Ramshackle: A Yellowknife Story is a comic by Yellowknifer Alison McCreesh that, at its core, is an intensely personal story about learning how to love a place.
Between being feasted on by mosquitoes, living out of a van, and working in tourism, McCreesh chronicles her
first summer in Yellowknife after finishing a degree in fine arts and hitching a ride up north with her partner, Pat.
Exploring the duality of Yellowknife as the biggest city in the Northwest Territories (with a Walmart and everything!) while at the same time having an Old Town that is somewhat an epicentre for off-grid living, this comic illustrates the ways in which some adventures are made better with a little bit of time and care.
As a twenty-something journeying up north, McCreesh’s interest was immediately snagged by the Woodyard, a city block nestled in Yellowknife’s Old Town. The Woodyard is certainly a place that has been recorded and mythologized in books like Old Town by Fran Hurcomb, and the glee McCreesh finds in off-grid living — unique housing, community and honey buckets — is only elevated by the sense of contented chaos that the author conveys in her illustrations of her life there.
A love letter to the Woodyard and Yellowknife as a whole, Ramshackle’s comic-strip style paired with McCreesh’s often gut-splittingly funny observational humour about life up here creates an opportunity to literally see this place through a new set of eyes.
McCreesh’s ability to express the extent to which the North stays with you and the peculiarities of Yellowknife, such as a “road closed” sign in the summer that seems to lead out onto the lake or the dependency of trucked water and sewage in Old Town and other parts of Yellowknife in the winter, makes Ramshackle seem like it’s starting a conversation with you.
This friendly book invites readers to reflect on their own experiences with the peculiarities of Yellowknife in a
“sharing is caring” kind of way. Though sometimes prone to exposing nostalgia as a fantasy of a place rather than an accurate portrait of it (apparently one of my favourite childhood playgrounds was “derelict” and its merry-go-round was “hazardous”), this comic is delightful.
Alternating between bombastically colourful vignettes of Old Town’s history and subdued blue-washed panels of observational humour, McCreesh artistically explores the quirks of this land and the people who live on it.
As a life-long Yellowknifer, flipping through Ramshackle feels like having a little bit of home in my hands.
A balm to any reader who is new to Yellowknife and feeling the isolation of a new city as well as a romp through memory lane for anyone who is familiar with Yellowknife circa 2009, Ramshackle is a must read for Yellowknifers and, of course, all the friends and family members that you are trying to convince to come up and visit you.