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Vo l . 2 , N o . 1 Janet Levin
proofreaders, and escaped my own weary eyes in the last read before production. Like the time I discovered at a dinner reading of my first book that my index-generating software application, which didn’t include first names, requiring that I insert them manually, one at a time, in the late night hour before the final deadline, had left me vulnerable to an easily prevented error. While manually adding the first names of the famous personages listed in the index pages, I flubbed the first name of a former Alaska attorney general – Charlie Cole – substituting in my late night edit session the first name of a college professor, the moral philosopher Robert Coles, who shared with him the better part of a last name! And so the first edition is forever blemished by the listing of a fictitious attorney general named Robert Cole; the eternal nature of an egregious typo is thus locked forever in stone, or the print equivalent – printed in bulk, bound, and preserved deep down in library basement stacks the world over. Luckily, second editions come along eventually, and the folly is eventually forgotten, at least until the next moment of the author’s unmasking reveals another preventable typological error, a momentary lapse in diligence and a reminder in the fallibility of man. When I was little, I always wanted to be a writer. I just knew it in my bones. When the mood would strike and the pen made its magical connection to the pad of paper, it would take on a life of its own, as if the inner psyche found its voice and could leap past all the filters of mind and the nonsense taught in school about how there needs to be a set structure, an intro, body and conclusion. I never
understood why. If the structure is imposed, does it not mold the thought itself, transforming it to fit? It’s like the youngish generation borne of a world of PowerPoint slides; their ideas risk being gutted in the constant effort to fit the next bullet point. God help the Twitter generation; though it may yield a resurgence in haiku, it certainly increases the pressure to contain expression to fit an ever smaller template. My favorite writing platform, even in this age of Tablet computers and Netbooks, is still to sit at our kitchen table, somewhere between the midnight hour and the first hint of dawn, and let the pen and paper make their own intimate connection when all else are asleep. In this darkest, loneliest hour the words come alive, dreamlike to dance on the page. In these hours I have long imagined having the creativity and passion to spin fictional narratives, and when younger had the energy if not the vision. But as I get older, I write more slowly, and find my words remain constrained by what is and was. Each time I put pen to paper, I am pulled back toward historical truth; that is my constant. And so, while fiction continues to elude me, I have instead elected to write historical nonfiction, a world that is as unknown and mysterious before discovery as that imagined by the novelist. II: Cold Facts, Harder Truths Many years ago, I lived down in the Mackenzie Delta, wearing the hat of a small town journalist, with the coolest job in the world, publishing a bilingual newspaper serving the Inuvialuit villages of the Western Arctic, with half the page in English and the other half in Inuvialuktun, trying to balance two worlds, two traditions, at a fascinating but uneasy crossroads. By day I was a journalist, but by night I was fast becoming an amateur historian, learning as much about the grand sweep of northern history so I would understand the issues of the day with greater depth and clarity. In the course of being a journalist, from time to time I would report on what might be viewed by political elites as bad news, the kind they hoped might never be written – stories of local corruption, land claims money wrongly spent, placed into the pockets of a few board members and not the people for whom it was meant. The more I read and the more I learned, though, the more I came to understand that these setbacks were temporary, that these early scandals in the post-land claim era appear to be a common growing pain across the entire North, and