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Poetic Tracks And Treading On Indigenous Lands: Examining Marlatt And Warland’S And Akiwenzie-Damm’S Literary Travels To Australia And Aotearoa, Christine C. Campana

The Goose

This paper considers the work of poets who travel from the area of the Indigenous land of Turtle Island now known as Canada to the Indigenous territories of Australia and Aotearoa. The poets engage in different forms of movement on the land that reveal varying degrees of awareness of and respect for Indigenous sovereignty. In particular, I put “17:00 / coming into Port Pirie” and “30/5 8:50 / past Menindee” from Daphne Marlatt and Betsy Warland’s 1988 Double Negative, an understudied collection of poetry in which the lesbian poets traverse Australia by train while reflecting on travelling through “(ab) …

Fungi Moves, Night Crawler, Tree Futures, Petra Kuppers

The Goose

Three Gothic Eco-Poems by Petra Kuppers.

Co-Editors Notes: Moving On Land? Choose Your Instrument, Tanis Macdonald, Ariel Gordon

The Goose

Editorial Introduction to The Goose Volume 20, Issue 1 (2023).

Moving On Fluvial Land: Human Migration And Liquid Identities In Shiv K. Kumar’S A River With Three Banks, Muhammad Ali, Saira Fatima Dogar

The Goose

This article argues that any territory’s geological knowledge is essential to the understanding of how and why its inhabitants move on it the way they do. Taking Shiv K Kumar’s novel A River with Three Banks as its primary text, the article focuses on the protagonist, Gautam, whose frequent migrations within his country seem to emerge from his childhood attachment with the rivers of his land, the Indian Subcontinent, the fluvial quality of which is not an unknown phenomenon to geographers around the world. Gautam’s profound knowledge of what flows under his land is thus what shapes his personality, one …

Tandem Travel: Reconsidering Road Narratives And Tactics For Subversive Travel, Nicole Emanuel

The Goose

Roads are frequently conceptualized as shared spaces that symbolize freedom, despite the fact that they are also tightly monitored sites where laws and public policy hold sway. The fundamental tension between movement on the one hand and restrictive regulation on the other makes the road a particularly paradoxical expression of “the commons.” Another contradictory aspect of roads is that they are often understood as atopic—places that are not really places, but merely a means of conquering time and space to connect a point of origin to a destination. What does it mean to live one’s daily life in such a …

What, Then, Is The Walk?: Reflecting On Pedestrianism In Jane Austen’S Persuasion, Jasmine Redford

The Goose

Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1818) contains a surprising amount of social walking and leisurely walking parities undertaken by Anne Elliot and her upper-class compatriots. Viewed through an Austenian lens, a reflection of the walk highlights the similarities and differences between nineteenth-century and post-millennial walking for pleasure. What is the cultural history of nineteenth-century pedestrianism in England, and why was it so important in literature and polite society alike? What, then, is the walk? Why indulge in a stroll, a promenade, or a pastoral ramble? How does this sociocultural pedestrianism reinforce the distinction between the classes? Perhaps Austen’s walk, both an …

Sun In Eponymous Glasses: Two Poems, Angela Hibbs

The Goose

Scintillating nature imagery captured in nouns.

One Day I Will Destroy This Place, Shyam Patel

The Goose

My personal narrative reveals the complex and often ineffable journey that I experience from academia to home and from home to academia. I speak to the different modes of walking that such a journey necessitates: walking back home, into a sea of whiteness, and out of academia. As I make my way from Toronto to Montréal, from my residence in academia to where I call home, I carry with me the cruel optimism of education, weighing down the steps that I take, I attempt to grapple with spatial negotiations. It often feels like an arduous and never-ending passage. Still, my …

Before Showtime, Amy Kaler

The Goose

In this piece of creative nonfiction, I reflect on the experience of having time on my hands in peri-urban spaces that are characterized by transience, liminality, and contingency, while waiting for performance time at youth cheerleading competitions. I describe walking around these places, specifically Las Vegas and Abbotsford (BC). I connect my experience to other accounts of aimless wandering, such as the "derive" of psychogeography, and note the ways in which the exercises of power and potential world-ending catastrophe are present, but latent, in these landscapes. In particular, I consider the historic cold-war threat of a nuclear bomb as well …

Pink Telephone, Gary Barwin, Elee Kraljii Gardiner

The Goose

"Pink Telephone" is a psychogeographical exploration of walking in woods considering ideas of communication and internal monologues and situating oneself and one's place in community.

Tetrapod: Adapted For Locomotion Across Land, Amy Wang

The Goose

Poetry by Amy Wang.

The Divide, John Barton

The Goose

A sonnet on the theme of "Walking on Land."

Two Poems, Nicholas Bradley

The Goose

Poetry by Nicholas Bradley

When The Moon Rises And You Want To Sing, Frances Boyle

The Goose

Poetry by Frances Boyle.

Bindweed, Leanne M.R. Charette

The Goose

Poetry by Leanne Charette.

“This Is A Book About Relations”: Pollution Is Colonialism By Max Liboiron, Thomas Letcher-Nicholls

The Goose

Book Review of Pollution is Colonialism (2021) by Max Liboiron.

