Footnotes Book Club
The hiking and outdoor industry often displays a very narrow definition of who or what “outdoorsy” looks like, and this is reflected in our stories. If you’ve ever been interested in learning more about hiking and the outdoors from a different perspective, or if you’ve struggled to find a hiking story that feels close to your own... meet us in the Footnotes!
Together, we’ll read our way through a selection of diverse hiking and outdoor books that highlight the voices of what advocate Jenny Bruso has dubbed “
unlikely hikers"—those queer, Indigenous, differently-abled, Black, plus-sized, racialized, trans and neurodivergent voices that we rarely see represented in popular depictions of outdoorsy adventures. Authors from
Carrot Quinn to
Derick Lugo to
Rahawa Haile are keen to share how their experience and perspective on the outdoors have been shaped by gender, race, ability, colonialism, environmentalism and more. There is a growing collection of stories from diverse hikers just waiting to be explored!
The Footnotes book club will meet virtually every other week starting in January 2025. This is a low commitment, low barrier space—you can read as much as you like and be as involved as you want to be! Members will have the opportunity to vote on upcoming reads, contribute to ongoing discussions and meet new pals with a shared interest in hiking. And we will all work together to connect our shared love of hiking and the outdoors to bigger questions about acceptance, belonging and self-discovery.
- Designated book(s) and suggested reading schedule
- Online space for sustained discussion
- Optional meeting/discussion every two weeks
- New connections with like minded pals!
Want to Check It Out?
Regardless of who you are and where you do or don’t fit in, there’s a place for you here! Please fill out the sign-up form below to let us know you’re interested. We’ll be in touch soon with more details.
January Book
Pack Light: A Journey to Find Myself (Shilletha Curtis, Andscape Books, 2024)
Kicking off in the new year, our first book, Pack Light by Shilletha Curtis, is the story of a vet tech who, after losing her job at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, decides to confront her childhood traumas by hiking the Appalachian Trail. This memoir is one woman’s story of Hiking While Black... because the great outdoors belongs to everyone.
About Your Facilitator
The Footnotes book club will be facilitated by Hike NS board member Morgan Bimm (she/they). Morgan is a professor and writer with over a decade of experience facilitating group discussions and workshops on social justice, feminism and cultural studies. She first fell in love with the idea of long-distance hiking through reading Cheryl Strayed’s Wild (2012) and sealed the deal in 2019 with a solo hike of British Columbia’s 75 km West Coast Trail on the traditional territories of the Huu-ay-aht, Ditidaht and Pacheedaht people. They have since hiked, camped, canoed and climbed in a number of provinces and places, always trying to connect their love of the outdoors to bigger questions about identity, bodies, and belonging. Morgan currently teaches gender studies at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, on the unceded and traditional lands of the Mi’kmaq people.
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