Jamboree weekend

The annual Long John Jamboree isn't necessarily a sign of spring in Yellowknife. Over the past few years, the temperatures on jamboree weekend have been absolutely frigid. This year, happily, the weather decided to cooperate. I even took my mandatory dog race photos without freezing my fingers!

Held out on the ice of Yellowknife Bay, the event was as well-organized as ever, with crowds coming out to enjoy the art show, kids events, and ice sculpture. This year I even saw people drinking in the beer tent (also known as the Brrr Garden), the nice weather a little more conducive to imbibing a cold beverage. Great fireworks display last night, which I was able to enjoy without even leaving my front room.

Awesome Northern Lights

We've had amazing Northern Lights this week. Took this shot from the little park across from my house. A rare treat to photograph the lights without freezing in the snow!

Fall afternoon in Yellowknife

After a hot summer, fall came early to Yellowknife, with cool temperatures in early September. Things have rallied, though, and today was a wonderful fall day - nice temperatures, some sunshine, and one last(?) blast in the boat. Snapped this picture of Negus Point on the way back to town, with the long-defunct Con Mine's Robertson head frame in the background. Hoping for a repeat next weekend!

The view from here

Well, not much of a view at all. The top photo shows downtown Yellowknife, taken a short time ago from the top of Pilots' Monument. The photo below it shows what it's supposed to look like.

At last count, we've had 333 forest fires in the NWT this summer; 54 of them have been put out. Smoke has blanketed the city for days on end. Last Thursday we had a brief thunderstorm. The clouds, combined with the smoke, made the street lights come on at 5 p.m. and dropped a sludgy rain that coated vehicles, houses, vegetation -- you name it.

A week and a half ago, my husband flew out to the East Arm of Great Slave Lake. Tracts of scorched earth, hanging smoke, open flame. A friend who's been in one of the burn areas said the fire came through so hot and so fast that some trees are charred to a crisp on one side, but still green on the other.

Highway 3, the road that connects Yellowknife and other North Slave communities to the rest of Canada, opens and closes, depending on how close the fire is to the road, and/or how much smoke is affecting visibility. People have been stranded in Yellowknife, Behchoko, and Fort Providence. There are all sorts of photos floating around showing the post-apocalyptic landscape that now borders Highway 3. A neighbor who just drove up told me that the view is surreal, with tree stumps the only thing left in some place, while in others there are standing trees, but with the tops and bottoms burned. It's not unusual to see trees with a little bonfire burning at their base scattered along the road.

There have been times, I've heard, when visibility on the road is zero. In Yellowknife, we often live in a sepia-tone bubble. Right now the air tastes like an ashtray and my high-tech asthma meds are barely keeping up. According to Environment Canada, Yellowknife's Air Quality Health Index is currently 15 on a scale of 10. The windows are coated with grime and our clothes reek of smoke. The T-shirt I wore grocery shopping yesterday morning is now buried the bottom of the laundry hamper because it smells so bad. Canadian Tire is pretty much sold out of car wash liquid, as people try to keep the smoke residue and ash from their vehicles. It's been a strange summer, and with no change in the weather forecast, it looks like it's going to continue for some time.

Smoke gets in your eyes . . . and lungs . . . and hair . . .

The Northwest Territories is having its worst fire season on record. So far, there have been 141 fires, 26 of which have been extinguished.

Kakisa, a lovely little community south of Great Slave Lake, was evacuated a few days ago. Although the fire took a run at it, none of its signature log buildings were burned. Things did not go so well at the Hoar Frost River, in the East Arm of the big lake, where a home was burned to the ground.

Highways have been closed and re-opened due to smoke, and the fire has come dangerously close to the fibre optic line that keeps everything from the internet to bank machines working in Yellowknife, N'dilo, Dettah and Behchoko.

Friday night we received a call from the territorial government to see if anyone was out at our cabin along the Ingraham Trail. They were planning to close the road, and wanted to know who was in the area. Memories of the fire that came through in 1998 and wiped out a neighbouring cabin, just a few hundred metres from ours, but left ours standing. A couple of scorched pillars supporting the outhouse was the only damage.

We've had a lot of smoke in town. The photo above shows the hazy shoreline across from our house. That by no means has been the worst. There have been a couple of times when you could only see a few hundred yards.

In the meantime, we wish for rain and cooler weather and hope that things do not get worse.

Yay for the beer barge!

The beer barge has arrived in Yellowknife, heralding the start of summer.

Back in the old timey days, the first barge that made its way across Great Slave Lake to Yellowknife, right after spring break up, carried a supply of beer. Given a lack of roads and the fact beer is heavy (so expensive to fly in), the little mining camp on the edge of the big lake would run dry towards the end of winter. The arrival of the beer barge was an occasion of great joy.

