Breakwater fends off the storms of 50 years as the Rock of N.L. literature
From Atlantic Books Today #98, fall 2023
Breakwater Books is celebrating its fiftieth birthday this year with a fall slate of books that includes the return of a beloved tour guide-detective, a stunning collection of fine art photographs, and a new novel on the lost women of Newfoundland and Labrador history.
Breakwater Books was founded in 1973 by a group of poets including Clyde Rose. In the 1980s, the press began to make an international impact by being one of the first independent publishers to go to the prestigious Frankfurt Book Fair. A memorable moment came at the fair when Breakwater put on a staged reading of Ellen Bryan Obed’s Borrowed Black: A Labrador Fantasy, which had been sold as nine translated versions across Europe. Each publisher turned up in a tuxedo to read from the story in each tongue. In 2002, Rebecca Rose joined the management team and bought the family press in 2009.
“Any company surviving 50 years is worth someone saying, ‘Wow, that’s amazing,’ right? But we’re watching regional presses and independent presses across Canada shutter the doors over the years,” Breakwater’s George Murray says.
Part of their key to success had been a flexibility to follow the market and a focus on the publisher’s core values that comes from being independent and owned by a president, he says. Over the years, Breakwater Books has focused on the educational market, nonfiction, poetry, and trade literary publishing.
“I’m a writer as well – I’ve published ten books – and this is the first time I’ve worked on this side of the desk,” Murray says. “It’s been a massive wakeup call for me as a writer to see all that goes on behind the scenes. The thousands and thousands of dollars spent on each book and the hundreds or thousands of hours spent on the book – and this is all post the writer doing the work.”
The long success has come with the acquisition of a few “friendly rivals,” such as the 2017 purchase of Creative Book Publishing. Breakwater took on their back catalog, adding to a library that stretches back half a century. Breakwater publishes 18 books a year and positions itself as a regional press that operates like a national one, like Toronto’s House of Anansi or B.C.’s Harbour Publishing.
But a publisher based on Newfoundland faces the extra costs and concerns about things like the price of fuel to get book-making supplies to the island, and the cost again to ship them to the mainland. “These are things we as writers never think about, but the publisher has to think about,” Murray says. “This is what I tell my students when I’m teaching: When you’re a writer, you’re an artist creating mostly alone. As soon as you decide to make it public, you’re investing in a partnership with a business that’s going to make it public.”
Part of that business model is finding new authors and publishing them in anthologies and building that into a book. That sometimes launches a writer like Michelle Porter to a national/international publisher in Penguin.
“That’s the lot of the small press. We’re basically a discovery machine looking for the new voice that will excite and bring that voice to the rest of Canada,” Murray says.
Of the four provinces Atlantic Books Today covers, Newfoundland has long been a powerhouse. Articles and posts about Newfoundland and Labrador writers routinely get the most attention and draw the most passionate fans. Murray attributes some of that to being on an island and out of the gravitational pull of big cities like Toronto and Montreal.
The fall 2023 collection includes Suliewey: The Sequel to My Indian by Saqamaw Mi’sel Joe and Sheila O’Neill. The two Mi’kmaw authors created both historical fiction novels from their own history. Mi’sel Joe has been the district traditional chief of Miawpukek First Nation since 1983. He’s considered the Spiritual Chief of the Mi’kmaq of Newfoundland and Labrador.
“He wrote a book about his ancestor, who had only ever been called by the colonial settler who hired him ‘my Indian.’ It’s using historical fiction to correct historical inaccuracies,” Murray says.
Murray says it’s about expanding the sense of what “our” culture encompasses. That includes the province’s widespread Irish identity, which accounts for some of that literary passion. “Clung to the side of a rock for 500 years in middle of the the North Atlantic, you end up having to make your own entertainment,” he says.
Another factor is the sheer physical beauty of the place, along with comparably affordable costs of living. That draws writers and artists, and they often stay. Murray moved from Ontario decades ago.
A much-anticipated fall title is Impressions of Newfoundland from Ting Ting Chen. The fine-art photographer taught herself her craft and wracked up the amateur awards. She moved from her native China to Newfoundland about six years ago.
“This is a new lens on Newfoundland. She sees Newfoundland differently than Newfoundlanders might have seen it,” Murray says. “Bringing that new perspective to us allows us to see ourselves through a new lens.”
Many of the images seem to turn a natural landscape into a painting, or frame a failing fishing shack in such soft morning light that it all looks newly created. She’s drawn many fans with her studies of Robert Tilley. She met the 73-year-old online first, and he gave her a tour of his part of the island when she moved to Newfoundland. In an unplanned moment, he peered into her rain-dropped car window, and she saw his face fully created in dozens of drops. She took a photograph, “Multiple Roberts in Raindrops,” and realized she had found her muse.
That photo is included here, along with a distant image of him seemingly holding up the Milky Way in “Ladder to the Sky,” dressed in Renaissance glory as “The Duke,” and our cover shot, “I and Myself in Me,” which was inspired by Jan de Bray’s 1664 “Portrait of the Artist’s Parents, Salomon de Bray and Anna Westerbaen” and Peter Paul Rubens’s 1614 “Agrippina and Germanicus.”
“She’s using Robert Tilley as a cypher for Newfoundlanders in general. If you look at some of the landscapes, they’re around the corner from me and I didn’t recognize them,” Murray says. “It’s just a different angle, a different colour palette. She’s focused in on something the rest of us, our eyes just move over. And that’s what we’re trying to do with fiction, with poetry, with everything. To find the new way of seeing and, in finding a new way of seeing, finding a new way of knowing ourselves.”
Kevin Major returns with his fifth instalment in the popular Sebastian Synard mysteries, wherein our hero is just trying to lead a tour of lighthouses when he finds another dead body at the bottom of the tallest lighthouse in the province. Five is for Forteau takes in the French Shore and very strange vandalism at a historic site.
Trudy Morgan Cole completes her Cupids trilogy with A Company of Rogues, her historic series exploring the lives of women settlers in North America as they wrestle with thoughts of homeland, colonization and seeking a sense of place and peace.
If all those new angles on Newfoundland and Labrador inspire a wanderlust, pick up a copy of the landmark Field Guide to Newfoundland and Labrador, compiled and edited by Memorial University biologist Michael Collins. The 900 photographs and illustrations of flora, fauna and icebergs will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about the wildlife of the land.
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