Why Are You So-
by Cathy Burrell

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For eight summers, my life went on the same way. The smell of lilacs, and when school was out, two tickets to the Calgary Stampede tucked into my report card, and a trip to Winnipeg to see Baba. And then Dad said we were moving. I said no, I wasn’t, but when it was clear I had no choice I asked where we were going. He said he got a job as the bakery manager in Yellowknife, a town in the Northwest Territories. I stared and stared at the map and finally realized that at 10 years old I’d had no idea there was any sort of land beyond the northern border of the province of Alberta. After her father’s third bankruptcy and the sudden estrangement of her two adult brothers, young Cathy Yurkiw was dragged away from a comfortable—if somewhat dysfunctional—childhood in Calgary to follow her father north. In Yellowknife, isolated from family and friends, she struggled to grow and put down roots, and to take care of her mother—whose depression and alcoholism were getting worse every day they stayed in the North. A raw and tender retelling of having to grow up without help in a strange place, and the kind of family falling-apart that leaves tangled relationships and bittersweet memories in its wake.

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Cathy Burrell is an adult educator and entrepreneur. Her writing has appeared in Maclean’s Magazine. This memoir is a look back at a confusing and challenging time, when she was convinced that everything would work out if only she could convince everyone in her family to just be ‘normal’. Cathy lives in Kelowna, British Columbia, with her husband Paul…and hopes this is her last move.

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Author

Cathy Burrell

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