Regional Aspects in Atlantic Canadian Short Stories

Home , Alistair MacLeod, Lisa Moore (writer), Michael Winter (writer), Wayne Johnston (writer)

“Shaped by the Sea”: Regional Aspects in Atlantic Canadian Short Stories

Diplomarbeit

zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades einer Magistra der Philosophie

an der Geisteswissenschaftlichen Fakultät der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz

vorgelegt von Daniela REITER

am Institut für Anglistik

Begutachterin: Ao.Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr.phil Maria Löschnigg

Graz, 2015 Acknowledgements

In the following I would like to thank a number of people who were very helpful, motivating and supportive throughout the process of writing this thesis:

My advisor Ao.Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr.phil. Maria Löschnigg for her professional and motivating guidance during the writing process of this thesis.

Jennifer Andrews for the support during my semester at the University of New Brunswick and for taking the time to be interviewed by me.

Tony Tremblay Herb Wyile, Gwendolyn Davies and David Creelman for the interesting and very helpful interviews about regionalism and Atlantic Canadian literature.

Alexander MacLeod who was willing to answer my questions on regionalism and short stories from Atlantic Canada via e-mail.

My mother, who always supports me in everything I do and who has been there for me every step of the way.

My two brothers who always manage to make me smile.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction ...... 3

2. Regionalism ...... 5 2.1 The Image of the Region – A Construct Created by the Center of the Nation ...... 7 2.2 Depression in the Maritimes ...... 9 2.3 Literature from Atlantic Canada ...... 10 2.4 Definition of regionalism ...... 12

3. Nova Scotia ...... 15 3.1 Nova Scotian Short Story Writers ...... 16 3.1.1 Alistair MacLeod ...... 16 3.1.2 Lesley Choyce ...... 18 3.1.3 Sheldon Currie ...... 18 3.1.4 Lynn Coady ...... 19 3.2 Analysis of the short stories ...... 20 3.2.1 “The Boat” by Alistair MacLeod ...... 20 3.2.2 “In the Fall” by Alistair MacLeod ...... 24 3.2.3 “The Vastness of the Dark” by Alistair MacLeod ...... 26 3.2.4 “The Tuning of Perfection” by Alistair MacLeod ...... 30 3.2.5 “Dance the Rocks Ashore” by Lesley Choyce ...... 34 3.2.6 “The Glace Bay Miner´s Museum” by Sheldon Currie ...... 38 3.2.7 “Jesus Christ, Murdeena” by Lynn Coady ...... 42

4. Newfoundland and Labrador ...... 44 4.1 Newfoundland Short Story Authors ...... 46 4.1.1 Michael Crummey ...... 46 4.1.2 Wayne Johnston ...... 46 4.1.3 Lisa Moore ...... 47 4.2 Analysis of Short Stories set in Newfoundland ...... 48 4.2.1 “Heartburn” by Michael Crummey ...... 48 4.2.2 “Roots” by Michael Crummey ...... 52

4.2.3 “That Fall” by Michael Crummey ...... 55 4.2.4 “The Boot” by Wayne Johnston ...... 57 4.2.5 “Grace” by Lisa Moore ...... 59

5. Expert Interviews ...... 66

6. Questionnaire for Canadian Students ...... 74

7. Conclusion ...... 86

8. Bibliography ...... 90 8.1 Primary Sources ...... 90 8.2 Secondary Sources ...... 90 8.3 Online Sources ...... 92 8.4 Images ...... 94

9. Appendix ...... 96 9.1 Interview with Herb Wyile ...... 96 9.2 Interview with Gwendolyn Davies ...... 105 9.3 Interview with David Creelman ...... 113 9.4 Interview with Tony Tremblay...... 122 9.5 Interview with Jennifer Andrews ...... 133 9.6 Interview with Alexander MacLeod ...... 149 9.7 Questionnaire ...... 153

1. Introduction

Canada as the second largest country in the world is home to numerous outstanding authors. However, Canadian writers have often been neglected and Canadian literature has frequently been seen as secondary literature and not as important as the literary classics (cf. Tremblay Interview 2014: 2). Further, for many years regionalism was seen pejorative in Canada and regional works were associated with hinterland. Thus, regionalism and regional works had rather negative connotations (cf. Tremblay Interview 2014: 6). For a very long time and still now, Atlantic Canada has often only been seen as a picturesque, peaceful place which is great to visit on a holiday. However, in political terms the region does not really count for Canadians from other parts of the country (cf. Wyile Interview 2014: 5). Also the literary outputs of the region have often been neglected in other parts of Canada and internationally. Nowadays however, “there is a whole sort of new generation that is interested in Atlantic Canada” (Wyile Interview 2014: 2) and in the literature from this region. The aim of this thesis is to give an insight into Atlantic Canadian literature by focusing on short stories from that particular region. Further, the thesis should explain and define the concept of regionalism and show which and how regional aspects are portrayed in short stories written by Atlantic Canadian authors. However, it is not within the bounds of possibility of this thesis to concentrate on all provinces that make up Atlantic Canada. Therefore, I chose to work on two provinces namely Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. I also had to restrict the number of authors and short stories in order to narrow the scope of this thesis even further. Further, the goal of this thesis is to give an insight into the opinions of experts on the field of regionalism and to show which opinions Canadian students have with regard to regional literature and region itself. In the theoretical chapter of this thesis, the concept of regionalism will be the main focus. With regard to the huge land mass of Canada, it will be investigated if Canadians feel connected rather to the region they live in or to the country as a whole. Further, the history of the study of regionalism will be concentrated on briefly. Thus, the shift in how regionalism has been seen will be explained. Additionally, the image of Atlantic Canada will be dealt with. In the next subchapter the Depression in the Maritimes will be the center of attention. The Depression was a time of huge economic decline in the years from 1920-1940 (cf. Creelman 2003: 10). Following, an 3 overview of the literature and, in particular, the short stories of Atlantic Canada will be given. Thus, the main themes of Atlantic Canadian short stories will be listed, the most known short story writers of the region will be named briefly and the differences of the new generation of authors and the older generation of writers will be depicted. The final aspect of the chapter will be to give a definition of the concept regionalism. In the third chapter, the Atlantic Canadian province Nova Scotia will be the center of attention. The Nova Scotian authors being dealt with in this chapter will be Alistair MacLeod, Lesley Choyce, Sheldon Currie and Lynn Coady, who all have a personal connection to Nova Scotia. Then, certain short stories by those authors will be looked at in detail and analysed with regard to regional aspects. The short stories I chose to work on are “The Boat”, “In the Fall”, “The Vastness of the Dark” and “The Tuning of Perfection” by Alistair MacLeod, “Dance the Rocks Ashore” by Lesley Choyce, “The Glace Bay Miner´s Museum” by Sheldon Currie and “Jesus Christ, Murdeena” by Lynn Coady. All short stories analysed in this chapter are set in Nova Scotia and portray distinctive aspects of the culture, living conditions and the social- and economic situation within the region. The fourth chapter concentrates on literature from the Atlantic Canadian province Newfoundland. First, the biographies of certain Newfoundland short story authors will be looked at. The authors dealt with in this chapter are Michael Crummey, Wayne Johnston and Lisa Moore. Each of them was born in Newfoundland and therefore they do not only write about the region of Newfoundland, but have a strong connection to the region and know what it is like to live in this part of Canada. The short stories being worked on in this chapter will be “Heartburn”, “Roots” and “That Fall” by Michael Crummey, “The Boot” by Wayne Johnston and “Grace” by Lisa Moore. In the analytical process, the regional aspects in those short stories will be depicted and analysed. Through the short stories the reader will get an insight into the lives of Newfoundlanders, the main industries and the main struggles of the region. The following chapter is based on interviews with experts on regionalism and Atlantic Canadian literature. I spent several months at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, in order to do research on regionalism and Atlantic Canadian short stories. During this stay in Canada I got the chance to meet various experts on the field of regionalism and Atlantic Canadian literature and interview them. Thus, I got an insight into their opinions and thoughts with regard to my

4 research topic. The interviews were each done orally and in person, except for one interview which was done via e-mail. The people interviewed were Herb Wyile, Gwendolyn Davies, David Creelman, Tony Tremblay, Jennifer Andrews and Alexander MacLeod. Throughout this thesis, the interviews will be quoted in the following manner (Name Interview year: page number), for example (Tremblay Interview 2014: 1). As already mentioned, the interviewees are experts on regionalism and Atlantic Canadian short stories and in the fifth chapter of this thesis certain questions of the interviews will be looked at and the answers of the experts will be discussed. The last chapter of this thesis focuses on a field study with Canadian students. During my stay in Fredericton, New Brunswick I created a survey in order to find out which opinions Canadian students have on regionalism and Atlantic Canadian short stories. 69 students from various fields of studies took part in the survey. The survey consists of three groups which will in the following be referred to as the Tremblay- group, the Andrews-group and the McLeod-group. The Tremblay-group attended a class on Atlantic Canadian art, literature and film, the participants of the Andrews- group attended introductory literary classes with a focus on British literature and the McLeod-group simply shared the same residence. Concerning the three different groups it was interesting to find out if there were major differences in the students´ opinions and if students who have attended literature classes on a university level have different opinions compared to students who do not have this literary education. In this last chapter the answers of the Canadian students will be evaluated, the most interesting ones will be presented in graphs and the similarities and differences between the three groups will be summarised and analysed.

2. Regionalism

For most Canadians identity is a much more localized feeling than the feeling of being Canadian (cf. Wyile 1997: ix). This means that, for instance, a person from Alberta would usually refer to themselves as Albertan before referring to themselves as Canadian, or a person from the Maritimes would call themselves a Maritimer before calling themselves a Canadian (cf. Tremblay Interview 2014: 12). One might say that this indicates that people living in Canada feel more connected to the 5 regions in which they live than to Canada as a whole. Thinking about it, this is not surprising because Canada, as the second largest country in the world, is simply too big to imagine or to cross physically (cf. Tremblay Interview 2014: 3). Due to the size of the country, it is hard or even impossible for the majority of the people living in Canada to imagine or identify with the thought that the entire country is an entity. Thus, the idea of the united country Canada does not really exist. Canada is a cluster of regions. However, this does not mean that there is absolutely no unity within Canada. The united country exists for example in terms of the legislation, the sovereignty and in terms of trade with other nations. In the minds of Canadians however, the united country does not exist. One of the main reasons for this is that people living in different parts of Canada do not have a shared heritage (cf. Tremblay Interview 2014: 11-12). The heritage of English Canadians, French Canadians, multicultural Canadians and aboriginal Canadians has very little in common (cf. Tremblay Interview 2014: 3). Additionally, the size of the country makes it almost impossible to have myths or any kind of heritage that is shared all across Canada. For this reason many myths of region exist within Canada, such as myths about the fishing culture on the East Coast (cf. Tremblay 2008: 29). With regard to the size of the country and the fact that people feel more connected to their region than to the nation-state as a whole, it can be assumed that regions play a more significant role in Canada than in other, smaller countries. According to Frank Davey (1997:5), “the most visible and recent regionalisms in the Canadian nation state have been Atlantic/Maritime and Prairie”. He explains “visible” as “those most frequently constructed in anthologies and criticism, and most successfully publicized and commodified as regionalisms both outside and within the geographic areas they claim to regionalize” (Davey 1997: 5). With regard to this, the difference between Atlantic Canada and the Maritimes has to be explained shortly. Both names are frequently used as collective terms to refer to the provinces located on the East Coast. While the term “Maritimes” refers to the provinces New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia, “Atlantic Canada” also includes the province Newfoundland and Labrador (cf. McCullough 2015, online). The study of regionalism has had a long history and various attempts have been made to describe the term regionalism. Frank Davey in “Toward the Ends of Regionalism” names Roger Gibbins as one of the first scholars who worked on regionalism, starting his study of Canadian regionalism in 1982. Gibbins states that

Canadian regionalism is mainly determined by geographic aspects (cf. Davey 1997: 1). Some years later Janine Brodie takes on a similar view in The Political Economy of Canadian Regionalism. Additionally, she observes that people often use the words “region” and “regionalism” wrongly. According to her, the two terms have often been mixed up and used as if they had the same meaning. Further, Janine Brodie argues that region and regionalism are social constructions, a view also Frank Davey agrees with in his essay (cf. Davey 1997: 1-2). Herb Wyile (1997: xi) says in the introduction of his essay “Regionalism Revisited” that the term regionalism has always brought “into view tensions between the centre and the periphery, the rural and the urban, the local and the cosmopolitan [and] the regional and the national”. Therefore, it is of course necessary to investigate the connection of regionalism to the nation-state. Davey mentions that even though the nation-state is also determined by geographical aspects, geography seems to have a higher importance to regionalism. While the nation-state is seen as connected to its citizens, regionalism is connected to people who live in a certain part of the country and thus share geographical aspects (cf. Davey 1997: 2). Even though geographical aspects might seem as determinant factors for regionalisms at first sight, Davey makes it clear that “regionalism is cultural rather than geographic, and represents not geography itself but a strategically resistant mapping of geography in which historic and economic factors play large but largely unacknowledged parts” (Davey 1997: 2). Davey´s point of view is that regionalism is an ideology (cf. Davey 1997: 1). He also emphasizes that regionalism is constructed by the nation-state to partly fulfill a purpose for the nation-state (cf. Davey 1997:5).

