Lines of Flight: An Atomic Memoir

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 [...]
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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 D?line, 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.