Chedoke is one of six creeks that weave their way through Hamilton, but it is the most hidden, lost to culverts and concrete. It sees daylight only in a couple of waterfalls where the creek flows over the edge of the Niagara Escarpment and in a short canal where it runs alongside Highway 403.

In elegant, seamless prose award-winning author John Terpstra attempts to trace Chedoke's afflicted waters back to their source, searching through historical archives and city documents, and even walking up the great storm drains that collect the water that spills from the escarpment. Daylighting Chedoke is a moving meditation on how urbanization and industrialization have literally buried our natural environment and what it would be like to free our creeks and reconsider our relationship with nature.

John Terpstra has published many books and chapbooks of poetry, the most recent of which, Disarmament, was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award in 2004. A retrospective of his work, Two or Three Guitars: Selected Poems, was published in 2006. Terpstra has also published three prose projects: Falling Into Place, a creative investigation of a giant glacial sandbar which lies beneath one of Canada’s busiest transportation corridors; The Boys, or, Waiting for the Electrician’s Daughter, the story of his wife’s three brothers, who lived with muscular dystrophy until their early twenties; and Skin Boat: Acts of Faith and Other Navigations, a frank reflection on faith and church in a secular era. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario.

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