Mining

MFA Alumni Book Highlights: From 50 to 80 Publications

/ Lynne Melcombe / Leave a comment

It’s been a while since I posted a rundown of books published by grads of the MFA in CNF program, and in that time the number has jumped from 50 to about 70—or 71, because I just added my own book to the list below.

I actually think the number is higher than that, maybe as high as 80, but I’m not sure everyone’s books are listed here. (I took this list from the UKing’s website.)

If your book(s)—either the one you started for your master’s degree or any you’ve published since then—aren’t listed here, please let me know and I will update the list.

(It’s great to see how many of us have gone on to write more books after that first one.)

Tamara Baluja (class of 2024) Nav Bhatia: The Heart of a Superfan, Penguin Random House Canada, 2024. Review to come. 

Niko Bell (class of 2023) Risk, Freedom, and the Future of Safe Sex, ECW Press, TBA.

Sheima Benembarek (class of 2020) Halal Sex: The Intimate Lives of Muslim Women in North America, Penguin Random House Canada, 2023.

Gloria Blizzard (class of 2021) Black Cake, Turtle Soup, and Other Dilemmas, Dundurn Press, 2024.

Alec Bruce (class of 2022) The Cooperators: The People Behind the Rebirth of a Nova Scotia Movement, Pottersfield Press, 2024.

S. Lesley Buxton (class of 2016) One Strong Girl: Surviving the Unimaginable—A Mother’s Memoir, Pottersfield Press, 2018.

Esmeralda Cabral (class of 2019) How to Clean a Fish and Other Adventures in Portugal, University of Alberta Press, 2023.

Michaela Cavanaugh (class of 2024) Present Tense: How We Reckon with the End of the World, McClelland & Stewart (Canada) and The New Press (US), 2027.

Marilyn Carr (class of 2020) Nowhere Like This Place: Tales from a Nuclear Childhood, Iguana Books, 2020. Review to come. 
How I Invented the Internet, Iguana Books, 2022.

Gregor Craigie (class of 2019) On Borrowed Time: Shaking Complacency in North America’s Seismic Zones, Goose Lane Editions, 2021.
Why Humans Build Up: The Rise of Towers, Temples, and Skyscrapers, Orca Publishing, 2022.
Radio Jet Lag, Cormorant Books, 2023.
Our Crumbling Foundation: How We Solve Canada’s Housing Crisis, Penguin Random House, 2024.

Pauline Dakin (class of 2015) Run, Hide, Repeat: A Memoir of a Fugitive Childhood, Penguin Random House, 2017.

Moira Dann (class of 2016) Craigdarroch Castle in 21 Treasures, Touchstone Editions, 2021.
Fat Camp Summer: Advice I Would Have Given My Parents, Sutherland House Books, 2025.

Deborah Dundas (class of 2023) On Class, Biblioasis, 2022.

Marsha Faubert (class of 2018) Wanda’s War: An Untold Story of Nazi Europe, Forced Labour, and a Canadian Immigration Scandal, Goose Lane Editions, 2023.

Amy Fish (class of 2023), One in Six Million: The Baby by the Roadside and the Man Who Retraced a Holocaust Survivor’s Lost Identity, Goose Lane Editions, 2025.

Catherine Fogarty (class of 2018) Murder on the Inside: The True Story of the Deadly Riot at Kingston Penitentiary, Biblioasis, 2021.
Someone You Know: An Unforgettable Collection of Canadian True Crime, HarperCollins, 2023.

Stacey May Fowles (class of 2015) The Girl in the Woods, McLelland and Stewart, 2018.
Baseball Life Advice: Loving the Game that Saved Me, Penguin Random House, 2017. 
Whatever Gets You Through: Twelve Survivors on Life After Sexual Assault, Greystone Books, 2019.
Good Mom on Paper: Writers on Creativity and Motherhood, Book*hug Press, 2022.

Joan Francuz (class of 2016) Press Enter to Continue: Scribes from Babylon to Silicon, 1920 House Press, 2018.

Kim Fraser (class of 2021) The Accidental Caregiver: Challenges and Triumphs of Intimate Family Caregivers, Sutherland House, 2022. Review to come. 