2.1 The Image of the Region – A Construct Created by the Center of the Nation

Canada’s East Coast is often viewed as a rural, peaceful and picturesque place. This myth of Maritime innocence is constructed by people from outside of the region (cf. Wyile 2008: 6). In this context Tony Tremblay argues that regionalism is constructed by the center of the nation rather than by people in the regions (cf. Tremblay 2008: 24). This means that people living in the center of the country construct a view of the region that is the total opposite to the urban environment they live in. For example when we think about the life in a big city we often picture it to be stressful, noisy and

7 hectic. The image of the region that is constructed by the people living in the center is that the regions are peaceful, quiet, idyllic and picturesque (cf. Tremblay 2008: 30). Ian McKay supports this argument when he says that “urban cultural producers, pursuing their own interests and expressing their own view of things, constructed the Folk of the countryside as the romantic antithesis to everything they disliked about modern urban and industrial life” (McKay 1994: 4). The image of the regions that is created in the center of the nation is understandably being kept up by the region in order to attract tourists and thus earn money. Especially because there is a lack of resources in Atlantic Canada people are dependent on tourism in order to provide jobs within the region. However, the tourism industry contributes to keeping up the constructed image of the region. The reason for this is that in order to attract tourists the regions have to present themselves in the way the people from the center perceive them and more importantly, the regions have to represent themselves in the way people from the center want to see them (cf. Andrews Interview 2014: 11). Marc Epprecht mentioned in an essay called “Atlantic Canada and ‘the End of History’: Postmodernism and Regional Underdevelopment” that Atlantic Canada has experienced a continuing deindustrialization after World War 2. Additionally Epprecht mentions that therefore, the government tried to market the only industry of Atlantic Canada in which they saw a chance in making money. This industry was tourism cf. Epprecht 1991: 448). Ian McKay gives an example for the tourism industry of Nova Scotia. He mentions that the tourism industry tries to homogenize and market the cultural diversity of Nova Scotia “in the economic interests of the state” (cf. Hodd 2008: 192). Further, Erik Cohen states that commoditization is rather used when the region is economically struggling than when it is “flourishing” (Cohen 1988: 382). Cohen also argues that one of the benefits of tourism is that it preserves some of the cultural heritage which might have otherwise been lost over the time (cf. Cohen 1988: 382). Of course this can be the case, however, as Thomas Hodd points out, the tourism industry only markets things that are wanted by the tourists. Thus, some aspects of cultural heritage might be preserved through the tourism industry. Other aspects, however, that are not profitable for commoditization are not preserved through tourism (cf. Hodd 2008: 193).

2.2 Depression in the Maritimes

As mentioned above, commoditization is often made use of when regions are economically struggling. The Maritimes faced this period of huge economical problems, referred to as “The Depression”, in the years from 1920-1940. David Creelman states in his book Setting in the East: Maritime Realist Fiction that during this time a continuing decline of Maritime resources and work opportunities took place. Before the First World War the industry in the Maritimes was flourishing, but later with increasing modernization the fishing industry which was one of the main fields in which people worked was not that profitable anymore. One reason for this was the ongoing modernization. Freezing systems were developed that enabled people to expand the fresh fish market. However, this required huge investments which people in many cases could not afford. Additionally, at that time limitations or even closures of certain fisheries were made in order to preserve threatened fish stocks. Therefore, many people decided to stop working in the fishing industry. After the First World War the timber trade began to collapse which was another major field of work in the Maritimes. The economic decline also took place in the agricultural industry. Many children of farmers moved to cities in order to get a job. After the Second World War the decline in agriculture continued. Many people stopped working in the agricultural industry and the farms that still continued invested in mechanized technology to improve the efficiency of their farms. According to Creelman this modernization of the remaining farms removed 36.000 jobs from the market in the 1950s. One of the results of the decline of these industries was underemployment. Numerous people had to leave the region to find work somewhere else. Between 1881 and 1981 approximately 80.000 to 100.000 people left the region each decade. Between 1921 and 1941 the number of people leaving the region was at its highest. During that time approximately 150.000 people left the region each decade. According to Creelman nowadays in Atlantic Canada there is a more cautious attitude towards modernity because modernization has by far not been beneficial for everyone. On the contrary, it has had various negative effects for numerous people in the region. Especially the decline of the fishing and farming industry resulted in a feeling of nostalgia in people living on the East Coast (cf. Creelman 2003: 9-13). Creelman points out that “[i]f there is a common ethos in the Maritimes, it lies not in a

“sense of shared community” but in the memory of shared community” (Creelman 2003: 11). This sense of loss was then used by the tourism industry and successfully made into a marketing strategy. An image of the Maritimes was constructed as a place that is old-fashioned, innocent, romantic and mythical (cf. Creelman 2003: 11).

2.3 Literature from Atlantic Canada

Tremblay (Interview 2014: 10) defines Atlantic Canadian short stories as follows:

Atlantic Canadian short stories are written by Atlantic Canadians who have a particular perspective on the world. That perspective is not urban. That perspective is informed by the socio-economic history of the region. That perspective is much more republican than is the perspective in other parts of Canada. What I mean by republican is that there is a sense of individuality, a lack of trust of government, of forces.

Major themes of Atlantic Canadian short stories are for example the immense pain of loss and alienation, registers of regret and the breaking up of families. The reason for the frequent appearance of these themes is the socio-economic history and the deindustrialization of the region (cf. Tremblay Interview 2014: 11). Examples for short stories that are characterized by a nostalgic longing for the past are the works by Alistair MacLeod. Further, Atlantic Canadian literature often deals with the main struggles the region is facing. Those struggles are for example the experience of a resource crisis in the region, outmigration, a shared reliance on tourism and the somewhat problematic relationship with the rest of the country (cf. Wyile 2008: 10). Herb Wyile (Interview 2014: 5) says about the issues Atlantic Canada is dealing with that the

[...] [r]egion obviously is at a very challenging point in its history [because] it is dealing with severe financial challenges, outmigration, it´s kind of paddling against the political current in the sense that people elsewhere don´t give much consideration to it in terms of national political issues. Atlantic Canada for a lot of Canadians just doesn´t really count. Except that they see it as this quaint and beautiful and culturally rich place to go to visit.

This quote emphasizes that Atlantic Canada is often simply seen as the idyllic place to visit on a holiday, but politically and economically the region is facing various challenges. These problems are often dealt with in the works by Atlantic Canadian authors. As Margaret Conrad and James Hiller mention in their book Atlantic Canada: A Region in the Making, what differentiates Atlantic-Canadians from many other North Americans is their strong “sense of place” which can be seen in the literature produced in Atlantic Canada (cf. Conrad 2001: 1). Characteristic of Atlantic Canadian short stories is also the humoristic way in which they are often written and a certain reluctance to engage in narrative experiments. (cf. Wyile Interview 2014: 6). However, this is about to change with contemporary writers, such as Lisa Moore and Michael Winter. In the 1970s and 1980s the most famous writers of the East coast were Alistair MacLeod and David Adams Richards. While Alistair MacLeod wrote short stories, David Adams Richards was a novelist. In the 1990s two other writers, Wayne Johnston and George Elliott Clarke gained major success. In the last twenty years many more writers from the East Coast have become successful. Examples for those writers are Lesley Choyce, Lynn Coady, Michael Crummey, Sheldon Currie, Lisa Moore and Michael Winter (cf. Wyile 2008: 8-9). The works of this generation often deal with the “political, cultural and economic dynamics of a postmodern “global village”” (Wyile 2008: 6). Additionally, the works by the recent generation of Atlantic Canadian writers are influenced by a focus on language, dealing with issues in a more sophisticated way and a wider range of literary influences (cf. Wyile 2008: 9). Creelman mentions that “late 20th century and early 21st century Maritime writers become increasingly good at talking back to their marginalization (Creelman Interview 2014: 4).” What he means is that the new generation of writers, such as Lisa Moore or Michael Crummey, critically reflect on the negative image of the East Coast and talk back to that through their literary works (cf. Creelman Interview 2014: 4). Atlantic Canadian writing used to be and still is considered as rather rural. However, there is a big shift in this respect especially in Newfoundland. Especially in the younger generation of writers there are many urban writers, such as Lisa Moore, Ed Richie, Michael Winter and Jessica Grant (cf. Wyile Interview 2014: 6). Nowadays, Atlantic Canadian writers try to emphasize “that there is still a lot about

11 the region that is sort of traditional, but our sense of traditionalism is very much in dialogue with modernity, progress and globalization (Wyile Interview 2014: 8).” To support this argument Wyile refers to Michael Winter who said “that there really is no such thing as the purely local or the purely regional anymore because it is all in this kind of dialogue with the present, with globalization and with the global modernism (Wyile Interview 2014: 8).”

2.4 Definition of regionalism

According to Tony Tremblay it is impossible to find a definition of regionalism that everybody agrees with. Further, he mentions that the definition of regionalism depends on who is defining it. Firstly, it depends on whether the person who wants to define regionalism has an insider or an outsider perspective, i.e. if a person is living in the region or if the person is living outside of it, such as in the center of the nation- state. Secondly, the definition of regionalism also depends on the person´s own particular bias. Tremblay says that for years regionalism had a negative connotation (cf. Tremblay Interview 2014: 6). As already described earlier, regionalism was often associated with hinterland, and regionalist literary works were often considered as marginal literature. Regional writers were seen as provincial and there was the stereotype that they were “narrow in their perspective[s]” (Tremblay Interview 2014: 6). At that time the common opinion was that important literature was beyond the local (cf. Tremblay Interview 2014: 6). According to Tremblay, in 1943 the view of anti-regionalism was strongly supported by a new anthology that was published in this year and was edited by A.J.M. Smith. The opinion of the majority of critics was that successful and important literature was “not local at all, but had a more universal application” (Tremblay Interview 2014: 7). Until the 70s this idea was strongly supported by most critics. Then in the 70s however, there was a shift towards the local again. Critics realized that the world´s best literature had always been local. Examples for this are James Joyce and Thomas Hardy whose literary works gained major success and are taught all around the world. However, many people forget the fact that these writers were local authors as well. In the 1970s there was a realization in Canada that the best literature in the world was ultimately local. Therefore, from this point onwards local and regional texts were seen from a new perspective (cf. Tremblay Interview 2014: 7). A major factor 12 that led to this shift towards the local was the Canadian centenary in 1967. Tremblay states that through the Canadian centenary there was an “unprecedented focus on Canada, money available for Canadian studies, encouragement around developing heritage and other local resources” (Tremblay Interview 2014: 7). The events around the Canadian centenary encouraged people to “express and explore Canadian identity” (Tremblay Interview 2014: 7). As a result writers, such as “Alden Nowlan, Alistair MacLeod and Sheldon Currie, whose work[s] not just explored the local, but celebrated the local and made the local lyrical (Tremblay Interview 2014: 7)” became successful. With regard to the importance of the local Tremblay refers to a quote by Alden Nowlan who said, “No culture without localism”. Tremblay explains this quote with the words “all culture is local” (Tremblay Interview 2014: 8). This indicates that the local is essential to our culture. According to Tremblay, “we have to understand that we start from somewhere, we emerge from somewhere and that process of emergence equips us with value systems, with biases of language and perspective, with political tendencies. [...] [W]e are deeply rooted first in the local (Tremblay Interview 2014: 8)”. What he means is that where a person grows up has an impact on their biases, beliefs and perspectives. As each person develops and broadens their horizon they might give up on some of their beliefs or perspectives and gain new ones instead. However, we cannot deny where we come from and where our roots are. As already said, from the 70s onwards regionalism has experienced a kind of revolution (cf. Wyile Interview 2014: 4). In the last 20 to 30 years however, the view of regionalism has changed even further. According to Herb Wyile this is an international phenomenon and therefore it has also taken place in Canadian literary criticism. Before that, regionalism was seen as a very fixed thing. The basic regions of Canada were the Maritimes, Central Canada, the Prairies, the West Coast and the North. Each of the regions was seen to have certain distinctive characteristics that made them different from each other. In the last 20 to 30 years however, critics have questioned this view of the regions of Canada (cf. Wyile Interview 2014: 3). Herb Wyile states that critics “pointed to the fact that regions are internally very diverse [and] they are very often overlapping in a very broad sense (Wyile Interview 2014: 3).” Thus, there was a shift in how regions were seen. “Region has shifted from being something very concrete, socially and culturally material to something that is essentially constructed. It is a way of thinking about place. We kind of looked back at

