Dan Rubinstein

Journalist, editor, author

Bachelor of Journalism, 1995

In my career, I’ve moved from newspapers to weeklies to magazines. And now moving from magazines to books is an opportunity to explore ideas in much more depth and from a multitude of different angles.

You’ve no doubt heard of green space and all the positive associations that being surrounded by nature brings to our physical and mental health. But what about blue space—time spent in, on or around water? The beneficial impacts to our health and well-being in “blue space” may be even more pronounced, posits Dan Rubinstein, BJ’95, a journalist, writer, editor and avid stand-up paddleboarder. His new book, Water Borne: A 1,200-Mile Paddleboarding Pilgrimage (ECW Press), documents Dan’s epic stand-up paddleboarding journey on rivers, lakes and canals in the summer of 2023. 

Dan started his career as a wire-service sports reporter. He then worked for newspapers, including the Telegraph-Journal in Fredericton, Times & Transcript in Moncton and Vue Weekly in Edmonton. He was an editor at Alberta Views and Alberta Venture magazines and has written for publications including The Walrus, The Economist, The Globe and Mail, enRoute, Cottage Life, Outside and Canadian Geographic, where he was managing and acting editor. He currently writes for Carleton University’s Communications Department in Ottawa and takes time out for longer writing projects. His first book, Born to Walk: The Transformative Power of a Pedestrian Act, published in 2015 by ECW Press, was a finalist at the Ottawa Book Awards and shortlisted for the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize.

As this year’s writer-in-residence for the MFA in Creative Nonfiction program, Dan is returning to Halifax this summer to do a workshop with MFA students and a public reading from Water Borne at the Halifax Central Library on June 8, 2025.

Can you explain a little more about what “blue space” is? 

It describes spending time in, on, or around water. There’s a growing body of research that speaks to the benefits of blue space. I’ve written a bunch of magazine pieces on blue space and blue space research and wanted to integrate that into the book. I talked to a lot of people who are blue space experts.  

There’s evidence that says that we know spending time in a natural environment is good for us. We know spending time in green space is good for us. There’s evidence that spending time in blue space is even better, that the psychological and physiological benefits are more pronounced when water is part of the outdoor environment that we’re in. I wanted to explore that research in a very visceral way.  

So, the exploration of blue space was what was behind your trip? 

My initial plan for the book was to do kind of like my first book, which I would describe as a bits-and-pieces book: travel to a bunch of different places, spend time with different people and jump around a fair bit in terms of the narrative. I looked at the benefits of walking in a variety of areas—physical and mental health, environmental, economic, political.… Initially I was thinking about something like that related to paddling and our relationship with blue space.  

But a friend of mine … said you should find somebody doing a really unusual trip on a paddleboard and make that the narrative of your book. Or you should do a trip yourself.  

Tell me about your journey. 

I decided I wanted to paddle in a place that was meaningful to me. I’ve always liked the idea of exploring my own part of the world and as a journalist, I also wanted to spend time with people and interview them to bring in other perspectives.  

It was about 2,000 kilometres over four months in the summer of 2023. There’s kind of a family layer on top of that. My mother’s family immigrated from Eastern Europe, and they took a boat to Montreal, where they were met by relatives who had preceded them and who were living in New York City. So they went to New York, and that’s where my mother met my father, who was a grad student from South America. They met, got married and wanted to start a family. This was the ’60s, and they figured Canada was a safer, quieter place than the U.S. and they moved to Toronto.  

So, connecting Montreal, New York, Toronto and Ottawa, where I live now, just seemed to kind of go with the overlay of my family’s journey.  

There was a quote in a story you wrote for enRoute magazine that said “paddleboarding is all about balance.” I take it you’re not just talking about balancing on the board. 

Yeah, I mean that’s the obvious thing, but metaphorically it’s about balance with the natural world, within yourself and with the people you’re around.  

A lot of the instructors and more experienced paddlers I’ve spent time with when I was just getting into the activity talked not only about balance, but perspective. And this is kind of the difference between stand-up paddleboarding and canoeing or kayaking. 

When you’re standing, you literally can look down and see fish and turtles and plant life. You can see into the water, and you see yourself as part of this natural system.  

One thing you noticed about being in blue space is that you slow down. You notice things. 

Blue space has all these human and ecological health properties, which is what I wanted to explore, but the main takeaway is that it slows us down. It makes us more receptive to other people. It seems to nurture connections between people from different walks of life.  

When I think about the challenges the world is facing these days—polarization and disconnection between people—I think blue space has the capacity to help us address all these things. It’s a pretty powerful force. 

Is long-form journalism also a way of slowing down? 

In my career, I’ve moved from newspapers to weeklies to magazines. And now moving from magazines to books is an opportunity to explore ideas in much more depth and from a multitude of different angles.

I love the long-form book format. But I don’t know how people can write a book every year or two, because it took everything I had to do this one. I figure one book every 10 years is probably my rhythm.  

Writing is such hard work and once I got into it I thought it was a terrible idea. Like, nobody’s going to like this, nobody’s going to read this, so why did I ever start? 

But something compels you as a writer to want to explore an idea. And then you’re on this track and you can’t stop. You just sit down and write every day. So, after weeks and weeks and months and months, suddenly you have all these words and the shape of a book.