Kathleen Winter is no stranger to writing, in any form. She has written for television — from Sesame Street to CBC documentaries — and for newspapers, including her former weekly column, Naturally, in The Telegram.

Her last book, boYs, a top-notch collection of short stories, won the hip-assuring Metcalf-Rooke Award and the prestigious Winterset award. boYs is a rare gem of a collection, showcasing a rare vibrancy of language. The book is alive, sentences pop like firecrackers: it is ultra-modern, punchy, lucid diction. Every paragraph is blocked full with a microscopic attention to detail, and it makes for captivating read that is a lesson in creative writing. Click here to buy boYs now.

Her latest novel, Annabel — hot off Anansi’s press and only a month old — was released to immediate acclaim and buzz, and Kathleen has been reading that wave of success on a very engaging and remarkable blog tour. Her writerly stamina is commendable. Catch her being interviewed or thinking out loud at palces like The Afterword, Open Book Toronto (who have just revealed that Annabel is part of Ben McNally’s Summer Reading Presentation), Kevin from Canada, and a rather fantastic read on The Globe and Mail’s website.

Already a bestseller in many of the country’s finest bookshops,  and already sold into the US and the UK, critics are eating it up.

“Read it because it’s a story told with sensitivity to language that compels to the last page, and read it because it asks the most existential of questions. Stripped of the trappings of gender, Winter asks, what are we?”- Globe & Mail

“Finely observed detail and gut-wrenching honesty, together with some rich characters and a perfectly rendered world, make Annabel a rare treat.” – Winnipeg Free Press

Annabel is an unforgettable novel of struggles, personal and inter-personal, and Kathleen’s empathetic voice does them justice in a way that connects reader to story. Destined to be one of the biggest novels out of Newfoundland this year, this is a story of isolation and a communication breakdown that breaks a family down, and breaks the reader down along with them. Click here to Read Salty Ink’s summary and review of this sure-to-be-a-book-of-the-year novel. Her writing is a mesmerizing combination of crisp language, deep empathy for her well-wrought characters, and a world-savvy wisdom. Click here to buy Annabel now

For a chance to win a copy of Annabel, email chad@saltyink.com by July 10th — subject line Annabel giveaway. (Also, she will be having a St. John’s launch on July 20th, at The Ship. 8 pm.)

Click the book covers below to read more about boYs and Annabel at their publisher’s websites.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Enjoy the Interview Below ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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

Well I have to say the first one is House of Hate by Percy Janes. It is a dark book but beautifully written, and it is set in Corner Brook where I lived from the ages of 12 to 16, so reading it was the first time I read a piece of literature that was set in a place about which I had my own intimate perspective. Another work that affected me is the journal of Lucy Maud Montgomery, with its compelling undercurrents of isolation and revelations about barricades of class and gender.

How did you end up writing books?

My dad taught me to read phonetically long before I went to school. I knew when I was four that I wanted to write books, because I loved them so much. There was always a library near where we lived – at one point, in Curling, the library was a mobile library in a van.  I have learned how to live in the real world by now, but I remember that feeling of escape, entering a book, and I can’t remember a time when I didn’t just assume I would make that happen for other people; create worlds.

What, in your mind, marked a turning point or real upswing in your writing career?

I will never forget the night John Metcalf phoned me to talk about some stories I had mailed to him. I was at a point where I began writing notes to myself on the outsides of the stamped, self-addressed envelopes you have to include with fiction submissions to editors. I was receiving so many rejection slips that I felt a need to write, on the envelopes that I knew would come back to me containing these rejections, “Kathleen, you are a good writer. Keep going and do not give up.” Believe it or not these notes cheered me up, though I had written them to myself, sometimes six months before. So John Metcalf phoned me and said he loved my stories. He said he felt, on reading them, as if he had come home, and he wanted to put the manuscript on the shortlist of the Metcalf-Rooke Award, which I later won.  The award was in his name but was also named after Leon Rooke. I had no money then, and before this phone call I used to visit the local bookshop and take Leon Rooke’s stories off the shelf and read them, and rejoice that someone in Canada was writing crazy, wonderful, immensely satisfying stories like this. Rooke was my hero. And now John Metcalf, one of the most eminent editors in Canada, was telling me I was being considered for the Metcalf-Rooke Award. That was the turning point, the upswing, in my writing career.

Any advice for aspiring writers?

Take rejection slips as reminders that you can improve. Look at the stories when they come back. It takes a long time to get a story back, so you have time to gain perspective about how to write it better. What is the reader getting out of it? Have you a clear vision? Work on a new draft, and send it out again. Always have something sent out. No matter how wretched you feel when it returns, have another piece ready and send it the day you are rejected. Then hope will come back to you. That crazy bird, hope. I felt hopeless all the way to the post office the day I sent my stories to John Metcalf. Always have a package of big envelopes nearby (many submissions still cannot be done online) and remember postage is less if you write the address horizontally.

What is your favourite part of the writing process? Your least favourite?

