Essays Inspired by Wanderlust
In the sixth of the 66 essays in this book, written when she was 33 years old, Angela Long begins by giving us a long list…
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A Proper Dawson Send-off
Writers-in-residence at Berton House have only two responsibilities, aside from being inspired by the place. They are to do public readings.
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The Story Behind the T.E.S.T. Program
Dan talks with John Firth about his award winning new book, North Star: The Legacy of Jean-Marie Mouchet in his latest The Bookshelf column
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Dawson City Summer Concert Series
Dan recaps the Dawson City Summer Concert Series for us from the 2025 season with a nice write up and lots of great pictures
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A Paranormal Mystery
In the summer of 1997, Andrew Pyper stayed at Berton House. It was his first taste of the North and he was hooked.
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Fractured By Karin Slaughter
Dan Davidson reviews Karin Slaughter’s book Fractured, the second in a twelve part series about Georgia investigator Will Trent
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Dawson Moments
It was quite exciting to have our town make The National news two nights in the same week. Dawson has many moments that are worth noticing.
It Takes Courage To Overcome Your Fears
In retirement, Theresa has returned to an activity that she enjoyed when she was young and has dabbled in over the years: writing.
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Patti Flather Wonders…
Patti Flather, one of the mentors at this year’s Young Authors Conference, is probably best known these days as a playwright.
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Reflections On An Attempted Murder And Recovery
Knife: Meditations After an Attempted MurderKnife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder At quarter to eleven on August 12th, 2022, on a sunny Friday morning in
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Writing And Drawing With A Personal Touch
The 42nd annual Yukon Young Authors’ Conference will take place May 1 and 2 at F.H. Collins Secondary School I think my most important advice
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A Chat With Chelsea Vowel
Since Covid, she has embraced planning and outlines My work is all about trying to understand the world and communicate what I understand to others
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A Yukon Company Wins An Antarctic Contract
Yukon’s Pelly Construction Builds for the British Antarctic Survey Thirty-four years ago Pelly Construction built a runway and airstrip for the British Antarctic Survey at
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Kevin Sylvester Likes To Plan His Books
The annual Young Authors Conference will take place May 2 and 3 as part of the week of the Yukon Writers’ Festival “I always try
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Tales Of A Persistent Ghost And A Saucy Parrot
Dan Davidson reviews John Firth’s book: The Caribou Hotel In spite of the main title and the fact that the chapters keep circling back to
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Surprised By Joy – A Love Story
Rick Karp honors his wife’s extraordinary life in Creating Lasting Impact: The Amazing Life of Joy Esther Karp.
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On The Road With Rick Mercer
The Road Years. Rick Mercer’s wild adventures across Canada. From chainsaw carving to musical legend and heartfelt tales from coast to coast.
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Coffee House Report
Music, camaraderie, and coffee! Dan Davidson highlights the monthly Dënäkär Zho Coffee House, a lively Dawson City tradition.
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Watching The River Flow
Ice bridges are vital for life in Dawson City, but their formation is never guaranteed. Dan Davidson chronicles the trials and triumphs.
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To Seek for Eldorado By Sam Holloway
Sam Holloway has spent most of his life in the far northwest or the High Arctic. Prospecting for gold often alone, in the Yukon and NWT
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Her Last Goodbye, by Rick Mofina
Rick Mofina, who lives in Ottawa, is a USA Today bestselling author of more than thirty crime fiction thrillers including Her Last Goodbye
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Decaying Memories: A Poem
I remember the steamboats the old man said. I remember them coming in spring. I remember the paddlewheels churning the water and bringing…
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Becoming A Writer Was A Practical Decision
Michael Gilio is no stranger to the Yukon, having visited innumerable times with his wife, Amy Sloan, whom he credits with providing…
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Kirsten Madsen Writes To Meet Her Ideal Readers
Kirsten Madsen will be filling in for Ivan Coyote during one of the latter’s two days at this year’s Young Authors’ Conference…
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Carrie Mac Writes What She Would Like to Read
Carrie Mac’s stint as a mentor at this year’s Young Authors’ Conference is a return engagement, as she was here in 2013.
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Keeping ‘The Percy’ Alive!
