THE WAYS of the BIRD RISING by © Amy Donovan a Thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of Th
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THE WAYS OF THE BIRD RISING by © Amy Donovan A thesis submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts , English Language and Literature Memorial University of Newfoundland October 2018 St. John’s Newfoundland and Labrador Abstract The Ways of the Bird Rising centres on a small Scottish island community threatened by offshore fracking. It takes the idea of “community” in the widest sense, extending its reach to the narrative voices of animals, plants, stones and the island itself in an attempt to evoke the consequences of resource extraction on a more-than-human world. The human story centres on Alana, who grew up on the island and is, with mixed feelings, moving back there after years away; and Comgall, a Canadian geologist who comes to the island as an employee of the company in charge of the fracking. In their own ways, both are reconciling their relationship to the land and to their respective rural homes, while being opened to the lively multi-species world around them—a process mirrored in the reader’s experience as the island’s many inhabitants contribute to narrating their home. ii Acknowledgements I have been constantly and repeatedly amazed by the wisdom, generosity, dedication, patience and support of my supervisor, Dr. Robert Finley. His sense of wonder, and his orientation to the world and to teaching, have made me a better writer and human. Without him this novel would not exist. My gratitude and admiration overflow. I am bedazzled every time I encounter Lisa Moore in person or in the written word, and this novel benefited greatly from her keen eye for character, sensory detail and the ever-elusive “tension.” Thank you, Lisa, for everything you’ve taught me about writing, and for believing in this project. I am indebted, too, to Alissa York for her generous reading of this novel, especially her attention to the more-than-human worlds I’ve attempted to create. Thank you to the many teachers and writers I encountered in St. John’s: Fiona Polack, Danine Farquharson, Mary Dalton, Jennifer Lokash, all my classmates and the members of the Naked Parade Writing Collective. My writing has been particularly helped by the critique, support and friendship of Terry Doyle, Heidi Wicks, Jen McVeigh, Matthew Hollett, and Bridget Canning. Thank you, too, to Aidan Diamond, for unwavering friendship and support throughout this master’s program. And thank you, as always, to my parents and too many friends to name. Breton Cousins, Carmen Lawrence, Kersti Tacreiter, Jamie Jordan, Darcy Harte, Jenny Reich and Adam Young inspired me and held me together during different stages of writing this novel. This novel includes quotations from two poems: T.S Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” and Alastair Reid’s “Growing, Flying, Happening” from his book Weathering: Poems and Translations. “Growing, Flying, Happening” was a crucial inspiration for this novel. The title, The Ways of the Bird Rising, is also borrowed from Reid’s poem. This novel is driven by thinking and reading in multi-species anthropology, and by my own encounters with the more-than-human world. For the former, thank you to Brian Noble for encouraging me to dream beyond the human during my undergraduate and master’s degrees in anthropology at Dalhousie University; and to the scholarly work of Hugh Raffles, Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing, Eduardo Kohn and Hayden Lorimer. For the latter, thank you to all the friends I’ve met during my work as a national park guide in the Cape Breton Highlands; to the corner of northern Cape Breton I call home, where the land is a constant guide; and to the Isle of Eigg and the wonderful people I met there. Eigg, Cape Breton and Newfoundland have all had their say in how this story took shape, and I am grateful to all of those islands for letting me into their natures. I live, learn and write on unceded Mi'kmaq territory—land that shaped this novel in ways I can only begin to grasp and for which I am deeply grateful. iii Table of Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgements iii Table of Contents iv Part 1 Winter 1 Chapter 1 2 Chapter 2 21 Chapter 3 32 Chapter 4 47 Chapter 5 67 Chapter 6 84 Part 2 Spring 100 Chapter 7 101 Chapter 8 126 Chapter 9 152 Part 3 Summer 176 Chapter 10 177 Chapter 11 192 Part 4 Fall 213 Chapter 12 214 Chapter 13 237 Chapter 14 260 Chapter 15 266 Chapter 16 278 Chapter 17 294 Chapter 18 311 