I guess I love the inspiration part, the new idea part, the “what if” part, when a magical world opens up, a new story with its own rules of physics, psychology, spirit and event. I also love the craft part though, working alone and with an editor on things like structure and technique. What I don’t like is those moments or hours or days when the writing is dead. You write it and you look at it and it is a corpse and it stinks and you are afraid the life inside the work has abandoned you.

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

In my story collection, boYs,  I’m particularly happy with the stories Binocular and The History of Zero, because they pack an emotional punch. Binocular is a big, fully-realized story that might have become a novel there is so much that happens, but because it is  short it is highly concentrated. Binocular makes people cry, and The History of Zero makes some people laugh until they cry, though it was inspired by events that I originally thought were tragic. I don’t have hindsight yet about Annabel since the book has just been released.

Annabel is a novel about many things. It is also, undeniably, an evocative portraiture of ethereal Labrador. It is convincing, right down to the plants, the smells, or how a blind man can navigate a canoe and hunt ducks, and the details of work on a trapline. How much research was involved here, or how much time have you spent in Labrador?

Labrador captivated me the first time I went there. I made a television documentary there, and for that documentary I spent quite a bit of time on the land, and was invited to stay with an Innu family in their hunting encampment. I also met people of Scottish and Inuit descent, like Treadway in  Annabel, and these people too showed me a great deal of beauty in the land, taking me ice fishing and teaching me how to do Labrador arts like making moccasins. The description of Labrador in Annabel as having a unique, magnetic energy, comes from my personal experience of the land. I have visited with children as part of the Labrador Arts Festival, and I have also visited for personal reasons. Each time I have been, the land has deeply affected my spirit. I have also studied Labrador maps and non fiction.

In Annabel, there is an engaging tenderness and empathy in the writing that connects the reader to the story. It must have been exhausting to dip yourself in and out of these people’s lives? What were some of the biggest challenges in writing Annabel?

The biggest challenge for me is always telling a story. I love writing character, and I love the characters in this novel. They surprised me, especially Treadway. But the bones of the story, that’s what I find hard, because my natural tendency is toward character and atmosphere and I have to remember the reader needs reasons beyond these to keep turning the page. The reader has to be dying to know what happens next. I have had to work like a dog to know how to achieve this compelling quality in a book. I practice in hope that my weakness can, with hard work, become a strength. The tenderness and empathy come easily to me, compared with the bones of the story, and I’m really happy that reviewers of Annabel have called this story compelling to the last page. That is a huge achievement for me.

Despite Wayne/Annabel’s hermaphrodism, predicaments, and role as the main character, in my mind, the father, Treadway, is the most complex character in this novel. He is a man whose ability to connect with the natural world exceeds his ability to connect with his family, yet he is there, faithfully, when needed, and out of love, not fatherly or marital duty. Knowing how the writing process works, would I be right in saying his character evolved as you wrote the book? Were you, in the end, as taken by his depth of character and complexity as readers were/will be? 

Yes, Treadway really surprised me during the writing. I had no idea he would become so conflicted, or that he would show so many sides. He has made me think a lot about the difference between who we appear to be (both to ourselves and others) and the true selves or longed-for selves inside us. He has made me look at people differently and not come to conclusions about them so fast. I love that this could happen even though, supposedly, I am the one who created his character. Maybe the depth of people I have known in my life has manifested in Treadway. I write unconsciously much of the time, before the technical work, and I stop if the writing goes dead, so maybe this is how Treadway came alive for me in a way I did not predict.

Wayne/Annabel’s physical status is a crux of the book, but, in my reading, wasn’t “what the book is about.” What is the book “about” in your mind?

The book is about how point of view can change identity. I deliberately chose an omniscient point of view for the writing, as well as a consecutive storyline that you might call old-fashioned. I wanted to restrain myself structurally so that I could know, and the reader could know, what was going on in everyone’s minds as well as how the big picture looked. This is not my ordinary way of writing. I like to get more close-up and more stream of consciousness. But to me this story was always about other possibilities inside the self we choose to project at any one moment.  For Wayne, there was an obvious and dramatic conflict between the inner and the outer person. But we all possess unexpressed selves, and this story explores the tension in that. I would love to know what you think the book is about. Thank you for these wonderful questions.

 [Salty Ink: the pleasure was mine, so thank you. And what did I think the book was about? I thought that Wayne/Annabel's gender ambiguity was simply a great means by which to explore questions of identity, and several societal constructs that can box us in. Also: that it was a novel about the basic desires and humanity that overide gender and age and connect us all.]

The qualities of Jessica Grant’s writing are beyond words, and for that reason, she might be the freshest, most readably original voice in the country. In the spring of 2010, the country clearly agreed with that sentiment. Her debut novel, Come, Thou Tortoise — a Globe & Mail Book of the Year — won the heavy-hitting Amazon.ca First Novel Award, the prestigious Winterset Award, and the Newfoundland & Labrador Downhome Fiction Award. She also won The National Post’s Canada Also Reads competition, garnering close to 50% of the votes, and is one of the ten official selections for the 2010 Evergreen Award.

