About Trina Moyles
From Trina’s website:
Trina Moyles is an award-winning freelance writer, journalist, and author with a passion for telling stories about social justice and environmental issues. She is currently an MFA student in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia.
Her first book, Women Who Dig: Farming, Feminism, and the Fight to Feed the World was released in early March 2018.
Moyles’s second book, Lookout: Love, Solitude, and Searching for Wildfire in the Boreal is about the memoir about Moyles’s four summers spent working in the boreal forest as a fire tower lookout.
Moyles’s journalism and narrative non-fiction work has been published extensively in newspapers, magazines, and online platforms, including The Globe and Mail, Alberta Views, Maisonneuve, Swerve, Vela Magazine, Motherboard, Briarpatch Magazine, Edmonton Journal, Vue Weekly, GUTS Canadian Feminist Magazine, Modern Farmer, Yes! Magazine, Permaculture Magazine, and Narratively.
Over the past ten years, Moyles has worked intimately with rural organizations and communities in Nicaragua, Guatemala, Cuba, Canada, and East Africa on human rights and grassroots development projects. With an academic background in Cultural Anthropology and International Development, she focuses much of her research and writing on human rights education, food security, sustainable agriculture, and gender equality.
Moyles works seasonally as a Fire Tower Lookout at a remote location in Canada’s rugged boreal forest.
In addition, Moyles recently launched a publication called OFF GRID Writing, a travelogue about losing and locating oneself in remote spaces and places (geographical and metaphysical), relationships, memories, desires, and ideologies.
Moyles is based in northern Alberta, but you’ll find her adventuring here and there with her loyal canine sidekick, Holly.
Lookout: Love, Solitude, and Searching for Wildfire in the Boreal Forest
While growing up in Peace River, Alberta, Trina Moyles heard many stories of Lookout Observers–strange, eccentric types who spent five-month summers alone, climbing 100-foot high towers and watching for signs of fire in the surrounding boreal forest. How could you isolate yourself for that long? she wondered. “I could never do it,” she told herself.
Craving a deeper sense of purpose, she left northern Alberta to pursue a decade-long career in global humanitarian work. After three years in East Africa, and newly engaged, Trina returned to Peace River with a plan to sponsor her fiance, Akello’s, immigration to Canada.
Despite her fear of being alone in the woods, she applied for a seasonal lookout position and got the job. Thus begins Trina’s first summer as one of a handful of lookouts scattered throughout Alberta, with only a farm dog, Holly–labeled “a domesticated wolf” by her former owners–to keep her company.
While searching for smoke, Trina unravels under the pressure of a long-distance relationship–and a dawning awareness of the environmental crisis that climate change is producing in the boreal.
Through megafires, lightning storms, and stunning encounters with wildlife, she learns to survive at the fire tower by forging deep connections with nature and with an extraordinary community of people dedicated to wildfire detection and combat. In isolation, she discovers a kind of self-awareness–and freedom–that only solitude can deliver. Lookout is a riveting story of loss, transformation, and belonging to oneself, layered with an eyewitness account of the destructive and regenerative power of wildfire in our northern forests.
Where to find Trina Moyles
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