Atlantic Books

Atlantic Books

Locate me
FR

short fiction

by

The High-Rise in Fort Fierce
Paul Carlucci
Goose Lane Editions

Paul Carlucci’s linked short story collection, The High-Rise at Fort Fierce, revolves around a dilapidated apartment building in the titular, fictional small town in the Northwest Territories. The opening story follows three generations of owner/caretakers of the building as they allow the high-rise to fall into further and further disrepair. They especially neglect the floors where they have crowded low-income tenants. Many of the collection’s protagonists are tenants who are being slowly poisoned by the high-rise’s mould-infested walls; their shared symptoms are one of the ways Carlucci creates cohesion across the overlapping narratives.

The mould and the illness it causes are symbolic of the theme of exploitation that runs throughout the collection. In the opening story, we learn the owners of the building know dangerous fungus is growing inside the walls and hope to keep it secret so they won’t be forced to do anything about it. Some tenants suspect the building is making them sick but lack the resources to relocate.high-rise

In “There Goes the Dogstar,” the narrator wonders if there might be something toxic behind a plaster bubble on the wall of his apartment but decides he won’t ask the landlord about it. He loves taking his dog up to the roof to stargaze and worries the landlord will take away his key to the roof as a punishment for raising the issue. The mould is a physical manifestation of how place and exploitation are connected in these stories. The High-Rise at Fort Fierce attempts to show how abuse is perpetrated and experienced in an isolated, Northern community.

Carlucci references the historic and ongoing systemic oppression of Indigenous Peoples by the Canadian government as a force that shapes life in Fort Fierce. In the first story, Norman Franklin, who inherited the high-rise from his father, reflects on an inukshuk at the entrance to Fort Fierce. Residents of the town are angry about the inukshuk because it is an Inuit symbol that does not represent the town’s Dene community. Norman thinks he might have an Indigenous relative and this inspires him to consider asking some of his Indigenous tenants how they feel about the inukshuk. He quickly decides against speaking with the tenants, reciting racist stereotypes about Indigenous people to himself.

In “Look at you, Percy,” a Dene woman named Linda mentions the inukshuk as a symbol of how the colonial government ignores distinctions between different Indigenous groups, making it easier for the government to steal land and resources from Indigenous Peoples while refusing to implement basic infrastructure in communities like Fort Fierce. In both these stories the Inukshuk becomes a vehicle to reveal the complex ways systemic racism impacts life in the town.

Early in the book Carlucci raises the idea of individual “newcomers” and “outsiders” in the Northwest Territories participating in systems of power that make it possible for them to take advantage of permanent residents of Fort Fierce. The narrator of  “Wood Toad,” a woman named Marley, describes a transient community of people who come to the town in the summer because they have, “… ruined their lives in the south and been lured north by the promise of escape.” These visitors often scoop up public-sector jobs, for which Marley says the locals are deemed too inexperienced or unskilled.

As a child, Marley has a strange and manipulative secret friendship with an adult surveyor from the south. Even though it is a brief relationship it has a huge impact on Marley. As an adult she is drawn to “newcomers” and starts advertising welcome baskets designed to make visitors feel at home in Fort Fierce. This is one of the quieter and more poignant stories in the collection; it captures the dynamic between people who are able to leave a small place and those who cannot.

While the mould is a subtle metaphor for the bodily harm people in positions of power inflict on people with less agency, almost every story in the collection has descriptions of more explicit violence, including battery, murder and strongly implied sexual abuse. Carlucci’s characters are complex and his strength is that he captures how people can be capable of both love and unforgivable brutality. But having several stories in a row hinge on lurid descriptions of assault or murder becomes repetitive. The graphic violence in the book, especially the descriptions of violence against Indigenous women, feels gratuitous and takes away from the more nuanced observations about abuse and exploitation in the collection.

by

Short Fiction:

Ben Tucker’s Truck
Azzo Rezori
Boulder Publications

Retired CBC Newfoundland journalist Azzo Rezori calls himself a professional observer, and that skill is apparent here not only in the everyday detail, but the inner selves of his characters as they tackle religion, romance, family and death.

 

Too Unspeakable for Words
Rosalind Gill
Breakwater Books

The pride of Corner Brook, Newfoundland explores a clash of values—old v. new—in her debut collection and shows herslef, as Russell Wangersky puts it, “to be a master of character.”

 

Long Fiction:

Catch My Drift
Genevieve Scott
Goose Lane Editions

In Catch My Drift, from New Brunswick’s Goose Lane Editions, Genevieve Scott combines the tight, evocative prose of a short story with the scope of an epic family novel. The result is an astute investigation of the evolution of a family.

 

Marry, Bang, Kill
Andrew Battershill
Goose Lane Editions

Another gem from Goose Lane in New Brunswick is Andrew Battershill’s Marry, Bang, Kill. It’s another soft-hearted tough guy joint, but the sharp writing and the audaciousness of the protagonist’s situation make it so much more: a literary page turner.

