Walking Upstream by Lloyd Ratzlaff

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.

Magpie, I love you more

for your flight and strut

than for your

squawk,

but can't vilify a creature

ten times tougher than I am

and a hell of a lot more handsome.

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. And as the mystic who believes in something far beyond himself, so the beetle he sees on a path is "a little Buddha," and the wind and the flowing river are "irresistible forces," while a pine teaches him "how you move / without going / anywhere."

(From Thistledown Press) 

Walking Upstream is available in April 2025. 

Lloyd Ratzlaff is a former minister, counsellor and university lecturer from Saskatoon. He is the author of three nonfiction books and has edited both an anthology of seniors' writings and a children's book. He has won two Saskatchewan Writers Guild literary nonfiction awards and was a finalist for three Saskatchewan Book Awards. Ratzlaff also wrote a column for Prairie Messenger Catholic Journal. His debut poetry collection is Walking Upstream.