I have always wanted to write about Alberta, and specifically the parts of northern Alberta where my family settled. I haven’t managed to do so until now. Or, at least, I haven’t managed to do so successfully (though I won’t get ahead of my readers, who will be the ones to tell me whether or not I’ve been successful this time). Like so many settlers in Canada, I come from complicated landscapes and families, and thinking through those has involved a long process of trying to attune my listening. My shelves are a mess of books about listening, about land, and about the stories that we tell. I turn to my books often for solace and comfort. As I put it in my book, social awkwardness since my youth has meant that my best friends have always been bookish humans and books themselves. So I relish any chance to talk about the books that have influenced my work.

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Field Notes on Listening could not exist, first and foremost, without other writers who have gone ahead of me in writing about northern Alberta. Jenna Butler is a wonderful example of one such writer. Her poetic meditation on the landscapes that she inhabits—not far from my own family’s historical farms—in her book A Profession of Hope: Farming on the Edge of the Grizzly Trail, is, to me, necessary reading. It is a thoughtful recounting of working the land in all of its seasons. It is a book of occasional setbacks and quiet successes. I heartily recommend it.

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Northern Alberta’s Treaty 8 territory is integral to the work of Driftpile Cree poet and writer Billy-Ray Belcourt. I have taught and actively recommend his debut book of poetry, This Wound is a World. This book continues to inform my understanding of place and support my unlearning of settler versions of history. I cannot speak for Indigenous experience, and so I strongly suggest that anyone interested in my book also read Indigenous texts connected to Alberta.

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I have also had to unlearn—or relearn—what it means to listen. To me, the literature on listening seems most often to be about three things: listening to music, listening to other humans, and listening to environments. Few books cover all three at once. I read quite widely in this area as I undertook Field Notes on Listening. One text that has stuck with me is Jean-Luc Nancy’s book, simply called Listening. In it, Nancy distinguishes between hearing—as receiving the stimulus of sound waves—and listening—as a process of coming to understand that stimulus. I feel as though the last few years I have sought to move from hearing the lands of Alberta toward listening to them, and doing so in a new, ecologically minded way.

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It is the birds of this land who are first and foremost among the animals to whom I have been listening. My birding book, Birds of Alberta, by Chris Fisher and John Acorn, is an essential tool. I have read it cover-to-cover more than once and I peruse it often after encountering an unfamiliar bird when I am out in the bush. This book was out of print for a while, and I was very glad to see a new edition published in 2020. It is very helpful.

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I have thought long and hard, too, about Alberta history in this process. I have been interested in which stories we tell and which ones we struggle to recount. Karina Vernon’s Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology is a very important source for learning about Black histories on the prairies. I recommend this book as one that helps to open up historical and contemporary understandings of the this place. Vernon writes that the prairies are an “ideational space,” that is, a place that we create through our ideas and stories. I continue to long for more, different stories about Alberta that will reflect its complexity and nuance—rather than to hear more tired clichés about this place’s supposed political landscape. Every time we retell the story that Alberta “is” a conservative place, for instance, we entrench that story just a little bit deeper. I am interested in transformative narratives, and Vernon shows that, for Alberta’s Black communities, such stories have deep historical roots.

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Finally—although I could go on—I have also been reading a great deal about the climate emergency. Writers in this area struggle—as I have struggled—to balance optimism with despair, hope with statistics, and rhetoric with bare facts. In all cases I expect that I fall on the side of the former rather than the latter overall. I am by nature optimistic, hopeful, and, well, prone to long-windedness in conversations (the last of which I have done my absolute best to avoid in the book). A range of voices is necessary in these conversations. I take cues, for instance, from Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, in its insistence in linking human greed to ecological catastrophe.

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I also, and perhaps equally, take cues from books like Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life: How Fungi Shape Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures and Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. Sheldrake’s and Simard’s parallel interests in the quiet roles that fungi play in ecosystems wonderfully demonstrate how interconnected all species are. Learning to take our cues from environments is a fantastic beginning for anyone who is seeking—as I am—to move away from human-centred ways of understanding the world.

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Learn more about A Field Guide to Listening:

At the start of a new Star Wars movie Kit Dobson suddenly realized his daughter had never truly seen the night sky. From then on he began to think seriously about how little we, as humans, interact with the natural world and how that has changed our place within it. Written in elegant sections, Field Notes on Listening starts at Dobson’s kitchen table, a family heirloom, and wends through time and space, looking at his family’s lost farm, the slow violence of climate change and loss of habitat.