13 those traditional notions of regionalism and [saw] that it is being constructed consensus rather than the reality (Wyile Interview 2014: 3).” Therefore, contemporary experts working on regionalism, such as David Creelman, Herb Wyile or Tony Tremblay avoid the view in their works that there is some essential quality to any of the regions and that every region has certain characteristics that make it different from the other parts of Canada. As already described earlier, due to the size of Canada there is no shared national identity, but various different regional experiences (cf. Creelman Interview 2014: 3). Therefore the temptation is to try to “essentialize what is coring about [a] particular region” (Creelman Interview 2014: 3). Those essentializing things of regions however are stereotypes and superficial aspects and should therefore not be used to classify regions. The typical stereotypes about the East Coast are for example that it is not as industrialized, that it is a have not province, that there is a stronger traditional culture, that there is a stronger sense of memory and that people are slower paced (cf. Creelman Interview 2014: 3). Instead of using stereotypical characteristics to describe a region the contemporary generation of critics see region as something that is “shaped by its own historical patterns and economic experience[s] (Creelman Interview 2014: 3).” To quote Creelman (Interview 2014: 4-5), regionalism is

the product of the discourses of the society, both locally – what we say about ourselves and how we manage our own issues – but also the way that we present ourselves nationally, sometimes to get what advantage we can locally; and then the way that we respond back to the nation when it talks to us. All of those things become sort of threads in this fabric of regionalism.

Thus, regionalism can be seen as “the product of a variety of different perspectives, both from within the region and the way that we are framed outside the region. Both the way in which we frame ourselves for the exterior but also the way the exterior frames us” (Creelman Interview 2014: 3). Creelman means that regionalism is the product of how the region is seen by people living in other parts of the country and how the people living in the region present themselves to the rest of the country. In this paper the view of regionalism is based on the contemporary critics´ concepts of regionalism. Thus, I would like to define regionalism as the following. First of all, regionalism is a social construction. This construct is created by both,

14 people living in the center of the nation-state through the way in which they view the region, and by people living in the region in the way they keep up this created image (cf. Creelman Interview 2014: 3). Additionally, regionalism is the construct of the social, economical and political history of the respective region (cf. Tremblay Interview 2014: 10).

3. Nova Scotia

This section focuses on authors and short stories from Nova Scotia. First the biographies of the authors are given and then the short stories are analysed. It is integral to shortly focus on the biographies of the authors as their cultural background is influential on and reflected in their works. Additionally, it is important to mention that the authors who wrote the stories about Nova Scotia actually have lived there for an extended period of their lives and therefore they have an insider perspective on the life in the region, which they illustrate in their stories. Nova Scotia is the second smallest of the four Atlantic Canadian provinces before Prince Edward Island which is the smallest. In 2011 there were 921.727 people living in Nova Scotia. The capital and largest city of the province is Halifax. Nova Scotia is almost completely surrounded by water and is connected to New Brunswick by a small land-bridge (cf. Giannetta 2011, online). The main fields of industry in Nova Scotia are manufacturing, agriculture, fisheries, mining, forestry, transportation and energy (cf. Munroe 2014, online).

3.1 Nova Scotian Short Story Writers

3.1.1 Alistair MacLeod

Alistair MacLeod was born in 1936 in North Battleford, Saskatchewan. He and his family however, moved back to Cape Breton Island when he was ten years old (cf. Wyile et al. 2007, online). He spent his teenage years at the farm of his family in Iverness County, Cape Breton. After high school MacLeod had various jobs in order to afford his education. He worked for example as a miner, a logger and as a teacher (cf. Creelman 2003: 126). MacLeod first studied at St. Francis Xavier University, where he got his Bachelor degree. Then he did his Master´s degree at the University of New Brunswick and later his doctorate at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. Later, Alistair MacLeod taught at two universities. First he taught at the University of Indiana for three years and afterwards he taught at the University of Windsor until he retired. At the University of Windsor he taught English and creative writing (cf. Wyile et al. 2007, online). During the summer Alistair MacLeod usually went back to the home of his family in Broad Cove Parish, Cape Breton, and spent a lot of time writing there. Alistair MacLeod who is probably the best known Atlantic Canadian short story author, was a very slow writer and put a lot of attention to detail. Therefore, he approximately wrote one short story per year. In the 1970s and early 1980s this resulted in two short story collections, The Lost Salt Gift of Blood in 1976 and As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories in 1986. These two short story collections and two additional stories, “Clearances” and “Island”, were published collectively in 2000 as Island: The Collected Stories (cf. Creelman 2003: 126). In 1999 Alistair MacLeod published his one and only novel No Great Mischief for which he received the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (cf. Choyce 2001: 229). In 2004 Alistair Macleod published his last short story To Every Thing There Is a Season: A Cape Breton Christmas Story (cf. Wyile et al. 2007, online).

Alistair MacLeod´s writing was very much influenced by his adolescent years in Cape Breton. During this time he experienced the difficult economic situation on the island being the result of the “economic downturns of the 1920s and 1930s” (Creelman 2003: 111). Due to the “wave of economic reforms in the late 1960s” (Creelman 2003: 111) MacLeod saw his community changing. He often portrayed the harsh economic situation as well as the changing world in his works (cf. Creelman 2003: 111-12). Additionally to MacLeod´s personal experience also his “family´s deep connection to their Gaelic heritage formed the templates of his creative vision” (Creelman 2003: 126). All of MacLeod´s stories except “The Golden Gift of Grey” are at least partly set in the harsh environment of Cape Breton (cf. Creelman 2003: 126). What is very interesting about MacLeod´s short stories is that almost all of them are narrated from the perspective of a young man or an old man looking back and reflecting on a “critical moment of their youth” (Creelman 2003: 127). Mostly, in the stories those male narrators have to deal with the harsh environment, economic difficulties and “cultural narrow-mindedness” (Creelman 2003: 127). Further, MacLeod frequently focuses on only one protagonist and his development and maturation in each story (cf. Creelman 2003: 128). Another typical characteristic of MacLeod´s writing is that throughout his career he wrote in the genre of realism. His stories, however, often included elements of modernism, when he, for example, uses his main characters as focalizers. In his works, MacLeod often looks at “the lonely struggles of individuals who achieve only an incomplete sense of connection to the larger world [...] (Creelman 2003: 128). Thus, MacLeod deals with “questions of identity and examines the threatening power of external forces” on the individual (Creelman 2003: 128). The working fields MacLeod focuses on frequently in his stories are the dangerous works of miners and fishers (cf. Creelman 2003: 130). In many of his earlier stories MacLeod also criticizes the patriarchal traditions where men were responsible to earn the money for the family. In MacLeod´s stories the man often is injured or killed and therefore the family becomes poorer and poorer (cf. Creelman 2003: 134). In his later stories however, he “tends to stress the importance of maintaining the traditional gender roles in order to preserve the heart of the society” (Creelman 2003: 137). Alistair Macleod died on April 20th, 2014 as probably the most well-known Atlantic Canadian short story author (cf. Parini 2014, online).

3.1.2 Lesley Choyce

Lesley Choyce was born in 1951 in Riverside, New Jersey. He studied at various universities and received a Bachelor´s degree from the Rutgers University, one Master´s degree from the Montclair State College and another Master´s degree from the City University of New York Graduate Center. In 1978, Choyce moved to Canada and took on the Canadian citizenship (cf. Wyile et al. 2007, online). Today, Choyce lives at Lawrencetown Beach in Nova Scotia. Besides being a well-known author he teaches in the English department and Transition Year Program at Dalhousie University and owns a little publishing company called “Pottersfield Press” (cf. Choyce 2013, online). Additionally to being a novelist, poet and short story writer, Choyce also published philosophical and historical works, as well as autobiographical texts and one photo-novel (cf. Wyile et al. 2007, online). His oeuvre comprises 84 books for adults, adolescents and children (cf. Choyce 2013, online).

3.1.3 Sheldon Currie

Sheldon Currie was born in 1934 in Reserve Mines, Cape Breton. In his younger years Currie was a member of the Royal Canadian Air Force. Afterwards he studied at the University College of Cape Breton and at the St. Francis Xavier University, where he received two Bachelor´s degrees. Later, he received a Master´s degree from the University of New Brunswick and a Ph.D. from the University of Alabama. For years Currie taught at St. Francis Xavier University (cf. Wyile et al. 2007, online).

Sheldon Currie is a novelist and short story author and is probably most well known for his short story collection The Glace Bay Miner´s Museum which was published in 1979. One short story of this collection having the same title as the collection itself, “The Glace Bay Miner´s Museum” became the basis for the film Margaret´s Museum (cf. Choyce 2001: 228).

3.1.4 Lynn Coady

Lynn Coady was born in 1970 in Port Hawkesbury on Cape Breton. She was adopted into a large family and at the age of eighteen, she gave her own child up for adoption. She studied at Carleton University in Ottawa and received a Bachelor´s degree in English and Philosophy. After that, she did her Master´s degree at the University of British Columbia. Her first novel Strange Heaven was published in 1998 and won the 1998 Air Canada/Canadian Author´s Association Award for Most Promising Writer Under Thirty and the 1999 Atlantic Bookseller´s Choice Award. In Strange Heaven, Lynn Coady reflects on her own experiences of being adopted, being pregnant as a teenager and putting her own child up for adoption. After that, Coady published several more novels, before in 2000 publishing her first short story collection Play the Monster Blind. This collection of short stories won the Dartmouth Book and Writing Award for fiction. Additionally to writing fiction, Lynn Coady has also written for periodicals, such as for The Globe and Mail, Saturday Night, Canadian Geographic and Chatelaine. She also worked as a teacher and taught creative writing at various educational establishments, such as the Simon Fraser University´s Writer´s Studio (cf. Wyile et al. 2007, online).

3.2 Analysis of the short stories

3.2.1 “The Boat” by Alistair MacLeod

“The Boat” is the first story in Macleod´s short story collection Island: The Collected Stories. “The Boat” was written in 1968 and first published in The Lost Salt Gift of Blood in 1976 (cf. MacLeod 1976). It is narrated by a man looking back and reflecting on his childhood and youth. He spends his childhood on the island of Cape Breton with his mother, father and older sisters. His father works as a fisherman on a boat and his mother is a traditional housewife. The narrator reflects on how the family got smaller over time because each of his sisters left the family in order to move to other places to start new families there. The main conflict for the young narrator is to decide whether or not he should stay on the island and become a fisherman, such as his father did. The story goes on with the son, who promised his father to go fishing with him as long as the father lives. On one of their fishing trips in November the son realizes that his father is no longer on the boat anymore. As the father cannot swim the son knows that going overboard means his father´s sure death. A few days later the corpse of his father is found, already partly eaten by fish. The story concludes with the narrator´s mother living alone in the house. Even the narrator and only son of the family has not continued the fishing business on the boat and has left the island in order to become a teacher at a university (cf. MacLeod 2000: 1-25). One of the main themes in “The Boat” is change versus tradition. The mother is very much tied to traditions and has trouble accepting change of any kind. She tries to raise her children in the way she was raised by her mother. Additionally, she wants her children to work in traditional working fields, such as on the boat. However, as one after the other of the narrator´s sisters gets older, they start working for a restaurant chain from the United States, which the mother hates. The mother disapproves of her children working there because she says that the restaurant is not run by “their people” but by others. This emphasizes the mother´s wish to stick to tradition and her refusal to accept change and new things. It also shows that the mother refuses to accept other ways of life than the lifestyle she is used to and her inability to be open towards new people. The mother only accepts her region´s people and their traditional ways of life. When the daughters leave the family to move to other places with their boyfriends, who are not fishermen, the mother is shocked

