Michael Crummey has had the kind of year every writer aspires to. Galore has to have been one of the most talked about books of the year and one of the most successful book out of Atlantic Canada. Random examples: shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award and The Winterset, winner of the prestigious Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book (Canada & Caribbean), a Globe & Mail, National Post, and Amazon  “Book of the Year” (among countless other best of lists, including a “book of the decade” nod from The National Post’s Mark Medley), and, among other accolades, it is currently on shortlists for the Atlantic Independent Booksellers’ Choice Award, The Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award, and the Canadian Booksellers Association Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year.

Crummey ventured into fiction, like most, by writing short stories. His first published short story was a runner up for the 1994 Prism International Short Fiction Contest. Since then, his work has been published in many anthologies, including the most esteemed anthology series to be included in in Canada: The Journey Prize Anthology (Vol.10 in this case). He published a stellar collection, Flesh and Blood, in 1998, which Random House republished in 2003, with three new stories. Flesh and Blood is a collection of stories set in a fictional Newfoundland town, Black Rock, “a community of exiles, characters estranged from their home, from their families or, just as often, from themselves.”

His debut novel, River Thieves (2001), is a “richly imagined story about love, loss and heartbreaking compromises” that tackles the contact and conflicts between the Beothuk and European settlers. It could not have been better received. A national bestseller, it won the Winterset Award, the Thomas Head Raddall Prize, the Atlantic Independent Booksellers’ Choice Award, and was shortlisted for some of the most prestigious national and international awards, like Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Prize, and the IMPAC Dublin Award. He followed up in 2005 with one of my favourite novels, The Wreckage, another critically acclaimed national bestseller. “A truly epic, yet twisted, romance that unfolds over decades and continents. It engages readers on the austere shores of Newfoundland’s fishing villages and drags them across to Japanese POW camps during some of the worst events of the Second World War. Haunting, lyrical, and deeply intimate.” In 2009, he gave us Galore, the mega-hit masterpiece mentioned in the first paragraph. “An intricate family saga and love story spanning two centuries, Galore is a portrait of the improbable medieval world that was rural Newfoundland, a place almost too harrowing and extravagant to be real.”

Click a book cover to read more about some of Michael’s Books. 

Crummey, now known as one of the biggest novelists out of Newfoundland and a top name in Canadian literature, actually got started with poetry, in 1986, while at Memorial University, when he won the Gregory J. Power Poetry Contest. He jokes that the award gave him “the mistaken impression there was money to be made in poetry.” From there he won the inaugural Bronwen Wallace Award for Poetry, amongst other awards, and has since published several books of top-notch poetry, including: Arguments with Gravity, Emergency Roadside Assistance, Hard Light, and Salvage. Michael also has a non-fiction book under his belt, a collaboration with photojournalist Greg Lock, entitled Newfoundland: A Journey into a Lost Nation.

Crummey’s career is one to aspire to, and he deserves every bit of recognition he has gotten. Random House’s website summarizes Crummey’s writing quite well: “[There is a] grace always present to redeem whatever hardships his characters endure. Both lyrical and political, Crummey shows the inevitability of loss and suffering in our lives without letting us lose sight of what’s worth loving, holding onto, and fighting for.”

Enjoy the interview below:

Salty Ink: Off the top of your head, without struggling for “favourites,” name one or two books you really liked by a fellow Atlantic Canadian author.

The Big Why, Michael Winter and Open, Lisa Moore

  Salty Ink: How did you end up writing books?

Pure, stubborn, ignorant pig-headedness. I started writing poetry at the age of 17 and it felt like a vocation from the start. I had no notion how to go about making a “career” of writing. I just kept plugging away, even when any sensible person would have thrown in the towel for a real job.

 Salty Ink: Any advice for aspiring writers looking to be published authors?

I’m a big advocate of stubborn pig-headedness, at least when it comes to the work of writing. There is no way to learn to write, or achieve any kind of success, other than working at it. A lot of the time you’ll feel like nothing’s happening, that there’s no progress being made. And you just have to keep working. 

 Salty Ink: Which piece of yours are you the most satisfied with in hindsight?