Maryanna Gabriel (class of 2022), On Earth as It Is: Walking the Camino, Pottersfield Press, 2023.

MJ Grant (class of 2016) A Cure for Heartache: Life’s Simple Pleasures, One Moment at a Time, Hodder, 2019.

Stephanie Griffiths (class of 2016) Sit Still and Prosper: How a Former Money Manager Discovered the Path to Investing with Greater Clarity, Calmness, and Confidence, Bird in the Sky Press, 2018. Review to come. 

Sue Harper (class of 2016), Winter in the City of Light: A Search for Self in Retirement, Amazon, 2019.

Suzanne Elki Yoko Hartmann (class of 2021) The Nail That Sticks Out: Reflections on the Postwar Japanese Canadian Community, Dundurn, 2024.

Virginia Heffernan (class of 2021) Ring of Fire: High-Stakes Mining in a Lowlands Wilderness, ECW Press, 2023.

Taslim Jaffer (class of 2022) with Omar Mouallem, Back Where I Came From: On Culture, Identity, and Home, Book*hug Press, 2024. Review to come. 

Kirk Angus Johnson (class of 2019) Some Kind of Hero: Love, Death, and Trauma in a Nova Scotia Town, Penguin Random House, TBA.

Kevin Kelloway (class of 2019) The Performance Equation, University of Toronto Press, TBA.

Kim Kierans (class of 2025) Journalism for the Public Good: The Michener Awards at Fifty, Bighorn Books, 2024. Review to come. 

Gwen Lamont (class of 2019) The View from Coffin Ridge: A Childhood Exhumed, Ginger Press, 2024.

Nellwyn Lampert (class of 2017) Every Boy I Ever Kissed: A Memoir, Dundurn Press, 2019.

Nellwyn Lampert with Pamela Oakley, Christian Smith, and Gillian Turnbull, eds., Bad Artist: Creating in a Productivity-Obsessed World, Touchwood, 2024.

Tyler LeBlanc (class of 2018) Acadian Driftwood: One Family and the Great Expulsion, Goose Lane Editions, 2020.

An artist's rendering of a river, mountains and trees in shades of grey, brown , and red, with the book title and author's name.

Lezlie Lowe (class of 2016) Nowhere to Go: How Public Toilets Fail Our Private Needs, Coach House Books, 2018.
The Volunteers: How Halifax Women Won the Second World War, Nimbus Publishing, 2022.

James MacDuff (class of 2024) with Mirriam Mweemba, The Illogical Adventure: A Memoir of Love and Fate, Pottersfield, 2025. Review to come.

Susan MacLeod (class of 2018) Dying for Attention: A Graphic Memoir about Nursing Home Care, Conundrum Press, 2021.

Leslie Marion (class of 2018) Easy Money: A Bankspeak Primer for Small Business, 4th Floor Press, 2020. Review to come. 

Jessica McDiarmid (class of 2016) Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, Penguin Random House, 2020.

Lori McKay (class of 2020) Searching for Mayflowers: The True Story of Canada’s First Quintuplets, Nimbus Publishing, 2024. Review to come. 

Lauren McKeon (class of 2016) F-Bomb: Dispatches from the War on Feminism, Goose Lane Editions, 2017.
No More Nice Girls: Gender, Power, and Why It’s Time to Stop Playing by the Rules, House of Anansi, 2020.
Women of the Pandemic: Stories from the Frontlines of COVID-19, Penguin Random House, 2021.

Lynne Melcombe (class of 2015) No Such Thing: A True Story of “Mild” Traumatic Brain Injury and My Twenty-Year (so far) Recovery, Iguana Books, 2026. 

Helena Moncrieff (class of 2016) The Fruitful City: Building Communities Around Nature’s Bounty, ECW Press, 2018.

Chris Moore (class of 2024) The Power of Guilt: Why We Feel It and Its Surprising Ability to Heal, HarperCollins (Canada), BenBella (US), August Books (UK), 2025.

Philip Moscovitch (class of 2019) Adventures in Bubbles and Brine: What I Learned from Nova Scotia’s Masters of Fermented Foods—Craft Beer, Cider, Cheese, Sauerkraut and More, Formac Publishing, 2019. Review to come. 