There won’t be a Percy DeWolfe Memorial Mail Race this year, but to keep the idea alive, the smaller-than-usual new board…
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It’s Bazaar Season In Dawson
Dawson ushers in the secular pre-Christmas season just before the ecclesiastical season of Advent, with several weekends of craft bazaars…
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Tr’ondëk-Klondike Achieves World Heritage Status
Twenty-six years after it was first proposed by Pierre Berton, in 1997, and 19 years after it was officially submitted by Canada…
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Another Successful Season Of Summer Music Outdoors
A summer’s worth of free noon-hour concerts at the Front Street Gazebo has come to an end for the third year in a row.
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Tales From Before And After The Gold Rush
The extreme focus on the drama of the Klondike Gold Rush tends to obscure the stories about the gold seekers…
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The Two Levels Of Authors On Eighth
Once again, this year, the annual Klondike Visitors Association (KVA) Authors on Eighth writing contest has two entry levels…
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Having Fun With Animal Names
I don’t know about other languages, but English tends to have names for groups of creatures. These are called collective nouns…
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Tales Of ‘An Alternative Klondike’
I’m not just sure when David Thompson started writing his tales of an alternative Klondike, but he began submitting entries…
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There Is Much to Savour In This Memoir
This book tests my understanding of the word calamity, which is usually defined as “a state of deep distress or misery.”
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A Yukon Mosaic
Eleanor Millard’s story is a familiar one. She came to the Yukon in 1965 and got captured. She has mostly been here since…
A Peek At The Yukon During ‘The Quiet Years’
Aside from just being a darn good read, this book covers a period about which very little has been written.
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Looking Inside the Insider
Christopher Ross writes about his journalism experiences at the Dawson City Insider from 1997-1999 and what happened after.
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The Bookshelf: When Dawson Made Hockey History
The Dawson Challengers had a dream to contest for the Dominion Hockey Challenge Cup (better known as the Stanley Cup.
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Dawson’s Fridays Are A Time For Music!
Fridays are live music days in Dawson, this summer, with concerts at Riverside Park Gazebo and at the KIAC (Dënäkär Zho) Ballroom.
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Spring Reflections in Dawson City
In a previous edition of the KK, I commented on the amount of snow we received here this winter, how it narrowed and raised the
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Meanderings: The Steeles wandered at random around the world
Peter Steele begins by defining his terms: “’Meander’ reads ’To wander at random’” This is very definitely what happens in this book,
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Exploring fading memories at the ODD Gallery
The opening of the recent exhibit at the KIAC ODD Gallery was unique with a mixed live & virtual talk for the Gathering/Tethering exhibit.
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A Klondike Korner: Sometimes life imitates art
Sometimes art imitates life. Sometimes life imitates art. There are two really clear illustrations of this idea in Dawson City at the moment.
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The Bookshelf: Seeking Redemption on the Yukon Quest Trail
Journey of 1000 Miles chronicles Hank DeBruin and Tanya McCready-DeBruin’s attempts at the Iditarod and the Yukon Quest.
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Robert Service’s great-granddaughter honours her ancestor
Robert Service’s great-granddaughter honours her ancestor. Charlotte Service-Longépé wrote Robert W. Service La Piste de l’Imaginaire.
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Klondike Korner: DCMF 2021 is reborn in a smaller, later version this COVID year
September 10 to 12. DCMF is a bite sized three day event spending days in the Waterfront Park Gazebo and nights in the Palace Grand Theatre.
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The Bookshelf: A poetic memoir of northern travels
Poetry with a bit of a difference, it has a strong ecological bias. Goodbye, Ice: Arctic Poems by Lawrence Millman
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Timelapse scenery at the ODD Gallery
Dan Starling’s exhibit “Unsettled histories: the transformation of a print” imagines the landscape of a Rembrandt evolving over centuries
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Friday is Concert time at the Gazebo
Most Fridays this summer, whether there is rain or shine, it will be concert time at noon at the Front Street Gazebo, in Dawson City.
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Learning how to cope with fear in overdrive
By the time you’re reading this column, the paperback version of Eva Holland’s fascinating study of fear will be out from Penguin Canada.
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Spring clearances in Dawson
In some ways, our streets are better in the winter. Spring makes it harder to get from the street to the boardwalks. Dawson is not a friendly town for people with mobility issues.
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Live music returns to Dënäkär Zho
COVID-19 pretty much shut down live music in Dawson in 2020. This year the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture (Dënäkär Zho), in partnership with the Dawson City Music Festival, has been trying hard to bring some of it back over the last few months.
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The Ice pool Contest is a go for 2021
The Ice Pool Lottery, officially known these days as the Dawson IODE Ice Guessing Contest, has been around in various forms since 1896. The Dawson Chapter of the IODE officially took over running the event in 1940 and has managed to keep it going in spite of pandemics and other natural disasters.
