• Book cover: Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female

Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female

by Tanis MacDonald

June 14, 2022 | ISBN 978-1-989496-53-4 | 216 Pages

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In this wide-ranging collection of essays Tanis MacDonald walks the reader down many paths, pointing out the sights, exclaiming over birds, sharing stories and asking questions about just who gets to walk freely through our cities, parks and wilderness. From a child spotting a snowy owl on her way to school to a young woman watching her own distinctive walk be imitated in an acting class, MacDonald shares how walking has shaped her life and the lives of many others. Wry, smart, political and lyrical, these essays share the joy of walking as well its danger and uncover the promise… Read more

Advanced Praise

"Tanis MacDonald walks her world as 'the ever-shifting all' of her, curious, wise, witty, thoughtful and engaging. Meander with this fine writer in the real and the imaginary; prepare to be provoked, inspired, gutted and joyful. Straggle is a marvel of a book: follow its fascinating trails." – Lorri Neilsen Glenn, author of Following the River: Traces of Red River Women

"Straggle is a poetic and illuminating collection of essays on the various paths that are open and closed to women – some dangerous, others freeing; some excluding us and others purportedly for everyone. I learned a lot from Tanis MacDonald’s wide-ranging and singular perspectives on everything from roadkill to stalkers to new ways of looking at birds. I held my breath while reading this book and at other times I laughed out loud. We should all be so lucky to have MacDonald as our strolling companion." – Emily Urquhart, author of The Age of Creativity: Art, Memory, My Father, and Me

    • **Honourable Mention for the 2024 Alanna Bondar Memorial Book Prize**
    • **Honourable Mention for the VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award**

    • 4 Recent Reads (Shawna Lemay, Transactions with Beauty, 21/02/2024)
      "Adds so eloquently and elegantly and feistily to the literature of walking."
    • Double Review! Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female by Tanis MacDonald & Field Notes on Listening by Kit Dobson (Jody Baltessen, Prairie Fire, 8/12/2023)
      "Straggle points the reader toward an activist consideration of walking. One that opens up restorative alternatives to entrenched colonial concepts of place and belonging."
    • Review (Mary Vlooswyk, FreeFall, 01/03/2023)
      "An eloquent compilation of poetry and personal essays written by a feminist academic poet with a challenge to herself and her readers to question how one moves through space.… MacDonald challenges social norms and capitalist assumptions, especially for those who come from settler backgrounds."
    • Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female by Tanis MacDonald (Michael Greenstein, Miramichi Reader, 15/01/2023)
      "A flaneuse for all seasons, MacDonald treks across much territory, walking the talk, and talking the walk. [...] She writes through looking glasses, leaves, and grass, holding ground, lines, and lives of daughters who converge in elegiac and witty ways."
    • Kim Fahner: Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female, by Tanis MacDonald (Kim Fahner, periodicities, 02/08/2022)
      "So much of what Tanis MacDonald’s Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female does is make a reader think about how identity, personal agency, self-reflection, oppression, gender, violence, equity, diversity, and colonization can all be tied to the physical act of women walking, speaking, and taking up their rightful space."
    • Step by Step (Gail Perry, Winnipeg Free Press, 25/06/2022)
      "This contemplative rendition on walking stands apart from what has come before it – books on fitness, pilgrimage, adventure. It is about walking the best one can in the circumstances. It is relatable and triumphant."
    • Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female (Stacey May Fowles, Quill & Quire, June 2022)
      "Bringing her keen poet’s eye to the essay form, her approach is lyrical and wide-ranging, examining the privileges and exclusions of the simple stroll, and asks us to consider who gets to navigate the world freely and who does not."
    • How to Sink So Deeply into Myth You Change Your Name (Yvonne Blomer, 49th Shelf, 19/09/2024)
      Tanis's book makes this wonderful list from Yvonne Blomer.
    • Six Books on Six Trails (Gary Barwin, 49th Shelf, 27/11/2023)
      Tanis's book is included in this list of recommended reading.
    • Walking, Talking and the Spectre of Stalking (Tanis MacDonald, Winnipeg Free Press, 18/06/2022)
      Tanis shares an excerpt of her new book.
    • Most Anticipated: Our Spring 2022 Nonfiction Preview (49th Shelf, 14/02/2022)
      Tanis's new book makes this list of the 49th Shelf's most anticipated non-fiction!
    • 39 works of Canadian nonfiction to watch for in spring 2022 (CBC Books, 19/01/2022)
      Tanis's book makes this list of works of non-fiction to watch for in Spring 2022!

  • 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.

  • Out of Line: Daring to Be an Artist Outside the Big City (2018)