Jason Murray (class of 2016) A Distorted Revolution: How Eric’s Trip Changed Music, Moncton and Me, Nimbus Publishing, 2017. Review to come. 

Jesse O’Reilly-Conlin (class of 2019) Visiting Africa: A Memoir, Demeter Press, 2021. Go: A Memoir of Movement, Iguana Books, 2023. 

Robin Pacific (class of 2021) Skater Girl: An Archaeology of the Self, Guernica Editions, 2024. Review to come. 

A microphone and cords on a white tabletop.

David Pate (class of 2023) The Worst Songs in the World: The Terrible Truth about National Anthems, Dundurn Press, 2024.

Renée Pellerin (class of 2016) Conspiracy of Hope: The Truth About Breast Cancer Screening, Goose Lane Editions, 2018.

Jen Powley (class of 2015) Just Jen: Thriving Through Multiple Sclerosis, Fernwood Publishing, 2017.
Making a Home: Assisted Living in the Community for Young Disabled People, Fernwood Publishing, 2023.

Laura Pratt (class of 2020) Heartbroken: Field Notes on a Constant Condition, Random House Canada, 2023.

Adelle Purdham (class of 2022) I Don’t Do Disability and Other Lies I’ve Told Myself, Dundurn Press, 2024.

Andrew Reeves (class of 2016) Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis, ECW Press, 2019.

Bonny Reichert (class of 2022) How to Share an Egg: A True Story of Hunger, Love and Plenty, Appetite/Penguin Random House (Canada), and Ballantine/Random House (US), 2024.

Dylan Reid (class of 2021) Messy Cities: Why We Can’t Plan Everything, Coach House Books, 2025. Review to come. 

Jo-Ann Roberts (class of 2023) Storm the Ballot Box: An Insider’s Guide to a Voting Revolution, Nimbus Publishing, 2025.

Jason Schreurs (class of 2022) Scream Therapy: A Punk Journey through Mental Health, Flex Your Head Press, 2023.

RC Shaw (class of 2017) Louisbourg or Bust: A Surfer’s Wild Ride Down Nova Scotia’s Drowned Coast, Pottersfield Press, 2018.
Captain Solitude: One Surfer’s Search for the World’s Greatest Sailor, Goose Lane Editions, 2024.

Sharron J. Simpson (class of 2021) The Kelowna Story: An Okanagan History, 2nd Edition, Harbour Publishing, 2025.

Christian Smith (class of 2017) The Scientist and the Psychic: A Son’s Exploration of His Mother’s Gift, Random House, 2021.

Suzanne Stewart (class of 2016) The Tides of Time: A Nova Scotia Book of Seasons, Pottersfield Press, 2018.

Karen Stiller (class of 2018) The Minister’s Wife: A Memoir of Faith, Doubt, Loneliness, Forgiveness and More, Tynedale House, 2019.
Holiness Here: Searching for God in the Ordinary Events of Everyday Life, NavPress, 2024.

William Sullivan (class of 2017) The City and the Smelter: How Against All Odds Did It Happen, First Choice Books, 2023. Review to come. 

Jon Tattrie (class of 2020) Peace by Chocolate: The Hadhad Family’s Remarkable Journey from Syria to Canada, Goose Lane Editions, 2020.

Gillian Turnbull (class of 2017) Sonic Booms: Making Music in an Oil Town, Eternal Cavalier Press, 2019. Review to come.

Jennifer Thornhill Verma (class of 2019) Cod Collapse: The Rise and Fall of Newfoundland’s Saltwater Cowboy, Nimbus Publishing, 2019.

Aaron Williams (class of 2017) Chasing Smoke: A Wildfire Memoir, Harbour Publishing, 2017.
The Last Logging Show: A Forestry Family at the End of an Era, Harbour Publishing, 2024.

Jennifer Robin Wilson (class of 2025) The Heart of Homestay: Creating Meaningful Connections When Hosting International Students, Page Two Books, 2025.

Gina Leola Woolsey (class of 2015) Fifteen Thousand Pieces: A Medical Examiner’s Journey through Disaster, Guernica Editions, 2023.