 

Catching the Light
Susan Sinnott
Nimbus Publishing

Susan Sinnott’s debut novel won Newfoundland and Labrador’s Percy Janes First Novel Award in 2014, before being published. Previous winners include Sharon Bala (The Boat People) and Joel Thomas Hynes (Down to the Dirt). This story of two characters and perspectives, polar opposites, is lyrical and rooted in small-town life.

 

Hysteria
Elisabeth di Mariaffi
HarperCollins

There are spectral aspects in this genre buster from St. John’s’ Elisabeth di Mariaffi, but the real terror comes from the most human of characters, a controlling husband who drugs his geographically isolated wife, who is suffering deeply from earlier trauma. This and other sinister characters work because of di Mariaffi’s precision with dialogue, setting and pace.

 

Art:

Mary Pratt: Still Light
Ray Cronin
Gaspereau Press

In a sense this is a no-nonsense look (from expert curator and frequent Atlantic Books Today curator Ray Cronin) at the life and work of renowned Newfoundland artist Mary Pratt, with a sampling of seven of her diverse works in the middle. In another sense, Gaspereau has created a work of art all its own.

 

Sixty Over Twenty
Andrew Steeves
Gaspereau Press

Let’s pause and appreciate physical books and the artisans who still take the time to make them beautiful. Andrew Steeves, a co-founder of Gaspereau, chronicles 60 books published over a 20-year period, and “the influence that using traditional book-arts tools has had on his thinking about culture, design and manufacturing.”

 

Global Politics:

Pay No Heed to the Rockets
Marcello di Cintio
Goose Lane Editions

Neil Postman once observed that, given our limited locus of control, international news is a useless distraction, especially given the shallow analysis of a 41-second news segment. Fortunately, as regards Palestine, New Brunswick’s Goose Lane has brought us the work of Marcello di Cintio and his observant travels through the rich cultural heritage of an ancient land.

From Black Horses to White Steeds
Edited by Laurie Brinklow and Ryan Gibson
Island Studies Press

“Think global, act local.” Scottish planner Patrick Geddes (1915-1932) is credited with the phrase that urges us to make local decisions in the context of an interconnected, vulnerable planet. From Black Horses to White Steeds is filled with inspiring examples of local—especially rural and island—initiatives making a more liveable planet.

Folklore:

Jack Fitzgerald’s Treasury of Newfoundland Stories Volume III
Jack Fitzgerald
Breakwater Books

Jack Fitzgerald is of course a Newfoundland treasure himself, a folklorist first class and an excellent teller of the tale. In his latest, he’s onto high-seas adventure and spy stuff, including the story of a Nazi weather station in Labrador and the Newfoundland inspiration for Treasure Island.

History:

Unchained Man
Maura Hanrahan
Boulder Publications

Memorial University Environmental Policy Institute adjunct professor and multi-award-winning author Maura Hanrahan has written a gripping true-life account of two men—including the celebrated Robert Bartlett—in 1914, on a perilous 700-mile trek across the ice from Alaska to Siberia to save the crew and passengers of the Karluk, crushed and sunk under pack ice. The unsung Inuit and their teachings made the rescue possible.

The Diary of One Now Dead
Tom Drodge
Flanker Press

During the Battle of the Atlantic six men boarded the B-26 Marauder Time’s A Wastin’ in Greenland, en route to Goose Bay, Labrador. The Marauder hit rough weather and crashed in Saglek; all six men died. Drodge brings an account of the tragedy via the diary of the pilot. The title comes from the Ellis Coles song about the events.

 

The Accidental Farmer
Joan Watson with Murray Creed
Nimbus Publishing

The establishment of the original Ross Farm in 1816 in Nova Scotia is a story representative of settlers of the time, the many Atlantic crossings, the volatility of the region and its peoples and the essential labour of survival. Watson and Creed bring the history to life as part of Nimbus’s Stories of Our Past series.

Caplin Skull
MT Dohaney
Pottersfield Press

Dohaney mixes oral history, anecdote and documentary to enliven a place—a fictional one, but yet one as real as any—and time, just before Newfoundland joins Canada. Written with humour, vibrancy and poignancy, Caplin Skull is a love song to a very real people.

 

Alexander Graham Bell: Spirit of Innovation
Jennifer Groundwater
Formac Publishing

Alexander Graham Bell remains a fascinating figure who maintained a home in Cape Breton for years of his life, and who with his wife mobilized the Baddeck community to assist victims after the Halifax Explosion. Groundwater’s account includes more than 50 visuals such as blueprints, artefacts and photos.

Humour:

Half the Lies You Tell Are Not True
Dave Paddon with illustrations by Duncan Major
Running the Goat Books & Broadsides

Labrador-born Dave Paddon, aka Newfoundland and Labrador’s Robert Service, presents tall tales, wrapped in incantation, inside foolishness, but perhaps there is a key. That key is hilarity for the old, the young and the goofy at heart.

