffMartin #HansHaryanto #jesseThomas #kitchener #lowerDoon #oldMillRoad #sydneyLancaster #TanisMacDonald

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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