M.T. Kelly

        I WROTE IN MY THIRTIES, publishing two more novels, and a book of poems, and the play, The Green Dolphin. Through my column I met Lynn King, whom I interviewed, then became partners with. We formally married 6 months before her death, in order to make probating the will easier, but were in effect married for 25 years. We have two sons, Max and Jonah. My book A Dream like Mine,  won the Governor General’s award for fiction and was made into a movie, Clearcut, starring Graeme Green. Much of my work has been translated into other languages. 

       During the late eighties and nineties I was also a contributing interviewer to TV Ontario’s literary show “Imprint.” This gave me the chance to talk to many writers, and some of these conversations were published in the book One on One: The Imprint Interviews.

    In my late thirties I corresponded with, then met, Alex Hall of Fort Smith, Northwest Territories (NWT), with whom I would canoe part of the route of Samuel Hearne, and also the Back and Thelon Rivers. He made it possible for me to visit the barren lands of northern Canada. Teacher's college had given me a practical interest in canoeing because of a course I did not want to take, Outdoor Education; again, never having experienced anything remotely like it as a child. I have loved canoeing a long time and canoed many rivers. It has been a passion.

        In 1995, on a trip with Alex, our planes were separated and we were forced down on a lake called Powder Lake in the NWT. Had Alex's plane been with ours, things might have been different: we could have set up the tents, got a fire going, as I have heard others experienced in the bush say, and sat back and enjoyed life. There would have been order.

        An aside. Earlier in this piece I mentioned my interest in how native people did it. After I had finished writing A Dream Like Mine, I talked to a man named Gus Nahwegehbow, the father of a friend, who was one of the last native people to trap the French River in the traditional way; without motors or planes. When I spoke to him, he was a tiny man in his eighties. What he said to me impressed me so much that I have made an anecdote out of it, a kind of set piece, but nevertheless what he said to me was of profound importance. So how did he do it, carry such weight, winter out, deal with going upstream, portaging, carrying the canoe, someone as small as he was, what was the secret? (I embellish, in telling the story – oh guru, how does one relate to the country that way?) Mr. Nahwegehbow told me: Well, the first thing you have to do is get organized."

        With this most recent trip, the planes separated, the pilot we were with was without food, matches (I had some), proper clothes, even proper shoes. I saw a situation that, years earlier, I would have been enraged about but would have endured. This time, after writing in my journal "squalor + anxiety = the right choice," I bailed out of the trip. Standing at Powder Lake, stuck there, seeing the warnings about toxicity on the oil drums, I had semi-romantic thoughts such as "maybe there are some places people shouldn't go." The wind was blowing. But I dealt with that sort of thing, the landscape and place, in Out of the Whirlwind. What was really important about my decision was that the "man was father to himself" and I got myself out of there, not guilt free certainly, but having made a decision to "protect" a part of myself, a part that was not protected before.