Excerpt: Northern Girls by Michele Willms
An Excerpt From Michelle Willms' Collection of True Stories
Editor’s Note: “We recently posted Dawn Macdonald’s review of Northern Girls: True Stories by Michelle Willms (see below), and I thought an excerpt from this book, along with Michelle’s intro, would be a good way to stir interest in this fascinating collection of linked true stories.”
Michelle Willms explains the background of the stories as a way into the book:
“I started writing about what happened in my childhood after my mom's death as a way to understand how everything broke down in our family. My mom was a northern girl from the far reaches of Ontario, and I also lived up north for part of my childhood (that's when things got especially dicey for me and my siblings). I didn't know how to write nonfiction well, so I started reading nonfiction by other writers and studying writing craft. I love nonfiction as a genre now, and I deeply appreciate all the brave writers who've bared their lives and inner worlds on the page. It has helped me feel less alone in this world and I hope my work does the same for others. Over the last decade and a half, I've slowly been writing this collection of nonfiction stories about the most difficult parts of my northern upbringing. Northern Girls: True Stories, is a collection of eight stand-alone nonfiction stories, some published in literary journals prior to their culmination in this book.”
Northern Girls
It is true, you were complicated, and you killed small animals, but then, so did I.
Growing up, there was always someone waiting in line to love my mother, and after my parents divorced when I was two years old, your father took his turn. I had a great deal of prejudice against you before we even met, and I mistreated you the first years we were forced to live in the same home. Before you arrived, my mother asked our young teenage babysitter to help prepare my siblings and me for your arrival, but with her limited understanding of blended families, our babysitter told us that adopted girls, like you, were very angry, and that in a fit of rage you might try to scratch our eyes out.
Soon after your father married my mother, he started yelling at us, spanking us at random, pushing my mother up against the wall, and slapping her in the face while she screamed. Their brief cycle of love, violence, and marriage came to a quick end. In one last agreed course of action, your father and my mother planned his exit while my siblings and I were on visitation at our real father’s house. Over a weekend, all evidence of your father vanished as he moved out of our house. When we returned, the living room felt especially naked—he had contributed a soft, comfortable sofa set to the marriage, and now he’d have it all for himself. What was worse, I could not see you when I walked in.
I had no claim on you because you’d come to live with us through him, but my mother, who had a marbling of tenderness throughout her broken and toughened heart, took me in her arms and said, “Britt stayed with us; we knew it wouldn’t be fair to separate you two.” Even though we remained family, it must have been hard for you being the only adopted one. It must have been hard to hear our mother say so matter-of-factly throughout your life, “I don’t like Britt.”
After your father left, you and I watched a string of male lovers, as well as one mysterious woman whom we were told to call Cookie, come through our house. They’d all sit around our table, share our meals, care deeply for our mother, and take up her precious time. And then all of a sudden, there was Joe. He was young, and handsome.
Things moved fast, and caught up in the whirlwind of love, the Great Getaway was set in motion. We would sell our house in the south, and move to the north. We’d exchange thick Steeltown air for conifer-filtered breaths.
After we moved into a house with some forested acreage, you took to the woods so often, walking alone. I never joined you because Mom had made it perfectly clear that we were to keep watch for bears, wolves, fox, and ticks, not to mention potential lusty men.
Northern Girls Book Tour Dates:
Sunday, May 3rd, 2026
at Mahtay Café and Lounge from 4 - 6 pm.
Book Signing and Open Conversation!
Address: 241 St. Paul Street, St. Catharines, Ontario.
Wednesday, May 6th, 2026
at the Rittenhouse Library from 6:30 - 7:30 pm.
An “In Conversation” event with Kelly Spence!
Address: 4080 John Charles Blvd, Vineland, Ontario
Sunday, June 7, 2026
Niagara-on-the-Lake Book Expo from 11 am - 4 pm.
Book Signing and Open Conversation!
Address: 14 Anderson Lane, Niagara On The Lake, Ontario
Sunday, June 28th, 2026
Chapters, Fairview Mall, from 12 - 4 pm.
Book Signing and Open Conversation!
Where: 285 Geneva St, St. Catharines, Ontario
About the Author
Michelle Willms holds a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and a Bachelor of Social Work from McMaster University, and a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of British Columbia. Her writing has appeared in multiple literary journals, as well as the anthology This Side of the Divide: Stories of the American West (Baobab Press). She is the 2021/2022 recipient of the Norman L. Rothstein Memorial Scholarship, awarded by the Smith Family Foundation on the recommendation of the Department of Creative Writing. Michelle and her family live in Southern Ontario, Canada, as settlers on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabeg, Ojibway/Chippewa, and Haudenosaunee peoples.