Inside Alison McCreesh’s Degrees of Separation

Yellowknife graphic novelist Alison McCreesh is back with Degrees of Separation, a 400-page book documenting a decade of life in the North.

The book is launched from 5-8pm on Friday, April 5 at the Yellowknife Visitors Centre, where an exhibition of McCreesh’s work will open – and where McCreesh has postcards at the ready for fans to send snail mail to friends.

Having drawn some 2,000 images for the book over a span of four years, McCreesh told Cabin Radio the exhibition and the postcards are a way to give some of that artwork a second life.

“Part of the exhibition is exploring ways of taking the artwork out of the book and getting us to interact with it differently, without it being within that narrative context or getting distracted by words,” she said.

“One of the ways I chose to play with that is to make a series of postcards. I’m hoping to get the word out and tell people: bring an address, bring five addresses, bring as many addresses as you want.

“You can pick up as many of these postcards as speak to you and send them to someone. I’ll have a little mailbox there and you can just throw them in.”

The postcards contain everyday scenes from Yellowknife that made their way into the book.

A handful brought by McCreesh to Cabin Radio showcase the likes of the downtown A&W, Vietnamese Noodle House, the digital clock and temperature gauge that star in many a tourist’s downtown photo, and a dog relaxing in old Yellowknife’s ramshackle Woodyard area.

Ramshackle was the title of McCreesh’s earlier graphic novel, which documented her opening summer in Yellowknife and now serves as a form of introduction to the city for newcomers.

Degrees of Separation follows that up by covering McCreesh’s life in the North from 2008 to 2018, starting with her decision to hitchhike to the Yukon.

McCreesh began working on the book after a planned residency in Angoulême – a French city that hosts a major comics festival, and which McCreesh calls “the world capital of graphic novels” – fell through when the pandemic began.

“For reasons still unclear to me, I decided to proceed and keep on moving forward with it,” she said.

“I wrote this book mixed in with my life and a pandemic, and then a third baby and everything else, over the course of about four years.”

She hopes locals appreciate the book for the shared experience of life in the North, like visits to small communities, having kids in the North or seeing friends move away.

The second audience, she says, is formed of people “who’ve never even given the North any thought – not because they’re not nice people, just because it hasn’t really been on their radar.”

“Maybe if they think about it, they think of this kind of monolithic, dark, cold, uninhabited or barely inhabited place,” she said.

“I hope people get a sense of how diverse the North is. It’s an enormous land. Even within the NWT, there’s such a variety of landscapes and demographics, cultures and histories. I hope it shows people that people live here in all kinds of different ways.”

The title Degrees of Separation refers to the degrees of the 60th Parallel, beyond which the book is set, and the separation between the North and southern Canada.

It’s also a play on the six degrees of separation said to connect any two humans.

“We’re all connected in different ways. I’m using it in that sense, too, to remind us of how interconnected everything is, how many connections there are between these different norths,” McCreesh said of the many communities and cultures that span the Yukon, NWT and Nunavut.

There’s a fourth meaning, too: the degrees on a thermometer.

“This wasn’t my original intent but, as I was working on the book, climate change became more and more at the forefront to me. Even though that’s not where I was going with that, I think if it brings to mind the idea of degrees and warming, that would also be relevant,” McCreesh said.

The book fast-forwards from 2018 to end with a page or two dedicated to 2023’s wildfires and the evacuation of Yellowknife.

“I was wrapping up the book by mid-August, and there’s a bit of talk of climate change and how it’s affecting small northern communities in the epilogue. It felt like what I was writing about was all hitting very close to home,” McCreesh said.

“Before I managed to get it fully wrapped up, we had to mobilize and evacuate. When we got back, it was so front-of-mind – it made what I had written even more real and relatable, and I felt compelled to throw it in.”

Degrees of Separation, published by Conundrum Press, is now available from Yellowknife Books and other booksellers.

The exhibition, presented by YK ARCC, is set to run through May at the visitors’ centre.