From culture shock to finding home, Hélèna Katz launches new book

Where is home? Fort Smith-based author Hélèna Katz’s new book, Dispatches from Canada’s North, explores that question.

The memoir features more than 40 stories about the Northwest Territories as Katz leaves downtown Montreal for a small alpaca farm on the outskirts of Fort Smith.

When she first moved to the NWT in 2006, Katz, who was a journalist at the time, said friends in Montreal would ask what it was like living in the North. So she began writing monthly letters, a practice she kept up for a few years.

“I realized at some point that what I had been doing was tracing my own journey through the three main stages of culture shock,” she told Cabin Radio.

“You arrive here and you’re really excited because there’s lots of new things to learn and to see and to do – and so that’s sort-of the ‘enchanted north’ phase. Then at some point, culture shock starts to set in. And that culture shock can be a positive thing, but there can also be challenges as well.

“Then the final stage is finding home, which I did.”

Katz recalled she had a cat with kidney disease and, unlike in Montreal, could not walk two blocks to a veterinary clinic to pick up medication. She said she made arrangements with a veterinarian who would come to the community every six to eight weeks.

While her animals are treated by the same medical team, Katz said she became accustomed to not seeing the same doctor at her own medical appointments.

“We rely quite heavily on locums in Fort Smith so, at some point, I started to want to call every doctor I saw Dr Locum,” she said.

Katz said she left Montreal all those years ago as she had fallen in love with the North – and then a northerner.

She described “a magical moment” she had while standing on the edge of the Dempster Highway in the Yukon one fall, during one of her first trips north.

“As I looked straight ahead to where the land meets the sky, I suddenly felt this powerful sensation coming up through the ground, through my feet and swirling up through my body,” she said. “In that instant, all of the boundaries between me and the land completely dissolved.”

Katz said when she shared that experience with an Inuk from Rankin Inlet, he told her: “You were one with the land.”

“After that, just that connection to the North kept calling me back,” she said.

“Over a period of 10 years I made a number of trips and then decided that, you know, Montreal was no longer home. It didn’t feel like home any more and I needed to find out if the North was where home was for me. And, as it turned out, the North is where my home is.”

Another story included in Dispatches from Canada’s North involves an afternoon Katz spent with a group of Dene women in Fort Simpson, scraping a moose hide.

“It was a powerful moment of understanding that connection, that unbroken connection between the land, the people and the culture,” she said. “In the city, you’re very kind-of divorced from everything, siloed.”

Katz said the book also includes funny stories, like the time she was planning to make the more than 10-hour drive to Grande Prairie to do some shopping and someone asked her to pick up frozen mice for their pet snake.

“Forever after that, the little beer cooler was, to me, now known as the mouse cooler,” she said.

Reflecting on home

Katz said she hopes readers of her book will be inspired to reflect on their own journeys and sense of home.

“Some people come here for a period of time and when they talk about home, they’re referring to where they’re from originally,” she said.

“For other people, they put down roots here and this is where they plan to live for the rest of their lives and they’ve fallen in love with the North.”

Katz will launch Dispatches from Canada’s North at the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre café from 3pm on Sunday, November 16. The event will feature a conversation about the book and a “lively version” of northern Jeopardy, crossed with CBC’s The Debaters, involving willing audience participants.

“When I have book launches, I would like to have something fun – not just me reading, but I would like to have something fun for the audience to do that is connected to the book,” Katz said.

A second book launch will take place at the Northern Life Museum and Cultural Centre in Fort Smith on Friday, November 21 at 7pm.

Katz said an exhibit of some of her felted artwork inspired by stories in the book will also launch at the museum that evening. The art exhibit will also be displayed at Yellowknife’s Northern Arts and Cultural Centre in March.

Beyond the book launches, Katz said she will have copies of Dispatches from Canada’s North, alongside artwork, for sale at the NWT Arts Handmade Holiday Market at the Explorer Hotel on Saturday, November 15.

Katz said people will also be able to find her book at The Cabin gift shop at Yellowknife’s airport, Ring’s Pharmacy in Hay River, and Wally’s Drugstore and Northern Life Museum and Cultural Centre in Fort Smith.

It is also available as an ebook.