20 and unable to accept this change once again. The mother cannot understand that her children do not share the same values and wishes as she does. Thus, in the story the mother stands for tradition, which can also be associated with the “older generation” of people and with people living in a rural region, who often try to stick to old traditions and the old way of doing things. On the other side there is the constantly changing world, which can be associated with the “young generation” of people who are open for change, who want to move on, who want to explore new places and learn new things. It can also be associated with people living in urban environments because there people are constantly confronted with the continually changing world. In the story this generation is represented by the daughters and to some extent by the father. The daughters are much more interested in new things than in what they are supposed to do according to convention, such as baking and sewing clothes. The room of the father with all the books, magazines and the constantly turned on radio could be seen as a connection to the world outside of the island. In this room the family members, and especially the daughters, have the opportunity to read and hear about things that happen outside of the island and thus educate themselves about what is happening in the world. At the same time it makes them interested in a different life, which the mother, obviously, does not want. Eventually, the daughters give up on the rural life in Cape Breton and move to different places. The theme of tradition and change is also visible in the scene where the father takes the tourists on a ride on his boat. Being on his boat is normal and an everyday routine for him, but unusual and extraordinary for the tourists. Also when the drunk father starts singing “sea chanteys” (MacLeod 2000: 13) and Gaelic drinking songs the tourists are amazed by his traditional behaviour. And it seems as if the tourists wanted to explore the regional folk, which to them seem like a curiosity. The father himself represents a connecting link between the traditional and the modern world. Even though he lives a totally traditional life, he does not try to persuade his children to live the same life. Additionally, he is interested in what is happening in the rest of the world and tries to learn as much as possible about it through his books and the radio. Those two aspects distinguish him strongly from his wife. One might also wonder if the father is even happy with his life as a fisherman. It is described that his skin never got used to the harsh environment on the boat and once in the story the father tells his son that he always had the wish to go to university. Therefore it could be assumed that the father was persuaded by his parents to take on a traditional

21 profession, just as the mother tries it with her children. Later in his life, the “obligations as a father and husband, chain him to a life for which he is personally unsuited” (Creelman 2003: 131). That the narrator´s father is physically unsuited for the job on the boat is emphasized in the following passage from “The Boat”:

My father did not tan – he never tanned – because of his reddish complexion, and the salt water irritated his skin as it had for sixty years. He burned and reburned over and over again and his lips still cracked so that they bled when he smiled, and his arms, especially the left, still broke out into the oozing salt-water boils as they had ever since as a child I had first watched him soaking and bathing them in a variety of ineffectual solutions. The chafe-preventing bracelets of brass linked chain that all men wore about their wrists in early spring were his the full season and he shaved but painfully and only once a week (Macleod 2000: 20).

In addition to his physical struggles, it definitely seems that his job has never made the father really happy and that he longed to do something else and see more of the world. However, he decides to “sacrifice himself in order to ensure that his children have the opportunity to escape their restricted heritage” (Creelman 2003: 131). An important image with regard to tradition is the boat itself. It represents one of the traditional working fields of the island. The boat is the thing that is talked about most in the family. When the narrator comes home from his first trip on the boat with his father as a child everyone asks him numerous questions about the boat. Thus, the narrator learnt from an early age onwards that the boat is something very important. Another essential image of “The Boat” is the ocean. The ocean is presented as negative and positive at the same time. On the one hand the ocean provides food, work and thus money for the people. On the other hand however, the ocean is presented as a harsh working environment with storms and the sea salt hurting the fishermen´s skins. Thus, “nature´s ability to bend and warp the vulnerable human” is made evident” (Creelman 2003: 129). The narrator´s descriptions in the story emphasize the harsh environment the fishermen were exposed to on the boat. Over the years the sea has also taken away many of the fishermen, including the father of the narrator. When the corpse is found in the water it is described as follows:

And the fish had eaten his testicles and the gulls had pecked out his eyes and the white-green stubble of his whiskers had continued to grow in death, like the grass on graves, upon the purple, bloated mass that was his face. There was not much left of my father, physically, as he lay there with the brass chains on his wrists and the seaweed in his hair (MacLeod 2000: 25).

In this scene the father is taken completely by the sea and became one with it. Another theme is the breaking up of families. This is a very typical theme and frequently used by Alistair MacLeod. In “The Boat” the family breaks apart mainly because of the mother´s intolerance concerning change. Her inability to accept that her children want to make their own choices and live different lives than what their mother expects them to, leads to the children moving away and having a somewhat distant relationship with their parents and especially with their mother. Also the narrator has to make the decision whether he should become a fisherman himself and stay on the island, thus conforming to his mother´s wishes, or whether he should leave the island and continue his education. Because of the fact that the narrator has promised his father to fish with him as long as he is alive, the father gives “him the chance to leave by allowing himself to be washed overboard during a storm [...]” (Creelman 2003: 133). After his father´s death, the narrator really decides to leave the island and becomes a university teacher. However, he never really gets away from the life on the island because he still dreams about it and feels bad for his mother who lives totally by herself. As already mentioned above, it can be assumed the father allows himself to be thrown overboard in a storm. Therefore, another theme in “The Boat” is suicide. Evidence for this assumption is given in the following scene:

So I told him one night very resolutely and very powerfully that I would remain with him as long as he lived and we would fish the sea together. And he made no protest but only smiled through the cigarette smoke that wreathed his bed and replied, “I hope you will remember what you´ve said” (MacLeod 2000: 21).

When the son promises his father to work on the boat with him as long as the father lives, the father answers in a very telling way which lets the reader suggest that he is planning his death in order to enable his son to live a different life from his own. Further, it can be strongly suggested that the narrator is aware of his father´s suicide.

This would explain why he still has nightmares a long time after his father´s death and feels guilty and unhappy (cf. Creelman 2003: 133-34). All in all, “The Boat” by Alistair MacLeod is a tragic short story which portrays the harsh environment of Cape Breton, people being “imprisoned” by the expectations to live a traditional lifestyle, social and cultural changes, and the island in contrast to the world outside of this regional microcosm.

3.2.2 “In the Fall” by Alistair MacLeod

“In the Fall” was written in 1973 and first appeared in the short story collection The Lost Salt Gift of Blood (cf. MacLeod 1976). The short story is written in the 1st person, from the point of view of James, the fourteen-year-old narrator. “In the Fall” tells the story of a family with immense financial problems. They have a small farm with their old horse Scott, some cattle and some chickens. The father usually goes away during winter in order to earn some money in the coal mines and comes back in spring to work on their own land. The main conflict in the story is that the mother insists on selling the horse Scott because it is old and of no use for the family anymore. Additionally, the mother argues that the money they spend on feed for the horse could rather be spent on their six children. The father has a very close relationship with Scott because a long time ago one night in February when he got very drunk and fell asleep in the bootlegger´s, the horse waited for him outside the entire cold night. Because of his close relationship to the horse, he does not want to sell it at all. However, the mother makes an appointment with a man called McRae who wants to buy the horse in order to kill it and use it as mink-feed. Knowing that he has got no choice, the father gives in and sells the horse to McRae for twenty-one dollars. After the horse is being driven away by McRae the narrator´s younger brother David is so sad and angry about the horse being sold that he goes into the chicken stall and kills all the chickens with an axe (cf. Macleod 2000: 98-117). One of the main themes Alistair MacLeod portrays in this story is the difficult economic situation on the East Coast. The family is very poor and the parents desperately need money in order to provide for their six children. The mother is presented as a person for whom money is very important. This can be seen from the beginning of the story onwards when she wants her husband to sell his beloved horse because it is old and of no use anymore. She sees her animals simply in terms 24 of economic value. Her attitude towards the animals is made visible throughout the story for example when she says to James, “’Come and help me feed the chickens. At least there´s some point in feeding them’” (MacLeod 2000: 103). As long as the animals are useful in providing food or money she will keep feeding and caring for them and as soon as they are old she would rather sell them to at least get some money for them. While the cattle and chickens provide a source of food and money for the family they are worth being cared for. Scott, however, does not fulfill such a purpose anymore and therefore has to go. The father being urged by his wife and being very well aware about their difficult financial situation, finally has to suppress his emotions for the horse and sell it in order to get some money for his family. In this short story, such as in various other stories by MacLeod, the “economic pressures threaten to overwhelm Macleod´s characters and force them to read their lives as meaningless” (Creelman 2003: 130). The irony in this story is however, that David, being furious about his father´s decision, kills all the chickens they own. Thus, the money they earned in selling the horse will probably be needed to buy new chickens. Another scene that makes it clear that for the mother money is more important than emotions is when the father decides to come back home for a weekend from his job in the mines and due to a snowstorm cannot go back to work for several days. The mother´s response to his inability to go back to work is as follows: “My mother told him he was a fool to make such a journey and that he had lost a week´s wages for nothing – a week´s wages that she and six children could certainly use. After that he did not come again until it was almost spring” (Macleod 2000: 100). The priority for the mother is to be able to feed her children and she cannot let her feelings take the upper hand on the choices she makes. Another theme in the short story is the ongoing modernization. This is visible when the mother says that instead of having a horse they might as well rent a tractor for the summer. As described earlier the ongoing modernization which started after the First World War was disadvantageous for many people because people working in agriculture or fisheries needed to invest into mechanized technologies in order to improve efficiency (cf. Creelman 2003: 9-10). These changes through modernization are a theme that MacLeod frequently adopts in his stories. In MacLeod´s stories modernization is often portrayed in a rather negative way, such as in “In the Fall” when the mother thinks about exchanging a beloved animal for a machine.

What “In the Fall” also shows is “characters who fail to resist the dehumanizing forces that threaten them” (Creelman 2003: 132). This means that the father fails to stand up for his beloved horse but gives in to his wife´s materialistic wish to sell it. Also McRae who earns his money in buying old animals and turning them into mink- feed failed to resist those dehumanizing forces. He does not show any emotions for the animals he buys and does not feel bad for doing his job. He “completely submitted himself to the raw and animalistic impulses of life” (Creelman 2003: 132). The end of the story, after David killed all chickens seems, against all expectations, rather peaceful. The narrator describes his parents facing each other. “My father puts his arms around my mother´s waist and she does not remove them as I have always seen her do. Instead she reaches up and removes the combs of coral from the heaviness of her hair” (MacLeod 2000: 117). Her hair “surrounds and engulfs my father´s head and he buries his face within its heavy darkness, and draws my mother closer toward him” (MacLeod 2000: 117). According to Creelman, this ending can be interpreted as the parents being well aware that they cannot overcome their troubles of the harsh environment in which they live, but they know that they have each other and this knowledge gives them strength and hope (cf. Creelman 2003: 133).

3.2.3 “The Vastness of the Dark” by Alistair MacLeod

Alistair MacLeod´s short story “The Vastness of the Dark” was written in 1971 and was first published in the collection The Lost Salt Gift of Blood (cf. MacLeod 1976). The story is written in the first person singular and narrated by a young man called James. The events of the story take place on June, 28th in 1960, which is the narrator´s eighteenth birthday. Over the last months, James has made the plan to leave his family on his eighteenth birthday because he feels that he needs to live somewhere else than Cape Breton in order to be happy and independent. The story starts on his eighteenth birthday and his thoughts about announcing his plan to his family. James is a bit worried about the reaction of his parents, but he is very determined to actually go away. In the morning he hurries to pack his things before his seven siblings wake up because he plans on leaving without saying goodbye to them as this makes it easier for him. Then he goes down into the kitchen and announces that he is going to leave today. To his surprise, his parents do not react 26 as he would have anticipated them to. He thought they would be very upset and try to hold him back. His parents however, behave as if they have already expected that he will go away soon and his mother simply asks him if he is about to go to Blind River, a place James has never even considered going to. Also his father does not try to hold him back he simply suggests that James could maybe wait a little longer before he leaves. James, irritated by the response of his parents, leaves and goes to his grandparents´ house to say goodbye. Also there the reactions are not as emotional as he expected them to be. Then, he hitch-hikes off Cape Breton Island. Finally, he feels more able to develop the individual he wants to become. James has the plan to go to Vancouver and therefore he takes the next opportunity to get farther away from Cape Breton. He drives to New Glasgow and from there another man gives him a drive further across the country. James gets an insight into totally new perspectives and a completely different lifestyle through the exchange with the man. Slowly, James sees that he expected his plan of going away from Cape Breton to be different and that he does not immediately become a completely new person simply by leaving his home. From Springhill, James is picked up by another car with three men inside. He sees miner´s gear in the car and finds out that the three men are also from Cape Breton. To the question of where he wants to go, he simply answers that he does not know it. The men tell him that they are going to Blind River to work in the mines and that they can take him with them if he wants to (cf. MacLeod 2000: 26-58). The main theme in “The Vastness of the Dark” is the mining history of Cape Breton and other places in Canada. James´ father and grandfather were miners and if James decides to go to Blind River, he will probably work there as a miner too. The story portrays the dangers of the mining business. James´ father is described to have lost a few fingers and has a huge scar over his head and face. Also his health is not at its best because his lungs are weakened due to breathing in the dusty air underground for years: “And he is older and greyer and apart from the missing fingers on his right hand, there is a scar from a broken bit that begins at his hairline and runs like violent lightning down the right side of his face and at night I can hear him coughing and wheezing from the rock dust on his lungs.” (MacLeod 2000: 34) James´ grandfather also has a lot of physical weaknesses due to his former job in the mines: “I can feel the awful power of his oddly misshapen fingers, his splayed and flattened too-broad thumb, the ridges of the toughened, blackened scars and the abnormally large knobs that are his twisted misplaced knuckles.” (MacLeod 2000: 45)