Reflections From A Maternity Leave: The Complex History Of Beaver Dam Flats And Refinery Park, Emily Ursuliak

The Goose

A personal essay reflecting on my relationship with Refinery Park and Beaver Dam Flats in light of its complex history.

On Foot, Dee Hobsbawn-Smith

The Goose

“On Foot” is an interdisciplinary examination of the importance of walking and running to the creative life. It is primarily a personal essay braided together with free verse poetry and a small proportion of inquiry into a few famous thinkers and writers who walked regularly. The essay traces a serious foot injury and the effects of that trauma, coupled with the threat of loss of sight, on a writer with a long history of walking and running as part of their creative process. The five poems unspool the sights and sounds of the natural rural world where they walk daily, …

Because The Muddiness Of Mud Must Be Uttered: A Personal Essay, Dorothy Ellen Palmer

The Goose

"Because the Muddiness of Mud Must Be Uttered," by disabled senior writer Dorothy Ellen Palmer, is a personal, braided, nonfiction essay tracing how her access to and understanding of moving on land has been shaped by ableism, ageism, and the pandemic.

Baby Steps, Amy Neufeld

The Goose

A creative non-fiction piece about childbirth and walking, situating the self and the new child, and climate anxiety and fear for the future.

Surface Tension, Kerry Ryan

The Goose

"Surface Tension" is a piece of creative nonfiction by Kerry Ryan.

Falling Into Action, Kent Hoffman

The Goose

Kent Hoffman explores human movement, his own mobility, and how it influences the way he moves on land. This personal essay, told through the lens of disability and accessibility, outlines his experience of living with Becker muscular dystrophy. Hoffman's approach to walking and mobility is heavily influenced by a fear of falling. As his mobility is changing, he's adapting and seeking out new ways to move on land. Different modes of mobility determine the way we experience personal movement, but accessibility determines who is welcome in spaces in the first place. Accessibility in the form of providing equal access is …

Off By Heart Lake, Gayle I. Sacuta

The Goose

Memoir, history and critique of girlhood on a farm on the Alberta prairie in the 1970's and 1980's.

When A Saunter Starts To Taunt Her: Exploring The Outdoors With Disabilities, Jessica Cory

The Goose

This first-person creative nonfiction piece examines engaging with the outdoors, primarily through walking and hiking, while struggling with diagnoses of Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos (hEDS) and Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS). The author also considers how growing up with a parent whose disabilities made it more difficult to enjoy hikes impacted her own perception of the ableism inherent in the design, architecture, and infrastructure of many state and local parks. The author discusses the importance and struggle of teaching environmental literature through the lens of Disability Studies and advocates both for visibility as well as concrete changes to make hiking and sauntering …

The Middle Of The Middle: Purgatory, Pilgrimage, And Human And Plant Mobility In A Time Of Climate Crisis, Stephen S. Collis

The Goose

This paper, adapted from a talk given for the Institute of the Humanities at Simon Fraser University on April 26 2023, explores intersecting issues taken up by an in-progress long poem I am currently writing. That long poem, “The Middle,” explores questions of climate displacement, migration, and refuge via a writing-though of Dante’s Purgatorio—itself a poem of pilgrimage. A further context for both the poem and the paper about the poem is an ongoing project of walking in solidarity with refugees, asylum seekers, and immigration detainees that the author has been involved with since 2015. In seeking to “override …

Strolling And Scrolling: On Mycologies And Queer Environmental Futures, Sabine Lebel

The Goose

This essay uses queer mycologies to advocate for radical rest in the face of anti-queer organizing and hate. The author explains how a burnout diagnosis forced her out of the office and into the woods with her dog. Learning to walk the dog on a leash precipitated a deep queer kinship with the dog, mushrooms, and slide molds in the Acadian forest.

Gaston-Paul Effa, Moine-Pèlerin Et Flambeur Au Risque De La Forêt Camerounaise, Sylvie Kande

The Goose

Book review of Gaston-Paul Effa's 2019 novel, La vertical du Cri. The narrator finds salvation in wandering between nations and throughout the African rainforest.

Inclement, Susan Wismer

The Goose

"Inclement," by Susan Wismer, is from Hageography:

Hagios, a Greek word for holy.

Hag, an old woman. Hag, an overhang at the edge of a cliff

Rough notes. Foot notes. Choreographies of happenstance.

Long Before Gps, Leanne Shirtliffe

The Goose

Poetry by Leanne Shirtlife.

Surrender No. 40, Ken Wilson

The Goose

In June 2016, I made an improvised pilgrimage on foot through the Haldimand Tract in southwestern Ontario, the territory deeded to the Haudensaunee in 1784 and mostly stolen back by settlers since then. I grew up in Brantford, a city in the Haldimand Tract, ignorant of the history of the area. When I learned about that history, I decided to walk through the Tract as a way of understanding, physically, the scale of the land theft that had occurred, a theft that, as a settler, I had benefitted from. “Surrender No. 40” is an account of that pilgrimage.