Wednesday, May 14, 2025 at 7:00 PM, McNally Robinson Saskatoon, Travel Alcove & YouTube
Join us for the Saskatoon launch of Lloyd Ratzlaff’s poetry collection Walking Upstream (Thistledown Press), with special guest Rita Bouvier and host Elizabeth Phillips.
This event will be held live in the Travel Alcove and also available as a simultaneous YouTube stream.
This collection by the author of three books of nonfiction takes readers into one man’s struggle to escape the corrosive effects of a punishing religion. We meet the small, frightened boy afraid of hell-fire and eternal guilt, and decades later, the man kicking free of the habit of self-excoriation. There is humour in the observation of the antics of birds, especially magpies and other corvids, and profound humility in the struggle to resist a confining culture. We walk with the poet-as-flaneur through neighbourhoods and along the river in a small prairie city, observing the incongruities, absurdities, and startling images and sounds of city life.
Lloyd Ratzlaff is a former minister, counsellor, and university lecturer who has authored three books of literary nonfiction and edited an anthology of seniors’ writings and a children’s book. He was a finalist for three Saskatchewan Book Awards, won two Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild literary nonfiction awards, and served on the boards of several writing organizations. He was a columnist for Prairie Messenger Catholic Journal through its last nineteen years of publication, and taught writing classes for READ Saskatoon, the Western Development Museum, and the University of Saskatchewan’s Certificate of Art and Design program. Walking Upstream is his first poetry collection. He lives in Saskatoon.
Rita Bouvier is a Métis writer and educator from Saskatchewan. Her third book of poetry, nakamowin’sa for the seasons (Thistledown Press, 2015) was the 2016 Saskatchewan Book Awards winner of the Rasmussen, Rasmussen & Charowsky Aboriginal Peoples’ Writing Award. Rita’s poetry has appeared in literary anthologies, print and online journals, musicals, and television productions, and has been translated into Spanish, German and the Cree-Michif of her home community of sakitawak, Île-à-la-Crosse, situated on the historic trading and meeting grounds of Cree and Dene people.
Elizabeth Philips (Host) is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Torch River. In 2015, she published her first novel, The Afterlife of Birds (Freehand Books), winner of the City of Saskatoon Book Award and a finalist for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award. She was the director of the Banff Centre’s Emerging Writer Intensive for eight years and is a former editor of Grain magazine. She is Acquisitions Editor and Editorial Director for Thistledown Press. She lives in Saskatoon.
