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From the February/March issue of EDGEYK Magazine: New short fiction from Yellowknife author Bren Kolson

Culture in Yellowknife in the 1970s boiled down to the recitals put on by the students of our two local piano teachers, Gilbert and Sullivan operettas staged by the Singing North, whatever the junior and senior high schools were able to cobble together and Max Ferguson on the radio.  We loved Max Ferguson.  We got

If you were to jump into one of the Fort Smith Paddling Club’s older vessels, you might spot a faded sticker somewhere on it that reads, NO DAM ON THE SLAVE! These days, the paddling club’s boats are busy, taking locals and visitors alike out to the Playground, Rollercoaster, Molly’s Nipple or any of the

On Friday evening a swift-moving forest fire jumped a fire break near Namushka Lodge, roughly 50 km east of Yellowknife, and ripped through the property, reducing the the 34-year-old business to ashes. Photos posted by the lodge on social media show charred remains of buildings, the twisted scrap metal of sidings and appliances, even patches

This article is free to read, thanks to support from the GNWT’s Department of Health and Social Services: With no residential treatment centres in the NWT (the territorial government says referring patients to southern clinics makes more sense), Devin Hinchey’s rehab took place at the Edgewood facility in Nanaimo, BC. Devin has been sober for more

It started small. In the early afternoon of Thursday, June 23, a Dominion Diamond Corporation press release noted that there’d been a “morning fire” during a planned outage at around 7 am. The mine’s incident management team had managed the incident. Its emergency response team had responded. No one was hurt. A few days later,

You’re sunburned, riddled with mosquito bites and your shoulders can’t paddle another kilometre — this doesn’t mean you can’t get a little gourmet game going on at the end of the day. Fire, tinfoil, a skillet (maybe don’t try this one on a 20-day trip up the Coppermine), and voilà, you have tartiflette! Ok, perhaps

This article is free to read, thanks to support from the GNWT’s Department of Health and Social Services: “Keep moving forward. If you stop, you’re going to run for the hills.” Devin Hinchey, 19 years old, walked through the doors of Nanaimo’s Edgewood rehab centre with his hands in the air. Surrender. A day earlier,

The camp counsellors called me White Woman. It was short for Goddamn Useless White Woman, Jeeze!… but I’m sure it was meant kindly. It was 1976. I was 21, and I was director of Camp Antler, a summer youth camp that took place each year on the Cameron River. Our campers came from Fort Providence,

The three Hinchey brothers wore onesies. One was a panda. One was a penguin. Devin was a kangaroo. They passed around their Christmas gifts to each other at one o’clock in the morning on December 17, 2014. In between the unwrapping, Devin and his parents took turns crying. After years of lies, theft and substance

The trails are home to everything from medicine to gin flavourings to diaper liner.

At the height of the Cold War, a plucky band of local bush pilots, miners and reservists enacted their role in a worst-case invasion scenario — and won

This year, the largest national park in Canada has the most women crew members on the fire line in its history, with five female Type 1 wildland firefighters making up a third of its initial attack force. Initial attack crews are the first to the scene when it comes to boots-on-the-ground fire management. It’s a

“Dog on 54 Avenue. Wouldn’t come close to check collar.” That’s the caption underneath the photo of my dog. You can see a Yellowknife resident’s hand reaching out of their car door, offering a gesture of peace. You can also see, about five feet away, my dog resolutely ignoring that hand. “Me? I’m not lost,”

First Published June 9, 2015: Among the books, tools and knick-knacks of Larry Galt’s plywood shack out along Highway 3 is a photograph of young Larry, bushy faced and bleary eyed, flopped over the wheel of a 1960s Pontiac. What the tightly cropped photo doesn’t show is the surrounding mayhem of a legendary Woodyard party,