The Only Snow in Havana

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright and librettist and author of the
children’s books Magic and What’s in a Name?

Ontario-born Elizabeth Hay has worked as a radio journalist in
Yellowknife, Winnipeg, and Toronto, has lived in New York, and has
traveled in Mexico and other parts of Latin America. In this book of
snow and fur and the colors of the south, she writes of the mysterious
union of north and south in her life.

She writes of Champlain’s search for the warmth of China and of her
own yearning for summer sun. She writes of David Thompson, who searched
this country and drew the map of northwestern America more than 100
years ago, and she writes of her own personal search among lovers and
friends in today’s world. She writes of Hannah Ebierbing, who was born
as Tookoolito; became known as the Eskimo interpreter and most trusted
aide of Arctic explorer Charles Hall; and survived a horrific disaster
after Hall’s death—but who, in the official account of the
expedition, was not even indexed. She writes of those hair-raising
moments when a researcher in a library opens long-forgotten records and
mementos of someone who lived along ago. She tells us, “I translate
the south, and the south translates me.” She may well have said the
same about the past.

Hay’s short pieces are suffused both with her own story and with the
history and spirit of this country. Yet they are not exactly stories,
and not exactly history. The reader may sometimes be confused, but it is
the intriguing confusion of following an original mind. And the writing
is a constant joy, alive with simple images that strike to the heart, a
clarity of expression that is like clean air, observations that stop on
the page. The book floats in the mind after it is read, like poetry.