In her own write

Writing is a solitary task best done in silence and isolation, so like most writers, Rachel Akitiq Qitsualik isn’t accustomed to putting on a public performance.

But there she is, sitting in front of a tiny glass-topped table tucked in front of a five-foot-high potted fern, preparing to read her latest story to an audience of about 60 people who have jammed themselves into Iqaluit’s Fantasy Palace coffee shop.

“What I really want is my writing to touch lives in a positive way. I do it as a prayer to the Creator. Honestly. I know it sounds mushy, but I try to give back in some way, I think, for the talent that the Creator has given me,” Qitsualik says in an interview after the reading.

“Skraeling,” her 11,000-word piece of historical fiction, has just been published in an anthology of history-based short stories by Canada’s best aboriginal writers called Our Story.

The collection, published by Doubleday Canada, also includes stories by such celebrated writers as Thomas King, Drew Hayden Taylor, Basil Johnston, Tomson Highway, and Tantoo Cardinal, and a foreword by Governor General Adrienne Clarkson.

“Skraeling” is a what-if kind of tale, an imagined reconstruction of a violent encounter in the year 1,000 A.D. between Tuniit, Inuit and Norsemen, somewhere on the eastern shores of the Canadian Arctic.

“It just caught my fancy. In the news there was some article about an artifact that had been found, from the Vikings, somewhere in South Baffin. I thought, what would it have been like to have been present at that moment in time?” Qitsualik says.

Qitsualik’s clean, transparent prose — short sentences, terse dialogue and just the right amount of concrete detail — contains no wasted words. It’s a style well-suited to convincing the reader that her imagined characters really could have met, fought and reconciled themselves to one another in the way she imagines that meeting for the reader.

Like all good writing, it’s a product of much redrafting, and the cutting away of unnecessary material until the right version is sculpted.

“When I first wrote it, it was huge. It was like a movie,” Qitsualik said.

The book Our Story was actually launched in Edmonton on Oct. 18. But the Nunavut Literacy Council, whose mandate is to foster a love of reading and writing, organized a separate launch in Nunavut in honour of Qitsualik’s story, on Oct. 22 in Iqaluit.

In Qitsualik, the literacy council couldn’t have found a more ardent advocate for the joys of reading. She’s been a fan of Fyodor Dostoevsky, the great 19th century Russian novelist, since she read The Brothers Karamazov at her father’s camp.

“I’m an addict. If I don’t read I go crazy. I read two or three books at a time. I don’t feel normal if I don’t read. My most favourite writer is Dostoevsky… and Stephen King, of course. I go through a lot of writers. One year it might be Doris Lessing, another year it might be Anne Tyler. But a lot of the time I don’t like female writers.”

Thanks to the Internet, Qitsualik’s writing in English has become known to a growing body of fans around the world, mostly through a personal web-page that she once maintained, a weekly column that she began writing for Nunatsiaq News in 1998, and writings published in aboriginal periodicals throughout the country.

But Qitsualik is also one of a handful of people in the Canadian Arctic to regularly produce creative writing in the Inuit language. The Inuktitut versions of her columns — which now appear in the Yellowknife-based News North — are not translations. They’re written in Inuktitut from scratch, and often differ from the English versions.

Now employed as a translator with the Nunavut Department of Justice in Iqaluit, Qitsualik has been involved with Inuit language and culture throughout most of her career. Her family roots stretch from one end of Nunavut to the other, from Cape Dorset to Pond Inlet to Gjoa Haven, where she spent most of her childhood.

This has made her familiar with both the eastern and western sides of Nunavut, and Nunavut’s numerous Inuktitut dialects and cultures.

For example, to portray the now-extinct Tuniit, or Dorset culture in her story, she partly relied on her knowledge of the Utkusiksalingmiut, whose descendants now live in Gjoa Haven and parts of the Kivalliq region.

“I think in some ways I patterned them after the Utkusiksalingmiut people, who are very shy, gentle people,” Qitsualik says.

Our Story is now available in Iqaluit, upstairs at the Arctic Ventures book section, for $32.95.