TORONTO - Author Joseph Boyden recently answered his cellphone (it has a New Orleans area code) while sitting in a hotel room in Calgary, following an all-night drive from Cochrane, Ont., to Toronto to catch a flight.
To get to Cochrane, he'd ridden 300 kilometres on the Polar Bear Express train from Moosonee on James Bay, where he'd been hunting with brothers, his son and an old friend.
Boyden travels to the James Bay area four or five times a year from his home in Louisiana.
"I'm not an expatriate by any means... I think our world is such right now that you can live in very distant places and still keep close to family and the land," said Boyden, 41.
"I really like that kind of psychic and geographic distance I'm given by living in New Orleans and looking back. After the well fills up back home, I come back to New Orleans and start the fiction process."
While Boyden was raised in a suburb of Toronto, it is the remote communities of Moosonee and Moose Factory, almost 700 kilometres toward the Arctic from North Bay, Ont., that are the primary setting of his second novel, "Through Black Spruce," one of five books on the short list for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.
"That's not my traditional homeland, that's for sure," said Boyden, who spent two years teaching in the James Bay area after studying creative writing at York University and now teaches at the University of New Orleans.
"But I fell in love with that landscape. It's this harsh beauty that's just stunning to me, and the people are amazing. I was taken in with open arms into all these different communities."
"Through Black Spruce" is, in a sense, a continuation of his first novel. "Three Day Road" tells the story of two Cree men from northern Ontario who go to fight in the First World War, interwoven with the memories of an old woman, the last living Oji-Cree medicine woman to live off the land, who cares for the one who returns.
Boyden's second novel follows relatives of his previous characters who are struggling with contemporary issues many decades later.
Their stories are unveiled through the thoughts of Will Bird, a hard-drinking, fearless bush pilot, as he lays in a coma, and through the stories that Annie Bird, his tough, mystical niece tells him of the time she spent away.
She went in search of her younger sister, who had disappeared on the back of a snowmobile and ended up living in the fast, glamorous modelling worlds in Toronto, Montreal and New York.
The book juxtaposes the traditional life of the Cree living in the bush in the north with the frantic pace of the big city.
Problems that plague northern aboriginal communities -- dramatically high teen suicide rates, alcoholism, drug addiction, diabetes -- tend to overshadow other facets that make up the communities, said Boyden, who has Metis and European roots.
"It's very easy to stereotype people and I wanted to try to kind of blow apart those stereotypes and look at the people behind," he said.
"I'm always astounded by what would appear on the very surface stereotypical is not at all. A lot of people up in James Bay are still tied to the land."
Boyden said in recent years, many First Nations are "re-discovering" their traditions, bringing a lot of healing to communities while people still grapple with social problems and the legacy left by residential schools.
"It's not perfect yet and I didn't want it to be, I didn't want to romanticize the world that I've seen or what I created," he said. "I wanted to not be apologetic about things like the drugs -- there are drugs seeping into the communities, there are alcoholics, there are all these problems, but there's much more to the people than that."
"Three Day Road" was nominated for the 2005 Governor General's Award and in 2006, it won the Amazon/Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize.
The Giller Prize winner will be announced on Nov. 11.
