Winter hits the north country

The snow is here, and this time it looks like it's staying. On Wednesday afternoon I went out to run some errands, only to find I had entered the snow globe zone. I had to walk into the wind, and by the time I reached my destination - an entire two and a half blocks away - the front of my black leather jacket was solid white. Minutes later the snow in my hair started to melt. I was cutting through the drug store when one of the cosmetic ladies caught sight of me. She didn't actually gasp, but her eyes went really wide before she recovered herself and said something sympathetic about the weather. I didn't bother to look in the mirror until I got back to the office. Good thing the weather hit after my lunch-hour United Way meeting. Hard to make a good impression on community leaders with streaky make-up and Gorgon-like hair.

While I was struggling into the wind, a man passed and said "Typical September weather, eh?" He's right, of course. Despite our lousy fall, winter is on the late side. Too bad Old Man Winter couldn't have held out for a few more days, and let the trick-or-treaters do their thing without biting wind and icy streets.

Radio days

Just spent three days in a how-to-write-radio-drama workshop with seven other Yellowknife writers. It was back to the future for me - I took part in a couple of radio drama workshops in the late '80s/early '90s and wrote some skits that aired on CBC Mackenzie. Surprising how much a person can forget in fifteen years . . .

We were all asked to come up with an idea for a skit (or a series), write a first draft, listen to a table read, write a second draft, and hear it read again. I was encouraged to find that I can still write under pressure - and what's better - revise under pressure.

The best part was hanging around with a group of funny, smart talented writers for three days. The workshop leader was Kelley Jo Burke, a spoken word/radio arts producer with English language performance programming in Regina, who is not only an engaging instructor, but a one-person sound effects factory.

Now if I was really ambitious, I'd finish that script and pitch it to my friendly neighbourhood CBC producer.

Adventures in cyberspace

Hello and welcome to my blog, part of my new cyberspace presence, along with my website. I am a writer of short stories and a photographer of northern landscapes (both natural and man-made), living in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada.

A number of my stories have been published in Canadian magazines and anthologies. The people at Storyteller magazine have been particularly good to me and run a number of my pieces. One of these, "The Prospector’s Trail," was reprinted in a textbook called Imprints 11. Over the years, some of the students who’ve studied "The Prospector’s Trail" have hunted me down via a string of electronic bread crumbs on the internet to get information about me and about Yellowknife. Well, my little chickadees — I’ve decided to make it a whole lot easier for you. I live to serve, after all.

So stay tuned for updates on my writing, life in the ’Knife, and anything else rattling around my overworked brain.

- Cathy