Mindy Willett in Ontario

TD Canadian Children’s Book Week was incredible. I felt like I was in the movie Planes, Trains & Automobiles as I wound my way around farmers’ fields and Toronto’s busy streets. What an incredible way for a northerner like me to get a sense of a different part of the country, including the diversity of the land, the communities and the children. It was a pleasure to look out into the audience and see so many wide eyes as I explained the joys of biking on ice-roads, paddling on large lakes and sticking my face in to drink from the clean water, sharing what the arctic circle really is and about the incredible diversity of northern peoples and places.

In particular, I liked dispelling stereotypes children had about their northern neighbours: no, people don’t still live in iglus, although they are very ‘cool’ ingenious structures that Inuit are proud of; no, we don’t go to school by dog team (well, most of us don’t anyway) but we do have them in many of our neighborhoods. Yes, we do love our movies, computers, cell phones, swimming pools, hockey teams and many of the other same things as children all across the country love.

I felt great satisfaction as children asked intelligent questions, engaged in conversations about what life is like in the Northwest Territories today and about the diversity of our great country. It was a pleasure to have children very interested in the stories I shared and in wanting to read the books. To hear, ‘Where can I get these?’ and ‘Oh, you have to tell us the ending’ after I shared only part of a story was a real pleasure. This opportunity helped the children and me feel like Canada is a little smaller.