Our online bookstore is now closed for the holidays. Click on any book to find it at your local bookstore or library.

by Martin Bauman

When Marjorie Simmins lost her husband, the late and celebrated author and film maker Silver Donald Cameron, to cancer in 2020, she struggled with two conflicting realities about his death: Cameron’s work was everywhere—“right bloody there… alive in print and film,” she writes in her newest memoir, In Search of Puffins—and yet, he was not. Simmins, the Truro-based author of Somebeachsomewhere, had spent more than two decades of her life with the man she called “Don.” She had even chronicled their unlikely love story—when they fell in love, there was 22 years and 6,000 kilometres between them—in her first book, 2014’s Coastal Lives.

Newly widowed and living alone, a continent’s width apart from the Vancouver suburbs where she grew up, Simmins had to rediscover both who she was and what it meant to call a place home. In Search of Puffins is a writer’s journey through grief, an ode to reinvention at any age and a love letter to Nova Scotia and all its wonders, big and small.

MB: Your first book, Coastal Lives, was a story about finding love—and how you and your husband, Donald, fell for each other despite the width of a country between you. In Search of Puffins is, in some respects, a story of accepting his passing. How did you realize that this was a story you wanted—or needed—to tell?

MS: Well, I did resist for some time, before it became obvious to me that I really should try to write the book. All of a sudden I thought, ‘Well, I have a beginning memoir, I have a middle memoir [The Year of the Horse], and I don’t have an end memoir.’

MB: Why puffins?

MS: Because they’re magical. And they fly, and they carry dreams around and I hadn’t had a chance to see them with Don. It came to me later that the puffins became a symbol of all the things and adventures that we hadn’t been able to do together—[though] we had many, many adventures together. They became a symbol of longing and delight.

CB: The years you write about during and after Don’s death have been eventful ones: we’ve seen a global pandemic, along with one of the most destructive hurricanes to hit Atlantic Canada—and that’s without navigating grief and loss. There’s a moment in the book where, in bracing for Hurricane Fiona to hit, you write that “facing the unknown, you have to hang onto something.” What was that something for you, in the unknown of a life after Don’s passing?

MS: You have to hang onto a sense of purpose, is what I found—and I hasten to say that everyone handles grief differently. In my case, it was all the work I did to extract myself from Cape Breton and to get to Truro. I focused on family, on friends, trying to bring some sort of lightness back into my life and looking for light to guide my footsteps. Later, that became a spiritual renewal for me—and that was important, too. But at first, it was just one foot in front of the other.

CB: One of the central themes of the book is the question of what makes a place home. You write of being torn between coasts—one on the west, where you grew up and where your family lives; another on the east, where you made a life and lifelong friends. You write, after Don’s passing, that it might break your heart to leave the Maritimes—and it might also break your heart to stay. How do you think of home today?

MS: I’ll probably be writing about different definitions of home all my life. I adore Cape Breton. It is a very magical, unique, lovely place and there’s a lot of lovely people there who I care about deeply. But for me, leaving Cape Breton was part of saying goodbye to Don. I needed to move in a new direction. I think I’m probably the luckiest person in the world to love as many places as I do. I have a Cape Breton friend who once said to me, ‘Oh, you’re so lucky. Wherever you go, you’re loved.’ It was a really great thing for her to say, because it really brought me up short. It’s the truth of it. She’s right. One of these days, perhaps I’ll give into this delicious reality of mine, which is many, many homes, and many places to love. ■

MARTIN BAUMAN is the Halifax-based author of Hell of a Ride: Chasing Home and Survival on a Bicycle Voyage Across Canada.