And it still is. We now have a road in, but the re-enactment of the arrival of the barge is a great way to remember Yellowknife's heritage, and as well as acting as a fund raiser for good work of the NWT Mining Heritage Society. We go down to Max Ward's dock in the Old Town, try to guess what time the barge will come in, have a barbecue and drink of (you guessed it) beer. A lovely way to kick off summer.

(Photo: the 2014 beer barge just about to reach shore at Max Ward's dock in Yellowknife's Old Town.)

NorthWords 9: A Brave New North

Last weekend's NorthWords Writers Festival was the usual blur of activity. As we've come to expect, the events were incredibly well organized, the visiting writers were friendly and approachable, and we all had a chance to hear from some really great local talent.

I sometimes blog about NorthWords here, but this time around I provided an article to the NWT Literacy Council's blog.

If you'd like to read about this year's NorthWords, please click on the link above.

Come see us at NorthWords!

The NorthWords Festival is almost here!

This year's festival theme is Brave New North, so it has a speculative fiction feel to it. Yellowknife events will be held from June 5 to 8, with Canada’s Premier Sci Fi Author Robert J. Sawyer as the headliner. Other guest authors include Hayden Trenholm, Liz Westbrook-Trenholm, Dave Bidini, Todd Babiak and Billeh Nickerson.

I will be reading twice during the festival:

Thursday, June 5 - A Touch of Fiction Brown Bag Lunch, 12 noon – 1 pm, Yellowknife Book Cellar

Thursday, June 5 - FLASH: Your 3 Minutes of Fame (Open Mike), 8 – 10 pm, Baker Community Centre (complimentary beverages & dessert)

I've written a new piece of speculative fiction for FLASH, so come on out. We'd love to see you!

Six weeks left for NorthWords mentorship program

The NorthWords Writers Festival is offering a one-on-one online mentorship program until March 31, 2014. The program is open to people living in the Northwest Territories or NWT students attending educational institutions in southern Canada.

Participants can book time to speak with an author about the writing process, publishing, agents . . . anything, really, that strikes the writerly imagination. Participants can also request feedback on a work in progress.

Fees are $20 per hour, which is a really good deal.

Mentors are Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, Laurie Sarkadi, Hayden Trenholm, Richard Van Camp, and Cathy Jewison (yes, me).

For more information, please check the NorthWords website.

Yellowknife's answer to Burning Man

OK, so maybe our little Boxing Day diversion isn't anywhere close to the scope and extravagance of the actual Burning Man festival, but it got me out of the house and standing around in the snow at -32C.

A couple of our neighbours had some dead wood to burn, so they decided to stage a little neighbourhood bonfire down on the ice of Yellowknife Bay. It worked - I'd say about 30 people showed up to celebrate the season and say hello to one another. It was a good bonfire, big enough without going over the top - my dad was a fire safety inspector, so I have a healthy respect for the flame.

My biggest concern was the slamming sound I heard right after they lit the fire. At first I thought it was a rifle shot, but I was early by a few days - in the North, people in some communities fire rifles to welcome the New Year. When I realized the ice under my feet was popping, I shuffled toward the shore. It's the same place I put my kayak into the lake in the summer, so I know it's only a couple feet deep. Except that it's -32, so it's frozen solid and no need to worry. So I shuffled back to the fire.

I lasted for almost an hour before my toes got too cold and I decided to go home. When I left, there was a ring of water around the dying fire and the people in charge were getting ready to shovel snow over the embers.

Wonder what they're planning for next year.

An Evening with Northern Authors

Join us tonight at the Yellowknife Book Cellar for An Evening with Northern Authors, 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. Store-wide discount of 20% and lots of local authors to sign your books. Get a jump on the holiday shopping!

NorthWords 2013: Generation North

Join me, and ever so many other authors, at the NorthWords Writers Festival, which runs from Thursday, May 30, to Sunday, June 2.

Author/Designer Douglas Coupland will headline the festival, which will also include poets Anna Marie Sewell and Reneltta Arluk, and Teller and Writer Sylvia Olsen. Mystery fans can get their fix with Giles Blunt, author of the John Cardinal mystery series, as well as Vicki Delany and Barbara Fradkin, whose work I know from the rather fabulous Ladies Killing Circle anthologies.

I will be reading a new (very short) story at the Flash: Your 3 Minutes of Fame open mike, on Thursday May 30, from 8:00 to 10:00 p.m. at the Greenstone Building. I will also MC A Touch of Fiction, readings by five authors, on Friday, May 31, from noon to 1 p.m., also at the Greenstone.

Be sure to check out the full schedule on the NorthWords NWT website and come out and join us!

