Dawn Macdonald's poetry collection Northerny offers a fresh take on growing up in the North
The Whitehorse-based poet and researcher discussed her book with Ryan B. Patrick on The Next Chapter
Dawn Macdonald grew up in a cabin 45 minutes away from Whitehorse with no running water nor electricity — it's that experience she dives into in her poetry collection, Northerny.
Northerny is a fresh and unsentimental take on growing up and living in the North. It breaks free of the perception of the North as a way to enlightenment or escape and offers a portrait of the region in all its messiness, beauty and pain.
Macdonald presently lives in Whitehorse and is an institutional researcher at Yukon University. Northerny is her debut book, and her poetry has been published in The Antigonish Review, Canadian Literature, The Fiddlehead, FOLIO, Grain, Literary Review of Canada and The Malahat Review, among others.
The poet and author spoke with The Next Chapter's Ryan B. Patrick about how her own experiences shaped the poetry in the collection.
I've seen that you've mentioned that your parents saw living in the Yukon as an adventure. Is that how you saw it?
Well, it's a bit different when you're growing up. And that's one of those things that I think I come at from a couple different angles in my collection. There's an aspect to the collection that is about that life out there, but there's an aspect that's really about the concept of story and how story can sometimes get in the way of understanding what's really happening or what's real life.
And I say that because as kids, growing up, some of the adults are there on an adventure, but kids aren't on an adventure. We're just living our lives.
We may not really recognize until quite a bit later that we're sort of inside of a story that we didn't know about.- Dawn Macdonald
And we may not really recognize until quite a bit later that we're sort of inside of a story that we didn't know about, that we've got almost these live reenactors who are trying to live as if they're in The Call of the Wild by Jack London, or as if they're in some sort of Robert Service poem. But you're not born having read those things. And so it's only over time that you start to feel this strange sort of secondary consciousness of what's been going on around you and what's the nature of the reality you've been living in.
Northerny is a very powerful and poetic look at life in the North. How did this idea for the collection come to you?
It's interesting. I think I really resisted writing something that's about the North, and I think that's common for people from the North, that we see a lot of the art that's presented as being 'northerny' and sometimes we find it quite boring or it's hard for us to relate to. And that's because it's often coming from that southern perspective of what seems exciting to someone who's just arrived in the North, when they come in and see the northern lights for the first time. And it's so amazing and they had some kind of journey of self-discovery.
So I think I really resisted that for a long time. But over time I started to see how as I was writing, the natural world just kept coming up in my poetry. Animals, birds, weather, landscape. That stuff is there because it's just so deep inside of who you are. And so I started watching how that was coming out and thinking, well, I think I do have a story to tell, but it's almost a different take or a flip on that main story about the North. It's how does that look coming from the inside, seeing what it looks like from the outside and trying to merge those two together.
There's a poem in the collection called "At Hidden Lakes" and it starts with the lines, "The pain in our bones brings the animals out. Now our emotions ease into animal time." So what does that poem and by extension, the whole collection, say about pain and healing?
That poem is speaking a bit about aging. So it's taken me quite a while to bring out my first collection. I'm almost 50. My husband and I have a little lake nearby that we sometimes go to visit and there are beavers in the lake, muskrats in the lake. We would spend time sitting by the lake and we would see that the beavers would, over time, become pretty friendly to us. They would come out and swim near us, let us make eye contact with one another, and we talked about how as we get older, we are less of a threat in the way that we move through the woods, but some of the animals can see that we're slow, that we're not moving as fast as we did, and that it's a bit safer to engage with us as the creatures that we are.
There is so much beauty without having to always clean up the mess.- Dawn Macdonald
Pain is such a reality in all of our lives and it's such a reality in the North. I had alluded to the high levels of violence and addictions in the North, the really messy lives that people live here. But I think there is so much beauty without having to always clean up the mess. I'm really drawn towards art that's not so clean and not so polished and that shows us some of those realities of things.
I like that. And your poetry looks at life in Yukon unvarnished and authentic. Fundamentally, what should people not from the North know about it?
I struggle with that word authentic because there's so many realities and this is just one of them. I think people not from the North should know that it's beautiful here. It's a mess. If you come up here, you're not our saviour. If you come up here, in some sense you're taking a job from someone here who probably could do it with appropriate training and development.
We're really prone to bringing people in to do jobs instead of hiring from our own people. So, to know that you're having an opportunity to connect with an incredible landscape with some really interesting people.
It's your story, but it isn't just your story. It's the story of the people who are here.- Dawn Macdonald
It's your story, but it isn't just your story. It's the story of the people who are here. It's the story of the First Nations. It's the story of this land and you are welcome here.
We'll probably have a good time together. But it's a complicated story.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
