Although the fall is a lovely season for hitting the trail, or wandering around a city, it’s also a time when we begin to retreat indoors. Autumn in Canada brings an array of conferences and festivals — and thankfully, for an obsessive walker, some of these events are a great showcase for my favourite subject. I’ll be talking about walking at a few different stops this fall. In mid-October, I’m thrilled to be joining presenters such as the Globe and Mail’s Doug Saunders and Swedish sustainable development specialist Charlotte Hauksson at the Council for Canadian Urbanism‘s annual CanU summit. My keynote, at noon on Thursday, Oct. 15, will be in the beautiful Horticulture Building at Ottawa’s revamped Lansdowne Park. Immediately afterwards, I’ll be zipping across the river to the Conference Board of Canada’s Better Workplace Conference at the Hilton Lac-Leamy in Gatineau, Quebec. My 2:15 p.m. session, with the ironically named Tim Sitt, the founder and owner of a health and fitness program called MOVE, will explore different ways one can avoid a sedentary lifestyle, and just how powerful walking can be. Two days later and three provinces to the west, I’ll be back in Edmonton for LitFest, Canada’s non-fiction literary festival. I’m doing two different things at LitFest: a seminar for the Alberta Magazine Publishers Association on how to make the jump from magazine writing to a book (Saturday, October 17 at 10 a.m. in the Centennial Room at the downtown Stanley Milner Library); and a walk starting at 3 p.m. on Sunday, October 18 — a walk that ends, naturally, with a talk at a pub. See you out there!