Happy book birthday to LOOKOUT: Love, Solitude, and Searching for Wildfire in the Boreal Forest by Trina Moyles, out now from Random House Canada!
“Moyles tells a totally engrossing story of fear and love, self-recrimination and healing, by turns vivid with memory and presence. Page after page, I felt immersed in the rejuvenating wonders of the natural world, rendered here in all their magnificent, everchanging detail. Reader, you will roar through this book.” ―Charlotte Gill, author of Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe
“Trina Moyles has written a beautiful, closely observed love letter to the boreal forest and the wilderness of northern Canada at a time when it is threatened by unprecedented change. But Lookout is more than that: it’s also a powerful, unforgettable story about the ways that solitude in nature can break us down, and then put us back together again.” ―Eva Holland, author of Nerve: A Personal Journey Through the Science of Fear
“A vital and howling missive of a book. Lookout holds the wide wisdom and fierce beauty of the boreal forest it depicts. Trina Moyles has spent several seasons sitting in the fire, looking into the heat of love, death and regenerated life; experiencing solitude as intensifying tincture. She writes as a wild and erudite witness, bursting with hunger and feral passion for the living world.” —Kyo Maclear, author of Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation
“Trina Moyles is a natural storyteller. As a novice fire lookout, she retreats into the bush, her heart and self-trust broken, and becomes the sort of woman who shoots a bear in the butt with a rubber bullet then bakes a peach cobbler, all while a record-breaking wildfire rages toward her. Lookout is courageous, vulnerable, funny and enthralling. Above all else, it imparts a much-needed message of hope and regeneration.” —Jan Redford, author of End of the Rope: Mountains, Marriage, and Motherhood
“With effortless prose, Trina Moyles proves herself a deft observer of both the fires in the distance, and the desires, dreams and doubts she holds close. Moyles’ voluntary solitude will make her readers somehow feel less alone. Lookout is a marvel.” —Marcello Di Cintio, author of Pay No Heed to the Rockets: Life in Contemporary Palestine
A page-turning memoir about a young woman’s grueling, revelatory summers working alone in a remote lookout tower and her eyewitness account of the increasingly unpredictable nature of wildfire in the Canadian north.
Trina Moyles is a writer, photographer, potter, and seasonal smoke spotter in the northern boreal. She is the author of Women Who Dig: Farming, Feminism, and the Fight to Feed the World. Her award-winning writing has been published in The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, Alberta Views, Maisonneuve, Hakai Magazine, and many other publications. She lives, writes, and adventures in northwestern Alberta with her canine sidekick, Holly. Trina is represented by Marilyn Biderman.