Photo credit: Allison Seto
Interview by Sarah Feldbloom
I’ve been working on a novel draft about land, identity, and coming-of-age for years – I started actively writing it during my MFA at the University of Guelph. That’s where I met Nadine Sander-Green. The shared desire to investigate questions about these topics through fiction helped create a bond between us, something that has lasted as we’ve continued to write. She and I both have a background in journalism, so when Nadine finished her book, it felt intuitive to interview her about it to find out how she navigated questions similar to the ones I’ve faced moving through my work. We chatted via video portal: Nadine in her most recent hometown of Calgary, and me in my city of origin, Toronto.
Sarah Feldbloom: Nadine, I’m curious – if someone asks you to describe Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit, what’s the synopsis you give them?
Nadine Sander-Green Well, to be honest, it really depends on who the person is. If I’m at the hairdressers and they’re like, oh, you wrote a book, then I’ll try to spit out the quick and dirty version. I would say this young journalist moves to the Yukon. She works for a daily newspaper. She finds herself in a toxic relationship, and it kind of goes downhill from here. But I don’t love that response. I feel like it doesn’t get into the why. Where the interest lays for me is in the land and power and extraction and this sense that people can turn a blind eye to the north.
SF: For those who haven’t been to the Yukon, what do you hope your readers will come to know about it through reading the novel?
NSG: There’s very little written about the Yukon with a contemporary and wider Canadian and global lens. I think folks have this two-dimensional idea of what the north is; it’s almost storybook like, that the Yukon is the northern lights, beautiful, untouched wilderness, and sled dogs, but there’s the nuance of the seasons, and the intensity of the lightness and darkness, and how you see that in the culture and the people. There’s poverty. There’s abuse. There are healthy and unhealthy things about the communities that inhabit it, like anywhere. But I think because so few people get to go there, they don’t see that.
SF: Writing from the position of a settler, and having worked for a year at the local paper in Whitehorse yourself, I’m curious about the strategies you’ve used to tell stories about that land ethically.
NSG: I have examined the conflict I feel about it a lot, especially because of the culture of people moving up there to collect stories for themselves. I understand that hunger because of the part of me that has it too, but it’s another level of extraction – of extracting something from a land that isn’t yours. At the same time, I think that if we all fear telling stories that are not from our birthright land, a lot of stories won’t be told. Most southern Canadians know nothing about the north, but if you look at a map, how much landmass is it taking up? It’s huge, and I find that scale of ignorance scary. So I tried to do it as ethically as possible. I lived up there on and off for a decade, and I’ve worked with the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Association and the local First Nations – the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, Na-Cho Nyäk Dün, and Vuntut Gwitchin First Nations – when the Peel Watershed case went to the Supreme Court. I also collaborated with a sensitivity reader during editing. I feel like I did as much as I could, but I still have ethical concerns over the writing.
SF: Why did you make the choice to feature characters that are southern settlers and their experience of the Yukon?
NSG: Well, for one, the story is about people that are not on their own land and what that means. But, the reality of it is that was my experience, and so I could write from it. I think if I was from the Yukon and could write about the community and was actually from there, that might be an even more powerful story, but I don’t feel like it’s a story I could tell.
SF: There is a character named Charlie in the novel, who is running for premier of the Yukon as the first Indigenous candidate for that role. How did you make the choices that you did about his perspectives?
NSG: I wanted to get to the intensity of the dynamic of young white people who know nothing about the north, like Millicent knows nothing about the north, suddenly being put in a position of power where she can ask Charlie questions that he might not feel are appropriate to answer, culturally. Though he has his back up when we encounter him, I wanted readers to see that he’s open and receptive to the need for the community to work together, but is also making sure that newcomers are doing the work to learn and not just assuming that First Nations people are going to explain everything. I had an experience myself when I was working for the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, when we were heading to Ottawa to the Supreme Court. We were sitting in a coffee shop at the Vancouver airport, and a chief said to me “What do you know? You probably don’t even know what self-government is,” and then asked me to explain it on the spot, which was uncomfortable but totally fair.
SF: Absolutely. Another thing I was curious about is that One of the characters warns Millicent, the protagonist, to be careful of the light. Can you talk about that?
NSG: Yeah, so on the practical level, I wanted to illustrate how the elements in the Yukon can affect us internally. You wake up in the spring and you’re like, oh, I wasn’t okay because of the darkness and the cold; I think people in southern Canada get a bit of that, but it’s really amplified in the north. On a more metaphorical level, what I was writing towards was that we all have darkness inside of us. There’s something about the isolation of the North, for those who aren’t from there, of everyone you know being far away – Millicent’s extended family and the people she grew up with – that leads to having this lack of accountability. It can bring out darkness inside of us that we don’t know we have. Experiencing the extremes of light and darkness is why many people, whether they admit it or not, are drawn to the Yukon, including Millicent. In the summer, when the river breaks, there’s this burst of serotonin in everyone’s brain, and I think that can be just as unhealthy as the darkness. I wanted readers to think about why these characters crave that. Like what is it inside of us that desires this extremeness? Why do people from down south come up to experience that?
SF: Can you tell me more about how the extremes felt to you? Did you crave them?
NSG: The desire to explore them is definitely in me, but I didn’t know it before I went up there. Being in the Yukon, I found that the environment promoted this investigation of how far we can push ourselves – our moods and psyches – and I was really attracted to that.
SF: There’s a section in the book where you use the word godly in relation to the environment, which I found interesting.
NSG: Yeah, I mean, Millicent isn’t religious in any traditional way. Part of her journey is recognizing how powerful the land is and that it shapes the culture of the community and every single person in it. She’s using that word because it’s the only one she has for a feeling that powerful.
SF: Is there something you wanted people to know that came to feel like a sort of private thesis for the novel as you were writing it?
NSG: One of the biggest things that came to me, and that I was writing towards, was this idea that anyone in a relationship can lose their self and their autonomy over their own life. That’s a really frightening thing. It feels surprising when you find yourself in that. But I also think that anyone can navigate their way back to themselves, even though it might seem at some points like an impossibility and that your life is over. We have this sense of control, but in a relationship with an unhealthy power dynamic, anyone can lose that. We go about our daily life thinking “this is who I am; these are my values,” without having an awareness that they can be pulled out from under us – and that’s certainly true when it comes to extraction of the land.
Sarah Feldbloom serves as a fiction editor for The Humber Literary Review. She’s contributed content to Global News, The Toronto Star, and CBC. You can find her writing in This Magazine, The Ex-Puritan, Riddle Fence, Grain, Broken Pencil, and other publications. For the last several years she’s been composing cross-country fiction about youth culture in Canada, and is currently at work on long form projects that explore uses of hydrotherapy and alternative pedagogies.
Nadine Sander-Green grew up in Kimberley, B.C. She has spent the past decade living and writing throughout British Columbia, Alberta, the Yukon and Ontario. Nadine completed her MFA from the University of Guelph and now lives in Calgary. Her stories can be found in The Globe and Mail, Grain, Prairie Fire, carte blanche, Hazlitt and elsewhere. Nadine’s debut novel, Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit, was released with House of Anansi in April.