Julie Salverson works with survivors of trauma. As a playwright she helps them tell their stories, work through their pain, bears witness to their suffering. But she is on the verge of buckling under the weight of these stories when a friend pulls her into a different kind of story. A group of Dene from Déline, on the shores of the Great Bear Lake, where the uranium that went into the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been mined, had gone to Japan to apologize for their actions.

From this Northern community Salverson traces the journey of the uranium from Canada to New Mexico and onto Japan. Along the way she examines the impact of the element on the communities where it was mined, processed and turned into weapons. Questions of forgiveness and the blurry lines between victim and perpetrator are addressed in a way that offers healing, but no simple answers. The result is unexpected beauty and hard-won insights that ripple through this narrative like stones dropped on still water as Salverson charts the influence nuclear arms have had on her own life and the lives of those touched by the various traumas of war, atomic or otherwise.

Julie Salverson is a nonfiction writer, playwright, editor, scholar and theatre animator. She is a fourth-generation Icelandic Canadian writer: her father George wrote early CBC radio and television drama and her grandmother Laura won two Governor General Awards (1937,1939). Julie's theatre, opera, books and essays embrace the relationship of imagination and foolish witness to risky stories and trauma. She works on atomic culture, community-engaged theatre and the place of the foolish witness in social, political and inter-personal generative relationships. Salverson offers resiliency and peer-support workshops to communities dealing with trauma and has many years of experience teaching and running workshops. Recent publications include the book When Words Sing: Seven Canadian Libretti (Playwrights Canada Press, 2021) and Lines of Flight: An Atomic Memoir (Wolsak & Wynn, 2016).

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"Her excursion takes her into some of the darkest reaches of recent history, but also illuminates the human spirit with hope and humour." - Quill & Quire

"While each memoir treads its own ground, readers who enjoyed Joy Kogawa's Gently to Nagasaki will find this a complementary title — a different take on similar themes." - The Globe and Mail

"One of the reasons I love this memoir is her honesty about the personal journey this project has inspired her to take, and the bits of wisdom she has figured out along the way." - Consumed by Ink