Remember, if you’re an MFA in CNF grad and you have a CNF book that’s not shown here, let me know and I’ll update this list in a future post.

Best Canadian Reads for Earth Day 2023

/ Lynne Melcombe / Leave a comment

April 22 is Earth Day. Here are some great books about the environment by Canadian authors to commit to reading.

Cover of 'Chasing Smoke: A Wildfire Memoir' by Aaron Williams featuring a wildfire scene with smoke and flames among tall trees against an orange sky.

I live in the Pacific Northwest, where two things are ever-present on people’s minds: how bad the wildfires will be this summer and when the next big earthquake will hit. Although Aaron Williams (class of 2017) wrote Chasing Smoke: A Wildfire Memoir (Harbour Publishing, 2017) as a memoir of one summer (of many) on a firefighting crew in the dense forests of British Columbia, it wouldn’t be possible to write such a memoir without touching on the impacts of a warming planet on creating the conditions that are making wildfires worse every year (2023 was Canada’s worst season on record). From hectares of dry brush where forests were clearcut to fire seasons that begin earlier and end later each year, Chasing Smoke not only describes a wildfire fighter’s lifestyle but a problem that must be addressed if we don’t wish to see our planet go up in flames.  

Book cover of 'On Borrowed Time' by Gregor Craigie featuring an urban skyline with yellow seismic wave graphics, emphasizing themes of earthquake preparedness.

One might not think climate change influences earthquakes, and that’s not where Gregor Craigie (class of 2019) focuses his attention in On Borrowed Time: North America’s Next Big Quake (Goose Lane Editions, 2021). But science acknowledges that as hurricanes, floods, and wildfires increase in frequency and severity, so too does global warming contribute to the frequency and severity of earthquakes. “As a result of the man-made global warming, the melting of land ice, mainly in Antarctica and Greenland, occurs in an accelerating process and sea levels are rising worldwide” as are increasing emissions of greenhouse gases. “Both phenomena also have an impact on earthquake risk since they lead to a small but notable increase in pressure on tectonic faults in the subsurface due to hydrostatic load….” And “sea-level fluctuations of just a few decimetres are enough to trigger earthquakes.” (https://www.gfz.de/en/press/news/details/mehr-erdbeben-durch-menschengemachten-klimawandel) Reading Craigie’s deeply researched book provides frightening insight into what can happen when the next Big One hits. 

Cover of the book 'Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis' by Andrew Reeves, featuring illustrations of various fish on a light blue background.

In Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis (ECW, 2019) Andrew Reeves (class of 2016), an award-winning environmental journalist, tackles the eponymous environmental crisis head on. When I began reading Overrun, I’d never heard of Asian crap, much less the crisis they’ve caused. But as I read Reeves’ entertaining account of how, with all good intentions, this voracious and prolific fish was introduced to control invasive water weeds in aquaculture farms in the southern US, I became increasingly aware of just how dangerous it can be to import any species of life to any part of the world where it lacks natural predators. From a few fish in the 1950s, several species of Asian carp have taken over river systems from the mouth of the Mississippi River watershed north to where they’re a handful of miles now threatening the ecology of the entire Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River system. This is what happens when humans, with all the best intentions, believe they can improve on billions of years of evolution and try to take nature into their own hands. 

Of the books I’ve reviewed to date, these three are the ones I’d recommend most highly as Earth Day reading. But they’re not the only ones to touch on environmental themes, even though the environment is not the main thrust of the book. I also highly recommend Ring of Fire: High-Stakes Mining in a Lowlands Wilderness (ECW, 2023) by Virginia Heffernan, which advocates for a different approach to resource extraction, one that is more environmentally safe and concerned with the welfare of Indigenous Peoples. The Fruitful City: The Enduring Power of the Urban Food Forest (ECW, 2018) by Helena Moncrieff (class of 2016) focuses predominantly on community sharing of the harvest of fruit trees within any city, but in so doing it also speaks to feed the human population by stopping our environmentally stupid wasting of nature’s bounty just because it sits on privately owned land.

Cover of the book 'The Fruitful City' by Helena Moncrieff, featuring colorful leaf illustrations and a subtitle about the urban food forest.

