Spurway finds heart and humour to balance the heavy questions she asks about life and death in her novel

Books by Heart is an initiative to help humanize Nova Scotia hospital care, with a curated collection of ebooks and audiobooks available for free to patients, families, and staff. The reading platform and program are being tested out first at the University of King’s College, and we’ve enlisted some King’s student reviewers to help promote more engagement with the collection within the King’s community. Find out more about the project (and read this book for free if you’re a member of the King’s community!) at BooksByHeartKings.ca

There was a time in Amy Spurway’s life when the magic of Cape Breton, N.S., was real.

“I was a bit of a feral ’80s child who went out in the morning and came back to get the hot dogs for the bonfire that night,” Spurway said.

Spurway developed a deep connection with the natural world with the “gaggle” of children who ran around their rural Cape Breton neighbourhood.

“Two channels on the television and a party line telephone,” Spurway said. “The only thing to do was go get your neighbours and wander around the woods or go to the beach.”

Her novel, Crow, is set in the same area and features a protagonist facing a serious health situation and deciding to go out in a blaze of glory, even if that uproots the family tree.

Spurway started writing and performing with CBC at 11 years old, when fantasy and reality were each still holding a hand and guiding her adventures. It’s no surprise that some of the magic of Cape Breton appears in her work, since it was seminal in her creative development.

Spurway said that Cape Breton is rich with storytellers who keep an ear to the ground for hints of romance or tragedy that defy logic, so they can spin it into a magic spell of their own.

“These are the things that make a good, compelling story,” Spurway said. “Whether it’s the supernatural, or the inexplicable, or the stuff of myths and legends and hyperbole.”

Spurway said the stories and mysteries of Cape Breton have had a big impact on her work.

“The storytelling plus this natural environment that invited curiosity, plus a personal fixation on the unseen and unexplained still influence me today.”

The book is named after its protagonist, Stacey Fortune, who’s been trying escape her avian nickname, and the rest of the shame associated with her early life in Cape Breton, with a new life in Toronto, until tragedy sends her home.

Spurway said Cape Breton provided a setting and a strategy to deal with the heavy themes about life, death and identity through humour.

“On the surface, a story about a woman getting diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour and moving home to die sounds like the most depressing thing in the world,” Spurway said. “I didn’t set out to write a funny story. That was largely driven by the characters. The final story ended up being this delicate dance between the profane and the profound.”

That delicate balance permeates every page of Spurway’s novel, like the thin veil that separates reality from fantasy, which should be no surprise from a writer who’s been working across artistic boundaries since the tender age of 11, when she was old enough to be distracted by shiny things; like a character named “Crow.”

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