Bluenoser’s Book of Slang
Vernon Oickle
MacIntyre Purcell

It’s said that language is not merely a component of culture. It is culture. Our localized use of words—dialectical dictums, idiomatic colloquialisms and vernacular tongue twisters—give us more delightful details on a given culture’s internal logic than any anthropological study. Paging Dr Oickle, whose delightful guide to the Bluenose lingo entertains and enlightens.

by

 

On March 18, 2018 the anthology collection Chillers from the Rock reached #1 on the Amazon Canadian Bestsellers list in four separate categories: Vampire Thriller, Werewolf & Shifters, Vigilante Justice and Hot New Releases (Thriller) . The book peaked at #152 on the Amazon.ca Bestseller’s Rank out of all of Amazon’s 1.8 million paid books at 5:17 pm Newfoundland time and was added to Amazon’s Bestseller’s list at that time.

Chillers from the Rock is a collection of twenty‐five short stories written by a diverse mix of some of the best suspense and horror authors in Atlantic Canada, including both award‐winners, veterans of their craft and brand new talent. This collection features the thrilling, creatively charged, astonishing fiction that showcases the talent, imagination and prestige that Atlantic Canada has to offer. It includes the work of Paul Carberry (Zombies on the Rock), Kelley Power (Winner of the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts and Letters competition), Matthew LeDrew (Coral Beach Casefiles, Infinity, Xander Drew), Ali House (The Six‐Elemental) and an introduction by Dale Gilbert Jarvis.

Engen Books is an independent publishing company based out of Newfoundland. It was started in 2007 by Matthew LeDrew and is currently run by LeDrew and partner Ellen Curtis, with a mission to promote literary expression and the medium of literature, regardless of genre, setting or style, and a belief that when you limit an author by geography or genre you are also limiting that author’s imagination, and thus limiting what you believe that author is capable of imagining.

Independent authors from Atlantic Canada and the world over offer some of the best, most imaginative, most exciting and transcendent fiction available on the market.

by

If there’s one thing Atlantic Canadians consider themselves experts on it’s winter and if there’s one thing they all like to talk about it’s the weather. So Winter: Atlantic Canadian Stories, an anthology of short stories edited by Dan Soucoup focussing on both, should be of interest to just about everyone who can read.

Within the general winter theme, stories range across the board. There is more than one recounting of feats of remarkable endurance and several childhood memoirs–often, but not always, involving hockey (this is Canada, after all). We’re also treated to the retelling of a Mi’kmaw legend, a truly tall tale, a ghost story and even a short story with an O Henry style ending.

Nonetheless, there’s a certain sameness to most of the stories. They were either written a long time ago, such as the offerings by Cassie Brown and Archibald MacMechan, or they hark back nostalgically to a mythical childhood that has long since disappeared. Even the ones that break the mould seem to somehow carry a whiff of camphor and candle wax. How often can you listen to Granddad tell a story, no matter how fascinating, without eventually rolling your eyes and fidgeting for freedom and a breath of fresh air?

As is often the case when the editor is going for a particular tone or type of story, the quality of the entries varies. Some are written by seasoned professionals and it shows. Some are written by rank amateurs. And, alas, it also shows. One thing all the stories do manage to achieve, however, is a true feeling of winter. That isn’t something that’s necessarily easy to accomplish, but it’s apparent that these authors really get the most dangerous of seasons–they know cold and they know snow, as well as what it can do to you. The stories, real or imagined, are steeped in authenticity.

It would have been nice to be given more information about the individual stories, such as when they were written and whether they were fiction or non-fiction. Most people like to know if what they’re reading is true or not and with realistic tales of long ago, written in the first person, that isn’t always possible.

Like winter itself this collection occasionally sparkles, but is too often just plain grey.

Winter
Dan Soucoup
Nimbus Publishing

by

Toward the end of the calendar year, Biblioasis released its Best Canadian Stories 2017 collection, edited by short fiction tsar John Metcalf. With the title, the pedigree and Metcalf’s explicit indications that good work is objectively hard to find (“It was sometimes impossible to find ten good stories in the magazines in a given year”), one comes to such a book with high expectations.

The results are solid. But as with most short story collections, some of the stories were thrilling while others passed me by without great titillation. Perhaps the quality of a story is more subjective than an editor might think. Having said that, it’s not hard to understand why any given story was selected. Metcalf has sought out stories with “sparkling language [and] glorious rhetoric.” For the most part he’s succeeded.

Of particular interest to Atlantic Canadian readers may be the fact that six of the fourteen stories are from our people, including stories by Halifax and Fredericton’s Lisa Alward, Brooklyn Nova Scotia’s Martha Wilson, Newfoundland’s Lisa Moore, Halifax’s Alex Pugsley, Mahone Bay’s Beverly Shaw and Halifax’s David Huebert, who lives in Windsor now but we’ll still claim him as our own. Six of fourteen in a national collection is punching way beyond our weight, so back pats to us. What interests me, and perhaps what gives these stories much more than a regional appeal, is that they don’t deal with stereotypically Atlantic themes (you know, the fishing and the lighthouses, not that there’s anything wrong with that). They deal with more universal interests like aging love; pet ownership; the ethics of competitive salesmanship; the mess and blood of sex, birth and dying; like, partying teenaged-girl angst (okay that one is neither east coast nor universal); and the tendency of loneliness to ruin solitude. The setting may be Atlantic but rarely is it that obvious or important. This is not to say stories clearly set on the crags of Peggy’s Cove or the streets of St. John’s can’t have universal appeal. They often do. But the Atlantic Canadian stories selected here are clearly contemporary.