While Jenn Thornhill Verma’s (class of 2019) Cod Collapse: The Rise and Fall of Newfoundland’s Saltwater Cowboys (Nimbus Publishing, 2019) is a memoir of a family’s lost way of life, one that had endured for generations in many families, it’s also a tale of the consequences of overfishing, not only to the environment but to those who depend on the sea for their living. And for those of us currently living in the Pacific Northwest, it’s a cautionary tale about the way deal with dwindling salmon populations. And finally, The Tides of Time: A Nova Scotia Book of Seasons (Pottersfield Press, 2019) by Suzanne Stewart (class of 2016) is more directly about the link between different people’s food-producing labour with a particular month, it’s also a compelling series of essays about how people can and do choose to live in harmony with the seasons. And it’s hard to imagine anything more environmentally advantageous than that. 

Must-Read Books from Recent Canadian Graduates: Part 2 of The List So Far

/ Lynne Melcombe / 1 Comment

So many new authors on this list! (For comparison, see the first list here.) Congratulations to all the newly published authors (at least since the first list), to all the authors who were published long before I reviewed your books, I’m reading as fast as I can, and to all the authors who’ve been published that I still haven’t got to … I’m reading as fast as I can! And to anyone reading this, if I’ve missed anything, gotten any details wrong, or in some cases don’t know the year you graduated, please let me know. And the winners are:

(Edited to add: Apparently I missed quite a few books that should go on this list. I’ve added them at the top of the list so you won’t miss them. There have been several more deals but the books aren’t out yet and I’m unable to find complete information about them.)

Barone, Rina (class of 20??) Art Always Wins: The Chaotic World of Avant-garde Pioneer Al Hansen, (press and year?)

Jaffer, Taslim (class of 2022) with Omar Mouallem, Back Where I Came From: On Culture, Identity, and Home. Book*hug Press, 2024.

Kierans, Kim (class of 2025), Journalism for the Public Good: The Michener Awards at Fifty. Bighorn Books, 2024.

Kuzmyk, Emma (class of 2025) with Addy Strickland, This Wasn’t On the Syllabus: Stories from the Front Lines. Simon & Schuster, 2024.

McKay, Lori (class of 2020) Searching for Mayflowers: The True Story of Canada’s First Quintuplets. Nimbus Publishing, 2024.

Moore, Chris (2024) The Power of Guilt: Why We Feel It and Its Surprising Ability to Heal. HarperCollins (Canada), BenBella (US), August Books (UK), 2025.

Moscovitch, Philip (2019) Adventures in Bubbles and Brine: What I Learned from Nova Scotia’s Masters of Fermented Foods—Craft Beer, Cider, Cheese, Sauerkraut and More. Formac Publishing, 2019.

Simpson, Sharon J. (class of 2021) The Kelowna Story: An Okanagan History, 2nd Edition. Harbour Publishing, 2025.

John Larsen’s (Class of 2023 I think) book is not out yet–due in 2026 I think. 

Book cover of 'Black Cake, Turtle Soup, and Other Dilemmas' by Gloria Blizzard, featuring a colorful abstract background with wavy lines.
Book cover for 'Press Enter to Continue: Scribes from Babylon to Silicon' by Joan Francuz, featuring an image of ancient scribes on a laptop screen.
Book cover for 'The View from Coffin Ridge: A Childhood Exhumed' by Gwen Lamont featuring a black and white photograph of a corridor with scattered leaves.

Book cover design for 'The Fruitful City' by Helena Moncrieff, featuring colorful illustrations of leaves and flowers, with the subtitle 'The Enduring Power of the Urban Food Forest'.
Book cover for 'Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis' by Andrew Reeves, featuring various species of fish against a light blue background.
Book cover of 'Peace by Chocolate' by Jon Tattrie, depicting the Hadhad family by the sea, highlighting their journey from Syria to Canada.

Exploring Craigdarroch Castle: Victoria’s History Told Through 21 Objects

/ Lynne Melcombe / 3 Comments

I’m pretty obsessive when I go into museums. I like to take my time, consider each object, read every placard, watch every video, listen to every audiotape. I don’t feel most museums are meant to be gone through in a single trip. There’s too much to take in and the brain tends to tire of all that information with no place created to file it yet. So, I’m quite happy to go back to museums time and again to see whatever I didn’t get to the last time. 

