A Yukon Mosaic: A Collection of Prose, Poetry, and Photographs
Text by Eleanor Millard
Photos by Robertson Bales, Josh Barichello, Boris Dobrowolsky, Dennis Senger and Steve Wilson; and images from the Yukon Archives
Self-published
53 pages
$25
Eleanor Millard’s story is a familiar one. She came to the Yukon in 1965 and got captured. She has mostly been here since, for nearly 60 years, living first in Dawson City, then in Carcross; and now Whistlebend, in Whitehorse. (Her Wikipedia page is not up-to-date on that.)
She has lived and worked in other places, and you can read about some of those (mostly in Central American nations) in her 2007 memoir, Journeys Outside and In. This book, her fifth since 2002’s River Child, is about the Yukon, as its title says, so it reflects elements of her various occupations over six decades.
She has been a barmaid, a social worker, politician, Minister of Education, consultant and, most recently, an English language tutor.
A Yukon Mosaic is a mixed bag of words and pictures, which book designer Sibell Hackney has assembled into a pleasing arrangement of material. There are 19 stories, some fiction, some memoir.
They deal with travel in the North, with friendships, with observations of the natural world and with reflections on the differences between the Yukon and Alaska.
“The prose writings are mostly based on my personal experiences and are basically true events with some creative touches,” she writes.
There are 26 poems of various lengths, some less than a dozen lines, some taking up a page. She tells me that most of these were originally written, some decades ago, and that she reworked them for this book, rediscovering a form of writing she hadn’t used for some time. She’s nervous about them, but she doesn’t need to be. Raymond Chandler once advised that a writer should never throw anything away—that it might prove to be useful later.
The poems celebrate the landscape, animals, birds and seasons, as well as poetic renditions of Indigenous stories she was told. Some are about people she has known and places that have had an impact on her.
She’s finding that it’s the poems she uses when she does public readings. They are self-explanatory snapshots that don’t need a lot of commentary to set them up.
There are 73 colour photographs by previously unpublished photographers: Robertson Bales, Josh Barichello, Boris Dobrowolsky, Dennis Senger and Steve Wilson. Hackney has managed to arrange them from two-page spreads to snapshots embedded in the text so that they seem to be a commentary on the words.
A final six black-and-white images have been selected from the Yukon Archives.
Millard has been touring her books around to various readings, with some more adventures along the way. She happened to read at the Dawson Community Library on September 19, the same night that half-a-dozen mudslides closed the Klondike Highway near both Rock Creek and the Dempster Corner, and so she ended up spending a few extra days here until it was safe to travel again. You just never know what might happen next.