There are two that particularly stand out: Huebert’s “Suture” and Moore’s “The Shoe Emporium.” Moore is a veteran novelist and short story writer, author of seven books and multi award winner. Huebert is the new kid on the block, winner of last year’s CBC short story contest and already acclaimed for his first collection, Peninsula Sinking. “The Shoe Emporium” comes on at a frenetic pace, but Moore never loses control of it. It’s just three diverse employees selling shoes in a mall, each trying to win a trip to Toronto by outselling the others. She masterfully twists the tropes of her characters, the charismatic sleaze, push-too-hard Type A and the hapless mourner. In a confined space there’s tension and resentment and sex and jealousy, with a surprise at the end. I was dizzy with it.

“Suture” is actually the final third of the long titular story from Peninsula Sinking, about three phases in a young man’s life, and his maturation from a guy who does crazy stunts to get attention from the cool kids to someone who, full of regrets and hopes, grapples with highly evolved intellectual and ethical conundrums and finds safety only in love. It stands just fine on its own and opens with this enticement: “Imagine it’s you facing the loss of the still-ripening cherries between your legs.” This story is very much set in the Halifax of the 90s (“swimming [in the harbour] among the tiny jellyfish and the tampon applicators”) to today. Huebert proves himself a wizard with figurative, sensual writing, layering bizarre images with tricky turns of phrase. The ultimate insight is not so new, but we are reminded that “there were palm trees on Antarctica once.” Anything can happen.

Indeed, that is the joy of a short story, its ability to surprise us in such a short space. It can be thrilling, as are several of the stories in this collection.

Best Canadian Stories 2017
Edited by John Metcalf
Biblioasis

by

Chad Pelley is the kind of writer readers and critics adore. He produces commercial bestsellers that get made into movies. He wins major awards, like the CBC NLAC Emerging Artist Award, and earns praise from writers like Lisa Moore, who called his work, “stylistically fresh, taut with emotional torques and charges, can’t-put-it-down compelling.” Essentially, he’s one of those rare authors who gives pretty much everyone who picks up his books exactly what they didn’t know they wanted. And that’s as good as it gets, really, because as we all know, you can’t please everyone.

Fifteen years ago, Pelley wasn’t writing at all. He was going through a breakup with someone he’d been with for six years and shifting into a new group of friends. But mostly he was spending days on end staring down the barrel of a microscope at a lifetime of tedium.

“I was reading a Michael Winter book when this all happened. He wrote a novel about what was going on in his life while he was writing another novel.” says Pelley. “I was in this flux in my life, and for some reason, reading Michael Winter’s book, about this guy going through all the same stuff, really resonated with me. Which was interesting because I had no real aspirations of being a writer. I grew up writing lyrics for a band I was in, that was about it.”

At the time, Pelley was exploring a few career options—he was writing a grant to start a record label and studying the MCAT for med school. “I was interested in a whole bunch of stuff, but nothing really pulled me towards it until I read Michael’s book, and then started writing my own book, and then it just felt right,” he says. “I didn’t want a job where I felt that if I quit, I’d be replaceable. When I’m writing my books, I feel like no one else would have written them if I hadn’t, and there’s a certain satisfaction in that.”

If Pelley hadn’t picked up that particular book (it was Winter’s This All Happened) at that exact time in his life, Pelley might be writing doctor’s notes instead of novels. But he did, and there was something about Winter’s writing that showed Pelley exactly what a well-written novel could be.

“[It showed me] there was more to a novel than just plot,” says Pelley. “It’s about engaging readers, and that interested me to the point that my Eureka moment wasn’t an award or an interaction with a reader, so much as me stumbling headlong into the purpose of an artist, or at least what art’s purpose for me is. Which is having this conversation about the world through the stories I write. I wrap them up in plot and employ tactics and techniques to make the writing engaging, but everything I write is a conversation I’m having with myself about the world.”

Pelley says he wrote until writing was all he was doing, and it was its own reward. But his validation came when he started submitting to journals and literary awards. “The first award I won was actually a huge validation, like maybe I can take this seriously,” he says. “I won a short story award in The Telegram in St John’s. It’s one thing to enjoy something, it’s another to be validated in your pursuits.”

The winning story was called “Holes to China.” It was one of the first stories he wrote and is included in his recent short story collection Four Letter Words. “It’s about this kid whose father just died of cancer and his mother isn’t taking it well, so he’s trying to dig a hole to China to get away from it all,” says Pelley. “It was a challenge because it was in a newspaper so the limit was 1,200 words, and it’s really hard to sum up a short story in 1,200 words. But I really enjoyed the challenge.”

He also really admired the jurors. Kathleen Winter was on the jury, and Pelley had read and enjoyed her books for years. Receiving recognition from her was a big deal. But she’s not the only writer who’s had an impact on his work—he also credits Newfoundland authors Larry Mathews and Jessica Grant. He connected with both Mathews and Grant when he enrolled in some creative writing courses at Memorial University.