Book cover of 'Craigdarroch Castle in 21 Treasures' by Moira Dann, featuring a tag with the castle's name and a pencil, dated September 21st, 1897.

I know I’ve been to Craigdarroch Castle in Victoria, BC, which now houses a museum of the way wealthy white settlers lived in Victoria (and elsewhere) in the nineteenth century. I can’t recall exactly when I was there, but there’s no way I could have taken it all in in just one trip. Which is why it’s such a delight reading through Moira Dann’s (class of 2016) Craigdarroch Castle in 21 Treasures (Touchwood Editions, 2021). 

Like Richard Levangie’s Secrets of the Hotel Maisonneuve, this was not Dann’s project for the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction at University of King’s College in Halifax. (I’ll never understand why that book didn’t get picked up: it was about The Mothers of Confederation, the wives of all the men who are touted as The Fathers of Confederation, who most assuredly played a role.) And therein lies a hint about the author, who was in the class immediately after mine and became a friend: she loves history. And Craigdarroch Castle is nothing if not a walk through history. 

Built by coal baron and shipping entrepreneur Robert Dunsmuir, who’d immigrated from Scotland in 1851 with his wife and newborn daughter, theirs is a genuine rags-to-riches story. Dunsmuir started out as an independent coal miner, found a rich coal seam near Nanaimo, and “turned that into wealth, influence, and power.” So much so that by 1887, less than four decades later, he started construction on the castle he had (according to rumour) promised his wife, Joan, when they left Scotland. 

In an introductory chapter called “Why I Wrote This Book,” Dann explains why she chose to tell the castle’s story through a series of objects: a clock, some chairs, keyboards, stained glass, photographs, drawings, paintings, radiator brushes (to show what a servant’s life was like), dance cards (with pencils provided), and more.

Many of the stories in this book and elsewhere start with objects of the time, placed in a restored context. Objects are also the jumping-off point of the post-Dunsmuir stories this castle holds. 

Some might say it’s preposterous to think an overview of a massive story repository such as Craigdarroch Castle can be reduced to not even two dozen objects. 

“In the particular is contained the universal,” said James Joyce … and I agree. We can view the wide expanse of meaning just as well, if not better, through the lens of a microscope as we can through that of a telescope. …

But Craigdarroch Castle houses more than just the stories of the “fractious, fractured” Dunsmuir family, Dann writes. In 1909, after Joan Dunsmuir’s death (Robert had died before it was completed), it was sold and went through several incarnations. From 1919 to 1921, it was Craigdarroch Military Hospital, for veterans returning from the Great War. Later, it housed Victoria College (predecessor to the University of Victoria), the Victoria Conservatory of Music, and the offices of the Victoria school board. It was sold to the Craigdarroch Castle Historical Museum Society in 1979 and turned into the museum it is today.

The collection described in loving and impeccably researched detail in this book “allows us a peek into the lives of different people in a different time and provides us a bit of context for our lives in the twenty-first century …” Dann writes. “These objects can set our imaginations alight. Imagining an earlier time helps us create a better now and imagine a better future.”

And a better future is something we can all strive to imagine. 

August 4 is BC Day. Here are some other books about BC:

Chasing Smoke: A Wildfire Memoir, by Aaron Williams.

Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, by Jessica McDiarmid.

The Ring of Fire: Balancing Resource Extraction and Indigenous Rights

/ Lynne Melcombe / 5 Comments

One of the things I’m enjoying about this project I’ve undertaken to read and review all the books published out of the University of King’s College Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Nonfiction Writing on is that I’m reading a lot of books I wouldn’t otherwise pick up. (Like Overrun and The Minister’s Wife, both great reads!)

Book cover of 'Ring of Fire: High-Stakes Mining in a Lowlands Wilderness' by Virginia Heffernan featuring a map of Ontario with geological lines and text in orange and yellow.

Because of that I’m learning a lot of things I wouldn’t otherwise learn. And I love learning. I’m a bit of a learning junkie. 

