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Windspeaker.com Books Feature Writer
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Illustrator Kayla Williams is happy that the “writing just fell in my lap one day” and resulted in her first picture book, Aurora’s Journey, which hit bookstores last week.
Through her rich illustrations and words, Williams tells the exciting story of Aurora, a young Inuk girl who sets out in search of her family when they go hunting in Nunatsiavut. Aurora must survive the harsh Arctic conditions and trust in the traditional Inuit knowledge she has obtained from her family and community.
Williams, Labrador Inuit and of mixed heritage, is the mother of a nine-year-old and a three-year-old.
“I've been reading children's books for a long time and there might be two that I've been able to read to them and be, ‘This is comparable to our life and our people and our culture’.”
Williams split her growing up years between Labrador and Ontario. While Ontario offered her a multicultural upbringing, it never offered her other Inuit from Labrador.
“People would ask me about where I come from and being Inuk and all of these things, and I had nothing to show them. All I had was generic Inuit people within an igloo or things you see on the news,” she said. “I could never pick up a book when I was growing up and see my culture and my people.”
Williams pulled on her Nunatsiavut community to help her shape Aurora’s Journey. During her trek, Aurora tunes into the landscape through her grandma’s words: “When partridges feast, bad weather is coming” and her father’s lesson that “when rocks and the land darken, the land is warning you of a storm.”
“I went out of my way to share my stories with as many people as I could from my home and to get some insight. As I was doing that, they would come back to me with suggestions on how I could…make it more culturally relevant,” she said.
Williams enjoyed working with Kegedonce Press, founded by Anishinaabe writer Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm in 1993.
“I changed my own story so many times and they were cool (with) whatever I wanted. They wanted my vision to come to life. It was really all in my hands,” she said. “You hear about when someone else gets copyright of the story and they end up changing it. But no, they were really, really great with doing whatever I wanted to do for the most part.”
Aurora’s Journey is her first foray into writing picture books. Williams says writing was easier than illustrating, although she’s been operating Big Land Design, which is all about drawing, for the past six years.
The words for her book flowed and “it was a just a matter of organizing my thoughts into a way that makes sense,” but the illustrating was more technical, with guidelines that needed to be followed. However, when the size of Aurora’s Journey increased, with each illustrated scene allowed to cover two pages, “that gave me a lot more room for my creativity,” she said.
Labrador Skies with Inhabit Books is Williams second picture book and that has also just come out.
Wiliams, who illustrates books for other authors, says it was different and easier doing illustrations for her own work.
“I love illustrating for anybody but there's definitely a lot more freedom that comes with illustrating for my own writing because I can do what I want to do…I can change things if I'm not happy with it,” she said. “I've worked with authors and I've also worked with a group of authors to illustrate for them…It's wonderful either way, but it's a lot of just doing what they want. Which there's nothing wrong with that. It's just a totally different feeling than doing what I want to do in the moment.”
Williams limits the use of Inuktitut words inAurora’s Journey to less than a handful.
It was a personal choice, she said. While she is taking language lessons, she is not a fluent speaker and Inuktitut, which has various dialects depending on the geographic region, is not an easy language to learn.
“I'm going to be touring and reading these books to a lot of children possibly publicly or maybe on video (and) my concern is that if I'm going to include these kinds of words in my book, I want to be able to pronounce them all correctly. And I think it was more so my own kind of self-doubt in that I'm not confident that I'm going to say everything right,” said Williams.
Aurora’s Journey can be purchased in bookstores or by ordering at https://kegedonce.com/books/auroras-journey/