Kimberley-born Author Nadine Sander-Green returned home on April 21 to do a book launch for her debut novel “Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit.”
The sold-out event was held at Grist and Mash Brewery and was supported by Cranbrook’s Huckleberry Books, who sold copies of the novel and carries them in their store.
The novel tells the story of Millicent, a fledgling reporter who moves to Whitehorse to start her journalism career at the Golden Nugget, a dying newspaper.
As the darkness of the Yukon winter descends, the protagonist starts a relationship with a filmmaker named Pascal that quickly begins to get toxic. It’s at the annual Thaw di Gras festival in Dawson City where the situation boils over and Millicent has to make the choice of staying with Pascal, or standing up to her abuser.
Sander-Green has her Master’s degree in Creative Writing and has worked in a wide range of writing jobs, including journalism.
Her first job in the newspaper industry was as editor for the Golden Star, where she worked for a year before an opportunity came up at the Whitehorse Star, the inspiration for her fictionalized Golden Nugget.
She said her first experience working as a journalist in Golden taught her a lot and was a lot of work, writing a ton of content to fill the pages of the paper.
“I think one of the big things with reporting in small towns is gaining people’s trust, whether they be politicians or whoever,” Sander-Green said in an interview with the Bulletin. “That was one of the biggest challenges and I was pretty young too, so I really had to find my voice and find my authority and learn a lot about the Golden area.”
She had a friend who lived in Whitehorse and said she had always dreamed of going up north, even though she didn’t know much about it at that time.
While working for the Golden Star, she covered a federal election, and although there wasn’t too much to cover on the local news front, she was really intrigued by the forums she reported on. When a political reporting job came up at the Whitehorse Star, she jumped on the opportunity, packed her life into her Honda Civic and made the three-day journey up north.
She described her experience starting at the Star “humbling.”
“I was 25 at the time and so I had gone and done my undergrad degree in creative writing and then I worked in Golden, but I’d never really been to a press conference or dealt with territorial or provincial-level politicians or done a media scrum or anything like that,” she said.
“I didn’t really go to school for that so I had to learn a lot on the fly, both about journalism and how to engage in conflict and press politicians and that sort of thing. But I also learned a lot about the Yukon, about First Nations and land claim agreements and different people and it was really hard to be honest.”
Sander-Green said she loved the excitement the job offered, as well as all the opportunities to meet new people and hear their stories, but she realized she, “didn’t love the conflict that much.”
“I saw the other journalists around me who were really thriving and now I see that they are amazing, national-level journalists and for me, I really was interested more in the human nature side of things and human interest stories,” Sander-Green explained.
“So to make money I moved into communications and did some interesting jobs and then started dabbling more in creative writing again after I left journalism.”
She went on to work a variety of different jobs, including for Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society in the Yukon, the Moose Hide Campaign in Victoria and the University of Calgary. She met her partner in in the Yukon and they eventually moved to Calgary where they live today with their family.
READ MORE: Moose Hide Campaign events scheduled for May 16 in Kimberley and Cranbrook
The idea for “Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit” came about initially when she started her Master’s degree in 2015. She had moved to Toronto and knew she’d need to write a book-length project and this story, based off her experiences up north, started to take shape.
She said in that nearly decade-long process the story went through many drafts and went from being very similar to her real life experience, to the more fictionalized story it ultimately became.
“When I first walked into the Whitehorse Star, it’s such a nostalgic and beautiful place, it felt like it was a 1960s newsroom and people should have been smoking cigars and drinking whiskey and writing their stories,” Sander-Green said. “There was just something so romantic about that that I really wanted to write about it and I also really wanted to talk about some of the issues of the North that aren’t really written about much.
“There aren’t really a lot of novels that have come out from the Yukon. There was something so rich about the land and the culture and the people, and what better place to set it than at a newspaper where these stories are told.”
Just about two weeks before her novel was published, the Whitehorse Star announced that after 124 years in print, they would be closing down. Sander-Green said she reached out to her former editor to share her work with him and thank him for the experience that planted the seeds of her first novel.
At her book launch, Sander-Green had numerous friends and family, who still live in Kimberley, in attendance, as well as two students from Selkirk Secondary’s creative writing program, Willa Honeyman and Mora Duffy.
Also in attendance was their teacher Jeff Pew, who also happened to be Sander-Green’s creative writing teacher when she went to Selkirk.
“Jeff was someone who really made me believe that art and self expression was worth pursuing,” Sander-Green said. “I came from a family of scientists, so I just think if it weren’t for him I wouldn’t have gone down the writing path.”
Pew said that 20 years ago when he first taught Sander-Green, he was “struck by her brilliant lens and natural approach to writing.”
“As seen in Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit, she was never afraid of exposing the vulnerable aspects of her inner and outer world,” Pew said. “I’ve followed her writing career for the last ten years and am so excited to see her land a contract with such a great publisher, House of Anansi. I’m confident Nadine will become a well-known voice in Canadian literature.”
You can get a copy of Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit at Huckleberry Books in Cranbrook or at indigo.ca