“[Mathews] brought in a lot of people in my position, who weren’t necessarily English students but wanted to learn more about writing, and his feedback—more than anybody else I’ve come across in 10 years or so of showing people my fiction—he could just see what I was trying to do and articulate it very well. I found that helpful. I went back a couple of years later and took a class that Jessica Grant taught and that was just as beneficial. Anything I write, she reads it and gives me feedback. So obviously, Larry and Jessica were huge influences.”

Right now, though, Pelley’s going through another (less extreme) shift, and it sounds like the recent political climate is having a bigger influence on his in-progress work than any writer. Except for, perhaps, George Orwell.

“George Orwell was the epitome of a perfect writer because he wrote really engaging stories, but they’re also talking about society and where it’s heading,” says Pelley. “1984 was a humongous influence for me, especially with what I’m starting to work on now, which is all these semi-conspiracy theory novels that are playing into modern fears, the whole ‘what if’ scenario. What he was playing with is what I’m playing with now.”

by

Drawing from a deep well of momentum, David Huebert lands his first collection of short stories Peninsula Sinking and solidifies his reputation as one of Canada’s most promising literary talents. Launched by the success of his poetry collection We Are No Longer the Smart Kids in Class, David Huebert’s first full-length prose effort undulates between the fierce, ubiquitous magnetism of Nova Scotian home life and the surprisingly moving power of the mundane. In Peninsula Sinking, Huebert’s characters walk into disjointed moments of memory and solitude finding ephemeral but meaningful clarity.

In these stories, Huebert, as deftly as any writer ever has, cuts the thinnest slivers of consciousness. His finest moments are quick snatches of a personal archive coalescing into single contemporaneous thoughts. Huebert experiments with how the loudest part of our interiority–the part that sounds like words and voice–is a crust on the yawning and often disturbing bog of memory. These explorations are not Proust’s madeleines. They come at us jarringly and unwanted in the form of dog erections, botched self-botoxing and Perrier rings on the coffee table. Huebert skewers cross sections of grief, shame and desire, puts focus on disconnection and threads together the ineffable moments in a singular patchwork.

Each of the eight stories in Peninsula Sinking proposes a familiar animal to accompany epiphany. In “Maxi,” a prison guard commits suicide by boa constrictor in a silent intimacy reserved for the best French New Wave. The 2016 CBC Short Story Prize winning “Enigma” descends into the mutual oblivion of a woman and her euthanized horse. “Drift,” the collection’s simplest and most gripping achievement, is an unadorned picture of one story from the 1992 Westray Mine disaster that begins with a pork tenderloin as its “recently growing, twitching” analogue. Elsewhere, dreams of neutered dogs and distant whale songs reverberate in the understated everyday of parents, siblings and lovers. Huebert’s animals work well: not just clever mirrors held up to his characters’ raging animality, but as new and sparklingly clear lenses with which to sketch their souls. With a tendency toward language that cascades rather than propels, Peninsula Sinking is a wonderful high point in a new and bright career.

Peninsula Sinking
David Huebert
Biblioasis

by

Good scribes pop up everywhere. However, occasionally, a certain concentration collects in a particular locale, such as Inverness County, Cape Breton.

Lynn Coady, Alistair MacLeod, Sarah Faber, Kate Beaton, Linden MacIntyre, Frank Macdonald, Tom Ryan, Rebecca Silver Slayter, Johanna Skibsrud, Oisin Curran and Susan Paddon. Just to name a few.

“It gets in your bones and in your spirit,” says acclaimed award-winning journalist and writer Linden MacIntyre.

Linden MacIntyre. Photo by Joe Passaretti

Is it the water, or the air, the landscape, the people?

“There’s an aura about the place,” says MacIntyre. Raised in Inverness and still spending his summers there, the Giller winner says it’s difficult to pin it down. “Collectively there’s a certain civility and a quiet contemplative character in Inverness that suits a person who wants to be a writer.”

MacIntyre says since he was a kid, a high social value was assigned within the community to someone who could tell a good story. “A small child realizes telling stories gets the approval of adults,” said MacIntyre. “Akin to when people play the piano or fiddle.”

Home By Choice

There’s a growing collection of creative people now living in Inverness County.

“I do think it’s the kind of place, if it grabs you by the heart it doesn’t let go,” says novelist Rebecca Silver Slayter.

The town of Inverness has a population around 1,400. If extended to all of Inverness County, the number jumps to 17,000.

Silver-Slayter moved to St. Joseph de Moine in 2010. She’s part of a cohort who studied together at Concordia in Montreal and then decided to move to Cape Breton. Some already had ties here, including Johanna Skibsrud and Sarah Faber.

“I feel I write better here than anywhere else I’ve lived,” says Silver-Slater, author of In the Land of Birdfishes.

“It’s not an easy place to live with the economy and the lack of jobs,” she acknowledges. “Those that stay are here for the love of it—with the commitment and energy to make it work.”

This same crew of writers are taking the directional helm of the successful Cabot Trail Writers Festival as it heads into its tenth year.

Silver Slayter says she’s amazed and strengthened by the audience turnout at that festival and also other writing events throughout the year. “The warmth and enthusiasm people bring, it’s quite a moving thing.”

