I’m off to Berton House in the Yukon next summer
by Rob - December 5th, 2006.Filed under: Berton House.
Carolyn and I will be spending three months next summer in Canada’s far north. We’ll be living at Berton House, the childhood home of famed Canadian nonfiction writer Pierre Berton, in Dawson City, Yukon Territory; Dawson City was the heart of the Klondike Gold Rush, and is at latitude 64 degrees north, about 100 km due east (along The Top of the World Highway) from the Alaska border.
Berton House is administered as a writers’ retreat, sponsored by the Klondike Visitors Association. Established Canadian writers apply to live there for three-month terms — and I was just accepted. This will be a real chance to get away from it all, and concentrate on my writing.
Carolyn and I will head there early in July, and stay until the end of September, 2007. (I’ve been to the Yukon once before, as an instructor at the Yukon Writers Conference in Whitehorse during February 2002, and I fell in love with the people and the geography.) My plan is to come back at the end of September with Wake, volume one of my WWW trilogy, completed.
Because of this residency, we will miss the World Science Fiction Convention in Japan, and we’ll also miss the NASFiC (North American Science Fiction Convention, which is in St. Louis in 2007). But we will be at the World Horror Convention in Toronto in the spring of 2007, the World Fantasy Convention in upstate New York in the fall, plus all these other events (and I will be back to Toronto in time for Word on the Street on the last day of September).
I’m very excited about this!
The fundraising dinner I was at last week was in support of Berton House, by the way.
More information about Berton House is here (click to enter) and here.
More about Dawson City is here.
Biographical details about Pierre Berton are on his website, in The Canadian Encyclopedia, and at Wikipedia.