Great weekend for the Northern Lights

There's been some news coverage today about the quality of the Northern Lights around Yellowknife this winter - lots of them, and great colours. This past weekend was particularly good, and as luck would have it, we were staying at Blachford Lake Lodge - great scenery and no light pollution. Some of the other folks staying at the lodge had good-quality cameras and took phenomenal photos. These are some I took with my little point-and-shoot.

At least the frost is nice . . .

We've had a serious cold snap in Yellowknife this week - temperatures in the mid-minus 30s for the most part, dipping down to minus forty last night.

As compensation for having to deal with the exposed-flesh-freezes-in-thirty-seconds scenario, we've been treated to a beautiful display of hoar frost on the trees. It's lasted for days, and has built up a nice coating.

And yes, I did freeze my fingers taking these photos, but who could resist?

Oops! I did it again . . .

I’ve been avoiding the Yellowknife Public Library’s semi-annual book sale for the past couple of years. If you could see the library loft in my little house, you’d know why. Books crammed onto the shelves in an unseemly manner, books out of spilling out of Rubbermaid containers on the floor, books stacked on the floor, without benefit of Rubbermaid containers . . . you get the idea.

The library sale always starts on a Thursday night at 6 p.m., and then runs for the next couple of days. It costs five dollars to get into the Thursday night event, so only hard-core bibliophiles show up. As fate would have it, I was working late on the Thursday of the book sale, held earlier this month, and was walking past the City Centre Mall at 6 p.m. What to do, but make my way to the library floor?

There were already a dozen people searching the tables when I showed up. I am particularly interested in northern books, so was making my way to their usual location at the far side of the room. It turned out that the northern section had been relocated, but I noticed a well-known Yellowknife book hunter investigating some oversized volumes nearby. I figured that if the table had caught his interest, the pickin’s must be good. I sidled on over, said hello, and scanned the offerings.

Hallelujah! A copy of The Nahanni Portfolio, a beautiful coffee table book by Pat and Rosemary Keough, long out of print. I grabbed it.

The Nahanni, for those of you who are unaware, is a particularly beautiful area of the Northwest Territories.

I asked one of the organizers the whereabouts of the northern books and was re-directed to the other side of the room. She warned me that the selection was not very big this time. Be that as it may, I was relieved that no one was shovelling books into a cardboard box, as I have seen at 6:05 p.m. on other Thursday night previews.

I was perusing the selection when the organizer, who was standing nearby, blurted out: “The Nahanni Portfolio! Good score!”

A young man had just been turning away from the northern table. He stopped. His head snapped toward me and he zeroed in on the book I was carrying. He gasped. “Where’d you get that?”

I pointed toward the oversized table. He couldn’t take his eyes off the book. “I lived in the Nahanni for many years,” he said. “I have every book ever published about the Nahanni. Except that one.”

As a fellow seeker, I understand the pain of seeing your Holy Grail of books hovering just beyond your grasp. A kind, generous person would have handed it across the table and relieved the poor man’s suffering. Instead, I advised him to check out abebooks.com.

“It’s an online marketplace for used books. You can probably find a copy there.”

His gaze lingered on The Nahanni Portfolio a moment longer, and then he turned away.

It was tricky searching the northern books while keeping a tight grip on The Nahanni Portfolio. It’s a heavy tome, but I didn’t want to set it down for fear others might think it was up for grabs. Most of the books on the northern table were about people who had gone hunting with the Inuit early in the last century. There was also a copy of Yellowknife, by Ray Price and Sunrise on the Mackenzie by Dick Turner, which criticizes the Berger Inquiry. I wanted to be selective, given the book-crowding problem at my house. Giddy from my previous score and unable to make a decision, I took them all, along with a book on weather shamanism. Oops. This is why I try to avoid the book sale.

I paid sixteen dollars for eight books. Now the problem was how to get them home. I walk to work, and my backpack can only hold so much. Fortunately, I was wearing my parka, which has two big pockets, so I stuffed a couple of books in each, and the rest went in the backpack. Walking for a half-hour in the cold and dark, weighed down by twelve pounds of books, is not my idea of a good time but you do what you have to do.

I looked up abebooks.com when I got home, and copies of The Nahanni Portfolio are listed. Canadian bookstores set the prices pretty high, but there appear to be a couple of good copies in the U.S. for a reasonable cost. So buddy, if you’re reading this, check it out. I do understand, after all.

Christmas book sale and signing

Many thanks to the Yellowknife Book Cellar and NorthWords NWT for organizing the third annual Christmas book sale and signing, held this very afternoon. As always, it was a great opportunity to meet with local authors - and more importantly, local readers - pick up some books, and have them signed.

