Between 2017 and 2020, I was a co-editor of the literary and scholarly journal The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada. One of the jobs I did as a co-editor was posting on social media on behalf of the journal, often using a goose persona and voice that was really amusing (maybe only to me). I think it was writing those Twitter posts as “The Goose” that first clued me in to something goose-ish about Northland Trails by S.C. Ells (1878-1971), a book I was writing about for my PhD dissertation on oil-worker poetry in Canada.
Ells, who liked to be called the “father of the tar sands,” worked for the federal Department of Mines and lived in Ottawa, but he spent a good part of most years between 1913 and 1945 living and working on Treaty 8 territory in Fort McMurray, Alberta. In addition to his surveying, mining, paving, and separation work that contributed to the development of the tar sands industry, Ells also wrote poems, short stories, and essays about the Athabasca region that he illustrated himself and collected in the 1938 and 1956 editions of Northland Trails. I consider this cultural work, alongside his other oil work, as foundational to extractive industry and the framing of the region as a sacrifice zone.
My goose theory is this: I suspect that as a migrant resident of the North, Ells felt an affinity with geese. In Northland Trails, I see Ells comparing himself to geese—subtly and perhaps unconsciously—as a way to indigenize himself, to justify his presence in the region, and, at key moments where his role as a colonizer and modernizer rubs up against his professed love for the northland, to take flight, adopting a goose’s-eye view that allows him to avoid taking responsibility for the harm that would result from his foundational work on the tar sands.
I have written a journal article that makes this argument using literary and visual close-reading strategies, but I first started to make it by writing found/erasure poetry as literary criticism. I have been working on these goose poems for several years, and I have so many versions of them (in part because they are handmade and editing a poem usually means making it again). I was honoured to workshop earlier versions of these poems with Jordan Abel, Kaie Kellough, and the other participants in the Banff Centre Summer Writers Session in 2021; it was during that session that I landed on the method of tracing text and images as they appeared on the individual pages of Northland Trails.
The long poem that makes up the chapbook The Goose is a sequence of readings of Northland Trails that looks from different angles at the representations of geese in the book, including the words, images, and ideas that are linked with them. Each page is a reading of the entire book from a specific angle. These texts/images have been a lot of fun for me to make—an ongoing, unfolding process that I’m so excited to see in print and open to interpretation by readers.
Thanks so much to rob mclennan for the invitation to publish a chapbook, for treating my work with such care, and for being such a generous and prolific publisher and advocate for poetry.
Dr. Melanie Dennis Unrau (she/her) is a settler of mixed European ancestry living on Treaty 1 territory in Winnipeg. Melanie is a Research Affiliate at the University of Manitoba Institute for the Humanities and a Visiting Fellow at St. John's College (University of Manitoba). She is the author of Happiness Threads: The Unborn Poems (Muses’ Company, 2013) and a former editor of Geez magazine and The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada. Melanie is working on a book titled “The Rough Poets: Petropoetics and the Tradition of Canadian Oil-Worker Poetry,” which is on contract with McGill-Queen's University Press.
