Join me in a cup of iceberg tea!

I am thrilled to announce that my first book iceberg tea, a collection of my favourite columns, has now been published. At the same time I am bidding good-bye to my regular column Prelude Notes that has been running in above&beyond, Canada's Arctic Journal for the last eight years.

For more information and to order your copy of iceberg tea,  please visit http://www.anneliespool.ca/Annelies_Pool/Iceberg_Tea.html


Here is my last column which appears in the May/June issue of above&beyond:

It’s hard to believe but I’ve been writing personal columns in the North for 30 years. I started writing Two Bits for the Hay River Hub in the summer of 1980 and while I don’t recall exactly what I wrote in that very first column, I think it’s safe to say that it had something to do with life in the bars. I was young, single and in love with the barroom life at the time and that’s mostly what I wrote about.
I do, however, remember how I felt after the first column went to press. As a writer, I have always been torn between the urge to write about my life and an innately private nature. After publishing that first column, I slunk through Hay River hoping nobody had noticed. That all changed when I got my first compliment.

Like many writers, I am an approval junkie. If we are writing what is honest, we are putting our hearts on the paper and that can get awfully lonely if nobody notices or cares. I have been very fortunate to be embraced by my readers throughout my career and this has kept me going. Somebody will come up to me in the street and tell me they have seen themselves in something I’ve written. Or send me an email saying how I have made them laugh. Then I feel it’s all worthwhile.

I wrote the column for The Hub for about two years before I moved to Yellowknife. I went on to write personal columns for News/North and then yellowknifer and finally for about 10 years or so, I’ve been writing Prelude Notes for above&beyond. My columns have documented my journey from the bar life to the bush life and have mellowed as I have mellowed.

It is impossible, I have discovered, to write the absolute truth because anything you have in your mind becomes limited as soon as you put it on the page. Words can never be more than symbols for what is real. And so I have often thought that in writing about myself that I have turned myself into a character. I have written a lot about my husband, Bill Saunders, and turned him into a character too and, fortunately, he doesn’t seem to mind. And when somebody calls him “Mr. Pool” instead of “Mr. Saunders,” he laughs.

Writing this column has been a fantastic journey but now it is time to put Prelude Notes to rest.  I am capping my career as a personal columnist with a collection of 50 of my favourite columns which I am calling Iceberg Tea — a name inspired by the Nunavut custom of making tea from iceberg chips and an email from a reader in Ottawa who said reading my column was like “sitting down with a dear friend over a cup of tea.”

I would like to thank all my readers over the years and here’s hoping we meet again soon over a cup of iceberg tea.