Come, Thou Tortoise is an innovative, unprecedented, unforgettable gem, and, pardon the cliché but I mean it: There is nothing quite like this. The story, the tone, the characters, the ultra-modern diction, the delivery: all Jessica Grant’s. Grant’s crisp, accurate descriptions dance the story so vividly off the pages as the story’s heroine, Audrey Flowers, sees and describes the world in a consistently unique way: “Why did she name her horse [Rambo] after that sweaty, bullety Sylvester Stallone?” Bullety; no one has ever used that adjective before, that apt neologism. As mentioned in her acknowledgements, it is a very “punny” novel, Grant plain has fun with language. Her outwardly off-kilter novel works because it is balanced with a sadness not milked into melodrama like most writers would do. This is a book you will never forget.

Every story has been told, writers are getting sharper and more talented, but no one except Jessica Grant is writing so fresh and so clean in a way that is accessible to a broad audience. Her first book, a collection of shorts, Making Light of Tragedy, is an original piece of work, perhaps most notable for its off-kilter, endearing, and often over-contemplative characters. Every story is delectably unpredictable and delivered in a distinctive way. She’s unique, vibrant, fun, or at times sad-sans-pathos. “I jogged down the walk from my building, hopscotching over the ice patches.” Hopscotching as a verb. She experiments with structure, has fun with language, and her characters are all experiencing some facet of life too few of us can tune into. Whether you want to read something for its creative merit, its originality, or because it’s plain fun to read, buy this book and meet these characters. I’ll reel it in, but I’m blowing nothing out of proportion: these stories have been published in numerous journals and anthologies, and the opening story alone won the country’s top short fiction award, The Journey Prize, in addition to the heavy-hitting Western Magazine Award.

Search Salty Ink’s archives for Salty ink’s reviews of her books, or, click on a book cover below to read more about that book at their publishers’ websites.

 Salty Ink Q&A with Jessica Grant

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

Mean Boy by Lynn Coady.

The Colony of Unrequited Dreams by Wayne Johnston.

If you weren’t a writer and professor, you’d be a … ?

Good conversationalist. That is my dream. To be, I believe the word is, scintillating.

What, in your mind, marked a turning point or real upswing in your writing career?

Coming home to Newfoundland. I’d been away for ten years and I came home and, just like that, I wrote differently. I don’t know why this is. I’d like to say it was all Newfoundland, but I think the time I spent in the States was crucial. The U.S. is a very dreamy, literary place. Something of that sunk in. But I couldn’t write while I was living there.   

For you, what makes for a good book?

I have to be surprised. I am very demanding about surprises. I don’t mean in terms of plot. I mean the ideas have to surprise me. They have to surprise me by being true. I have to fall off the sentences in amazement. Also, the voice must be earnest; even in its irony, the voice must be looking earnestly outward, trying to communicate.

In Come, Thou Tortoise, in a mistaken act of heroics, Audrey disarms an air marshal aboard a flight. Later, her father builds an airplane in the basement to help her get over a fear flying. In your short story, “The Plane Princess,” a woman finds a flight attendant badge, and on her next flight, wears it and acts out a fantasy she’s “one of them.” A.) are you aware of your fixation with airport culture and currently working towards a pilot’s license? B.) where do all of your original ideas come from, are they the product of exploring a fleeting thought and really running with it?

A.)  Yes, it’s an obsession. I’m possibly at my happiest in an airport. What’s that movie where Tom Hanks gets trapped in a terminal. Terminal. I loved that movie. I love watching planes take off. I love watching them land. I think they’re amazing. Very few people seem to feel this.

B.)  I don’t know how to answer this part. I like part A a lot, but part B is hard. Maybe some of the ideas come from odd thoughts I’m about to dismiss, because I think they aren’t worth their salt, but then I say, hey, maybe you are salty enough, come here, let’s put you on the page and see how you shake out.

Your work features a great deal of animals, and to a lesser degree, scientists devoting their life to obscure and specific research related to lab animals. These elements of Come, Thou Tortoise and some of your short fiction, like “Humanesque,” are well-informed. Do you have a background in the life sciences or is this the product of research? Are you an animal lover or  just fascinated by esoteric scientific research? What’s the deal?

My mother is a psychology professor who studies animal behaviour. She has a lab. In that lab there have been rats and goldfish. I’ve had close encounters with both.

Am I an animal lover? I love the animals I’ve known personally. They are, in no particular order:

A horse (Mick), four hamsters (Pumpkin, Pumpkin II, Squeaky, Mogul [as in a ski bump, not a business tycoon]), six cats (Cedes, Tosca, Aida, Cosi, Lumpy, Mittens), a dog (Yoldi), a tortoise (Scooter), a caterpillar (Pilly). 

Yes, I read author bios and acknowledgements, and it says in your bio for Making Light of Tragedy that you’ve written music in addition to literature. Elaborate, and is this something you still dabble in?

I no longer dabble, thanks be to Jesus. I used to play guitar (not well) and write intense political songs that made people uncomfortable – which I enjoyed. This was when I was living in the States. I played open mics and after a while got gigs and a bass player and a CD. We travelled around with our gear in a van. It was not a cool van. I played in Buffalo, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Hartford CT, Ithaca NY. I’m kind of proud of that. But I’d be mortified for anyone to hear now what I was playing then.

