Moon of the Crusted Snow-which you can order here-is set in an Anishinaabe community in the north. Waubgeshig Rice is a writer and journalist originally from the Wasauksing First Nation. With more and more unmarked graves of children found around the sites of residential schools, with the increased publicity throwing residential school survivors back into post-traumatic stress, with indigenous communities deep in mourning and non-indigenous folks wanting to stand in support, at least most of us (I hope) with climate change causing record heat in western Canada to the point where elderly and isolated people are dying alone with COVID raging in Africa and other low-vaccination areas, meaning most of the world… I would say chilling and warm and distressing, although that’s a bit of a mouthful to put on a cover, and who wants to read a distressing book in what’s already a distressing time? “Chilling in the best way possible,” says the cover quote from novelist Eden Robinson. In 2014, he received the Anishinabek Nation’s Debwewin Citation for excellence in First Nation Storytelling.To mark Canada Day, I thought I’d write about Waubgeshig Rice’s award-winning novel Moon of the Crusted Snow. He currently works as a video journalist for CBC News Ottawa. Along with reporting the news, he has produced television and radio documentaries and features for the public broadcaster. He started working for CBC in Winnipeg in 2006. He graduated from Ryerson University’s journalism program in 2002, and has worked in a variety of media across Canada since. His journalism career began when he was a 17-year-old exchange student in northern Germany, writing about being Anishinaabe in a European country for newspapers back in Canada. His debut novel, Legacy, was also published by Theytus in the summer of 2014. Some of the stories he wrote as a teenager eventually became Midnight Sweatlodge, his first collection of fiction published by Theytus Books in 2011. The stories his elders shared and his unique experiences growing up in his community inspired him to write creatively. He developed a strong passion for storytelling as a child while learning about being Anishinaabe. Waubgeshig Rice is an author and journalist originally from Wasauksing First Nation.

Waub rice book