Author Joan Mettauer busy during upcoming Culture Days

By Medicine Hat News on September 23, 2017.

Medicine Hat News

A Medicine Hat author will be a big part of the city’s Alberta Culture Days celebrations.

Joan Mettauer has three separate appearances planned for this week in conjunction with the three-day festival celebrated across the province Sept. 29-Oct. 1.

Mettauer will actually get out of the box the day before Alberta Culture Days officially begin. On Sept. 28 she’ll launch her new novel “North: The Last Great Race” with a reading at the Medicine Hat Public Library at 7 p.m. The next day she and other local authors will participate in the Downtown Art Walk, reading from their work during Culture on the Street from 6-9 p.m. and then Mettauer will do a book signing at Coles in the Medicine Hat Mall on Sept. 30 from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Mettauer is formerly a long-time resident of Canada’s north, and her experiences up there form the basis of both her current book and its 2014 prequel “Diamonds in an Arctic Sky.”

“North” follows Inuvik musher North Ruben as he and his team compete in the Iditarod and deal with “hazards of Alaska’s remote and rugged interior” that he has gravely underestimated, Mettauer explains in a release.

Mettauer, who began writing in 2009, says she fell in love with the North during her time there and when she decided to start writing in her retirement years she could think of nothing better than sharing some of her experiences in some of Canada’s most remote locales.

Writing her first book began as a deeply personal process — “to help me put to rest some of my ghosts” — after counsellors suggested the bereaved mother write. At first not planning to publish it, encouragement from those who read the finished product eventually changed her mind. A third book in the series has been completed and should be released before Christmas, Mettauer said this week.