“Bringing her keen poet’s eye to the essay form, her approach is lyrical and wide-ranging, examining the privileges and exclusions of the simple stroll, and asks us to consider who gets to navigate the world freely and who does not. The natural world and our connection to it is a primary focus, but these essays – and the poems interspersed throughout them – prove that nature writing can go well beyond the traditional: 'I will add the possibility of nature writing as disability writing, as feminist worldview and as assault survivor narrative.'
"Straggle certainly acknowledges walking’s myriad benefits, but what is more striking is how it details walking’s limitations – both in the fallibility of the human body and in the constraints the world imposes upon that body. As an assault survivor, MacDonald has first-hand experience with the healing power of movement, but she poignantly acknowledges the threat and very real fear public spaces can bring to people like her.”

“In this wide-ranging collection of essays Tanis MacDonald walks the reader down many paths, pointing out the sights, exclaiming over birds, sharing stories and asking questions about just who gets to walk freely through our cities, parks and wilderness. Deer move mysteriously through these essays, knowing just when they vanish from sight, as do predators, both human and animal. She walks to begin to understand the place she now calls home in Southern Ontario, catalogues the fauna around her in FaunaWatch and continues walking through illness.”

“From a child spotting a snowy owl on her way to school in Winnipeg, to a young woman watching her own distinctive walk be imitated in an acting class, to a worried daughter helping her mother relearn how to walk after a bad fall on a busy road, MacDonald shares how walking has shaped her life and the lives of many others. Wry, smart, political and lyrical, these essays share the joy of walking as well its danger and uncovers the promise it offers — of healing, of companionship and of understanding.”

“The other thing I say in Out of Line after ‘if you don't have community, art will break your heart’ is your heart will be broken anyway, eventually, but it's better with community. You will recover faster and you won't die of heartbreak if you have community.”

“Emily Urquhart returns to Watershed Writers, but this time she’s guest hosting to interview Tanis MacDonald for her new book, Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female, which is about walking as a way of relating to the world, to each other and to memory.” (Watershed Writers presents in-depth conversations with local writers living and writing in the Grand River watershed area.)

“In GUSH, more than 100 women and nonbinary writers from Canada and around the world take apart the bloody instruction of menstruation: its cultures, its lessons, its equipment, and its lexicon. GUSH offers menstrual manifestos for our time that question the cultural value and social language of monthly blood loss, with rage, humour, ferocity, and grief, and propose that the menstrual moment is as individualized, subjective, personal, political, and vital as the feminist click. With work from emerging and senior writers in poetry, cartoons, flash fiction, personal essays, lyric confessions, and experimental forms, this anthology features the voices of Indigenous writers, writers of colour, writers with disabilities, rural writers and urban writers, representing four generations of menstruators: writers who call down their bloodiest muses.”

“Mobile’s strength lies not so much in its emotion, though MacDonald at times elicits that too, as in the poems that follow Jane’s apotheosis in the second section. Rather, the voice of this Mobile crackles with a sometimes-caustic humour, with wordplay, music, and confidence throughout. It speaks to us not merely as if from across the airwaves, but as if fully animated by a body in motion, asking what it means to take up city and citizenship in a female form.”

“Who better than a poet to orchestrate uncommon magic on a gray Saturday morning in the heart of the noisy city?
Poet Tanis MacDonald took a handful of us lucky souls on a journey on just such a morning in Toronto. Dressed for soggy, brisk conditions with the possibility of more rain, we walked from Broadview subway station south to Riverdale Park, across the park to a footbridge over the busy Don Valley Parkway. On the other side of the bridge, we slipped onto the Lower Don River Valley Trail … and into another world..”

Tanis MacDonald wrote a short essay on how she came to poetry, prompted by Susan Gillis on her blog Concrete and River:
"I started writing poetry because it was impressionistic and weird and a bit mysterious: a lens in front of a screen behind a veil in a stormcloud. It made sense only when you looked at it from all sides."

Susan Gillis followed up with some excellent questions about Mobile. Here's part of Tanis MacDonald's reply:
"I wanted to examine women taking up public space, beginning with what it could mean for a woman to move through the city of Toronto as she moves through difficult mental and emotional spaces. Writing Mobile was a long engagement with a cascading series of questions about strength and vulnerability."

“MacDonald offers a virtuoso display of poetic craft…her poems consistently mix fearlessly intellectual elements with passages rich in lyric resonance.”

"Fired with a signature intelligence, these shrewdly honed, sometimes volatile poems invoke us to give them our closest attention."

“Original, absorbing, and long-overdue critical examination of the way Canadian female poets have written against the grain of the male elegiac tradition. MacDonald’s scholarly conversation with these works is an important step in understanding the contrary energies of feminist remembrance.”

"The Daughter’s Way represents a new way of understanding Canadian women’s poetic elegies….a compelling and precisely focused engagement with gender, genre, and nation. MacDonald (herself a poet) brings a rich understanding of the importance of poetic form."