Thus, it is emphasized that even though the two men were lucky to survive the work they did in the mines for years, their bodies are weakened from it. Even though the work in the mines was very dangerous, low-paid and very hard, James´ grandfather has a very romanticized view of it: “Once you start, it takes a hold of you, once you drink underground water, you will always come back to drink some more. The water gets in your blood. It is in all of our blood. We have been working in the mines here since 1873.” (MacLeod 2000: 35) This statement by James´ grandfather is not only a very romanticized version of mining, but it also seems as if he implies that James will work in a mine sometime too because it is part of the family´s history to work in the mines. However, the mines are already closed on Cape Breton Island James still has the chance to become a miner if he goes to places such as Blind River, which his mother implies. It is obvious that James is not very fond of the mining culture. However, as the mines were closed there is a lack of jobs on Cape Breton Island now and therefore the economic situation is not easy: “And now, strangely enough, I do not know if that is what I hate and so must leave, or if it is the fact that now there is not even that mine, awful as it was, to go to, and perhaps it is better to have a place to go to that you hate than to have no place at all.” (MacLeod 2000: 36) James thinks about the difficulties he would have finding a job on the island because mining was one of the main industries there and as the mines are closed many people lost their job and cannot find a new place to work. As James at the end of the story gets into the car with the three men it is very likely that even though he does not want to work in one of the mines he will still end up doing so. The reason for this suggestion is that he might go with them and he probably will need to earn money soon. As in Blind River one of the main industries is mining, it will probably the easiest way for him to make money. And if his grandfather is right saying that once you start mining you will not stop again, it is very likely that he will continue to work as a miner once he started. Thus, even though he left Cape Breton he might not be able to flee from the mines. Another theme in the story is the feeling of being imprisoned on Cape Breton. James expresses that he feels being captured on the island and he wants to see what is happening in the rest of the world or at least in other parts of Canada. “For today I leave behind this grimy Cape Breton coal-mining town whose prisoner I have been all of my life.” (MacLeod 2000: 33) Not only does he feel imprisoned on the island, but also within the traditional life there, which has included working in the

28 mines for the last century. He feels the strong urge to do something else and also to become someone else from who he currently is. He thinks that can only achieve those things in leaving Cape Breton. However, on his trip through Canada he realizes that his personality is not going to change by simply changing the place he lives in and that he does not even know what exactly he wants to change about his personality. “And perhaps I have tried too hard to be someone else without realizing at first what I presently am.” (MacLeod 2000: 56-7) This thought of James emphasizes that he does not even know himself that well. This is typical for teenagers and shows that even though he thought that he was already an adult and able to live completely by himself, he actually has to get to know himself better, which is part of the process of becoming an adult. The man who picks James up in New Glasgow with his bright red car is described as the total opposite than the people living in the small mining towns in Nova Scotia. He is obese and his hands seem very small compared to the hands of James´ father and grandfather. The hands of James´ male family members are so big and strong due to the hard work they did for years in the mines. The hands of the man are small because he has never done hard physical work. Thus, the man is a motif for people who live in urban places and work in offices or similar places. He is an outsider in the mining towns who does not respect the lives of the people living there. On the contrary, he tries to take advantage of women whose husbands got killed in the mines. Sitting in the bright red car with the foreign licence plate, people consider James to be an outsider who comes to their region even though he is from Nova Scotia himself. He realizes how people from his region behave thinking that he is from Ontario.

The people on the street regard me casually in this car of too-bright red which bears Ontario licence plates. And I recognize now upon their faces a look that I have seen upon my grandfather´s face and on the faces of hundreds of the people from my past and even on my own when seeing it reflected from the mirrors and windows of such a car as this. For it is as if I am not part of their lives at all but am here only in a sort of movable red and glass showcase that has come for a while to their private anguish- ridden streets and will soon roll on and leave them the same as before my coming; part of a movement that passes through their lives but does not really touch them. [...] Their glances have summed me up and dismissed me as casually as that. “What can

he know of our near-deaths and pain and who lies buried in our graves?” (MacLeod 2000: 55)

This emphasizes the attitude Atlantic Canadians might have towards people from central Canada, who are outsiders in their region. People living in mining towns might assume that people from other places do not realize the immense danger and exploitation through the mines and thus have a limited perspective on their lives. Expecting that others do not understand their situation and the loss of family members they have had due to mining, they treat people from other places like outsiders who do not have an impact on their lives. James realizes that he used to have the same attitude towards people from other places, which he imagined to be much nicer than the place he lived in. He realizes that you never know where a person is from and what kind of person they are in simply judging superficial things, such as their car or their licence plate.

3.2.4 “The Tuning of Perfection” by Alistair MacLeod

“The Tuning of Perfection” was published in 1986 in MacLeod´s second short story collection called As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories (cf. MacLeod 1986). The short story is written in the third person and the protagonist is Archibald. The story starts with Archibald and his fiancé building a house on the top of a mountain in order to be “alone together” (MacLeod 2000: 274-75) there. After they finished the house they get married and soon after they have one child after the other. During the winter Archibald works in a lumber camp to earn some money for his wife and three daughters. He also works there when his wife is pregnant with the fourth child and wants to be back before its birth. However, one day his twin brother comes to the camp to tell him that while he was away his wife and his unborn child died. His twin brother being very exhausted and sick from the long journey to the camp dies a few days later. Archibald has lost two of his most beloved people. Later in the story his three daughters start living with their aunts and also start to call their father “Archibald”. Archibald lives alone and lonely in his house on top of the mountain. After a long time folklorists become interested in Archibald because he is known as “the last of the authentic old-time Gaelic singers” (MacLeod 2000: 280). Patiently, he explains the meaning of his songs to them and does not mind the folklorists. At the

30 age of seventy-eight years Archibald is asked by a group of producers to go to Halifax with his family members in order to perform some songs on stage to be filmed and shown on television. Archibald does not want to follow the producer´s instructions to cut the songs and cannot understand that the meaning of the songs does not interest the producer at all. The producer however, is simply interested in the effect the performance creates on the audience. Also Archibald´s relatives and friends are more interested in the trip to Halifax than in the correct performance of their Gaelic songs. Their chance to go to Halifax, however, is bound to Archibald´s willingness to perform because the producers only want the group of singers if Archibald is one of them. In the end Archibald refuses to change the songs and thus to perform on stage (cf. MacLeod 1986: 101-34). The main theme in “The Tuning of Perfection” is heritage, and the story can be classified as “a heritage preservation narrative” (Hodd 2008: 191). The protagonist Archibald is very well aware of his Gaelic heritage and still knows the language and many traditional songs which he used to sing with his wife. The younger generation of people, however, often do not care that much anymore about their heritage. This is visible in various passages of the story, such as when Archibald asks his granddaughter what the producers want them to sing and she answers, “’Oh, who cares? [...] It´s the trip that´s important.’” (MacLeod 1986: 112) This answer shows that she is not proud of her heritage, but that she simply wants to go to Halifax (cf. Hodd 2008: 202). Even though she is able to pronounce the Gaelic songs correctly, she does not know and does not care very much about what the words mean. It is not only his granddaughter though, who is not very interested in her heritage, but almost all of the younger generation are like her. Archibald is presented in the story as one of the last people who has a profound knowledge about their heritage and who also values it. Also in Archibald´s outrage about the producer wanting to cut his songs it is made clear that he cares about the meaning of the Gaelic songs and thus about his heritage. The producer on the other hand simply wants something that he can market easily and that will be liked by the audience. He does not understand Gaelic and has no interest in the meaning of the songs as long as they sound good (cf. Hodd 2008: 203). This is first emphasized when the producer says to Archibald, “’Look, I really don´t understand your language so we´re here mainly to look for effect.’” (MacLeod 1986: 123). Thus, it becomes very clear from the first encounter with the producer that he simply wants to make a great show. Another example for

31 this is when the producer tells Archibald that he does not want the other group of people to perform because of the way they look and that Archibald would be great on stage because the folklorists know him and because he has credibility. This once again emphasizes that the producer does not care about the heritage that comes with the Gaelic songs and would probably hire anyone who can imitate the songs and looks the way he wants them to look. Archibald does not agree to change or shorten the songs and thus stays true to his heritage (cf. Hodd 2008: 202-04). However, many of the younger people cannot understand his decision, “In the next room he heard a youthful voice say: ‘All he had to do was shorten the verses in a few stupid old songs. You´d think he would have done it for us, the old coot.’” (MacLeod 1986: 130). Here it can be seen that especially young people often do not understand the importance and the necessity to preserve heritage. At the very end of the short story it is portrayed how Carver and some other men come to Archibald´s house one evening and bring him a box full of bottles of liquor and Carver says, “’Look Archibald [...] we know. We know. We really know.’” (MacLeod 1986: 134) Through this, Carver expresses that he and many others of the community finally understand that Archibald wants to preserve their heritage and also indirectly apologize for their willingness to commodify their heritage (cf. Hodd 2008: 205). As already mentioned in the first chapter of this thesis, tourism and commodification is not an ultimately bad thing. Even though the tourism industry only markets things that are wanted by the tourists, it can also help to preserve certain forms of cultural heritage (cf. Hodd 2008: 193). If Archibald had agreed on singing for the show on television, he probably would have drawn more attention to Gaelic singing. Thus, he could have made others interested in wanting to learn to sing how he does. Because he is known as the last authentic Gaelic singer and his granddaughter already does not know what the words of the songs mean, it is very likely that these traditional songs will not exist much longer after his death (cf. Hodd 2008: 207). Another theme in the short story is nature and the different ways to treat nature. Archibald is described as a man who lives in harmony with nature. For instance when he worked in the woods he was always careful of what trees to cut. This is shown in the following remark said by Carver to Archibald: “’ ‘That Archibald,’ they say, ‘no one knows where he gets all them logs, hauls them out with them

32 horses and doesn´t seem to disturb anything. Year after year. Treats the mountain as if it were a garden’ “(MacLeod 1986: 117). Thus, it is shown that Archibald takes care of nature and takes just as much as he needs. The opposite is the new generation of people who go into the woods and cut down everything without thinking about what they do to nature. This is emphasized in the next statement by Carver, “‘Not like now, eh? We just cut ´em all down. Go in with heavy equipment, tree farmers and loaders and do it all in a day, to hell with tomorrow.’“ (MacLeod 1986: 117). With this remark MacLeod wants to emphasize the modern attitude towards nature where everyone wants to make the highest profit, but does not care about what they do to nature. Not only is the attitude of some people towards nature criticized in this passage, but also the ongoing process of modernization in general. While Archibald gets his wood in the traditional way with a horse, the new technical machines make work easier for the people, but are by far not as careful as Archibald (cf. Hodd 2008: 202-03). This theme in “The Tuning of Perfection” functions as a warning of “the power of industrialization” (cf. Hodd 2008: 194). A negative attitude towards nature can also be seen in the scene where Archibald sells his horse and later is told by Carver that the horse is not used to work, but to produce birth control pills. When he hears that the horses are kept pregnant over and over again and their colts are probably thrown away after birth, he is simply shocked about what has become of the world. He is shocked about the people who do not seem to show any feelings for living creatures and hopes that what Carver told him is not true. Additionally, birth control pills represent unnatural sexual behavior for Archibald (cf. Hodd 2008: 202). In those two scenes about the work in the woods and the selling of the horse, “natural, valued work as opposed to unnatural capitalist exploitation” is emphasized (cf. Hodd 2008: 202). Also in this short story, Alistair MacLeod includes the theme of breaking up of families. This happens already at the beginning of the story when Archibald´s beloved wife, his unborn child and his twin brother die. After these terrible incidents, Archibald also loses his three daughters to their aunts. From that point onwards he lives alone in his house on the top of the mountain. As already mentioned earlier, “The Tuning of Perfection” can be classified as a heritage preservation narrative. According to Hodd, a heritage preservation narrative comprises five key elements. Firstly, there has to be some kind of tradition that is performed by a certain cultural group (cf. Hodd 2008: 194). In “The Tuning of