Long-time award-winning columnist, poet, playwright and novelist, Frank Macdonald has lived in Inverness his whole life. “Well, except for that obligatory decade working away,” jokes Macdonald in his gravelly, easy-going voice.

His first two novels, A Forest for Calum and A Possible Madness were each long-listed for the Dublin Impact Award.

Macdonald says the story-telling goes back centuries, with the Gaelic culture immersed in an oral tradition. “Before writing, people gathered stories from the ‘characters’ around town, to share with others.”

Macdonald continues as a columnist for the Inverness Oran, the area’s weekly publication.

“I just love the town I live in and my ability to tell stories has been gratifying,” says Macdonald.

Despite the isolating nature of being on an island on the far east of the country, Rebecca Silver-Slater says it’s worth it. “The challenges of doing events and tours are well outweighed by the way of life here.”

Alexander MacLeodAlexander MacLeod credits immense, unwavering support of the people in the community for his writing success. “People care,” said MacLeod.

One of seven children to Alistair and Anita MacLeod, since he was born, Alexander has spent every summer in Inverness. His collection of short-stories, Light Lifting, was a finalist for the Giller Prize.

MacLeod says the Port Hood building supply store is a terrific example of the area’s dedication to writers. “There beside the bulk nails, you find Cape Breton literature for sale, in a hardware store! That doesn’t always happen.”

He says the Inverness Oran is an important fixture in supporting the craft of writing. “It’s always been a place where they respected stories.”

Frank Macdonald says he remembers receiving letters from the acclaimed short-story master and novelist, Alistair MacLeod. “He was an encouraging subscriber,” says Macdonald. “He wasn’t sending them as Alistair MacLeod the writer, but as a subscriber who appreciated a letter from home every week.”

The younger MacLeod, Alexander says that although the strong cultural fabric seems built it, others laid the foundation. “It’s been a place driven by books, culture and thoughtful stuff for a long time,” says MacLeod, citing the great thinker Moses Coady and Mi’kmaq poet Rita Joe.

Fewer Distractions and Lots of Beauty

“It depends on the person, but being here helps me focus in a way I’m not able to do in the city,” says writer Sarah Faber. Her debut novel All is Beauty Now came out this fall. “It’s so calming here. For someone like me, with a constant chatter in my brain, this is a good place to get a clearer look. There’s a certain stillness I can achieve that allows you to go inwards.”

Faber says she likes being away from the industry flutter that might accompany living in Toronto. “I’d probably be caught up around the anxiety of it all,” she laughs.

Like MacLeod, Faber came to Inverness as a kid every summer and she also spent a year there during high school. When she and her friends from Concordia were considering moving rural as a group, Inverness seemed a natural choice. Although the history of writing greats wasn’t the reason she and the others moved here, Faber says the existing support is excellent. “I always had a sense it was an artistic place, lots of music and theatre. For a relatively sparse population, there’s lots going on!”

Her husband, Oisin Curran is also a fiction writer. His second novel, Blood Fable came out in October.

Faber says Inverness’ stunning beauty—including its expansive cliffs and sandy beaches—inevitably find their way into her writing. “The descriptions of beaches in Brazil (in All is Beauty Now) are really descriptions of beaches here,” says Faber. She also appreciates the community’s commitment to the arts. “People are just so supportive, it’s lovely. It’s nice how people will come out for events, even in the dead of winter.”

It lives, breathes and thrives

“It’s just a very potent cultural space” says Alexander MacLeod. “Not necessarily glamorous, just a lot of people working regularly; and working very, very hard.”

That desire and drive to enrich their community continues to thrive.

“According to the old model, it’s hard to create employment,” says Silver-Slater. “But if at least a certain segment of people can work here, while bringing money in from elsewhere, that’s ideal.”

Like a snowball effect on a vivid, snow-swirling February afternoon; creativity breeds creativity.

“Every new person living here helps support all the rest,” says Silver-Slater. “Enabling each other. I can’t imagine living anywhere else.”

by

In “The Train,” the opening story of Wayne Curtis’s new collection, Homecoming, 12-year-old Jack, fascinated by locomotives, dreams of the world beyond the family farm. Determined that “the land does not own me, not like it does my father,” he buys a return ticket to the nearby town of Bradford. The journey becomes more complicated than he anticipates: trains do not run according to his schedule and not all the adults he meets are as honest and kind as those he knows from home. A dark tone underlies the quiet pastoral story as the world-weary preteen remembers ordering a rope from the Eaton’s catalogue half a lifetime ago as a six-year-old, convinced that “lassoes save lives.” The rope becomes a more sinister presence when Jack ropes a pregnant heifer, trips her, and causes her to miscarry her calf.

“The Train” sets up motifs that permeate the collection: travel to and from home, running to and/or from experience, the malevolent preying on the innocent, dreams threatened by of circumstance and inheritance. Filled with detailed descriptions of the land and environment, these tales are set mostly in New Brunswick but range into southern Ontario, particularly the Niagara region and St. Catharines.