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An indigenous fable for all ages
Teiakwanahstahsontéhrha’ (We Extend the Rafters) is the latest exhibition at Dawson City’s ODD Gallery. The machina animation style movie is projected on the east wall at the far end of a metal frame structure which mimics the look of an Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) style longhouse.
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Dublin Gulch
The present book, one of several projects Michael Gates has had on the go since he retired, is one he was commissioned to write by Victoria Gold, the owners of the Eagle Gold Mine.
Why did it have to be snakes?
Book Review: Bury Your Horses by Dan Dowhal
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Navigating Dawson’s streets last summer
We are in the third season of a mammoth upgrade project to deal with the deficiencies in the town’s sewer and water infrastructure. That has meant that getting around town has been interesting enough for those of us who live here. For visitors, it’s probably been a mite of a mystery.
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Jack London imagined a virus
What’s of particular interest to readers in this year of the COVID-19 pandemic, is that London managed to predict the spread of a virulent disease three years before the so-called Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918.
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The Klondike Gold Rush Steamers
In these days of highways and 1000-year level flood dikes, it’s easy to forget that the best way to get to Dawson used to be by sternwheelers. While most of the stampeders made their way here in small boats and rafts in 1898, a sizeable number cruised to the fledgling town from St. Michael’s, Alaska, in riverboats and steamers and, once the White Pass chugged into Whitehorse, still more hopped on boats from there.
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A delayed Short Film Festival will happen in October
After a few months of working at home, Dan Sokolowski is finally back in his southeast corner space at the KIAC (or Dënäkär Zho) Building.
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Authors on Eighth overcome COVID-19
Each year there is a writing contest called Authors on Eighth connected to an annual walk along the Writers’ Block along Eighth Avenue in Dawson City.
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Pandemic Parades Take to the Streets
Summer is generally the time for two major parades in Dawson: Canada Day in July and Discovery Day in August. The latter is the larger of the two events, but neither one takes any longer than 15 or 20 minutes to pass any given vantage point.
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An ABC Aviation Adventure
There are all sorts of ABC books out there, but they are seldom as focussed on a particular subject as this one, which manages to do the job of introducing all the letters while remaining firmly in the air.
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From South to North with the Erebus
Let’s begin at the end. “On 9 September 2014, at a press conference in Ottawa, Prime Minister Harper announced to the world that one of
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Dawson in the deep freeze
The most annoying thing about being fully dressed to walk outside at -45 degrees Celsius is that I can’t see my feet.
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The Percy DeWolfe committee is ready for its last race, but the event will carry on
In its present form, the Percy DeWolfe Memorial Mail Race is a 210 mile (338 km) run from Dawson to Eagle, Alaska, and back. If you can do that, then you can try your hand at the Yukon Quest or the Iditarod.
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Seventy tales from the Yukon, Atlin and Tibet
Peter Steele’s book arrived on my desk at just about the time in my cataract affliction when I was unable to read it, the white
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Dawson’s Thaw di Gras
Dawson celebrates almost spring, sort of end of winter, with a local event called Thaw di Gras. An obvious play on New Orleans’ Mardi Gras.
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Hiking to Siberia
Lawrence Millman has written 16 books, including Hiking to Siberia. The latter is the subject of this column and the source of most of the stories Millman read to an attentive audience at the Alchemy Café when he visited Dawson City.
Dawson entertains itself at monthly coffee houses
It’s Coffee House/Open Mic time at the KIAC Ballroom once again. This is a monthly event that usually takes place on the first Saturday of
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Dawson Invitational Volleyball Tournament begins another 40 years after celebrating the creator’s last winter
The next 40 years of the Dawson Invitational Volleyball Tournament (DIVT) kicks off on Oct. 25 in Dawson City. The DIVT celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2018 with a special mass assembly to honour the years of success and the two teachers who started the whole thing.
Time marches on, but backwards sometimes
Looking west – that hill cuts an hour off an hour of direct sunlight every fall There’s a significant date that is fast approaching. No,
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Missives from One Bucket Creek
For 20 years, from 1994 to 2014, Al Pope produced a regular column for the Yukon News. It was called Nordicity. He said it started because
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Changes are not always welcome, even if they are historically accurate
Sometime before the beginning of winter, the old CIBC building on Front Street will turn grey and I’m quite certain that some people will be
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A stroll along the Writers’ Block
Dawson City would not be nearly as well-known as it is without the writings of three men who lived here for parts of their lives.
