Dispatches from Canada’s North: A Fort Smith author on finding a place to call home

“He wears his childhood in the Eastern Arctic like a caribou wears its antlers,” Hélèna Katz writes of her husband Mike. “It’s not just him that I love — it’s his northern-ness, too.”

It’s one of several honest, funny and tender observations and anecdotes in Katz's new book, Dispatches from Canada’s North, a collection of more than 40 stories about her life in the Northwest Territories after moving from Montreal almost two decades ago.

The stories range from wolves and bears at the door to moose-hide scraping with Dene women eager to share their skills, long-distance grocery runs, and the steep learning curve of moving from a large city to a community of just under 2,500.

“In the city, you're really disconnected from what's around you,” she told CBC. “Here, it was learning about that unbroken connection between the land, the people, and the culture, and how all of those things are all intertwined.”

Katz moved to Fort Smith in 2006, but said the stories in the book started long before that. She had travelled to the territories several times before the move, which she said helped her slowly build a connection to the North.

On a trip along the Dempster Highway as a travelling writer, she had a strong, physical reaction to the landscape, an experience she writes about in the book and said has stayed with her to this day.

“I was ‘at one with the land,’ an Inuk man from Rankin Inlet, Nunavut, later explained when I described the sensation,” she wrote in the book.

Before moving to Fort Smith, Katz was an established author and journalist, she worked at the Montreal Gazette, freelanced for national magazines, and wrote several non-fiction books, including The Mad Trapper: The Incredible Tale of a Famous Canadian Manhunt.

She also has a severe visual impairment and can’t see clearly beyond a few feet, something she said shaped the way she observed and wrote about her new home.

That’s how the book began. Before she ever considered turning it into a collection of stories, Katz spent three years sending monthly letters from the North to friends who kept asking what life was really like up here.

“I would pick a topic each month and then just write a whole story around it,” she said. “About things that were different for me and how I was adjusting.”

The mailing list grew as those letters were forwarded to friends of friends. And when they suggested she write a book, Katz looked back at them and found the letters captured the strangeness, humour and everyday realities of life above the 60th parallel.

Many of the stories focus on the unusual parts of life in the North. One essay describes a grocery run to Grande Prairie, where a friend asked her to pick up a TV, which “seemed pedestrian,” she wrote after another friend requested ten boxes of frozen mice for their pet snake.

“So our little beer cooler, now to me, is forever known as the mouse cooler,” she said.