Walking as Remapping: Poem-Making from Place with Anna Swanson

Led by writer Anna Swanson, this walk invites participants to explore pathways along the Eramosa and Speed Rivers through found poetry.

May 13.2025

Time

6:00pm - 8:30pm

Location The Boathouse Tea Room, 116 Gordon St, Guelph ON

Price Free

Walking as Remapping

This walk invites participants to engage in an exploration of place through poetry. Inspired by the practice of ecological mapping and the work of writer Anna Swanson, participants will use sight, sound, and texture as tools for gathering language from the world around us on this walk along the Speed and Eramosa Rivers. Throughout the walk, landscape and cityscape will be observed not just as scenery, but as layered texts: full of found language, silences, and ruptures.

Starting and ending at the Covered Bridge steps by the Boathouse Tea Room, this walk includes moments of observation, note-taking, and guided prompts that encourage poetic response. The poems created—individually and together—become a remapping of Guelph based on the sensory, emotional, and imagined textures of the city. No experience with poetry is required—just a willingness to walk, to notice, and to listen. Registration is required.

Facilitator

Anna Swanson

Anna Swanson is a queer writer and librarian living in Guelph. Her first poetry book, The Nights Also, won the Gerald Lampert Award and a Lambda Literary Award. Her writing has appeared in various anthologies including In Fine Form: The Canadian Book of Form Poetry and The Best Canadian Poetry in English. She works with Riddle Fence as a poetry editor, and loves wild swimming in all seasons. Her second collection, The Garbage Poems, will be published by Brick Book in Fall 2025—”a series of found(ish) poems built out of text from garbage collected at some of my favourite swimming holes over the course of eight years”.