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Friends of the Palace Grand plan 21 shows this summer
The Friends of the Palace Grand (FotPG) has existed for a number of years. Originally under the umbrella of the Dawson City Arts Society (DCAS),
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Want to win gold for your writing?
The winners of the contest are announced annually at the final stop of the Authors on Eighth Walking Tour, which always concludes at Berton House
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How real life can inform fiction
In the course of his Massey Lecture series in 2013 (published as Blood: The Stuff of Life, from House of Anansi Press), Lawrence Hill used a
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Joanna Lilley feels most herself when she’s writing
Joanna Lilley has always loved reading. She’s one of those people that you’ll find in the theatre reading a book before the movie begins. It fits
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Consumed by craft
Heather O’Neill is pleased to be returning to the Yukon this year for another engagement during the Yukon Writers’ Festival and Young Author’s Conference. She
The saga of Dawson’s street clearances
The melting season is upon us with a vengeance, spoiling all the plans I had for a series of columns about street clearances in Dawson.
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Sigmund Brouwer says put your character in a problem situation
With over 100 titles and four million books in print, Sigmund Brouwer is a bestselling author of books for children, young adults and adults. He
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David Geary says to “be hungry for other people’s stories”
David Geary is no stranger to the Yukon. He was here to work with Gwaandak Theatre a year ago last February. Now he’s looking forward
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Watching the River Thaw
Members of the Yukon Order of Pioneers (YOOP) have placed the Ice Pool Tripod on the ice of the Yukon River and the tickets for
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Fear should never be a deterrent
Jan Redford describes herself as a compulsive journal writer who always knew that she would like to be an author. “I remember filling pages with
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What is the Yukon Writers’ Festival?
In 1990, a number of organizations joined together to merge the Young Authors’ Conference (YAC) and the National Book Festival into the more far-reaching Yukon
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Dawson City International Short Film Festival celebrates two decades of short films
Dan Sokolowski is about three weeks away from launching the 20th edition of the Dawson City International Short Film Festival (DCISFF) when we sit down
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A Commemoration of the Yukon’s WWI Fallen Soldiers
This slender volume contains brief biographies and photographs of the men from the Yukon who fought and died for Canada between 1914 and 1918. Seven
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The Aurora Trail offers a second set of house concerts
The second half of the Aurora Trail lineup of the Home Routes program began in February, with three house concerts planned between Feb. 1 and
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Thaw di Gras is Coming Soon
[two_third] It’s perhaps still a bit wintery by March 15, but that is the annual date when Dawson City celebrates what is nearly the end
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A Trip to the City of the Lost – Returning to Rockton
Somewhere in the Boreal Forest, there is a small community called Rockton. It’s sometimes called the City of the Lost because it’s inhabited by people who, for
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Ready for Christmas Eve
The cast including shepherds, angels, wise persons and citizens. PHOTO: Dan Davidson What would Christmas Eve be without carols and a pageant. All are
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Nature’s little automatic defroster
One of the most annoying things about the fall and spring seasons is the need to scrape the frost off your vehicle’s windows before you
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Murder and romance in small-town Alaska
With over 225 novels to her credit, Nora Roberts is a bestseller by any definition. Wikipedia says the books are all romance novels, so I’m
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Autumn sunlight and shadows
We’re past the halfway mark in October as I write this. The sun rose today at 9:16 and will set at 18:49 (6:49 for most
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It’s beginning to look a lot like … (you know)
Pre-Christmas in the Klondike, It’s a season of bazaars and open houses that lead up to the actual holidays.
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John Henderson: Celebrating the Great White North
When he arrived in Yellowknife, back in 2004, with his wife, Serena, and baby daughter, Janessa, it didn’t occur to John Henderson that he might
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Home Routes provides a cozy evening of music
The 2018–19 season of Home Routes Concerts kicked off in September with a tour by country singer Tim Hus, accompanied by his sideman of 15
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Where the Trump family fortune got started
“I’m a fifty-pager,” says Whitehorse writer Pat Ellis, commenting on her preference for producing short history booklets. Her latest, Financial Sourdough Starter Stories—“The Trump Family,
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How an email exchange became a 15-year blog project
Now that the Moccasin Telegraph has run its course after 15 years of providing an opportunity for folks to share history and reconnect, we have stopped preparing more editions.
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