If you want an even more gritty look under the guise of the capital city on offer in tourism campaignsMegan Gail Coles’s “Small game hunt at the local Cowardly Gun Club“ Joel Thomas Hynes’s “We’ll all burn in our beds one night“ or Eva Crocker “All I ask“ will do the job.
If I don’t have time for day trips, what book can get me there instead?
Michael Winter’s “Why big?“ is a fictional account of Rockwell Kent’s time in Brigus in the early 20th century. A completely original exploration of the artistic temperament and capacity of love, the book is also a perfect depiction. about the brash, outrageous (DNE: generous) and unforgiving nature of communities off the coast of Newfoundland. One of my favorite times.
And then, of course, there’s Labrador, which is quite another world. Until now, Labrador’s literature was mainly narratives of frontier life. Elizabeth Goudie’s “Labrador’s Woman” is an unadorned profile of life in a trapped family in the 1920s and 30s. Dillon Wallace’s narrative of Hubbard’s disastrous expedition, “Labrador Wild Attraction,” is a classic of the adventure genre (mis). Great novel by John Steffler, “George Cartwright’s Afterlife“ is one of the few books that deals with the barbaric grandeur of Labrador in fiction, and in Cartwright it presents a character almost as big and ferocious as the place itself.
The voices of the indigenous peoples who have lived in Labrador for thousands of years, as elsewhere, are not well represented in the literature. “Their day“ The magazine, which exists to preserve the oral history of Labrador, is one place to find a piece of that community’s story.
Which literary pilgrimage destination would you recommend?
There is an unwritten rule in St. Or maybe it’s just the average, making it seem like a rule.
A casual pub on a steep road between Duckworth and Water Streets, The Ship is the closest thing the city has to an underground literary landmark. No plaque yet, but I can attest that Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney freed himself in one of the men’s urinals. Michael Ondaatje spent a night on the dance floor during a performance by a local ska/funk/reggae band. Everyone from Daniel Lanois to Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Sarah Harmer to Fred Eaglesmith to a 10-member Bulgarian choir performed at this tiny venue. Hundreds of writers, local and other, have read from its stage. And the bar itself also appears in dozens of poems, stories, novels and songs.
