Memories of farming in the 1940s conjure up images of horse-drawn farm machinery, grain stooks in fields, hay meadows, free-range chickens and cords of wood strategically placed for fuelling the kitchen range – all before farming became the highly technical, big-time operation it is now.

Author Victor Carl Friesen was born and raised on a quarter section farm in Saskatchewan and still owns the "home place." It is there he still goes to renew his inner being. His poems, grouped into seasonal activities or observations, celebrate the rural world. Written in traditional blank verse, his poetry includes activities of yesteryear, his personal connections to rural life and his reverence for nature. Nature, as Henry David Thoreau said, is "one and continuous."

Victor Carl Friesen lives and writes in Rosthern, Saskatchewan, but photographs nature anywhere. The first recipient of the Alberta Book Award, he is the author of five books including The Year Is a Circle.

Author (and painter) Victor Carl Friesen remains ever a “farmboy,” although he now, with his wife, Dorothy, lives in the town of Rosthern, Saskatchewan, but five miles from the quarter-section on which he was born. He holds MA and PhD degrees from the universities of Saskatchewan and Alberta respectively. Both his master’s thesis and doctoral dissertation focused on Henry David Thoreau, a foremost nature writer, and resulted in two books: The Spirit of the Huckleberry, a literary analysis of Thoreau’s work, and The Year Is a Circle, poems and photographs celebrating the American writer. Friesen has published nine other books and has won the Alberta Book of the Year Award and the Pfeiffer Award for academic research and writing. In addition, Friesen has authored some three hundred journal articles.

Victor Carl Friesen's profile page