Many of the stories are linked by two couples: Sean O’Riley and Amy Black, and Floyd and Beverly Harris. In “Night Riders,” troubled teenagers Sean and Amy escape from an orphanage in downtown Fredericton, having stolen the vehicle of church elder, Mr Dennis, who has abused them physically and emotionally for years. Confident their predator is unlikely to turn them in, the two set off on a fugitive road trip, conning and stealing their way to St. Catherines, where they remake their lives but remain haunted by their origins.

Curtis frankly confronts the issue of child abuse and its pernicious aftermath. Amy is troubled by nightmares and Sean becomes addicted to alcohol to escape the pain of his memories. In “Country Lanes,” the adult Sean picks a fight in a bar to exorcise the still palpable rage he harbours against Mr Dennis. Although they never fully resolve their childhood traumas, the pair shares a deep symbiotic bond.

Home is both a memory and an elusive goal in these stories about moving and settling, trying to connect and missing connections. In one of the finest pieces, “At Mount St. Joseph’s,” Floyd travels back to Bradford, NB to visit his elderly, ailing ex-wife and make peace with the place where their marriage ended painfully. In her state of dementia, Beverly fails to recognize Floyd, but is happy to converse about the past with her “strange” visitor. Floyd, a poet, is drawn into her memories: “There were things that I could remember that she could not, and there were things that she could remember that I could not, so our conversation was a patchwork of one-sided memories that either of us could make contact with. It was hit and miss, like dancing with a giraffe.”

While most stories are convincingly told from the view of young narrators, Curtis also writes honestly about the relentless downward spiral of old age. At times Curtis posits home as a place, at times home is found in another person: nearly all male characters are emotionally attached to women friends or former lovers. In “Brothers and Sisters” Sean laments his 50 years of unrequited love for Amy, who feels a sisterly affection for him: “Some would say mine has been a meagre existence, but I didn’t see it that way. I had learned years ago that the human body and soul could adapt to any condition. I thought of those old Wallace Stegner lines that Amy used to quote: ‘Home is a notion that only the nations of homeless can appreciate, and only the uprooted comprehend.…What else would one plant in a wilderness…? What loss would hurt more?’”

An award-winning novelist and poet, Curtis’s mode is realist and his observations perceptive and detailed. Although nostalgic in tone, these stories do not romanticize the past or idealize the idea of home. These are quiet, reflective stories of flawed survivors. Although Beverly assures Floyd, “It’s never too late to come home,” that “home” is always a shifting and ambivalent idea.

Homecoming
Wayne Curtis
Pottersfield Press

by

Halifax-born writer, poet, and gender studies professor Trish Salah always knew words would be a big part of her future. Books and writing were an important part of her childhood, whether she was falling in love with a new book or reciting the plots of entire novels to the adults around her.

“There’s one moment that stands out for me,” says Salah. “As a very young kid, I decided to explain to my uncle who was visiting—a very patient man—what the plot of Lord of the Rings was. It was a kind of recounting in a very chronological order. I think he probably didn’t understand that I intended to speak for several hours.”

By the time she reached junior high, she was writing her own fantasy, science fiction and poetry. Like a lot of young writers, her work was derivative at first, but she continued to develop her skills and when she was in high school, she entered her first writing competition. Although she doesn’t remember the name of the competition anymore, Salah says it was a contest specifically for high school students in Nova Scotia.

Looking back now, Salah says the story was about “a young genderqueer hustler” living in a futuristic society. The main conflict of the story was “a seduction and assault by a group of decadent aristocrats.”

“When my mother and the school psychologist took a look, they were very worried,” says Salah. “I don’t know if it ever was sent forward.”

Years later, she thinks that story was an unconscious—or perhaps semi-conscious—attempt to achieve two goals: to use the writing conventions of the genres she truly enjoyed and to “think about the possibilities for living.” Now, when she reflects on the science fiction and fantasy she enjoyed most when she hit her twenties, writers like Angela Carter and Rachel Pollack come to mind. “They definitely reworked those genres to think about the social in various ways,” she says.

The master’s thesis she wrote in the 1990s, which she describes as a series of interlinked magic-realist stories set in the Halifax underground music scene and linked by poems, reflects those interests as well. For Salah, writing is about imagining the world in new ways and the simple pleasure of storytelling. It’s also a way for her to play with and develop new insights into language. She adds that she also enjoyed exploring “how language always does more than it seems, or than we intend.”

She didn’t submit any more writing during her high school years but she did continue to write. About a year after high school she moved to Montreal and enrolled in the English and Creative Writing program at Concordia University. She started submitting to small magazines, and got involved in a few different publications including The Moosehead Anthology and Index Magazine. Around the same time, Salah developed an interest in the way French feminists were using l’ecriture feminine and l’ecriture au feminin to “write the body.”

“I was curious as to whether or not this way of writing one’s self as a woman, into subjectivity, into literature and into the world might provide a pathway for my own self becoming legible in the world,” she says. “I think my first publication was in Tessera, which was a bilingual journal of feminist poetics and poetry. [The poem] was called ‘when there are three’ and it was really about the question of whether l’ecriture feminine could encompass trans women.”