I’ve been saying for years now that Hard Light is the best thing I’ve ever written. I knew as I was writing it that something different was happening, that I was tapping into a vein that was giving a particular life to the material that had never been there before. And I had the same experience while writing Galore – which by the way, I now think is the best thing I’ve ever done. It felt like there was more going on than just me writing a book, that I had opened a door onto a larger world than the one in my head. I hope I still feel as strongly about Galore ten or fifteen years from now.

 Salty Ink: What has been the most memorable moment of you writing career to date?

I don’t think anything has quite matched the experience of seeing my material in print for the very first time, a trio of poems in the St. John’s literary mag TickleAce. This was probably 1985 or 86. The thrill of opening the journal to find myself in there is still something I can feel to the tips of my toes.

Salty Ink: What is taking up too much of your time lately?

Driving. I have three step-kids, all of whom are busier than the average Fortune 500 CEO. Spend half my life dropping off and picking up.

 Salty Ink: Hard Light is quite astounding in its impact on a reader, and is the most visceral and convincing portrayal of Newfoundland’s bygone culture I have read, exceeding any work of non-fiction I know of. The backcover calls it “a love-letter to a world and a way of life that has vanished completely.” Was this intentional from the beginning, or did these poems/stories just come to you and then you made a cohesive collection?

That love-letter was intentional from the beginning. Although I had no more coherent a plan than that. I started collecting stories and material in the summer of 1995, intending to write a book about Dad’s life growing up in Western Bay and fishing on the Labrador coast. Had no idea what it would look like, I just dove in and hoped something would come to me. Most of that material wound up in the first section, 32 Little Stories. Stumbled on John Froude’s diary of life sailing around the world on tall ships and immediately saw that as part of the collection. Most of the pieces in Hard Light came to me relatively easily. It felt at times that I was just channelling something.

 Salty Ink: Much of your writing focuses on the loss of culture or a struggle with identity, is this intentional or more subconscious?

It’s something I’ve become aware of over time, looking back and seeing the repeated pattern. But it wasn’t at all a conscious choice. It wasn’t until a year or two after I finished River Thieves that it struck me how preoccupied with cultural loss I was. 

 Salty Ink: Your debut novel, River Thieves, could not have been better received. It won the Winterset Award, the Thomas Head Raddall Prize, the Atlantic Independent Booksellers’ Choice Award, and was shortlisted for some of the most prestigious national and international awards, like Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Prize, and the IMPAC Dublin Award. What was the biggest thrill attached to River Thieves for you?

Got to bring Mom and Dad to Toronto for the Giller Prize ceremony in 2001. My parents were endlessly supportive of my writing even though I a) often used them as material and b) seemed destined to live a life of relative poverty and complete obscurity. It was great to watch them taking it all in at the Four Seasons, the two of them dressed to the nines.

 Salty Ink: Galore draws largely on Newfoundland folklore and seemed like a real divergence from your previous two novels, which were steeped in specific historical events (European contact with the Beothuk in River Thieves, and WWII in The Wreckage). Why the leap from well-informed history to folklore?

 I’ve always felt the real wealth of Newfoundland is the oral culture of the place, the cumulative stories, knowledge, superstition, wisdom and foolishness that constitutes the lore of Newfoundland. There’s plenty of interesting history here, interesting events that make for great fictional terrain, but that’s not what makes Newfoundland what it is. There’s something less definable than a war of independence or a constitution or a language at the heart of what makes the place unique. And I guess I wanted to take a shot at a book that was a kind of spiritual or cultural record of Newfoundland. My ambition at the outset (which I quickly recognized as ridiculous but it was still worthwhile shooting for the stars) was to have all of Newfoundland happen in this tiny fictional outport I was creating. I also planned to make nothing up, to have everything included in the novel be something I found in the folklore. I abandoned that notion as well, just to have a little control over the narrative arc of different storylines. But there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of details, incidents, stories, superstitions, folk cures, names, characters from Newfoundland folklore in the book. I like to think of the book as one of Nan’s patchwork quilts. Mom can look at them and recognize the blouse or skirt or pants the patches originally came from. But the whole is something more than the sum of those parts.