Swearing In Russian
At The Northern Lights

Katya’s grand and disorienting adventure begins in Moscow when the Russian girl has an internet flirtation with Richard Joy, an ornithologist studying birds of the Arctic. They marry and he sweeps her off to a small Inuit town Iqaluit where they begin family life with their baby daughter Masha.

But internet intimacy is pitted against the isolation of a remote and foreign community. Iqaluit, like any frontier town is populated by adventurers, misfits, misanthropes, and natives whose own culture is in transition. 

Katya’s world is shaken when her friend Elisapee, keeper of Inuit myths, goes missing on the ice in a blizzard. Cut off from her friend and her neighbours, while  her husband is away “down south” on a business trip, Katya’s internet ties to Moscow and her family  bring added anxiety. Her brother Grishka, with whom she has an intense psychic alliance, is suffering from a terminal illness and is on the verge of death. Jealous thoughts about Richard cloud her mind and she is stranded  in cyberspace cut off her previous life and connections. 

The blizzard abates, Richard returns and Elisapee is found, but now comes the task of intimacy and forging a family and community of her own. 

Swearing in Russian at the Northern Lights is a surprisingly assured debut by a singular talent. Told in sensuous prose, this is a story of love and grief, of the delicate strength of human connections, and of the resonance of myths within the individual and communal psyches. 

Ania Vesenny’s fiction has appeared in Per Contra, SmokeLong Quarterly, elimae, and Descant. Her short story “Snowrise” was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She is recipient of the Evelyn Sullivan Gilbertson Award for Emerging Artist in Literature.