I grew up in west-central Alberta, in rolling plains that were relatively treeless, though there were “the woods” where we sometimes played, perhaps half an acre or so in size, exciting and mysterious, and then in my teens I moved to small-town Manitoba and later to Winnipeg, which continued to press into me as “heart’s home” in the prairie provinces the sense of, well, prairie. In recent years I’ve come to understand, however, that as arbitrary as lines on a map may initially be (the provincial boundaries, for example), they form containers by which we know ourselves, and in the case of central Canada where I’ve lived most of my life, there’s a lot more in my container than prairie. Continue reading →