Salty Ink has twice spoken of your “not milking the sadder aspects of the story into melodrama ,” and your “sad-without-pathos moments.” It works, it suits your style and delivery of the story, but is it a conscious choice you make as a writer, to not tug too overtly at a reader’s heartstrings or to do so at length?

When I started writing, I had no sense of humour and I wanted to make my readers cry. This was in my late teens, early twenties. I tried to write a novel. It was quite bad. In fact, that whole novel ended up compressed into a single sentence in one of the stories in Making Light of Tragedy. What does this have to do with not pulling on the reader’s heartstrings. I don’t know. But again, I’d say it’s about the idea dictating its treatment. You remain true to the idea. The reader’s heartstrings shouldn’t come into your brain while you write. (That’s quite an image – sorry.)

If a bad storm trapped you in cabin for a full week, who’d you rather spend the week with, Audrey Flowers or Uncle Thoby?

That’s the kind of hypothetical question my grandmother used to ask, and not about characters, but about real people, and the question would usually involve leaving someone to die in the desert. Actually writing a novel is kind of like being trapped in a cabin with your characters, except for years, not a week. And so you have to love them a whole lot. I’d be happy with either Audrey or Uncle Thoby. In fact, I would not say no to spending time with either. I miss them.

Audrey “Oddly” Flowers is accused of being IQ-challenged throughout the book. I prefer to think of her as ethereal and open-minded. Certainly endearing. You?

Yeah, the novel treats the idea of IQ with irony. I hope this comes across. Skulls can be measured. Brains can be measured. But inner life – or intelligence – can’t be. We are immeasurable. We are universes. This is a paradox. We’re finite. But we’re infinite. This paradox is made manifest in the book through Winnifred, the tortoise, who is a portable room, and whose room is both involuted, like a galaxy, and cosy. We are portable rooms too. Or take the human brain in Audrey’s father’s lab. Audrey can’t get over how small it is. She can hold it in her lap. And yet, it’s a person. It makes no sense to her how small a human brain is. But back to IQ: An IQ test, as her dad tells her, is a test that measures how similar your brain is to the brain that made up the test. Audrey’s brain is not similar to the brain that made up the test. But is she less busy on the inside? No.

Carla Gunn’s writing has been featured in the Globe and Mail, The National Post, The New Brunswick Reader and heard on CBC radio. From her publisher’s website: “Along with writing, she teaches psychology and she worries. About everything. But especially climate change, mass extinctions and that mole that she can feel but not see.”

Her 2009 debut novel, Amphibian, about a nine-year-old, environmentally conscious, ahead-of-his-years-and-peers Green Channel addict, has had an amazing year and deserves all of its due attention. She’s emerged as one of Canada’s exciting new voices, and lucky for us, she’s at work on a new novel already. Amphibian was shortlisted for the prestigious Commonwealth Writers Prize (Canada and Caribbean Region) — a career-affirming pat on the back like few others — along with being A Globe & Mail top five debut novel of the year, a National Post Book of the year, being featured in the Quill & Quire best of 2009 edition, a Canada Also Reads nominee, and has garnered a striking abundance of rave reviews, in addition to landing itself onto countless other best of 2009 lists, (like Salty Ink’s, click here). Amphibian is also set to be translated into German and published by Verlag Random House. Click here to read more about Amphibian at Coach House Books’ website, and click here to read Salty Ink’s glowing review of Amphibian.

“Sometimes you start reading a book and fall in love by page two. That’s what happened when I tore through Carla Gunn’s novel Amphibian. The book’s narrator, nine-year-old Phin Walsh, is an encyclopedic pint-sized worrier … it’s a sparkling, memorable debut.” – The Coast

“Carla Gunn has fashioned (more likely been possessed by) an irresistible voice. I confess this kid grabbed me from the top and held me in tender thrall.” – The Globe & Mail

“’One of this year’s most original literary creations is Phineas Walsh, the nine-year-old narrator of Fredericton author Carla Gunn’s polished, engaging first novel … Phin is a “symbol for our times – a child so overwhelmed by information that his childhood is being stolen from him, Yet Gunn manages to alleviate the intensity that threatens to overwhelm the novel with good doses of humour and hope.” – The Quill & Quire.

Enjoy the wonderful interview below.

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

 Nights Below Station Street by David Adams Richards has stuck with me for years. It has a very strong narrative voice and I’m drawn to those sorts of novels.  It also takes place in Miramichi, N.B. where I grew up.

How does one go from being an aspiring writer to a published author, any insight? Suggestions?

There’s an episode of the British show Keeping Up Appearances in which Hyacinth Bucket, who had never been on a horse, leads some people she’s trying to impress to believe that she’s a skilled equestrian. When they invite her to ride at their ranch, Hyacinth is unfazed and says, “Well, maybe I can ride. How would I know? I’ve never tried.” I’m a bit like Hyacinth and that’s helped me most, I think. So my advice to aspiring writers: foster a naive optimism. 