I was seated with Randy Freeman (photo above), author of Stories from Yellowknife a collection of historical snippets about our fair city. Randy used to have a popular weekly history column on CBC radio, which was the genesis of the book. He is planning a series of books with tales from across the North, and many of us are waiting for the next installment.

I also picked up Bill Braden's new book, The Evolution of Canada's Arctic Ice Road: On Good Ice, Lifeline to Gold, Diamonds and the Future. It includes Bill's most excellent photography, so I am looking forward to reading it.

And of course, my own book, The Ugly Truck and Dog Contest and Other Tales of Northern Life, was a part of the action. It was smack-dab in the middle of the book display (photo below).

A bunch of happy authors

It's been a big literary weekend here in Yellowknife. The weekend started on Thursday evening, with the northern launch of Blood and Water, and science fiction anthology about the tussle over resources, set in the near future. Anthology editor Hayden Trenholm, a former (and still honourary)Yellowknifer was in town to read from the collection. It was a lovely evening, courtesy of the Yellowknife Book Cellar.

On Friday evening we launched Coming Home: Stories from the Northwest Territories, published by Great Plains Publications with funding from De Beers Canada, in conjunction with the NorthWords Writers Festival. You can see a number of the authors hamming it up in the photo above, along with contest judges Judy McLinton and John Mutford, NorthWords president David Malcolm and Judith Drinnan, the hard-working and ever-supportive owner of the Yellowknife Book Cellar.

On Saturday a whole whack of us drew inspiration from a workshop conducted by the accomplished and always entertaining Richard Van Camp. Saturday evening, Richard launched his tenth book, a short story collection called Godless but Loyal to Heaven. It's reportedly his darkest book to date. I was at the launch and have a copy, so guess I'll find out in due course.

There's nothing authors like better than to have their work published. It was a very good weekend.

Book launch - a new northern anthology

If you're in Yellowknife this coming Friday, join us for the launch of Coming Home: Stories from the Northwest Territories. Published by Great Plains Publications with funding from De Beers, the anthology features new work by 17 NWT authors (including moi) and is the first contemporary collection of NWT stories.

The launch will be held at the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre Cafe on November 16, from 7 to 9 p.m. The event will include readings, music, refreshments, book sales and signings. See you there!

Dog Island 8 - My Homework

Darkness has descended upon Yellowknife, as it does in the fall. In some parts of the country – where it actually gets dark in the summer – people can occasionally enjoy a drive-in movie. Not an option in a place where the sun glares through your window at two o’clock in the morning.

But the midnight sun of our summer evenings is quickly fading as the inexorable march towards winter continues. Sometimes during this in-between period, if we are very, very lucky, a group of our local film buffs – members of that esoteric organization known as the Dog Island Floating Film Society – will stage Yellowknife’s answer to the drive-in movie.

A week ago Friday, a flotilla of boats – cabin cruisers, utility boats, canoes, kayaks, and – strangely enough – a floating dock, all gathered in the vicinity of Dog Island, out on Yellowknife Bay, to enjoy this year’s offering of films. A huge screen was set up in front of the houseboat anchored in front of Dog Island, while the organizers projected films from a tiny island (basically, a point of rock sticking up from Great Slave Lake) just in front.

There were a number of National Film Board shorts – carefully chosen by the society’s selection jury – along with local offerings about fish camps and the Aboriginal lifestyle. The crowd was enthusiastic, popcorn was distributed to the movie-goers’ boats from one of the local houseboats, people and dogs wanting to go from Point A to Point B to visit friends casually cut through the boats strung together. We had to ask a canoeist to paddle us over to the boat selling T-shirts. It’s a community thing.

It was all good. Until the rain started. Sadly, “Dog Island 8 – My Homework” was cut short by a deluge. The organizers, fearing damage to the rented AV equipment – not to mention electrocution – called it a night a little earlier than we had all hoped.

Many thanks to Terry, Aggie, Andrew and all the other folks who made it happen.

Join me at NorthWords!

The NorthWords Writers Festival starts this week. There's a great line up of writers presenting workshops, participating on panel discussions and reading from their work. I'll be participating in the following events.

Flash! Open Mike

Thursday, May 31, 2012

8:00 to 10:00 p.m.

Atrium, Greenstone Building

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Fiction with Flare (readings)

Friday, June 1, 2012

Noon to 1:00 p.m.

Atrium, Greenstone Building

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Signings with Sizzle

Saturday, June 2, 2012

Noon to 1:30 p.m.

Yellowknife Book Cellar

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Why Fiction? Panel

Saturday, June 2, 2012

1:30 p.m. to 3:00 p.m.

Explorer Hotel, Katimavik B

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Check out the NorthWords schedule for a listing of all the events. It's going to be great!