More on: place

Rudy Wiebe was born in 1934 in Speedwell, a small Mennonite community in northern Saskatchewan. His parents had fled Russia in 1930 and became part of the last generation of homesteaders to settle the Canadian West. In 1947 Wiebe’s family moved to southern Alberta. Wiebe studied literature at the University of Alberta and the University…

Skin Boat: Acts of Faith and Other Navigations The following essay is excerpted from a new book of the same title from Gaspereau Press (www.Gaspereau.com).   TODAY I believe in God. A visiting friend and I were listening to a jazz trio one Sunday morning in an Anglican church. The trio led off with a…

The following is excerpted from Soil and Sacrament: A Spiritual Memoir of Food and Faith by Fred Bahnson, forthcoming from Simon & Schuster, Inc. The book tells the story of the author’s series of pilgrimages to communities that integrate religious practice, love for place, and the production of food, including Pentecostal coffee roasters in Washington…

What we built to hold us, the year’s memory, menus and daytrips, after a while came loose. Those nights we balanced on each other’s mistakes, cradling our wine: twigs those branches now. Who knew what lived there? She she she called one bird. What lived there knew its place. Another bird splits its nest wide,…

I am hollowing a dwelling        in the granite of my heart. I am thinking then to torch       its walls, and sweep out all debris with a green, a heavy branch       of rosemary. I mean to chip a niche inside       therein to rest a…