For six long winter months, Alison McCreesh, her partner Pat and their two year old son Riel, traveled north of the 60th parallel. Through a combination of prolonged stays at artist residencies and short side-trips, they experienced six circumpolar countries: Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. This book contains Alison's original postcards, which she created daily, exploring not only the "Idea of North", but also illustrating, both through sketches and words, how her family dealt with the uniquely northern issues that they encountered in their circumpolar adventure. Alison's astute and often hilarious insights give an intimate glance into the trials and tribulations of travelling, parenting, working and living in the North. McCreesh's previous book Ramshackle won the NorthWords Best Book Award.

Since moving to the Northwest Territories in 2009, Alison McCreesh has travelled extensively throughout Northern Canada and the Arctic. Through her gallery work, illustrations, sketchbooks and comics, Alison documents and explores the contemporary North. Her work dwells on the way northern identity shifts rapidly as tradition and modernity collide and coexist North of 60: sometimes in confrontation with one another, sometimes evolving in parallel and sometimes mixing to create striking hybrids. Alison currently lives in Yellowknife in a small shack on the shore of Great Slave Lake - with high speed internet and no running water.

Alison McCreesh's profile page

• Winner, North Words

"The artist becomes most enamoured with a last redoubt of squatters, shacks known as the Woodyard, a picturesque haven for thrifty bohemians that appeals to her love of the "simultaneously exotic and mundane. Her book, too, is warmly makeshift, looking busy, cramped and earthily coloured, but welcoming and amiable all the same. As McCreesh's title admits, her Yellowknife is just one among many, this is not the story of the city's mining industry, or government workers, or Dene peoples. Instead, her outsider's perspective and her good-humoured portrait of the Woodyard community help introduce her readers to a particular part of Yellowknife life, as McCreesh herself was welcomed once."
--The Globe and Mail