What do these three things have in common.

• Notes from Kathryn

They are the tools of my trade

They are the tools of my trade when writing the fantasy series the Bears of the Ice. You see I build fantasy out of fact.

So, the first item is the fur-lined hat, or a ushanka as the Russians call them. But I didn’t go to Russia I went to Churchill, Manitoba above the Arctic Circle in Canada to observe polar bears in the wild.

The second item is one of the seventy-five books I read on polar bears in which I learned about their biology, habitats, hunting strategies, mating and cub rearing, as well as many other behaviors. 

And then there is my dictionary of Inuit words. I often make up languages for the animals in my books to speak. I kind of take a real word from another language and give it a twist. In the Guardians of Ga’Hoole, the owls of the Northern Kingdom spoke Krakish that was a mixture of Norwegian and Yiddish. These bears of the Nunquivik speak a ‘dialect’ of Krakish that is a blend of Norwegian and Innuinnaqtun, an indigenous language of Canada and the Inuit people who live above the Arctic Circle.

 I don’t call this research exactly. I call this world building and I think of myself not just as a writer but a world builder.