Environmental journalist Trina Moyles joins a celebrated list of non-fictiion writers showcased by Wordfest—from Peter Wohlleben and Susan Casey to John Vaillant, Diana Beresford-Kroeger and Robert Macfarlane—whose work deepens our connection to our planet and to ourselves. We can’t wait to host her in Calgary as we kick off Wordfest’s 2026 season!
Join us for an illuminating conversation with Moyles about her latest book, Black Bear, a dazzling memoir about one woman’s coexistence with bears in the boreal forest and a singular meditation on sibling loss.
Says Kevin Van Tighem who will be hosting the conversation: “Trina Moyles’ unflinchingly honest and often poetic account of family estrangement and inter-species reconciliation is about much more than bears and siblings—it takes us right into the heart of the Alberta conundrum, of what it means to be a part of a culture that simultaneously loves and ruins the places and lives that give it meaning.”
Your ticket includes the conversation and an audience Q&A. Shelf Life Books will be on site with copies of Black Bear and Moyles’ back list. You can also pre-order copies of the book here.
We are thankful to Penguin Random House Canada for making it possible to connect you with Trina Moyles.
Kevin Van Tighem
Talk Show Format
Audience Q&A
Pop-Up Bookstore
Libations Bar
75 minutes. No intermission
Penguin Random House Canada
Trina Moyles is an environmental journalist, creative producer, and author. Her debut book, Women Who Dig: Farming, Feminism, and the Fight to Feed the World (2018) was a finalist for the High Plains Literary Awards and is currently being adapted into a documentary film. Lookout: Love, Solitude, and Searching for Wildfire in the Boreal Forest (2021), a memoir about her work as a fire tower lookout in northwestern Alberta, won a National Outdoor Book Award and the inaugural Memoir Award at the Alberta Literary Awards. In 2022, Moyles received the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Award, the province’s highest honour for the arts, for her dedication to writing. Moyles’s journalism has been widely published in Canadian Geographic, The Globe and Mail, The Narwhal, and Hakai, among other publications. Today, she lives in Whitehorse, Yukon with her partner and their three dogs.
A dazzling memoir about one woman’s coexistence with bears in the boreal forest and a singular meditation on sibling loss.
When Trina Moyles was five years old, her father, a wildlife biologist known in Peace River as “the bear guy,” brought home an orphaned black bear cub for a night before sending it to the Calgary Zoo. This brief but unforgettable encounter spurred Trina’s lifelong fascination with Ursus americanus—the most populous bear on the northern landscape, often considered a nuisance to human society. As a child roaming the shores of the Peace in the footsteps of her beloved older brother, she understood bears to be invisible entities: always present but mostly hidden and worthy of respect. Growing up during the oil boom of the 1990s, the threats in the siblings’ hard-drinking resource town were more human, dividing them from a natural reverence for the land, and eventually, from each other.
After years of working for human rights organizations, Trina returned to northern Alberta for a job as a fire tower lookout, while her brother worked in the oil sands, vulnerable to a boom-and-bust economy and substance addiction. When she was assigned to a tower in a wildlife corridor, bears were alarmingly visible and plentiful, wandering metres away on the other side of an electrified fence surrounding the tower. Over four summers, Trina begins to move beyond fear and observe the extraordinary essence of the maligned black bear—a keystone species who is as subject to the environmental consequences of the oil economy as humans. At the same time, she searches for common ground with her brother on the land that bonded them.
Impassioned and eloquent, Black Bear is a story of grief and a vision of peaceful coexistence in a divided world. It captures the fragility of our relationships with human and nonhuman species alike, and the imperative to protect the wild—along with the people we hold closest.
Kevin Van Tighem
Talk Show Format
Audience Q&A
Pop-Up Bookstore
Libations Bar
75 minutes. No intermission
Penguin Random House Canada
Kevin Van Tighem, a former superintendent of Banff National Park, has written more than 200 articles, stories, and essays on conservation and wildlife which have garnered him many awards, including Western Magazine Awards, Outdoor Writers of Canada book and magazine awards, and the Journey Award for Fiction. He is the author of Bears Without Fear, The Homeward Wolf, Heart Waters: Sources of the Bow River, Our Place: Changing the Nature of Alberta, Wild Roses Are Worth It: Alberta Reconsidered, and Understory. He lives with his wife, Gail, in High River, Alberta.
In the spirit of reconciliation, we acknowledge that we live, work and play on the traditional territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy (Siksika, Kainai, Piikani), the Tsuut’ina, the Iyarhe Nakoda Nations, the Otipemisiwak Métis Government of the Métis Nation within Alberta District 6, and all people who make their homes in the Treaty 7 region of Southern Alberta.
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