[ad_1]
If you want an even rougher look under the hood of the capital on offer in tourism campaignsMegan Gail Coles’s “Small game hunting at the local coward gun club” Joel Thomas Hynes’s “We’ll all be burned in our bed one night” or that of Eva Crocker “all i ask” will do the job.
If I don’t have time for day trips, what books can take me there?
Michael Winter’s “The big why” is a fictionalized account of Rockwell Kent’s time in Brigus at the turn of the 20th century. An entirely original exploration of the artistic temperament and possibilities of love, the book is also a perfect picture of the insular, insanely flahoolic (DNE: generous), and unforgiving nature of Newfoundland’s outport communities. One of my all time favorites.
And then of course there’s Labrador, which is a totally different world. To date, Labrador literature consists mainly of accounts of frontier life. Elizabeth Goudie’s “Labrador woman” is an unadorned account of life in a capture family in the 1920s and 1930s. Dillon Wallace’s story of the disastrous Hubbard expedition, “The Temptation of the Labrador Wild,” is a classic of the (mis)adventure genre. The great novel by John Steffler, “George Cartwright’s Afterlife” is one of the few books that takes Labrador’s ferocious grandeur into fiction, and in Cartwright it features a character almost as big and enthusiastic as the place itself.
The voices of the indigenous peoples who have lived in Labrador for thousands of years are, as elsewhere, underrepresented in the literature. “those days” magazine, which exists to preserve Labrador oral history, is a place to find some of that community’s story.
Which literary pilgrimage destination would you recommend?
There is an unwritten rule in St. John’s that a writer must spend a minimum of 25 percent of an art grant on The Ship. Or maybe that’s just the average, which makes it feel like a rule.
A nondescript pub on a steep lane between Duckworth and Water Streets, The Ship is the closest thing to an underground literary monument. There is no plaque yet, but I can confirm that Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney relieved himself at one of the men’s urinals. Michael Ondaatje spent a night on the dance floor during a show by a local ska/funk/reggae band. Everyone from Daniel Lanois to Bonnie “Prince” Billy to Sarah Harmer to Fred Eaglesmith to a 10-piece Bulgarian choir has performed in the small hall. Hundreds of writers, local and others, have read from the stage. And the bar itself features in dozens of poems, stories, novels, and songs.
[ad_2]
Source link
