• Age: 16
• Grade: 11

Finding Ft. George is the poetic record of Rob Budde's growing love of Prince George and the Cariboo north-central region of BC. The poems are an act of discovery and they describe the various social, political, historical and environmental systems that Budde encounters with the eye of a patient, astute observer. Engaging in the language of location, each poem explores a place, a time and the process of building a relationship between the two. Sometimes gritty, sometimes ironic, sometimes barely able to see the place at all, the poems are all love poems to a new home -- gifts of arrival.

Rob Budde teaches Creative Writing at the University of Northern BC and has taught previously at the University of Winnipeg and the University of Manitoba. He has published seven books of poetry, fiction, and short fiction. He has been a finalist for the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer and the McNally-Robinson Manitoba Book of the Year. In 1995, Budde completed a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Calgary. Recently Budde published a book of poetry titled Finding Ft. George, a collection of poems about Rob s growing relationship with Prince George and Northern BC. Rob lives in Prince George with his partner, Debbie Keahey and four children: Robin, Erin, Quinlan, and Anya. Check out his poetry blog: www.writingwaynorth.blogspot.com

Rob Budde's profile page

"Rob Budde's latest collection of poems Finding Ft. George is a unique look at settling into a new community and making it a home. With poems delving into every aspect of Prince George, British Columbia, Budde's collection reveals aspects of life in a small town that usually go unnoticed by people... The language Budde employs is concise, with each image working together to create a complete picture of Prince George for the reader. Also, the idea of the 'poem' itself occurs in most of Budde's work. The result of such a rhetorical device is the feeling that the reader is being given the opportunity to experience the intimacy of Budde's unique point of view, just as it unravels."

—JIVE Magazine

"[V]erse bursting with energy... he is well on his way to becoming a major Canadian poet."

—Prairie Fire Review of Books

Finding Ft. George

The lyric poems in Finding Ft. George reflect Rob Budde’s discovery of Prince George and the north-central region of BC. Although one senses that Budde loves his new home, many of his poems express melancholy of what the “resource town” Prince George has become. Budde speaks of the beauty of nature where “over the hill” the lakes are “not waiting for tailings to swallow, but sensing a change in the air” and where the “toad licks her lips slouches in the mooseprint hoping the earth holds on”. Yet in Prince George, he describes the “boarded-up windows of downtown” and “the new big boxes on the outskirts scooping up what fiscal agility the town has left”. Although Budde’s focus is clearly on the environment, he also voices social and political concerns.

Budde is the author of two collections of poetry and three works of fiction.

Caution: Contains some coarse language.