Virginia Heffernan’s (class of 2021) book Ring of Fire: High-Stakes Mining in a Lowlands Wilderness (ECW, 2023) is not one I would have picked up. And I have to admit that I struggled through Part 1: Prospectors and Promoters.

But I didn’t struggle because it’s not well researched and written; Heffernan is top-notch at both. Rather, my ADHD brain made it difficult for me to keep track of the enormous cast of corporations, characters, and deals that have been attempting to shepherd the Ring of Fire from its discovery through to the extraction of an abundance of critical minerals that will be crucial to Canada’s continued development as a sovereign nation. 

I honestly don’t think I could do what Heffernan did in these opening chapters, and she tacitly acknowledges the complexity in Part 1: Prospectors and Promoters by including, at the back of the book, a complete list of key players along with a timeline of crucial developments from 1987 to 2022. But as difficult as it must have been to untangle all that information and keep it straight, it was essential that she did it. This complex history laid the foundation for Part 2: People and the Planet, which looks at the critical importance of appropriate development of the Ring of Fire to the well-being of northern Ontario’s Indigenous communities; and Part 3: Power and Protest, which examines how protest movements have influenced related developments in Ontario’s halls of power. 

What is the Ring of Fire? In the opening pages of the book, Heffernan writes:

The Ring of Fire is a 5,000-square-kilometre crescent of ancient volcanic rock rich in nickel, copper, and other metals considered critical to the global transition to renewable energy. The metal deposits lie hidden beneath the remote swamps of the Hudson Bay and James Bay Lowlands of northern Canada, the second-largest temperate wetland in the world. The area is home to several thousand Indigenous people in communities accessible only by plane or winter road. The deposits, too, are stranded by a lack of infrastructure. In 2022, Canada and the province of Ontario pledged billions of dollars towards a critical-minerals strategy, including building an all-weather road to the Ring of Fire.

Resource extraction has a long and dubious history that’s included significant steps in the advancement of civilizations along with unchecked environmental degradation, impoverishment of local Indigenous populations, and enrichment of the few on the backs of the many. But, as Heffernan argues throughout Parts 2 and 3, it doesn’t have to be that way. Her hope for Ring of Fire mines, based on social and political changes that have been slow in coming, is considerably more optimistic. In her conclusion, she writes:

In my vision, the federal government has scrapped the Indian Act and stopped clawing back resource revenue from First Nations. The majority of government funds required to administer the Indian Act has been redirected towards delivering much-needed capacity to northern communities.

The First Nations of Ontario’s James Bay Lowlands have seized the opportunity to become self-governing and self-sufficient … [with] the power to write their own laws on a variety of local governance issues affecting their communities, including environmental protection, public order, and land and resource use and planning. 

Marten Falls … has become a hub for education and small business. Acrid wafts of burned diesel no longer permeate the air because diesel generators have been replaced by wind turbines supplemented by hydro power humming its way along transmission lines ….

Heffernan goes on to envision mine funds being invested in schools, hospitals, and community centres staffed by Indigenous locals, some of whom are working hard to bring back Indigenous language and culture. She sees sustainable housing, suited to the cold-but-warming climate, that has become available for all, supplied by clean water and connected to sewers, electricity, and high-speed internet access. 

In other words, with the approach to development that Indigenous People have been fighting for, Ontario’s northern and Indigenous communities could thrive and prosper, as so many southern communities have been doing for so long. 

I never would have pictured myself reading a book about mining, but Heffernan’s book has opened my eyes to the possibilities. I don’t think I’ll ever look at mining through such stubbornly jaded eyes again. 

July 1 was Canada Day. Here are some other books about Canada’s history, geography, and culture, for better and for worse:

Louisburg or Bust: A Surfer’s Wild Ride Down Nova Scotia’s Drowned Coast, by RC Shaw.

Murder on the Inside: The True Story of the Deadly Riot at Kingston Penitentiary, by Catherine Fogarty.

Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, by Jessica McDiarmid.

Peace by Chocolate: The Hadhad Family’s Remarkable Journey from Syria to Canada, by Jon Tattrie.

Chasing Smoke: A Wildfire Memoir, by Aaron Williams.