Description
1 April 2026. PRE-ORDER NOW
After being tracked by wolves and left behind in the forest as a child, after sleeping through a flame-spilling chimney fire, after regularly riding in vehicles driven by adults under the influence, and after physically fighting off one of her mother’s abusive partners, author Michelle Willms is both surprised and grateful she survived her northern childhood. Following the sudden death of her mother in 2001, Willms began writing about her and her family’s history to better understand how tragedy and the breakdown of trust impacted multiple generations, and to find healing.
Brave, engaging and electric, Northern Girls is a collection of true stories about the fractured legacy of growing up in rural northern Ontario. Exploring themes of generational trauma, parental addictions, and domestic violence, Willms confronts a past replete with both fragility and resilience.
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.
Praise
“Set against the backdrop of Northern Ontario in the midst of a tumultuous childhood, the essays in this collection stitch together beauty and danger, resilience and oblivion. Willms lays bare her coming-of-age with the candour of youth, an unflinching eye, and a poet’s ear for language. Fierce, harrowing, and lyrical, these essays ask what it means to survive.” Anna Leventhal, author of Sweet Affliction
“In Northern Girls, the landscape is never just scenery; it’s an accomplice, a witness, and a mirror. Willms writes the Canadian North with a visceral, sensory precision that chills to the bone—from the ‘lake-water seasoned flesh’ of a trout to the terror of wolves tracking a family through the snow. But the more harrowing wilderness here is family, where a mother’s neglect is as biting as the frost and safety is as fragile as a ‘mirror-top’ lake. This collection is an intimate, beautiful excavation of what it means to survive the freezing temperatures of both the Canadian winter and a difficult family life and emerge, like the grass in spring, into a hard-won light.” Sarah Einstein, author of Mot: A Memoir
“Like scales on a freshly caught trout, Willms’ true stories in Northern Girls glisten with visceral detail, evoking a felt sense of place that can only come through deep reflection and narrative refinement of memories. Willms breaks the silence on intergenerational family trauma with searing vulnerability. She writes with poetic lyricism and emotional precision, balancing grit with love and connection. Her deeply moving stories skip like stones thrown across a darkly placid northern lake.” Cid V Brunet, author of This Is My Real Name
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