Northern Girls: True Stories by Michelle Willms
Reviewed by Dawn Macdonald
Life in the North is brutal and glorious. The woods and waterways are beautiful; the things that happen at the forest’s margin come from darkest fairytale. Children are malleable; kids who grow up in such an environment will adapt to the shape of its dysfunction. We learn to alternate between fight or fawn, flight or freeze. Let me be the first to assure you, as a Northern girl myself, that alcohol facilitates each one of these responses.
Michelle Willms grew up split between her mother in northern Ontario and her father in the big-city South. Her mother, who had herself grown up as one of nine children in a home described as a shack, is fighting so many demons it’s impossible for her to show anything resembling consistency of care. Willms in turn is marked by the relational trauma of this fractured bond, and by the incidental traumas of everyday life in rural, northern communities. In Northern Girls: True Stories she collects a series of eight vignettes that sketch the contours of a place and a childhood.
Willms tells these stories straight, which lets the emotional impact unfold within the reader. She largely refrains from telling us how to feel. There is trauma in every tale, but this is not a misery memoir. It’s just life in the North. She’s brilliant at first lines, like this one from the titular story “Northern Girls”—“It is true, you were complicated, and you killed small animals, but then, so did I.” Or the first line from “Uncle Normand of the North” which kicks off the collection—“Your mother has brought you up north to see her family and you are allowed to sit in Uncle Normand’s lap because he wasn’t the brother who molested her as a child.”
In her writing, she draws on the northern landscape in ways both familiar and unexpected, as when she notes that rather than two ships passing in the harbour, she and her brother are more like “two snowmobiles passing on a frozen lake.” Left without adult supervision at the trailer park one summer, she recalls, “Excitement bubbled up from under the surface of my thoughts, like gasoline in water from a cracked motorboat engine ….”
The storytelling is skilful in its pacing, tone, phrasing, and impact. The incidents are unique to Willms’ history but the background rings absolutely true, certainly to my own experience in another Canadian North: the ubiquity of alcohol starting from a young age, drug dealing as a practical alternative to scarce employment, the presence of human and non-human predators, and the physically violent bullying that’s blatantly ignored by teachers at school, contrasted with the substitute teacher who awkwardly attempts to diagnose his students’ emotional problems using the pseudoscience of iridology.
Willms is clear about the damage she’s incurred in these circumstances, but sustains a coolness in the telling that shows how normal this all seemed at the time, a coolness that heightens the effectiveness of the material without overdramatizing. The stories themselves are left to do the work. This small-format paperback sits lightly in the hand, but like many products of the North it punches above its weight.
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.
About the Reviewer
Dawn Macdonald lives in Whitehorse, Yukon, where she grew up without electricity or running water. She won the 2025 Canadian First Book Prize for her poetry collection Northerny. She posts weekly on Reviews of Books I Got for Free or Cheap (on Substack), as well as reviews for journals and The Seaboard Review of Books.
Book Details
Publisher : Baraka Books
Publication date : April 1 2026
Language : English
Print length : 120 pages
ISBN-10 : 1771864095
ISBN-13 : 978-1771864091
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