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 writer, speaker, teacher and workshop leader who has worked in professional and community engaged performance for many years. Her theatre, opera, and essays embrace the relationship of imagination and foolish witness to stories of violence. Her book Lines of Flight, An Atomic Memoir (Wolsak & Wynn) follows her journey tracing uranium from the Northwest Territories to Hiroshima while unearthing the secrets of her childhood, burning out as an activist and finding beauty in haunted places. She runs workshops for groups practising resiliency through drama. She has published many essays about how to witness a terribly beautiful world as well as the role of clown and courage in facing difficulty. She is a professor of drama at the Dan School of Drama and Music at Queen’s University and is based in Kingston, Ontario.

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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