Launch of Treed: Walking in Canada’s Urban Forests (Wolsak & Wynn) featuring Lisa Jones, Program Director of TREES Winnipeg.

Ariel Gordon walks us through the streets of Winnipeg and into the urban forest that is, to her, the city’s heart.

Along the way she shares with us the lives of these urban trees, from the grackles and cankerworms of the spring, to the flush of mushrooms on stumps in the summer and through to the red-stemmed dogwood of the winter. After grounding us in native elms and ashes, Gordon travels to BC’s northern Rockies, to Banff National Park and a cattle farm in rural Manitoba, and helps us to consider what we expect of nature. In the end, the essays circle back to the forest, where the weather is always better and where the reader can see how to remake even the trees that are lost.

Ariel Gordon is the author of two collections of urban-nature poetry, both of which won the Lansdowne Prize for Poetry. Recent projects include the anthology GUSH: menstrual manifestos for our times, co-edited with Tanis MacDonald and Rosanna Deerchild, and the fourth installment of the National Poetry Month in the Winnipeg Free Press project. She lives in Winnipeg.

Trees Winnipeg (The Coalition to Save the Elms) is a non-profit organization founded in 1992 in response to the heightened threat of Dutch elm disease to Winnipeg’s extraordinary American elms. In recent years, they’ve expanded their mission to also promote species diversity, tree planting, and Heritage trees.

• Monday, May 27, 2019
• 7:00pm
• McNally Robinson, 1120 Grant Ave
• Winnipeg, Manitoba