Perfection” it is Archibald and his knowledge of the Gaelic language and various Gaelic songs. Secondly, in a heritage preservation narrative there is usually something or somebody that threatens the further existence of the heritage. Such a threat could also be somebody who tries to exploit certain traditions (cf. Hodd 2008: 194). In “The Tuning of Perfection” the producers who want to commodify the Gaelic songs can be seen as the threat because they are not actually interested in the Gaelic heritage, but just try to market it. Next, a heritage preservation narrative is a text that usually shows different levels of knowledge about one´s heritage (cf. Hodd 2008: 194). In the short story this is visible when Archibald´s granddaughter is able to sing the Gaelic songs, but does not know what the words mean. Further, a heritage preservation narrative needs a person who tries to preserve the traditions that make their culture (cf. Hodd 2008: 194). In MacLeod´s story this is obviously Archibald, who refuses to cut and change the verses of his songs. Lastly, there need to be “preservation motifs”, such as “notebooks, tape recorders, museum artefacts, and/or environmental symbols” in a heritage preservation narrative (cf. Hodd 2008: 194). In MacLeod´s story the forest and how differently people treat it could be seen as a symbol for a preservation motif. All in all, “The Tuning of Perfection” is a story that is marked by the concern of people to lose their “cultural roots” and by the dangers of commodification of heritage (cf. Hodd 2008: 194-200).

3.2.5 “Dance the Rocks Ashore” by Lesley Choyce

“Dance the Rocks Ashore” is one of the short stories of Lesley Choyce´s short story collection Dance the Rocks Ashore which was published in 1997 (cf. Choyce 2001: 227). The story is narrated in the first person from the point of view of Mary, the wife of a former fisherman. She reflects on the end of her husband Jim´s fishing career due to the fact that all cod were gone. Soon after he stops his job as a fisherman, he starts to show symptoms of Alzheimer´s. Dealing with her husband´s memory getting worse and worse is obviously not easy for Mary. The story goes on with Mary and her husband visiting the place where he grew up. The land on which his parents´ house used to be is often referred to as an island because it continually drowns and the rocks that connect it to the mainland are under water most of the time. That day, the rocks are not under water, however, and they can go over onto the island. There, he 34 tells her some stories of his childhood. “Dance the Rocks Ashore” concludes with Mary falling asleep in their living room for some hours and waking up shivering and realizing that her husband is nowhere around. She sees that the door is open and finds her husband outside in the freezing cold in a chair, wearing one of her coats and not moving. She thinks that he is dead, goes on her knees in front of him and starts crying, but all of a sudden he strokes her hair and tells her that he just fell asleep (cf. Choyce 2001: 173-88). The main theme in “Dance the Rocks Ashore” is the Alzheimer´s disease from which Jim suffers. As soon as he had to give up his job as a fisherman, the disease started. His Alzheimer´s could be seen as a way of coping with the fact that he can never go out on his boat again. After he realized that the cod were gone, “Jim had his own way of dealing with it. He didn´t hardly talk to me or anyone for about ten days. And then he started to lose his memory” (Choyce 2001: 181). Thus it can be seen that his Alzheimer´s disease is probably linked to the loss of his job, which he definitely seemed to like. Further, Mary struggles to cope with the fact that her husband´s condition is getting worse. She does not want to accept that her husband loses more and more of his memory. Even though she read in a magazine on how to behave when her husband forgets who she is, she does not follow the advice but pretends that he made a joke. Obviously on one hand she tries her best to not make him feel bad for his lapses, but on the other hand her behaviour can be interpreted as self-protection. Additionally, the growing responsibility she has for her husband slowly drags her down. Another main theme in the short story is the fishing culture to which the couple belongs. Jim loved being out on his boat and his job as a fisherman. Mary however, always feared that something could happen to her husband while he is on one of his trips. Therefore, she secretly is happy when the cod are gone and he cannot continue his job as a fisherman. “Even though I loved the ocean for its beauty, I never trusted it once in my whole life. We were sworn enemies, she and I. Both of us had wanted Jim, but I had won.” (Choyce 2001: 180). Although Mary knows that nothing can happen to her husband at sea anymore, it seems that she has not won the fight against the sea completely because as soon as Jim stopped fishing, he started to lose his memory. Thus, Jim often has trouble recognizing his wife, but he always remembers his love for the sea. Additionally, fishing is very important for many people in the community in which Jim and his wife live. This can be seen in the

35 reactions of the other fishermen when they hear about the cod being gone. Many of them get very aggressive or even leave the region. As fishing is probably the main industry in the region people are completely dependent on the sea and when the cod are gone and the fishermen lose their jobs, they know that they will not be able to provide for their families anymore. Therefore, many fishermen react aggressively to the fact that they cannot fish anymore and some even leave to find jobs somewhere else. In “Dance the Rocks Ashore” the power of nature is made visible in the passage where Mary and Jim go for a walk and look over to the place where Jim grew up. Because that day the tide is very low, they can use the rocks to go over to the piece of land. Usually, however, the rocks are under water and each year more and more of the land is swallowed by the sea. Reflecting on his childhood, Jim describes the place he grew up as heaven and hell:

Heaven on a summer day with blue seas stretching to the horizon. Swimming in the pools with the fish and crabs, sometimes a young harbour seal slipping by right beside you like it was nothing at all. Other times, the storms came and battered away at the barn and the house, and a good blow might last three or four days, and you´d see the sun for only an hour before a new storm would come in right at you again until you thought you would crack (Choyce 2001: 182-83).

Thus, the beauty and especially the harsh conditions of living directly beside the sea are emphasized. While the power of nature is one of the main themes of the short story, the sea is its main motif. The sea being a dominant motif of the story is very characteristic for “[...] Maritime writing, [in which] the Atlantic ocean plays a significant and multi- layered role [...] (Löschnigg 2014: 104). In “Dance the Rocks Ashore” “the sea and the bizarre coastline are depicted as awesomely menacing forces” (Löschnigg 2014: 104). This is visible, as described in the previous paragraph, in Mary´s attitude towards the sea. Even though she likes the sea, she has never trusted it and is very well aware of the power the sea has. The sea not only has the power to take the fishermen´s jobs away, but also to take away lives. According to Löschnigg (2014: 104), “[e]ven though the sea in Choyce´s story is definitely humanized, this anthropomorphizing is deployed not to mitigate, but, on the contrary, to underline the threatening nature of the ocean [...].” That the sea is humanized in the story is very 36 visible when it is stated that Mary never trusted the sea and that Mary and the sea are sworn enemies. Thus, Mary´s relationship with the sea is described in the same way human relationships would be described. Also in the scene in which Mary thinks about the island where Jim grew up, the humanization of the sea is visible: “Every time I thought about that place through our entire marriage, I had this sneaking suspicion that the sea had stolen Jim Crofter´s family farm and that it was anxious to snatch him away as well.” (Choyce 2001: 180) In this quote it seems Mary is thinking that the sea has taken away the farm on purpose and the sea is also described to be anxious, which both again are human features. Thus, it can be seen that Mary sees the sea as something similar to a living creature. The different kinds of threats caused by the sea are constantly dealt with in the short story. It is described that the sea does not only have the power to take away the fish, jobs, and lives of people, but also to take away the land. This is visible when Mary and Jim go over to the island he grew up on, which continually drowns. “Unfortunately the sea has swallowed up most of the old farm. It´s hard to believe that in forty short years the Atlantic could have been so hungry as to chew up a barn and a field and so much land.” (Choyce 2001: 180). In this scene the sea is portrayed “as a monstrous, greedy woman eating away the land and devouring buildings along ‘her’ way” (Löschnigg 2014: 104). Another motif which appears frequently in Atlantic Canadian short stories is the motif of home-coming. In “Dance the Rocks Ashore” this motif is made use of when Jim and Mary go over to the island on which Jim grew up and he remembers how it was to live there and tells Mary about his childhood (cf. Löschnigg 2014: 105). It is interesting that “Choyce gives the narrative voice not to the home-comer himself, but to his wife, whose emotional involvement is naturally not as strong as her husband´s” (Löschnigg 2014: 105). Thus, the narration is not as emotional as it might have been if it was narrated by Jim himself. Even though through the home-coming to the island Jim remembers his childhood and the beauty of living right beside the ocean, he also remembers the negative phases of his childhood, such as when his father beat him. For Jim the ocean, the weather and the land are related to personal positive or negative times and experiences of his childhood (cf. Löschnigg 2014: 105). Decay and loss are other main themes of “Dance the Rocks Ashore”, which are dealt with throughout the short story. Not only did many fishermen lose their job because of the disappearance of the cod, but Jim also lost the house in which he

37 grew up and the land surrounding it, to the sea. Furthermore, Jim starts to lose his memory. Throughout the story the narrator Mary becomes more and more aware of Jim´s worsening health and that she will eventually lose him. “Processes of decay and loss, of which Mary becomes utterly aware in the course of the story, and especially during their visit to Crofter´s Point, are mainly presented as being brought forth by the forces of nature” (Löschnigg 2014: 106). Nature cannot be entirely controlled by human beings, and therefore no one can stop the cod from disappearing, the land from drowning or Jim from losing his memory. All in all, “Dance the Rocks Ashore” is a story of “loss and displacement brought forth by economic conditions as well as by disease” (Löschnigg 2014: 107). The story again provides an insight into the lives of fishermen who depend on nature in order to be able to earn money and which economic and psychological difficulties they have to deal with when they are not able to pursue their careers anymore. Thus, the harsh environment of Nova Scotia is described and that living right beside the sea can be “heaven or hell” (Choyce 2001: 182).

3.2.6 “The Glace Bay Miner´s Museum” by Sheldon Currie

This story by Sheldon Currie appeared first in his short story collection The Glace Bay Miner´s Museum. The short story was also the basis for the film Margaret´s Museum (cf. Choyce 2001: 228). “The Glace Bay Miner´s Museum” is written in the first person singular from the perspective of Margaret, a young woman who has lost both her father and one of her brothers to the mines. Margaret is not a very popular young woman and has difficulties finding young men who are interested in her and want to go out with her. One day she gets to know Neil Currie, a very big man whom nobody knows in her community. After their first meeting, Neil Currie visits her regularly at her shack and plays songs on his bagpipes for her and her sick grandfather. Soon Neil announces that he wants to marry Margaret and after some time and building a house right beside the ocean, they get married. Neil starts to work in a mine, in order to be able to provide for his wife, together with Margaret´s brother Ian. One day an accident happens in the mine and both, Ian and Neil are killed. Margaret insists on bringing the two corpses to her mother´s shack in order to wash them before they are brought to the doctor´s. However, Margaret does not plan on washing them, but she plans on cutting off pieces from the bodies and putting them 38 in jars. Therefore, she sets out to a shop to buy certain liquids to preserve the body parts. While she is away from her mother´s shack, her grandfather dies because Margaret left him alone for too long and did not hit him on the back, a procedure he needed from time to time in order to be able to breathe properly. Arriving back at her mother´s shack and finding out that her grandpa died, Margaret cuts him open and takes his lungs and puts them in one of the jars. She also cuts off certain parts from her husband and her brother´s bodies and puts them in jars too. She stores the jars in a suitcase and gives it to one of her friends Marie, telling her not to look into the suitcase and not to tell anyone about it. Back in Margaret´s own house beside the ocean she already awaits the police and is brought to a mental clinic in which she has to stay for some time. The story concludes when Margaret comes back to her house, picks up the suitcase from her friend Marie and starts setting things up in order to establish a museum including the body parts of the three men (cf. Choyce 2001: 211-26). Sheldon Currie created the title “The Glace Bay Miner´s Museum” after an actual museum, called the Cape Breton Miner´s Museum and the short story was published ten years after the construction of the Cape Breton Miner´s Museum. This museum “contains mining artifacts, a nearby re-creation of a miner´s village, and the famous Men of the Deeps choir” (Hodd 2008: 195). Additionally, under the Cape Breton Miner´s Museum there is an actual coal mine through which retired miners give guided tours. The story quite rightly implies that the Cape Breton Miner´s Museum gives a romanticized view of mining and does not portray the harsh environment and dangers to which the miners were exposed. As already described in the first chapter, various industries struggled after the Second World War and so did the mining industry. In the 1960s only half of the mines were still in operation and the Cape Breton Miner´s Museum was established in order to counteract the rising unemployment rates (cf. Hodd 2008: 195). Thus, the mining culture was commodified in a way “that transformed the hardships of mining life into a friendly tourist experience” (Hodd 2008: 195). This means that the Cape Breton Miner´s Museum does not show the reality of the mining industry, but a nicer, nostalgic version of it (cf. Hodd 2008: 195). Margaret´s museum however, represents the other extreme of a mining museum. She wants to confront the tourists with the dark side of the mining industry and the dangers that come with working in the mines. Her museum can be seen as the absolute opposite of the Cape Breton Miner´s Museum. In her museum