What is your favourite part of the writing process? Your least favourite?

Fantasizing and imagining what my characters will do or say is more fun to me than actually writing.  I love listening to people’s conversations and plucking little bits out to seed a scene. I don’t like the final stages of the editing process because by that time my work is so familiar to me that I’m utterly bored by it.  

What is great about being a writer? What isn’t so great?

I like the autonomy that comes with writing and with the other forms of work I do. It’s comforting to know that if I piss someone off, they’re out of luck. If I were a capuchin monkey, they could punish me by withholding bananas or by biting off my fingers or toes, but in this capitalist system where money is the primary form of power, they don’t have much recourse since I have so very little to lose – as evidenced by my income statements. The downside to writing is that I have very little to lose – as evidenced by my income statements.

What’s the most unexpected question you’ve had in an interview or talk about your novel?

One reader at a book club meeting in Ontario asked – in a very challenging manner – if I belong to the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.  That surprised me…kind of.

What is taking up too much of your time lately?

I try to cobble together an income with a patchwork of contract jobs and that often interferes with writing.  Most irritating, though, are those pesky things I do for free because I’ve gotten into this mentality of being some sort of subsidization service (anyone who does contract teaching at a university in Canada knows what I mean by that). After a week of not having time to write, I get really cranky and bitter and David Adams Richards’ advice to writers becomes more and more attractive: “Burn your bridges.”

Where did the idea for this book come from? Did Phin come first, or did the idea come first, and a nine-year-old narrator felt like the right way to deliver the story?

When my son was nine, he jumped off his bike to pick up a plastic bag and yelled, “Don’t people know sea tortoises choke on this?!” This happened just around the time I decided I should try my hand at fiction. It really was the perfect motivating event since I’m passionate about environmental issues and gravitate to child narrators.  As soon as I had the theme and a rough idea as to the protagonist, Phin’s voice became louder and more insistent with each scene I wrote. I enjoy that feeling of being possessed because then writing feels like some sort of weird altered hypnotic state instead of hard work.

What I found so effective in using Phin to deliver this story, and all of its environmental concerns, was that children see the world in right and wrong, they do not have that grey zone we adults create by justifying our actions or plain ignoring social and environmental issues. Was this in some part why you chose to use a child narrator for this story?

Yes – and partly because I find children a lot more interesting than many adults. Children haven’t been entirely “socialized” so they’re more likely to clearly see some of the illogic and inconsistencies in the adult world. And because their perspectives are so fresh and interesting, we’re compelled to listen to them.  Some readers say they loved Phin because he gave voice to their own fears and concerns about the environment, while other readers who aren’t particularly interested in such issues liked him because he was funny and insightful – they could forgive his righteousness because of his age.  I don’t think this book would have worked with an adult protagonist, or even an older child.

The book is jammed full of enlightening, random animal facts and stark stats about environmental issues, particularly about endangered species. How much research was involved here? What were your sources?  When one of my sons was younger, he found a lot of fiction creepy (I tried once to read Roald Dahl’s The Twits to him and he was totally freaked out by how mean they were to each other and asked, ‘Didn’t they ever hear of a divorce?’), so he tended to gravitate to the decidedly less disturbing (!) realm of real life.  Animal encyclopedias were his favourite and that’s where I got a good start on accumulating Phin’s information.  I loved the research part of writing this book – so much fun to learn that some lizards can squirt blood out of their eyes and sea cucumbers can throw up their guts on predators. 

I’ve read you are at work on a new novel, Nuts. Is it too soon to tell us a little bit about it?

It’s narrated by a thirteen year old, Sam, who’s baffled by his father’s seemingly bizarre behaviour – like spending all of his time building some sort of secret device in the back shed and taking scything lessons.  When he discusses his concerns with his best friend and his mother, they have all sorts of unpleasant theories. And although his mother scoffs at Sam’s hypothesis that maybe it’s a brain tumour, given the alternatives, that’s what he’s rooting for.  In a nutshell, ‘Nuts’ is about social alienation and disillusionment and what qualifies as ‘disordered’ in present-day society. Now all I need to do is burn some bridges so that I have time to write it…

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.

Carol Bruneau, an anthologized writer of short fiction and multi-award-winning novelist, really got started in 1995 with the publication of her short fiction collection After the Angel Mill, which was nominated for the Dartmouth book award, and heralded by The StarPhoenix as “One of [Cormorant's] gems this year … a collection of linked short stories that is as hard to get out of your head as a haunting blues song.” She followed up in 1998 with another collection of linked stories, Depth Rapture, blending realism and black humour, which the Globe and Mail remarked had “the maturity and richness of a first-class storyteller.” Like After the Angel Mill, Depth Rapture was nominated for the Dartmouth Fiction award.

And then came her true break out, her debut novel, Purple for Sky, which not only won her the Dartmouth Fiction award she had been twice nominated for, but also the prestigious Thomas Head Raddall award — the award given to “the best novel of the year by an Atlantic Canadian author.” Purple for Sky was also a Globe and Mail top book of the year, and nominated for the Pearson Reader’s Choice Award. Very few books, particularly a debut novel,  garner that kind of reception. It was picked up in the US as well, by Carroll & Graf. The National Post called it “this year’s surprise,” stating that “Bruneau has a saucy, punchy, even ebullient writing style.”

