Advance Praise
“The literatures of place – the very meaning of place – emerge from stories: tales we share around the kitchen table or over the hubbub of the bar, stories that we decipher from the land and our ways of living there, and legends in which we create our own meanings as we reflect and learn from the paths down which our lives wander. If a culture is a product of stories, those stories arise from individual experience. But we can’t hear those stories unless we listen. Too often, we don’t take the time to do that – we simply skate the surface of life until the ice runs out. We live today in fraught times; it seems the ice is running out not just figuratively but in reality. Never has it been so critical to listen to our home places and find the meanings in their stories. Kit Dobson is a very good listener – and an exceptional storyteller. His Field Notes on Listening are a fine addition to Canada’s literature of place, and to our collective project of finding ways to live that honour where we come from, mine our own lived experiences for meaning and offer the hope of better tales tomorrow.” – Kevin Van Tighem, author of Wild Roses Are Worth It: Reimagining the Alberta Advantage
“Kit Dobson’s field notes are welcome company for anyone wishing for a different pace, a more deliberate metronome, for our culture of hurry and distraction. They are stanzas that pause and pay attention to all the things we blur past – the lands and neighbourhoods where we live, the Indigenous and immigrant histories continuing to unfold, the humans among the more-than-human neighbours, the interdependent ecologies urban and rural whose prospects are so fragile. It’s a book that listens to what we seem determined to forget, to the threats to our collective future from the uncertain richness in the present place and moment.” – Daniel Coleman, author of Yardwork: A Biography of an Urban Place
“In a world reshaped before our eyes by climate change and by the pandemic, Field Notes on Listening suggests a way forward through a radical sort of listening. It is a kind of deep attending to place that many of us have forgotten how to practise; it is also a kind of listening to the changed world that is new and vitally present. When the path back to the lands we stand on and to those around us has been obscured almost to the vanishing point, Kit Dobson advocates for listening as an essential sort of navigation that re-grounds us. It is listening as though our lives depend on it . . . because they do.” – Jenna Butler, author of Revery: A Year of Bees
