A Season in the Okanagan | The Bill Arnott Interview

This conversation took place on June 17th, 2025, in an online interview in Vancouver. It has been edited for length and for clarity.

I recently had the opportunity to talk with celebrated BC author, Bill Arnott about his new book A Season in the Okanagan. His new book follows in the vein of his other travel memoirs, combining great personal stories, set in the the geological history of a place, and augmented by the stories of the people he meets along the way, all while engaging in reconciliatory actions that engage the reader in the stories, histories, and culture of the Indigenous Peoples who call the land home. And as in his other books, there is something for just about everyone; be you a visitor, repeat wanderer or resident, Bill offers a thoughtful and storied romp through one of BC’s most beloved regions.

Christina Barber: When I read the passage from the chapter “Toward Vernon” in A Season in the Okanagan, I was struck by the synesthetic quality to encounters with the past; when one journeys to a place they’ve known, the experience is coloured by the full spectrum of sensations — what we’ve seen, heard, felt, tasted, and smelled overlaps, complicating and elevating our most recent experience. What is that like for you returning to these places and memories of your past?

“With the window ajar by my bed, I would wake to the smell, lingering in still morning air, a fragrance of blossomy greens. If the song of the dove had a flavour, the smell of the lilies had texture. The feel of oil on canvas, silky smooth. A tactile scent.”

Bill Arnott: What I found fascinating about this particular Seasons book is the fact that I’m effectively going home, and yet I’m still a traveller. There was this kind of dichotomous and yet kind of symbiotic melding perspective, which I found rather fascinating and rather unique. I felt privileged to be asked to create a memoir in this manner. As a local and as a tourist traveller, it felt like as well as a privilege, a bit of an obligation. I wanted the story to be told well. This one is deeply personal, and yet, I endeavoured to make it as relatable as possible.

Obviously, whenever we’re talking about any place where we’re drawing in the layered historical and cultural narrative of the fact that wherever we are, we’re on Indigenous land. And so me speaking from the perspective of having two European settler parents, there’s again adding to that mosaic and that respect and that weaving of personal and aggregate collaborative narrative.

CB: In your travels, you speak of encounters with what I affectionately call the ruins, these buildings and vestiges of a past and often industrial life that mark the landscape. What is your relationship to these remnants?

Bill Arnott: Wherever we go, there’s an echo there of who’s been there before.
I always liken, especially if I’m making a point of doing some walking or hiking or tracking, invariably, we’re walking in the footsteps of those who walk the land. I always like an analogy when you think of the notion of the songlines of the Australian Aboriginal People, where you physically, physiologically, and mentally walked the land into being. Which then I liken to that sort of metaphysical approach, that notion of you’ll see it when you believe it. In other words, things appear when you set your intent on them.

CB: In A Season in the Okanagan, you write about some of these places where you stopped along the way, the CPR railway station and the bake ovens for example. I found a personal connection to these elements because of the things I look for on my own walks. How important do you think it is to keep and maintain these vestiges of the past? And is there still something there in these forgotten ruins, the ones that are overgrown and dilapidated, should they be left? Should they be preserved?

Bill Arnott: I think one of the most profound answers I ever heard was having this very similar conversation with an indigenous totem carver. This took place up in Haida Gwaii, and I know I’ve heard similar things from other carvers, certainly across Western Canada, and the answer being, the totem is a great example. His response was, oh, that’s up to the totemic item itself. Sometimes they stand for one year, sometimes they stand for a thousand years and that is not for us to decide. Things that fall down to the ground may take a new form the same way a tree falls, becomes a nurse log, and then in fact can nurture a whole new environment a little bit closer to the ground. So it can just be a reimagining of place and connectivity; I thought that was a brilliant way of putting it.

CB: Photography is central to many of your books. In A Perfect Day for a Walk, you feature your own photos, often juxtaposed with historical photos. In A Season in the Okanagan, your photos have a different feel to them. How would you describe your style?

Bill Arnott: I call them painted photos. They’re photos I take on a smartphone and then I’ve customised using a couple of applications that I use going back and forth between them, Apple products and PC Windows-based products.
So I’ve created something I feel is quite unique and somewhat proprietary that I’m terribly proud of. It gives a look and a feel that I feel just creates a little deeper, more sensory engagement with the reader. I know as a reader of this genre, I love that level of engagement. I liken it to a scored film. All of a sudden we get a couple of the sensory elements involved that just makes it so much richer.

So yes, those are painted photos. And there is a little bit of branding involved with respect to my season memoirs. You may remember A Season on Vancouver Island and now A Season in the Okanagan, well, later this year, the Rocky Mountain Books publisher will be launching A Festive Season on Vancouver Island. This is a series I’ve branded in this manner with this style of artwork. I also work with Arsenal Pulp Press, so I want to write with a somewhat different voice and keep these books, these narratives, these brands distinct and unique.

CB: I noticed that the painted photos in this book were blue and yellow in tone. Was this a deliberate choice? A harkening back to your own Ukrainian heritage or to the other Ukrainian stories you tell?