From here she released Berth in 2005, a ReLit award nominee heralded by CanLit icon Lynn Coady as “a subtle work of offhand wisdom and insight, heartbreakingly true-to-life,” and her most recent novel: Glass Voices. Glass Voices — an emotionally rich look at both perseverance in the face of tragedy and the complexities of human relationships – was named a Globe and Mail and Sunday Herald book of the year in 2007, and nominated for multiple awards, such as the Relit and Dartmouth Fiction award. It was also picked by author/critic Stephen Patrick Clare as a top ten book of 2007.

CLICK A BOOK COVER BELOW TO READ MORE ABOUT THAT TITLE.

 Click the “Read More” tab to the right to read the rest of this article: A great interview with Carol –>

Salty Ink Q & A with Carol Bruneau

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.

An Audience of Chairs by Joan Clark, and The Nymph and The Lamp by Thomas Raddall. I loved both for their lovely intertwining of characters and settings.

Salty Ink: How did you end up writing books?

I wanted to write books from the time I was seven, then spent nearly 30 years working up to it—studying English, studying journalism, working in the news business then FINALLY starting to write fiction. I began when my youngest son was two. Having three kids made me realize time was short. It was the kick in the arse I needed. Ever since, I’ve found that living a writing life, like writing itself, is a daily process, a daily choice, an ongoing commitment.

Salty Ink:  What is your favourite part of the writing process? Your least favourite?

Two parts of the process make me happiest: the early “radar phase” when you just start doodling to hear the characters’ voices and start feeling like a magnet for ideas; and the final revisions phase when you uncover the last tiny secret that makes everything gel.

My least favourite part is starting the draft when I’ve got a ton of notes and bits and pieces, but am not sure how to build the story. Being a circular thinker, I find figuring out structure to be most challenging. It’s gotta be easier for writers who process things in a more linear way—but maybe not, who knows? 

Salty Ink: What is great about being a writer? What isn’t so great?

Being “allowed” to live by the imagination is a gift that not everyone has or is able to “indulge.” I say “allowed” and “indulge,” the downside being that artistic creativity is undervalued by a world that measures success by the cash generated. Obviously for most writers this doesn’t compute.

Salty Ink: What’s your main goal when you sit to write?

To get something down, to do it with some kind of grace, and have fun.

Salty Ink: What book of yours came the easiest/hardest, and any guesses as to why?

Berth was the easiest, because its story is linear and happens over one year instead of many, and because it deals with characters living in extreme isolation, its imaginary world was easier to create. Glass Voices was hard, but not as hard as the novel I’ve recently finished writing, based loosely on the life of sculptor Camille Claudel. Working on it has continually pushed me out of my various comfort zones.

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

Touring an asylum for the insane in Southern France.

Salty Ink: I love the sell line on the back of Glass Voices, as it is a truly rich well from which to draw out a great and honest story: “Seventy-one-year-old Lucy Caines’ husband suffers a severe stroke that makes Lucy reexamine her complicated relationship with the man she has variously loved and loathed.” Particularly for people who might not have read this yet, could you elaborate for us?

Lucy’s husband Harry is a dickweed, basically. But because of the times and the tragic circumstances of her life—they’re the only members of both their families to survive the Halifax Explosion—she has few options but to stay married to him and put up with his drinking, gambling and womanizing. But persevering teaches her a lot that she needs to learn about herself and about forgiveness and the value of not quitting.

Salty Ink: Purple for Sky has been a particularly successful novel — a Globe and Mail book of the year and a winner of the Thomas Head Raddall award and the Dartmouth Fiction Award, for starters. The title is interesting, care to elaborate on it, particularly for anyone who hasn’t read it yet?

It comes from the central motif in one of the characters’ narratives, a crazy quilt which becomes a figurative landscape: green for trees, blue for lakes, purple for …etc. In the U.S. edition the title was changed to A Purple Thread for Sky, which is pretty clunky. But the publisher thought “Purple for Sky” was too obscure—i.e. Canadians would get it, but not Americans. Go figger.

Salty Ink: You teach writing yourself at NSCAD, do you find working in writing either enhances or interferes with your own writing?

 I love being surrounded by visual arts students—their creative energy is always inspiring. And the analytical writing I teach there doesn’t cross circuits too much with my fiction-writing in the way that teaching creative writing does. Also, my students—many of whom aren’t readers—keep me grounded in the reality that art is a lot bigger than literature alone. As a writer I find it humbling, shocking, but almost refreshing to be around students who have never heard of Margaret Atwood.

What fuels all this work? I’ve gathered that tea seems to play a big role, and an awe of Flannery O’Connor perhaps. (I’m only speculating. Also: I am jealous of her prolific output.)

