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Winnipeg Free Press

Seeing the forest and the trees

Di Brandt was a 'barefoot girl from the Mennonite village' when she moved to Winnipeg at 17 years old for college. Unfamiliar, out of place, untethered. Assiniboine Forest, a short walk from Canadian Mennonite University, became her safe haven. 'This forest was a wonderful halfway place between the country where I had grown up and the city that was so confusing to me in every way. It's a very deeply cherished place for me, then and many years later,' says Winnipeg's inaugural poet laureate, seated on a shady park bench on a hot weekday afternoon. Cyclists, dog walkers and groundskeepers pass by at regular intervals. Ruth Bonneville / Free Press Poet Di Brandt at one of her favourite places, in the woods at Assiniboine Forest Brandt, 73, knew from a very young age she would eventually leave Reinland, the darpa, or village, where she was raised in southern Manitoba. It was the early 1970s and the community was at a crossroads, trying to preserve its traditional ways while modernity was creeping in around the edges. Growing up, Brandt herself felt pulled in contradictory directions: speaking Plautdietsch at home, where reading and questioning were frowned upon, and German at church, where women were barred from leadership roles. All while attending an English-speaking public school. 'We were getting educated in three completely different cultural paradigms and ways of being,' she says, adding the upbringing also provided an appreciation for language and cross-culturalism. After graduating high school, a student loan allowed for a swift exit. Her devastated parents drove her to the campus on Shaftesbury Boulevard, then called Canadian Mennonite Bible College. 'They felt like they had failed to protect the traditionalism of the culture,' Brandt says. 'They spent a lot of really creative energy and care trying to create a whole world for us so we didn't have to leave or want to leave.' She discovered the forest within days of moving into her dorm. The sprawling woods provided a reprieve from navigating the big city and conversations with strangers — something that was completely foreign coming from an insular village where everyone knew everyone and their family history. Between studying theology, experimenting with trending fashions and attending rock concerts, Brandt spent hours alone in Assiniboine Forest, roaming beyond the built pathways through swaths of birch, poplar and oak. She got to know the different groves and swampy places. She listened to the trees and shared space with deer, ducks and geese. Communing with nature has been a lifelong practice — private and spiritual. 'When I was a little kid, maybe five or six, I would say to myself, 'Oh, I haven't gone and appreciated nature yet today.' And I would go outside and lie in the grass and choose something to appreciate,' Brandt says. In the highly social darpa, the countryside offered treasured alone time. At school, she kept her woodsy wanderings to herself. On the occasion that a classmate found out she had spent an entire day in the forest, she would be met with a surprising reaction. 'They were like, 'What? That's really dangerous, you shouldn't be wandering around in a forest by yourself,'' says Brandt, who found the busy traffic and downtown crowds more scary. She acclimatized and found her calling, thanks to professors who supported her creative writing and encouraged her to pursue intellectual aspirations. Brandt has since gone on to become an internationally renowned poet and scholar. Her first collection of poetry — questions i asked my mother, published by Turnstone Press in 1987 — became a bestseller and was shortlisted for a Governor General's Award. She's travelled the world, held teaching positions at multiple Canadian universities and, in 2018, was named the city's first poet laureate by the Winnipeg Arts Council. Yet at the time, Brandt's feminist critique of her upbringing was met with strong backlash from local Mennonite religious leaders (including at her alma mater), leading her to be shunned by her home community and estranged from some family members. Every Second Friday The latest on food and drink in Winnipeg and beyond from arts writers Ben Sigurdson and Eva Wasney. Throughout her globetrotting career, Brandt — who now lives in North Point Douglas — has maintained her connection to Assiniboine Forest, visiting the woods often and exploring the trails with her late husky-Labrador mix, Maddie. Her return to CMU has been more recent. Last month, she presented at Mennonite/s Writing, an international literary conference hosted at the university for the first time and which Brandt has been involved in since its founding in 1990. Brandt is currently in a season of return — revisiting spaces she was previously ostracized from and having a dialogue with the people there. 'That has been a challenging but also creative conversation,' she says. 'I feel like I'm redoing the project that began my career, but with a lot more overview and resources now.' Eva WasneyReporter Eva Wasney has been a reporter with the Free Press Arts & Life department since 2019. Read more about Eva. Every piece of reporting Eva produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press's tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press's history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates. 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