The Artist: Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer. Her second collection of poetry, Stowaways (Palimpsest Press), won the 2015 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry at the Manitoba Book Awards. When not being bookish, Ariel likes tromping through the woods and taking macro photographs of mushrooms.
Residency Project: Ariel will be working on creative non-fiction about urban forests. The essays use Winnipeg’s Assiniboine Forest, a never-developed tract of aspen parkland in Charleswood, as a springboard to talking about our attitudes towards urban/nature, from invasive species like purple loosestrife and leaping carp to urban adaptors like the coyotes living in our garages and the deer stripping our gardens. Also in the works are essays on Winnipeg’s elderly elm canopy, decommissioned golf course, and private orchard of fruit trees.
Meet the Artist: Saturday, July 4th at 2:00 p.m. at Poor Michael’s Bookshop, Onanole, Manitoba. Join Ariel for a reading from her essays on urban forests, including a slideshow of images from Winnipeg’s Assiniboine Forest. Ariel will also talk about what she’s been working on when not hiking in the park, looking for mushrooms and thinking about trees.