Chapter 19 326 Chapter 20 342 Part 5 Winter 344 iv Part 1 Winter 1 Chapter 1 She remembers the day they stopped singing. The water was dark below them. Blots of white sunlight spilled from above. A quavering quality to the light, like the sky might suck it back in. When she surfaced to breathe she could feel the winter sun blooming through the wet skin of her back. They were hungry that morning. They had spent the night in a cloud of jellyfish that filled a hollow along the island’s rocky shoreline. They had expected to find food there. Instead: pulsing slime. The next morning they came across a humming mass of krill. In the bright sunlight the tiny creatures’ shells were translucent, revealing amorphous insides. She has tried looking into their hard, black eyes. Flat obsidian; this, she reasons, is why they eat them. That morning the six of them rushed upward through the water with mouths open and ate. Their baleen became succulently clogged, their skin folds slapped. She forgot the jellied invaders and they carried on. They took up their song again, light at first then careening through the ocean. The song itself a creature independent of vibrating throats and lungs, carrying the pod’s stories to places they can only imagine. Then the youngest one went quiet. For a moment she assumed something had happened only to him: a cough maybe, a barbed 2 hook snagged on baleen. Something temporary and isolated, a problem the song could carry him through. From her other eye she saw a skate, reeling, severed from its usual grace. Then she felt it—a strange low vibration in the water. From deep below, the rocks cried out. Her larynx and the folds within it seized. Then all their songs went dark. * “Testing started this morning,” says Tyler. “Jesus. I totally forgot that was today,” Comgall answers from his position at the ash- coloured pressboard desk. White Crow has stuck their offices in a small prefab in the middle of the woods—the cheapest land for sale, or the only land for sale, or maybe the location thought least likely to attract vandals. The long slog through the damp forest, or the six-kilometre dirt road, bumpy even in the company’s lifted Ranger. Outside the prefab’s small windows, sunlight glints off the damp bark of leafless sycamores. Winter moss, Comgall noticed this morning, has begun to cling to the concrete supports. The smell is more and more of forest than of vinyl siding. There’s a squirrel living under the pressure-treated stoop. 3 There’s shale, he knows, below. There’s the feeling of the island settling. “How long do you think before they start drilling if they find something?” Tyler is Canadian too, a business guy, some kind of accountant maybe. In this life Comgall is more or less a glorified PR man, but there’s another part of him that knows tectonic movements and the life histories of shale so well he used to feel them flowing through his own blood. Back then if he stood still enough he imagined he could feel plates sliding beneath his feet, could curl his toes with the ancient roots of trees around bedrock. He could feel the carbon contained in his skin cells, a kinship with shale. The continents move at the same rate your fingernails grow, his first- year geology professor had told the class, and he’d closed his eyes, held his breath. Now he says: “I read the study. It’s there. They just have to find the most economical place to access it.” “And people are pissed, eh?” Comgall shrugs. “Not as pissed as you’d expect. Offshore stuff is far away.” “But they’re all such fucking hippies,” says Tyler, slick in a lavender dress shirt, pressed camel-coloured khakis, a Dolce & Gabbana belt. “Maybe they’ll get there,” Comgall says. “But fuck. I’ve been thinking I was going to get there for years, and I’m still not.” “You? Get where?” Tyler looks up. 4 “Don’t you ever wonder if you’ll get sick of it all?” “Nope,” says Tyler. “Shouldn’t be talking like that. The walls have ears.” When it’s windy in the forest, the aluminum and plastic walls seem to have limbs and voices too, an echo of the forest itself. Talking and trembling in the gusts. The island breathing damp wind through the sycamores. How strange this mildness is compared to home. On Comgall’s last day of work in St. John’s a month ago, he had to strap crampons to his boots to get there. The silence at the office was thick and dark, though they’d all known this was coming. The price of oil had been dropping for more than a year, since before Comgall transferred back to the east coast, but back then everyone figured it was just temporary. It still probably is.