Episode 5 | Tanis MacDonald
 

In this episode, Tanis MacDonald encourages us to challenge the voices in the canon that do not satisfy, and examines her changing relationship with both walking and art.

She discusses:

1:06 | How poetry attracts people with its strangeness and makes space for two disparate ideas to sit alongside each other.

1:58 | Writing about a female experience of the city in her poetry collection Mobile.

4:40 | Reclaiming the “Crazy Jane” trope and writing about a character who is struggling to leave capitalism and colonialism behind.

7:06 | Considering questions of mobility in her forthcoming book Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female. 

11:24 | Being vulnerable with students and using her own work to teach revision strategies.

14:26 | Her book Out of Line: Daring to be an Artist Outside the Big City and how to measure success as a writer.

  Bonus Writing Exercises

Shut Up and Write

Word Hoard

Recommended Reading

Abandon Me by Melissa Febos

Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong

Pain Woman Takes Your Keys by Sonya Huber

Unlikely Hikers by Jenny Bruso 

Vancouver for Beginners by Alex Leslie

Homie by Danez Smith

Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth by Warsan Shire

You can find Tanis's work here:

  More About Tanis

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.