Friday Special Blend
Friday December 12th, 2025 with Susan Johnston
Boreal's Songs for the Snowy Season. Ken Wilson's Walking the Bypass. Vannah Leblank's Shards.

On Ken Wilson's Walking the Bypass: "Walking the Bypass recounts Ken Wilson’s singular experience of walking alongside the decidedly pedestrian-unfriendly Regina Bypass, all while situating the highway within the ongoing history of settler colonialism in southern Saskatchewan. Through a series of ambitious and unconventional walks, Wilson sets out to understand the arrival and significance of the new (and politically contentious) highway encircling Saskatchewan’s capital as well as the Global Transportation Hub, a sprawling warehouse park the Bypass was intended to serve. He offers a new perspective on these heavily travelled yet untrodden spaces in a region dominated by industrial agriculture and high-speed transportation. Reflecting on the profound transformations to the land since the arrival of settlers in the 1880s, he wonders whether it’s possible to form a connection with the land through walking—even on the gravelly edge of the freeway." On Vannah Leblank and Shards: In this book delving into the hard questions often kindled by hardships, Vannah Leblank shares her poetry on the themes of illness, brokenness, confusion, redemption and hope. In a story-like progression of poems building up to a climax of questions both answered and unanswered, she walks along the reader with brutal honesty, not shying away from hard truths, but also seeking the hope in the darkest of times. Seven guests have also contributed their poetry at the end of the anthology, completing it with different insight on the same themes and quests. Read on to see how even brokenness can be turned into beauty at the Hand of Someone who holds it all.