39 she exhibits the body parts of her dead family members consisting of her grandfather´s lungs, her husband´s lungs, fingers and tongue and her brother´s penis. Both, her husband and her brother died in one of the mines. Even though her grandfather, who used to work in the mine too, did not die there, he was very sick and had problems breathing. It can be concluded that the work in the mine and constantly breathing in the dusty, moist air had damaged his lungs and caused his weakened health. Thus, all of the three men died because of their work in the mine (cf. Hodd 2008: 199). Even though Margaret´s museum seems a lot more authentic than the Cape Breton Miner´s Museum, it still “participates in similar acts of cultural exclusion” (Hodd 2008: 206) due to Margaret´s decision of which artifacts to exhibit. Margaret´s museum can also be seen as a memorial for her dead family members. Through her collection of the body parts and other items that belonged to her family members, she manages to create “a multigenerational monument that laments the loss of both family and heritage” (Hodd 2008: 206). “The Glace Bay Miner´s Museum” can be classified as a heritage preservation narrative. The character who most emphasizes the importance of heritage preservation is Neil Currie. He is able to speak Gaelic and knows a variety of traditional songs that go back to his Scottish heritage. In addition, he is also able to play the bagpipes, a traditional Scottish instrument. For Neil his roots are very important which he shows through his entire behaviour. One example is that he got fired from his work because he refused to speak English. Neil functions as a connection between the old generation and the new generation. He knows the Gaelic songs Margaret´s grandfather wants to hear and is in general very well aware of his heritage. To be precise, he is not only very well aware of it, but also lives his heritage. Thus, he helps to preserve the Scottish heritage. Margaret on the other hand, is a representative of the new generation, who do not know much about and have hardly any interest in their heritage (cf. Hodd 2008: 195-98). That Margaret is a representative of the new generation can already be seen when she sees Neil´s bagpipes for the very first time: “When he got the box open it was full of brown sticks and a plaid bag. Bagpipes! I never seen bagpipes before. Never knew there was any. Never heard them before.” (Choyce 2001: 214). Her reaction to the bagpipes shows that she is not familiar with her own heritage and it emphasizes “the extent of her cultural ignorance” (Hodd 2008: 198). As her relationship with Neil grows, she gains more interest in her heritage through him. (cf. Hodd 2008: 198)

As described earlier, heritage preservation narratives have certain characteristics, such as the presence of a threat to the heritage. In “The Glace Bay Miner´s Museum”, the threat is the fear of completely losing their Scottish heritage. This threat is made visible in a dialogue between Neil and Ian:

“There´s no future,” Neil would say. “There has to be a future.” “See in the bedroom, Ian. See your grandfather. That´s the future.” “Well he´s there. The future is there.” “He´s there all right. He can´t breathe, he can´t talk, he can´t walk. You know the only thing he´s got? Some old songs in his head, that he can hardly remember, that your father hardly ever knew and you don´t know at all. Came here and lost their tongues, their music, their songs. Everything but their shovels.” (Choyce 2001: 221)

This dialogue emphasizes Neil´s awareness of his fading heritage. He knows that from generation to generation less and less is transmitted and that eventually there will probably be nothing left of their heritage (cf. Hodd 2008: 196-197). Neil´s statement, “Everythhing but their shovels.” (Choyce 2001:221) is an allusion to the exploitation of workers in Cape Breton by coal-mining companies that took place for decades. All men of Margaret´s family lost their lives to their job as miners. Either they died directly in mining accidents, such as her father, brothers and husband or they died of the negative health effects of the work in the mine, such as her grandfather (cf. Hodd 2008: 197). Thus, “[w]ith each death, more and more of the community´s collective heritage memory is being buried with the men who fall prey to the mine” (Hodd 2008: 197). To summarize, “The Glace Bay Miner´s Museum” deals mainly with the exploitative nature of the mining industry in Cape Breton. Additionally, it depicts the harsh and dangerous lives of miners. The loss which the families of miners often had to deal with when their beloved family members died in one of the mines is shown through the museum Margaret established. Further, “by creating an alternative perspective on mining life, Currie (through Margaret) is challenging the authenticity of the cultural narrative claimed by heritage sites such as the real Cape Breton Miner´s Museum.” (Hodd 2008: 206-07)

3.2.7 “Jesus Christ, Murdeena” by Lynn Coady

“Jesus Christ, Murdeena” is one of the short stories in Lynn Coady´s collection Play the Monster Blind which was published in 2000. The short story is written in the third person singular and the protagonist of the story a young woman called Murdeena. It all starts when Murdeena is fired from her job in a fast food restaurant because she gave a customer the wrong change. Murdeena always has had difficulties with numbers and because her boss in the burger restaurant is not a very understanding person, he fires her. From this point onwards Murdeena starts to go for walks at night which her mother, Margaret-Ann, does not approve of. She thinks that the neighbors will start talking about Murdeena if they see her walking alone in the evenings. Murdeena, however, does not care about that and keeps walking every evening. Every evening she tries another pair of shoes, but none of them feels right to her. Therefore, one day she has the idea to go for a walk barefoot and from that day onwards she does not wear shoes at all anymore, which makes her mother furious. Since the age of thirteen, Murdeena has always played the piano for seniors and one day, a while after she started to go for walks barefoot, Murdeena announces to the old people that she is Jesus. When Murdeena tells her mother that she is Jesus, her mother is shocked and angry at the same time. Obviously, she does not believe Murdeena and complains about the arrogance of her daughter´s statement. Murdeena keeps trying to persuade all people in her environment that she is Jesus and thus, she loses all of her friends and her mother does not talk to her anymore. Murdeena tries to persuade the seniors for whom she still plays the piano once a week, to let her touch them and thus heal them from their pains. She also tries to heal some other people who have hurt themselves but no one agrees to let her touch them and no one believes that she has some kind of healing power. In the end Murdeena realizes that the seniors are still the most tolerant of all people in town as they still come to listen to her playing the piano and also to what she has to say. They only do not want to be touched by her. Murdeena knows that if there is a chance of persuading the people in town that she is Jesus, she has to start with the seniors because they are the most likely to accept her and might finally believe her (Coady 2000: 67-85). “Jesus Christ, Murdeena” is a satirical short story which deals with the question, if you possess the truth should you tell the others? Murdeena thinks that

42 she is Jesus and maybe she really is. No one of the town she lives in gives her the chance to show if she really has healing powers and thus if her story is true. However, the people treat her as if she was insane and try to avoid any contact with her in the end. Even though Murdeena is the protagonist she is not the focus of the story, but everyone else and how they react towards her new lifestyle. Thus, the main theme of the short story is people´s reaction to difference. A stereotype of the East Coast of Canada is uniformity. Especially in small communities, people frequently react negatively to different people or different lifestyles. Thus, often there is little tolerance for difference. In “Jesus Christ, Murdeena” this is emphasized from the point onwards when Murdeena starts to go for walks. Lynn Coady might intentionally have chosen such an ordinary activity as going for walks to emphasize that the activity itself does not matter that much to the people it simply has to be something the majority of them does not do in order to make them gossip. Gossip usually is a big thing in small towns where all the inhabitants know each other. When Murdeena starts to go for walks in the evenings, automatically, the other people assume that something must be wrong with her. Additionally, her mother Margaret Ann, who does not want her daughter to be the subject of the community´s gossip, tries to persuade her to stop going for walks. Going for walks barefoot is something very untypical to do for Murdeena as she is described as a great person in contrast to her siblings who are described in rather negative terms:

She had always been the sweetest, most uncontentious little girl. Even as a baby, she never cried. As a child, never talked back. As a teenager, never sullen. She was their youngest and their best. Martin had driven drunk and had to go to AA or face jail, and Cora had gotten pregnant and then married and then divorced, and Alistair had failed grade nine. And all of them moved far away from home. But Murdeena never gave them any trouble at all. Agreeable was the word that best described Murdeena. She was always the most agreeable of children. Everybody thought so (Coady 2000: 76).

In this passage Coady emphasizes how normal and nice Murdeena had been before she started to go for walks. Additionally, “Everybody thought so” again depicts the importance of what the community thinks. Thus, it shows that the idea of what is considered as normal in a certain community is based on the general consensus of the people living there. If somebody however, does something that is new or 43 different, the reactions are often not very positive. In the quote above, the siblings of Murdeena are described to have failed school, have gotten pregnant way too early, have driven drunk and have left the region. All of these aspects are stereotypes of the Maritimes. Thus, in this short passage Lynn Coady manages to include these stereotypes of the uneducated, drunk Maritimers who eventually leave their region to move somewhere else. The old people, who tolerate Murdeena´s talking about being Jesus, still refuse to let themselves be touched by her. This could be interpreted as a way to protect themselves and their beliefs. If they let Murdeena touch them and she actually had the power to heal them, they would have to change their set of beliefs. Therefore, in refusing to be touched by Murdeena they protect themselves and can stick to their beliefs (cf. Tremblay, English 2473 class, Fall 2014: personal notes). All in all, “Jesus Christ, Murdeena” portrays many stereotypes of the East Coast, namely that people are lazy, unemployed, get pregnant way too early or even end up in jail. Through the short story, Lynn Coady talks back to the existing stereotypes of the region and tries to make people aware that even though those stereotypes exist, they do not necessarily have to be true. Further, the story depicts how people react to change and new things. Lynn Coady might have chosen such an ordinary activity as to go for walks to emphasize even more that the activity itself does not matter that much, but that it is something new to which the community is not used. The overall message of the story is that people should try to be more open to new things and different lifestyles.

4. Newfoundland and Labrador

This chapter focuses on short stories written by authors from Newfoundland1. First, the biographies of the authors will be dealt with briefly. This is essential as the cultural background of the authors is reflected in their works. Further, the authors did not simply write about the region of Newfoundland, but each of them was born there and lived in the cultural context of the region for an extended period of time. The

1 Note that this thesis will only focus on the island of Newfoundland and not on the entire province “Newfoundland and Labrador”. 44 short stories that are analysed in the following chapter are all set in Newfoundland and give an insight into the lives of Newfoundlanders. Newfoundland and Labrador is one of the Atlantic Canadian provinces and the youngest province of Canada (cf. Radcliffe Rogers and Rogers 2009: 1). Newfoundland joined confederation in 1949 and thus became Canada´s tenth province. The province was renamed to “Newfoundland and Labrador” in 2001 (cf. Newfoundland and Labrador Tourism 2015, online). The island of Newfoundland covers 111.390 square kilometers. Together with Labrador, the province covers 405.212 square kilometers. Newfoundland and Labrador has a population of approximately 510.000 people, which is a rather small number with regard to the size of the province (cf. Newfoundland and Labrador Tourism 2015, online). The largest city and capital of Newfoundland is St. John´s. Most of the inhabitants of Newfoundland are of Irish or English descent. In the parts of the province that are sparsely populated however, most of the people are mainly Inuit and Montagnais- Naskapi (cf. HighbeamTMResearch. Inc. 2015, online). The fishing industry is what kept the first settlers in Newfoundland. This industry also had a huge impact on forming Newfoundland´s economy and culture (cf. Radcliffe Rogers and Rogers 2009: 2). The Grand Banks, south of Newfoundland “was once one of the best cod- fishing areas in the world, but overfishing has severely depleted stocks, and the Atlantic cod fisheries were closed in 2003” (HighbeamTMResearch. Inc. 2015, online). However, Newfoundland is rich in mineral resources, timber and water power (HighbeamTMResearch. Inc. 2015, online). Because of all the existing minerals, Newfoundland has a long mining history and mining has been a big contributor to Newfoundland´s economy. In this region fourteen different mineral commodities are produced or mined (cf. Government of Newfoundland and Labrador 2015, online).