The one thing you’ll hear said, consistently, about Michelle Butler Hallett’s work is that it is hard to categorize. It’s unique; rare in its style, delivery, and effect on a reader. I’ve felt mentally exercised by her work, and I give that out as a compliment, and, what better a compliment than to have everyone agreeing her work defies categorization? The Globe and Mail has even said, “Butler Hallett seems often to be creating from a subliminal place, riding on intuition, unencumbered by the counsel of editors.” Books in Canada were apt offering up two words to describe her writing, “Economy and power.”

 The shadow of grace (2006), her debut and collection of short fiction,  was graced with the following, spot-on front-cover endorsement by CanLit icon Michael Crummey, “A rare debut, a collection that takes more risks than some writers take in a lifetime. And Michelle Butler Hallett has the talent to match that courage. She has command of an astonishing range of voices, places and era and never shies from confronting the thorniest, most troubling questions about what it means to be human. More please, ASAP.”

Double-Blind (2007) was shortlisted for the Sunburst award, and, the jury summarized it as “Sanity, madness, torture in the name of science—Double-blind is wonderfully original while chillingly based in history. It really shook us up. Through the chronically self-deceived mind of the narrator, the novel delves into profound questions of ethics in a morally ambiguous world, and comes up with tragically ironic answers. The writing is incredibly layered, with metaphor and symbol perfectly balanced against the hard neutrality of scientific language.”

Sky Waves (2008) really exemplifies the whole can’t-be-categorized bit. It’s told as a “drew.” I plucked this description right off her website: “Throughout ninety-eight non-linear but interconnected chapters and several different narrators, characters, and storylines are networked together, almost as a mural against a timeline of 1901 to 2005. Sky Waves explores the often funny and often sad human need for — and fear of — meaningful communication.”

Salty Ink Q & A with Michelle Butler Hallett

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.

MBH: Lives of Short Duration, by David Adams Richards; Right Away Monday, by Joel Thomas Hynes.

Salty Ink: How did you end up writing books?

MBH: It’s a bit spooky. I bashed at a typewriter before I could read. I copied out the text of storybooks before I went to kindergarten, yet I felt I had some trouble learning to read. (I could read already, not sure how, but the teaching methods in school utterly confused me at first.) I used reams of white typing paper for my own comic books. In second grade, just before Christmas break, I finally recognized that this  ‘creative writing / language arts’ work Miss Ellsworth set us to meant the same stuff I did at home . I understood motive and desire for a lovely moment there and saw – did not decide, saw – that I would be a writer. I feel very much like a conduit some days, a channel.  I do not choose the stories I tell; they seem to choose me.

Salty Ink: What’s your main goal when you write a piece?

MBH: To let the characters speak. To stay sane. To keep the story honest. To finish it.

Salty Ink: Of all your works, do you have favourite, or hold one more dear, if so, why?

MBH: Can’t say I do, but I have some characters I really love. Keefer Breen turns up in two stories in The shadow side of grace and twice, unnamed, in the background in Sky Waves. A good friend’s after me to write a novel about Keefer, but Keef needs a stern linear realism – and to tell me what he’s been up to. My doomed hard cases – Kit Marlowe in my play Peter’s Accent, Harry Singer in the novella Obliged to Drink Bad Water, Nichole Wright and Gabriel Furey in Sky Waves – they fight. Fight hard. And they love, despite their own suffering. The children in Double-blind: I feel such sorrow for them, because the institutionalized and specific psychiatric abuse they suffer has plenty of precedent; read up on Ewen Cameron or the Duplessis orphans if you’d like to lose several nights’ sleep … and they’re just Canadian content.

Salty Ink: What book of yours came the easiest/hardest, and any guesses as to why?

It all hurts. My books – one story collection, one first-person linear novel, and one multi-narrator networked novel – are all quite different from one another, and they each needed different kinds of writing. The shadow side of grace exposes all my worst weaknesses.  Double-blind, with its unreliable first-person narrator and weird subject matter, helped drive me towards a depressive collapse. Me, Prozac and the black dog – we’re old friends now. That kind of acceptance and recognition of histories fuels Sky Waves, too, which is about communication and love and how, like a net, they bind us. I continue to work with themes of recognition and history in the novel I’m clewing up now. Some characters from Sky Waves recur in the next novel. Characters recur all over my work, in fact; I want to build an interconnected fictive world.

 Salty Ink: What is your favourite part of the writing process? Your least favourite?

MBH: I love to outline, and I love to revise. I find the first draft, fighting past all the demonic voices prophesying failure, by the far the most difficult part.

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

MBH: A night in Miramichi, New Brunswick, when I got to hang out with friends Judy Bowman, Lee Thompson and Doug Underhill and unexpectedly receive the honour of becoming a Daughter of the River, an honourary Miramichier.  Later the same evening David Adams Richards told me that the last time he spoke to Alistair MacLeod, they enthusiastically discussed my work and talent. (I studied with both Richards and MacLeod through the Humber School for Writers.)  A potent night. One I return to when I fear I’ll never get another sentence right.

 Salty Ink: What’s next, any works in progress?

MBH: Lots. For now, I’m only willing to mention a novel that wrestles with history, histories, harm and healing – with the odd laugh, of course – and a collection of short stories that knife-fight with medical misadventure, self-determination and power.