Bill Arnott: Well, that’s neat that you should say that, now. One of the things I’m proud of is I don’t change anything with respect to the photos or the light. All I’m doing is this painting wash that exemplifies some of the natural canvas, if you will, so the colours that you see are the colours that I saw and it just so happened that that part of the world is yellows and blues and if we go back and put them side by side by with my A Season on Vancouver Island, those were much more the blues and the greens of sky, sea, and forest, whereas through the Okanagan, there is a lot of that semi-arid land and there’s a lot of the sere browns to go with the sunlight. And there’s those beautiful flowers. It’s a unique sunflower, the Okanagan sunflower. It’s its own little subspecies there. So that just was very much the land, and the season is a factor as well. If we were to stop there in the winter, things would seem pretty monochrome throughout a lot of that valley.

CB: Your narrative is a composition of perspectives through which you give voice to: your own memory, the geological history of the Okanagan, the history of the peoples who have shaped the land, and the Indigenous peoples whose traditional territories make up the region. How did your own relationship with the Okanagan change during the making of this book?

Bill Arnott: Well, I would say because I referenced this book being very personal, it does encapsulate the lion’s share of my life or certainly a good fifty years worth of that time passing, maturity, that awareness, and education. When I was growing up, there was as a child of settlers a very Eurocentric perspective. Where I was and how I was living, awareness of the Indigenous narrative and cultural history was nominal, and there’s just a great example that this is just something that has shifted for so many European Canadians. This awareness in a healthy, positive, proactive, hopeful, reconciliatory manner that I just see as essential and it’s nice to see that these things are moving in that positive direction and I would be one of those many, many people in that very positive, proactive wave at getting closer to where things ought to be.

CB: Do you feel that the Indigenous ways of knowing, that you relate in your book, are becoming more prevalent or at least better understood as a way to forge closer ties to the land?

Bill Arnott: I think one of the tidiest and most brilliant, insightful and all-encompassing items that answers that question is that carving that you may remember, the photo of Father Pandosy from the Pandosy Ranch in what’s still called the Mission, which is a suburb of Kelowna now. And I believe it was in 2007, that an Indigenous carver effectively made a sculpture of this Jesuit missionary in which it encapsulates and incorporates all of the four indigenous seasonal food chiefs, as well as Sen’klip, the sort of all-encompassing pervasive, ever present, omniscient coyote figure. That to me is the quintessential collaborative, forward-looking reconciliatory, healing, artistic mixed media, mixed cultural time. It’s all there in a beautiful 3D, life-sized visual and it’s a striking image because it’s life-size. Father Charles Pandosy was a tall individual, just over two meters, so it’s a striking presence and it looks like it could be part of the land, almost like a tree, almost like it’s growing, almost like it’s carved. And yet, there’s the food chiefs, there’s the coyote and it’s very much shared space, common ground. It just makes you feel positive for the past, present and future.

CB: You mentioned your upcoming book A Festive Season on Vancouver Island, are you planning on a quartet or is it going to be a longer series?

Bill Arnott: A Festive Season on Vancouver Island would be the third book in that season memoir series; I love a trilogy. That would be nice and tidy, but the publisher has been indicating that they would love some more. People enjoy them. They’re a pleasure to make and to share. They’re commercially successful, and so there’s that element. And I’m comfy talking about the art and the commerce side of it. But nothing is written in stone as far as that goes. It would have to be something very special that I’d want to jump in with both feet, and feel that there’s a story to share.

CB: Beyond A Festive Season. What else are you working on these days?

Bill Arnott: Well, you will see this fall. The follow up book to A Perfect Day for a Walk for Marshall Press will have A Perfect Day for a Walk by the Water in which we examine Vancouver’s shores, exploring Vancouver shoreline.

Rather than an inside looking out, it’s a little more of an external looking in and how water and shorelines have written the narrative of our city. It’s another fascinating exploration, not only on foot in this case, but on the surface of the water, under the water and every point in between.

Bill Arnott is the bestselling author of A Perfect Day for a Walk: The History, Cultures, and Communities of Vancouver, on Foot, the award-winning Gone Viking travelogues, BC’s top-selling A Season on Vancouver Island and A Season in the Okanagan, plus other books of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. He’s been awarded for prose, poetry, songwriting, and for his expeditions received Fellowships at Britain’s Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. Bill’s a past director on several boards, university lecturer, contributing writer to numerous magazines, gives countless presentations for TV, radio, podcasts, and literary festivals, and is a travel ambassador for Canadian Geographic and Adventure Canada. When not trekking with a small pack and journal, armed with his laughably outdated camera phone or showing off cooking skills as a culinary school dropout, Bill can be found on Canada’s west coast, where he lives near the sea on Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh land. Find Bill online @billarnott_aps or with his #GoneVikingCommunity.

Publisher: Rocky Mountain Books (April 15th, 2025)
Paperback: 7″ x 4″ | 216pp
ISBN: 9781771607247

Christina Barber

Christina Barber is a writer and educator who lives in Vancouver. An avid reader, she shares her passion for Canadian history and literature through her reviews on Instagram @cb_reads_reviews. She has most recently been committed to writing and staging formally innovative single and multi-act plays.