Midnight Light: A Personal Journey to the North

Our author suddenly finds himself unencumbered with his regular Toronto newspaper job and, remembering an all-too-brief visit to Yellowknife for a literary festival, packs his bags and heads North to work at the local paper. The Yellowknifer is a slim, twice weekly rag unique in that it focuses solely on Yellowknife, no reheated stories from wire copy — also clearly an early inspiration for Bidini's The West End Phoenix a local community newspaper he would launch on his return to Toronto.

And the book is a series of dispatches that upends any notion I have of this Northern capital city and the work of small town journalism. The folks at the paper might hew to certain stereotypes - some have landed here after being kicked out of everywhere else while for others this is but a pitstop to bigger and better - but the Indigenous Dene people are armed with a steely pragmatism and the folks that call Yellowknife home (“people live here!” As the mayor famously said on TV) are ok with who they are, free from big city pretension and wide-eyed small town optimism. It's a clear-eyed rendering of a summer in Yellowknife from a consummate storyteller (and a damn fine musician - Your Tragically Hip might get all the love but Whale Music is still the best Canadian album ever)