 Salty Ink: As a writer of both novels and short fiction, do you have a favourite medium? Do you see short fiction as its own distinctive form of writing than novel writing, and if so, how so?

MBH: Good lord, yes. Quite distinct. Why, oh why do we in Canada treat the short story as some sort of finger-exercise for novel writing?  It’s like we’re ashamed of it, the way a terribly respectable Edwardian family might be ashamed of a child born with an alleged but invisible defect they insist exists. A novel allows for longer development arcs and more conflicts. A short story is more focused, and, arguably, somewhat more intimate. A novel feels to me like a long and significant conversation. A short story is what a stranger whispers to me in the fog while grabbing my arm hard enough to leave marks. Very different. Just as stage plays and screenplays differ greatly, or sonnets and epics.

Salty Ink: You’ve been described as, and declare yourself, “part-steampunk.” Enlighten us on that term, steampunk.

MBH: I can’t define ‘steampunk’ because then I will impose my own mental limitations on it. I can comment on some of what steampunk is about. It’s an aesthetic that celebrates human potential though recycled art and the muse of the road not taken. Ask yourself: what if we’d never gone digital? What if dirigibles remained the dominant form of air travel? What if we always got our hands dirty and felt the satisfaction of building something really cool out of, I dunno, locomotive parts, a discarded teapot and a Jacob’s ladder? Steampunk, one can argue, grows out of cyberpunk (think Blade Runner) but is usually nowhere near as dystopic. I use steampunk tropes in my work – and science fiction tropes, historical fiction tropes, and literary realism tropes — but first I take them apart, adjust gears and recalibrate to my own needs and liking. I love the optimism.

Salty Ink: You say Sky Waves is written as a “drew.” Can you explain that term to us, and, why you chose this structure for Sky Waves?

MBH: ‘Drew’ is old Newfoundland English for a row of mesh in a fishing net, sometimes 98 or 100 meshes. Because the novel is set in an historical and then speculative Newfoundland and Labrador, one which votes Responsible in 1949, I figured a fishing net as a governing structure might work – never know what you’ll haul in after you cast out. Sky Waves gets told in 98 chapters, and each is connected somehow to the preceding and following chapter, even though the novel as a whole is non-linear. The individual storylines go forward in their development, even if they, too, jump around a bit in time and narrative voice. Sky Waves talks about families, histories, communication and love, and how we are, ultimately, intertwined. Even entangled. For better or worse.

“A highly original voice.” – The Vancouver Sun
“One of the most gifted writers I know.” – Alden Nowlan
“The best literary voice to come belling out of the Maritimes in decades.” – Farley Mowatt

New Brunswick’s Raymond Fraser got started early. In his Jr. year at St. Thomas university he was co-editor for the student literary magazine Tom-Tom.  At 25, living in Montreal, he and Leroy Johnson founded the literary magazine: Intercourse: Contemporary Canadian Writing. And this ambition and talent led to one of the most remarkable careers of any Atlantic Canadian author, and resulted in, just this month, in his being awarded the inaugural Lieutenant-Governor’s Award for High Achievement in English Literary Arts, a 20,000$ award “designed to recognize the outstanding contribution of individuals to the arts.”

Here is a chunk of text from the press release for the award: ”

“’I felt it in my bones quite early, the desire to be a writer. At 14 I decided maybe it would too dull. Thought I’d live an exciting life for a while, and then write when I was older.’  However by the time the Chatham boy turned 17, Fraser’s mind was made up, and New Brunswick’s cultural life is the richer for it.”

Moreover, in the recently released gem, Atlantic Canada’s Top 100 Books, Fraser ties with the likes of literary icons David Adams Richards and Wayne Johnston for the author with the most titles in the list. Five. That’s quite an honour. Fraser has written 7 works of poetry, 2 biographies, a memoir, and compiled the anthology East of Canada. He has just released his eighth novel, In Another Life. You can buy it here: http://fraserbooks.blogspot.com/

“Wily Fredericton scribe Raymond Fraser proves again why he is one of Atlantic Canada’s finest writers with the beautiful and haunting tragic-comedy of one boy’s rise to prominence in his community and his slow descent into the throes of alcoholism. In Another Life is a powerful and poignant story that will capture the minds and hearts of readers. Think Catcher in the Rye meets Hemingway and Bukowski.” — Leap Magazine

“A beautifully wrought story, tragic, poignant and full of rich detail. It’s just masterful.” — Robert Lecker

“In Another Life is heart-warming and heart-wrenching all at once. It’s the real deal, a genuine masterpiece of storytelling, sadly beautiful, and perhaps Fraser’s finest work to date.” — Stephen Clare, The Book Club

Two Quick Questions for Raymond Fraser

I don’t think it’s the highlights that were important in my writing years so far but the lowlights, the near-darknesses, and making it through those times and being the better for it. Getting off the booze in 1982 which gave me a second go at life and writing when I thought both were finished, and then going through a lot of frustrations and self-doubts and finally getting things sorted out through assorted revelations.