THEBACHA/FORT SMITH
Patti-Kay Hamilton seems almost disbelieving when describing the latest turn in her life.
Fort Smith's Patti-Kay Hamilton writes on an iPad while sitting at her kitchen table. - Paul Bickford/NNSL photo
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Hamilton – best known for her 30 years as a radio personality with CBC North and as a still-active biathlon coach – now considers herself a writer.
"That's hard to say, isn't it? I'm a writer," she said. "I'm shy about it."
As for why that seems so hard to say, she explained, "It's just something so impossible."
However, the Fort Smith resident has turned what seemed an impossibility into reality. She is a published writer and is working on a novel.
Hamilton believes now is the time to tell more stories about the North.
"People are interested in the North," she said. "The world's eyes are on the North."
However, she believes that, despite the thirst for Northern stories, only a few of the stories of the North are being told and traditional stories are being lost.
"We need to nurture our kids. We need to nurture creative writing, because that's what's going to endure," she said. "When the Deh Cho Bridge collapses a thousand years from now, Deh Cho legends will live on. When all the diamonds are pulled out of Tlicho soil, Tlicho legends will live on."
Hamilton retired from the CBC two years ago, partly to launch her new career as a writer.
"The time was right. I was ready to go, but I was anxious to get writing," she said. "I was kind of frothing at the bit."
She was also inspired to make the move by the memories of two people, who died before all their stories were told.
One of those was Mary Cadieux, the mother of Hamilton's former partner, Dolphus Cadieux, and the grandmother of her son.
In 1975, a few years after Hamilton first came to the NWT on river-paddling adventures, she joined the Cadieux family to trap for 14 years and actually lived in the bush for five years at a camp at Beaulieu River, halfway between Yellowknife and Lutsel K'e.
"She is my muse," Hamilton said of Mary Cadieux, explaining that thinking of the late elder makes her want to write. "She's the one who makes me sit down in front of my laptop and get busy, because she taught me a lot – many, many things – and told me many stories, but one of the things she taught me was that a story is a gift that needs to be shared."
She said Mary Cadieux led a very traditional life – she was born in a skin tent on Great Bear Lake, didn't see a white man until she was a teenager and was a skilled hunter.
"When I moved out in the bush, she took it upon herself to teach me as fast as she could everything that she knew because, I think, she was afraid that this naïve white girl from the south was going to either hurt myself or someone else," Hamilton recalled. "So whenever we were alone she would use it as an opportunity to tell a story. And that's how she taught things."
Sometimes the stories were adventures from Cadieux's childhood and sometimes they were legends from her Slavey people around Deline.
Hamilton said, for her, the experience was just like magic.
She said one of her biggest regrets is she didn't record Cadieux's stories, possibly for a book, even though she had unsuccessfully applied for a year's leave of absence from CBC to do so.
"And before I knew, she no longer could tell those stories and then she was gone," Hamilton said, noting Cadieux died last year. "Mary's death really hit me hard and made me realize that I'm running out of time. I'm going to be 62 next month."
Hamilton learned a similar lesson from the death of her father, Fred Hamilton, who was a decorated veteran from the Second World War and later a journalist with the Canadian Press.
"He was such a strong and powerful writer," she said, noting he had memories of war, amazing experiences from childhood and a great imagination. "His intention was always that when he retired, he would write those down. He had little notes and little pieces of paper. But he waited so long that, by the time he stopped working, he got sick and he died."
Hamilton said the lesson from her father's death is don't wait.
"And that is one of the reasons that drove me to retire when I did from CBC," she said. "Because when you're working every day and you're milking the goat, you can't have the energy. It's exhausting creative writing."
Her first published work was in last year's ,Coming Home: Stories from the Northwest Territories, an anthology featuring 17 Northern writers produced by NorthWords NWT.
Hamilton said she had written many stories for CBC that ended up on the air and on a website.
"But to have NorthWords pick that story and publish it in that book was a hundred times more exciting," she said. "I was over the moon. I still am."
She has also done well in a couple of writing competitions and will have a short story in the March edition of Up Here magazine.
As for her nascent novel, Hamilton said, while not giving away too much about the story, it is about how a family living a traditional lifestyle in the North is impacted by the animal rights movement.
She has sketched out the story and actually started writing it in August.
