“Jenna Butler’s writing is beautiful, spare, inventive, and carved out of experience with razor-sharp clarity.”
Revery: A Year of Bees
"I hope you're okay in there, lovelies. I hope you're warm." After five years of working with bees on her farm in northern Alberta, Jenna Butler shares with the reader the rich experience of keeping hives. Starting with a rare bright day in late November as the bees are settling in for winter she takes us through a year in beekeeping on her small piece of the boreal forest. Weaving together her personal story with the practical aspects of running a farm she takes us into the worlds of honeybees and wild bees. She considers the twinned development of the canola and honey industries in Alberta and the impact of crop sprays; debates the impact of introduced flowers versus native flowers, the effect of colony collapse disorder and the protection of natural environments for wild bees. But this is also the story of women and bees and how beekeeping became Jenna Butler's personal survival story.
The Author
Jenna Butler is an author and scholar whose research into endangered environments has taken her from America’s Deep South to Ireland’s Ring of Kerry, and from Tenerife to the Arctic Circle, exploring the ways in which we impact the landscapes we call home.
Butler is the author of three critically acclaimed books of poetry, Seldom Seen Road, Wells, and Aphelion. Her award-winning collection of ecological essays is A Profession of Hope: Farming on the Edge of the Grizzly Trail, and her environmental travelogue, Magnetic North: Sea Voyage to Svalbard, was released by the University of Alberta Press in Autumn 2018. Butler’s latest work is the essay collection Revery: A Year of Bees, released in 2020 with Wolsak & Wynn. She is at work on two new collections of essays, a book of poetry, and a novel.
A professor of creative writing and environmental writing at institutions across western Canada, Butler lives and works between northern Alberta and the southern tip of Vancouver Island.
Find out more about Jenna’s work, teaching, upcoming events, and publications on the Author tab at the top of the page.
News & Events
Summary Block
