In September’s episode of Crow Reads, Rayanne Haines talks with Trina Moyles, author, writer, and wildfire lookout about her latest book. Lookout: Love, Solitude, and Searching for Wildfire in the Boreal Forest, is a memoir about Moyles four summers working alone at a remote lookout tower in Canada’s northern boreal forest, offering an eyewitness account of the increasingly unpredictable nature of wildfire. During the conversation, the two talk about Moyles new book, the freedom one finds in isolation, living and working as an artist in rural settings, how social justice sits in her work and how bears play an important role in her life both as an artist and a woman.

Trina Moyles is an author, writer, and wildfire lookout living in the Peace Country of north-western Alberta, Treaty 8, traditional territories of the Cree, Beaver, Dene, and Metis peoples. Her latest book, Lookout: Love, Solitude, and Searching for Wildfire in the Boreal Forest is a memoir about her four summers working alone at a remote lookout tower in Canada’s northern boreal forest, offering an eyewitness account of the increasingly unpredictable nature of wildfire.

Her essay Herd Memory won the Jon Whyte Memorial Essay Award at the 2019 Alberta Literary Awards, and later placed Silver in the Personal Journalism category at the 2020 National Magazine Awards.

Moyles is currently an MFA student in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia, where she’s working on a non-fiction book about living alone in a black bear corridor in northern Alberta during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic. She, Bear is a meditation on nature, loneliness, desire, trauma, art, and bodily autonomy in relation to coexisting with a community of bears.

Moyles spends her summers out in the bush, and her winters migrating between the Peace Country and Edmonton.