The History of ShakingTheTree.ca

It was December 2007. A handful of us from the now-defunct McMaster University Writer’s Certificate Program had formed a small writers’ group. We met once a month in each other’s homes, trading pages, breaking bread, and dreaming about a shared space for our work.

On the snowy drive to one of those holiday gatherings, a mixed CD landed on Peter Gabriel’s Shaking the Tree. I played it a few times before I arrived and, by the time dinner hit the table, I’d pitched it as the perfect name for our site.

Brown tone photo of the 250-year-old Oakville Oak.
Original landing page.

I sketched early concepts, bought the domain, and for a short while it felt like we were building something together. Life had other plans, as it usually does. The group drifted apart, but I kept the URL “just in case.”

Around January 2009, the site found a second life as my personal blog. Around that time I’d been struck by the story of the 250-year-old Woodlands White Oak and Joyce Burnell’s fight to save it—a story that became one of the visual anchors of the site. I photographed that oak in every season, trying to capture something both timeless and familiar.

More or less the original site design.

Shaking the Tree became my space to write about anything and everything: music, relationships, politics, social issues, sports, and whatever else was rattling around in my head. When I joined another writers’ group—this one also made up of people I’d met through McMaster—I posted the postcard-length stories we challenged ourselves to write each month, little proofs that we were still finding our way back to the page.

In 2015, I deleted the blog. And although I kept other blogs for specific projects, I no longer had a home for the “anything pieces”—the essays and fragments that didn’t fit neatly anywhere else. I missed that space.

Screen capture of the site before it went offline.

At some point, I noticed that shakingthetree.ca was no longer mine. It had been scooped up and repurposed for things like random NIKE shoe sales. In 2022, at the height of my Wayback Machine obsession, I realized the URL was available again. It bothered me that someone else had owned it—and even more that it had been reduced to a spam site. So on December 28, 2022, Shaking the Tree was reborn. Sort of.

For a while, I wasn’t sure what to do with it. Did the name still fit who I was now? Was I just trying to go backward? For almost two more years, the site was nothing more than a quick blog install and a couple of posts. Then—almost exactly two years later, apparently still powered by holiday-season inspiration—I finally said yes to the dress. This was where my words were meant to live. It always was.

Screen capture of the original STT2 design.

The version you’re reading now isn’t a replica of the old STT—that lives in the archive—but a continuation of the idea that started it all: a space to explore. A place to sit with questions, curiosities, and the small and not-so-small moments that shape a life. More journal than “content hub,” rooted in community, memory, and whatever ideas I’m wrestling with next.

After all these years, this URL still has branches worth shaking.

So join me as I look at the world from the lighter side of 50. The winds of age may blow a little softer through the trees beyond that imaginary border between immortality and throwing your back out putting on socks—but there’s still plenty worth talking about in the stories, headlines, and everyday moments that keep shaping us.