Degrees of Separation: A Decade North of 60 by local author Alison McCreesh chronicles her experiences over the last 10 years travelling across the North.
Spanning most of Northern Canada and heading abroad to circumvent the North Pole, this graphic novel delivers a lush tale that is intrinsically linked with the Northern landscape and its peoples. As McCreesh debuted this book at the Yellowknife Visitor’s Centre just last week with a well-attended book launch, Degrees of Separation is hot off the press and on everyone’s mind.
This book feels, above all else, like it was assembled with care. The attention to detail, meticulous notes, hand-lettered style, and the special time taken to recognize family pets and the vast landscapes that McCreesh has encountered while travelling makes this book a cohesive piece of art. With their soft backgrounds and inviting sense of light, the illustrations in this book help to bring to life each of the many places that McCreesh has visited. From Whitehorse to Pangnirtung to Lapua in Finland and back to Yellowknife, McCreesh’s illustrations and storytelling immersed me in not only the landscape but the cultural attitudes and idiosyncrasies of each place.
This book is also laugh-out-loud funny. McCreesh is a master storyteller, and that could not be made clearer than when witnessing her ability to tease the humour out of both the terrifying and the mundane. Wasting no time jumping into the thick of it, this graphic novel starts with McCreesh transforming the low-grade anxiety of one of her experiences hitchhiking to Dawson with a friend, where events just went from bad to worse, into a tidy dark humour story that sets the mood for the rest of this book. Along with an ability to pull humour from everyday moments, McCreesh also has a keen understanding of how knowing the history of a place and its peoples — whether that place is a city, community, or neighbourhood — and it enriches your experience in that place.
This book takes life one day — one moment — at a time, often with pages being made up of neat lines of illustrations that gave me the impression that I was getting a glimpse into a story that was so much bigger on the inside than it appeared to be. This turned out to be the case, as this graphic novel periodically included deep-dives into the Indigenous, mining, and cultural history of each location. These fascinating additions to McCreesh’s life story both contextualize our daily lives, entwined with the history of the places we live and, alongside the Yellowknife Historical Museum by Giant Mine that opened just two weeks ago, speaks to the ways that history can be preserved and shared through the dedicated effort of people in the community.
Compiling vignettes of McCreesh’s life on the road as a translator, artist and recreational traveller, Degrees of Separation always return to Yellowknife. The author’s earlier work, Ramshackle: A Yellowknife Story, is my go-to book to send to people down south to convince people to come up North — “just for the summer.” It’s a quick, quirky, lovable read that, above all else, is portable.
Degrees of Separation, on the other hand, I had to give the same treatment as Ducks by Kate Beaton. This graphic novel is hefty enough that you need two hands and a surface to rest it on to be able to read it, making it a hearty read for those who are looking to sit down for a weekend with a good book and learn about the North through the eyes of someone who loves this place.