Ultimately, Salah began focusing on poetry because it helped her sort out her thoughts, develop arguments and explore her relationship with language, including Arabic.

“I grew up in a mixed household with part of my family speaking Arabic,” she says. “I never really learned the language—my father passed when I was seven and that language learning didn’t continue. I’ve never really returned to it as a project, although it’s been marked as a kind of point of desire or a point of alienation in language.

“I guess I became interested in thinking of poetry as a medium to think about language and its relationship to what it is to be a person.” This exploration ultimately resulted in Salah’s first published book of poems, Wanting in Arabic.

Her second book of poems, Lyric Sexology, explores gender identity and the discourse around it. Although the book was published in the US in 2014 , it’s just been released in Canada by Metonymy Press (with extra poems!).

“I think it is also a kind of passionate reckoning with the very uneven, violent and difficult ways in which trans and genderqueer have been written in various archives,” Salah explains. “I say passionate, because it is about recognition and desire within distortion, and also about attending to the fact that trans and genderqueer people have had a role in making the discourses that I’m calling archives, if sometimes under very compromising or impossible circumstances.”

Salah’s next published short story, “It Can Grow!!!” will be included in the upcoming collection of science fiction and fantasy writing called Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy by Transgender Writers. The collection will be published this fall, by Topside Press.

by

The first collection of short stories from award-winning poet Sandra Bunting spans the realm of cozy to the unusual and macabre. Her tales take readers across Ireland and to France, Cuba, Louisiana and other locales–a reflection of the New Brunswicker’s own extensive travels and homes. While some excerpts of the book could use some polishing, almost all of the stories in The Effect of Frost on Southern Vines entice from the start.

Intriguing descriptions are found throughout the anthology. The reader can easily envision the vibrant blues and the fabrics blowing in the breeze in “Caribbean Blue,” the natural hues of the bog in “Gorse Flies” and the “carnivorous” Spanish moss in the book’s title story.

Intricate details of daily life present themselves in cases like from “The Corner House”:

‘The bishop’s man is here to collect for the new church again,’ they whispered. Neighbours, sitting out to catch a few rays of sunshine before turning to their chores again, gathered up their chairs…No one ventured out until they were certain the danger had passed.

Bunting has created some compelling characters, especially Tracy from “Getting Lost,” who is as determined as she is damaged, and who everyone is drawn to despite her secret wounds. Bunting, at times, also reveals her sense of humour, such as in “For a Song” when Weasie–the quirky, long lost cousin–welcomes young Brooke into her home:

‘To your stay with us.’ [Brooke] looked around vaguely to see who else made up the ‘us’ Weasie had mentioned and took a sip of the drink.

Unfortunately the book has cases of telling rather than showing (“Julia’s imagination ran away with her” or “The local fire department worked hard to put out the fire,” for example.) Also, several of the stories end in the most extreme possible way or with a predictable rom-com-style finale.

But the lasting impression of The Effect of Frost on Southern Vines is that it is a collection of short stories with unique story lines that are quickly consumed; like of a woman trying to save her marriage through dancing for CCTV, of young Irish Traveller teens trying to save nearly mauled-to-death animals or of a war veteran living outside of a zoo.

The Effect of Frost on Southern Vines
Sandra Bunting
Gaelóg Press

by

Scars and Other Stories is Don Aker’s first book for adults–published 30 years into a career in which he has produced nearly two-dozen books for young readers.

The 20 stories in the book were written between 1989 and 2016. Although the stories span three decades, they don’t represent the linear progression of a writer’s development. The book starts strong and the stories feel like one integral body of work.

The opening story is “The Invitation”–the piece that launched Aker’s career, winning him an award in the Atlantic Writing Competition and a $10,000 grant. It sets the tone for much of the rest of the book, with its carefully told story of a boy in 1960s small-town Nova Scotia who faces a choice between going to an unpopular new kid’s birthday party (knowing he’ll likely be the only one there) and watching the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination on the only colour TV in town. You can guess what he decides–but the choice comes with a heavy emotional cost.

Many of these pieces feature people feeling paralyzed or trapped–a man whose out-of-control anger has cost him his marriage, and who desperately hopes to win back his ex even while continuing to resent her; a widower who is descending into dementia without recognizing it; a skeptical, tightly controlled woman who visits an unusual Tarot-card reader. Aker renders their dilemmas compassionately, depicting the inner workings of their minds and capturing the telling details in their surroundings.

But he remains strongest in writing that features children and young people. Although a number of these stories are set in the past in rural Nova Scotia, there is no nostalgia here. Instead, Aker depicts the casual brutality of school and, frequently, a sense of dread and immediate or impending violence. In the title story, which he has said is largely autobiographical, a boy is inadvertently hit in the head with an axe by his father and then has to deal with the harder blow of realizing just how little his dad cares.

There are also moments of humour–in particular the laugh-out-loud story “Playing Pool,” which will ring true to anyone fumbling around with a household project.

Scars and Other Stories shows a writer with a careful eye for details, but who doesn’t get bogged down in them or let them detract from the emotional core of his stories.

Scars and Other Stories
Don Aker
Pottersfield Press