Join the Waterloo Public Library for an evening garden visit with Tanis Macdonald as she shares from her new book, Straggle: Adventures Walking While Female. Following the conversation, Tanis will lead a short optional trail walk to enhance the event experience. 

In Straggle, Tanis MacDonald walks the reader down many paths, pointing out the sights, exclaiming over birds, sharing stories and asking questions about who gets to walk freely through our cities, parks and wilderness. She walks to understand the place she now calls home in Southern Ontario, catalogues the fauna around her and walks through illness. Wry, smart, political and lyrical, these essays share the joy and danger of walking, and uncovers its promise of healing, of companionship and of understanding.

Tanis MacDonald is an essayist, poet, professor and free-range literary animal. She is the host of the podcast Watershed Writers, and the author of Out of Line: Daring to Be an Artist Outside the Big City. Her essay “Mondegreen Girls” won the Open Seasons Award for Creative Nonfiction in 2021. She identifies as a bad birder, and lives near Ose’kowáhne in southwestern Ontario as a grateful guest on traditional Haudenosaunee territory.

Katherine Spring will be moderating for the evening.

Katherine Spring is associate professor of film studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. Her book Saying it With Songs was published by Oxford UP in 2013. Kat is the newly appointed co-director of the annual Music and the Moving Image conference at New York University. An avid soundwalker, she enjoys leading students on meditative walks around Laurier's Waterloo campus.

This event is presented in partnership with Wordsworth Books.