4.1 Newfoundland Short Story Authors

4.1.1 Michael Crummey

Michael Crummey was born in 1965 in the mining town Buchans which is located in central Newfoundland (cf. Wyile et al. 2007, online). He lived there until the 1970s and then moved with his family to the mining town Wabush in Labrador. Michael Crummey studied at Memorial University of Newfoundland and received an Arts degree with a major in English. Later, Crummey studied at Queen´s University in Kingston, Ontario, and received a Master´s degree. After this he started a PhD program, from which he dropped out because he wanted to spend more time writing. In 1996 his first collection of poetry called Arguments with Gravity was published. For this collection he won the Writers´ Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador Literary Award for Poetry. In 1998 he published his first collection of short stories Flesh and Blood. This collection consists of thirteen linked short stories set in the fictional mining town Black Rock. In 2001 Crummey published his first novel River Thieves (cf. Dragland 2002, online). Michael Crummey´s oeuvre comprises numerous poems, short stories and novels.

4.1.2 Wayne Johnston

Wayne Johnston was born in 1958 in Goulds, which is located south of St. John´s, Newfoundland. Wayne Johnston studied at Memorial University in St. John´s and 46 received a Bachelor´s degree in English (cf. Johnston 2006, online). From 1979 to 1981, he worked as a reporter for the St. John´s Daily News and then decided to become a full-time writer. In 1983, Wayne Johnston received a Master´s degree in creative writing from the University of New Brunswick. The first book by Johnston, which was published in 1985, was the novel The Story of Bobby O´Malley, which won the W.H. Smiths/Books in Canada First Novel Award. Johnston wrote various other very successful novels, such as The Divine Ryans which won the Thomas Head Raddall Award and was made into a film later for which Johnston wrote the screenplay (cf. Wyile et al. 2007, online). Johnston is not only a novelist though, but also writes short stories, such as “The Boot”.

4.1.3 Lisa Moore

Lisa Moore is one of the most important contemporary Canadian short story writers and was born in 1964 in St. John´s, Newfoundland. She studied at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, where she earned a Bachelor´s degree (cf. Wyile et al. 2007, online). After that, she went to study at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, where she became a member of a collective of writers called “The Burning Rock”. Also other successful writers, such as Michael Winter, were part of “The Burning Rock”. Lisa Moore´s first short story collection was published in 1995 and is called Degrees of Nakedness (cf. Chafe 2008, online). Her second collection of short stories Open was published in 2002 and nominated for the Winterset Award and the Giller Prize. Lisa Moore won the the Canadian Authors´ Association Prize for short fiction (cf. Wyile et al. 2007, online). However, Lisa Moore is very well known for her short stories, she has also written several novels. Her first novel Alligator was published in 2005 and was also nominated for the Giller Prize and in 2006 the novel won the Commonweatlh Writers´ Prize (cf. Chafe 2008, online). Today, Lisa Moore lives in St. John´s with her husband and her two children (cf. Wyile et al. 2007, online).

4.2 Analysis of Short Stories set in Newfoundland

4.2.1 “Heartburn” by Michael Crummey

“Heartburn” is a short story that was published in the collection Flesh and Blood in 1998. It is told in the third person alternately from the perspectives of Sandy Wilcox and his wife Georgie. In the story, both of them are reflecting on their past. They have been married for seventeen years and have three children. Their first child died in Georgie´s womb. While Georgie mourned the loss of their baby, Sandy thought that it would be best to move on. Years later when the story is set, Sandy struggles to cope with the death of their baby and also the way in which he dealt with it when it happened. His subconscious tries to deal with the topic of losing their baby in his dreams. He also frequently has nightmares about drowning. The reason for those nightmares is that as a teenager he broke into the ice and almost died. When he was rescued, his father thought that he was already dead. His mother however, started hitting his chest and all of a sudden Sandy came back to life. This incident has shaped Sandy´s life. What also haunts Sandy in his dreams is a mining accident he witnessed. He frequently dreams of being lost underground. His wife Georgie only knows about his nightmares concerning the mining accident. Sandy does not have the courage to tell her about the dreams of their unborn child or his nightmares about drowning because he thinks that she would assume that he is going crazy. In the end, constantly being forced to face his fears and guilt in his dreams gets almost unbearable for Sandy and he wishes to die. In the part of the story that is narrated by Georgie, she reflects on how she witnessed the rescue of Sandy out of the ice-cold water and fell in love with him afterwards. She also looks back on the day she was planning to leave Sandy. When she was putting the suitcases in her car, she had a slight doubt about what she was doing and in that second the Company siren started to wail and she realized that there has been an accident in the mine in which Sandy works. After realizing Sandy´s tough situation coping with the accident in the mine and the nightmares he keeps having about the accident, she decides not to leave him. Even though she stays with him, there is not that much love for Sandy left (cf. Crummey 1998: 33-48). One of the main themes in “Heartburn” is dreaming and being haunted by nightmares. In Sandy´s dreams he is confronted with the darkest moments of his life.

One topic that is addressed through Sandy´s dreams is the danger of working in the mines. Sandy used to work in a mine and was there during an accident. After this incident he keeps having nightmares of being lost underground, slowly running out of oxygen and knowing that he will probably die. Thus, the harsh working environment of miners and especially the extreme danger of the job are emphasized. In one of his dreams he has been lost underground for more than forty-eight hours with a group of coworkers:

He is lying back against bare rock. It hurts to breathe and he feels as if he is slowly drowning, the remaining oxygen in the drift being wrung from the air like water from a towel. He can hear the other men breathing around him like the sound of animals snuffling outside a canvas tent. He tries desperately to recall their names and faces. There are five of them, but that´s all he can bring to mind, the number, and it terrifies him to think they may have forgotten him in the same way (Crummey 1998: 36).

This scene emphasizes the danger of working in the mines. The passage can also be interpreted as the way in which miners are exploited by big mining companies. To the mining company only the profit they make matters. The people however, who are actually doing the dangerous work underground are nameless and faceless because they do not matter to the company´s bosses. If an accident happens, any miner can be exchanged easily. Only the number of workers has to stay the same in order to make the same profit. The mining accident is the second accident that could have ended deadly in Sandy´s life. The first accident happened in his young years when he broke into the ice and almost died. Also this near-death experience still haunts his dreams and he frequently dreams of drowning and being unable to breathe. The inability to breath that occurs often in his nightmares could be seen as the inability to breathe in his real life, metaphorically speaking. Everything seems too much for him and thus he might have the feeling to be unable to breathe. Another topic that Sandy often dreams about is the death of his unborn child. When the baby died in his wife´s womb Sandy thought it would be best to simply move on. While sitting beside his wife´s bed in the hospital his reaction to her sadness was very trivial and insensitive: “’Now woman,’ he said. ‘There´s no help in that. We´ll have others.’” (Crummey 1998: 42) Reflecting on the death of his child, he seems to understand that his initial reaction was wrong and he seems to regret his 49 behaviour. In one of his dreams not his wife, but he is the one who carries the baby in his body:

And then the dream changes. The child changes in the dream, and suddenly there is a dead thing inside him. How did Georgie bear it? He wants it out of him; he never wants it to leave his body. In the dream he begins bawling helplessly, a grief unlike anything he´s ever felt coming over him, his body shaking, convulsing. And it´s the weeping that wakes him (Crummey 1998: 42).

In this scene Sandy´s dream about having the dead baby in his womb is a way of dealing with the situation. Through the dream, his subconscious assimilates the traumatic experience of losing a child. The image of himself having the baby in his body and the feeling he had when the baby died in his body is a way of sympathizing with his wife. On the one hand he wants the dead thing out of this body, but on the other hand he never wants to let his baby go. He now fully understands what Georgie went through and what she felt like. However, he does not manage to tell her that he regrets his reaction to the death of their child because he thinks that she would assume he is going insane. Not talking to his wife about his feelings and thoughts but knowing that his initial reaction to their dead child was wrong and the feelings of guilt create an almost unbearable situation for Sandy. He also has started to look at family photos. Especially, the photo of the little grave with the name Andrew Samuel Wilcox written on it is a photo he looks at every time. Again this reminds him of his younger, more insensitive self because he was against naming the dead child. His wife, however, insisted on naming the baby and Sandy had to agree. Now he is very glad that the baby has got a name, even though it never lived. When he looks at the picture of the little grave with the baby´s name on it, the fact that the boy had a name makes Sandy feel more connected to his child. The fact that Sandy and Georgie never talk to each other about their feelings, concerns and fears makes their relationship weak over the years. Even though they have been married for seventeen years they do not know that much of each other.

It was after he fell asleep that she started, almost sat bolt upright in bed. In the darkness she couldn´t picture his face. Her heart hammered against her chest. Seventeen years of marriage, three children, and she had suddenly forgotten what the man looked like. 50

The thought that he might sometimes forget her in the same way made her skin crawl (Crummey 1998: 43).

This paragraph shows that Georgie has the feeling that she does not really know her husband. From not remembering his face it could also be concluded that he does not mean that much to her anymore and that she might not love him at all anymore. Sandy being haunted in his dreams frequently, cannot find the courage to tell his wife that he regrets some of his earlier behaviour and that he also mourns the death of their first child. He also cannot talk to her about any of his other traumatic experiences that he struggles to cope with. The reason why he does not talk to his wife is that he does not want to seem weak. His fear of being considered weak can be seen in the following scene:

After the local news Georgie lifts herself up out of the knitting chair and sets two pairs of wool socks with newly darned heels on the seat. Sandy watches her as she walks into the kitchen for a last glass of water before bed. There´s a slight limp in her step and he feels a momentary pang of guilt about the broken spring in her chair. He could fix the damn thing, but he´s afraid Georgie will read into it, that she´ll think he´s getting soft in his old age (Crummey 1998: 44).

Clearly, he is worried that his wife might see him as soft and maybe he thinks that this would make him less manly. Throughout the story, it seems that he believes that men have to be strong individuals in every situation and that talking about feelings is for women. However, the only thing that could help him to improve his condition is opening up and talking about his problems. Talking about their problems is also the only way to make their relationship better and to find their love for each other again. To summarize, “Heartburn” deals with traumatic experiences, such as being almost killed due to breaking into the ice or the accident in the mine. Additionally, the story focuses on the relationship of Sandy and Georgie and on how their once existing love has faded over time.

4.2.2 “Roots” by Michael Crummey

“Roots” is a short story out of the collection Flesh and Blood. Michael Crummey said about the writing process of this short story:

The story “Roots” in Flesh and Blood [...] started out as a kind of ode to my father and the work he did at the mill in Buchans for 30 years. But before the end of that first short scene in which the father collapses in church (based on a true event by the way), it was already about someone else´s father, and it became a different story altogether (Draper 1999: 26).

The story is characterized by shifts of voice, setting and time. Additionally, newspaper articles and other documents are included (cf. Fuller 2001: 200). What is also interesting about “Roots” is that the story “is sub-divided into twelve chapters” (Löschnigg 2014: 110) and is characterized by a “negotiation of chronology” (Löschnigg 2014: 109). One of the main characters in “Roots” is Ian who grew up in Black Rock, but has lived in Toronto for years working as a freelance journalist and photographer. He returns to Black Rock in order to write a journal about the mining life there. Ian´s father was a miner and therefore Ian wants to go through old pictures with him and hear the stories about how it was to work in the mines. Additionally, Ian frequently goes to the local mine museum to read through the old Company records of the former mine. Ian´s mother has concerns about his idea to write the journal because she thinks that it might be too much for his weakened father to reflect on all his experiences in the mine. Nevertheless, Ian goes through the pictures and some of the company records with his father. In the process of researching, Ian finds out about a long kept secret of his father. His father tells him that one of his mining colleagues died not because he fell, such as he and his colleagues told everyone, but because another colleague pushed him during a playful race to the hoist. This secret has made Ian´s father feel bad for years and now as he has revealed it, he feels a lot better. Ian, however, does not understand why it made his father feel so bad. In the end of the story Ian reflects on his father´s health and that he could die any time (cf. Crummey 1998: 49-68) “Roots” predominately focuses on the mining history of the fictional town Black Rock. Through his father, Ian gets an insight into the lives of miners and the harsh conditions and dangers in which they had to work. Ian´s father started to work 52 underground at the age of nineteen. He was also there when the accident happened in which Sandy Wilcox and others were trapped underground. Ian´s father reflects on the poor working conditions, “The ventilation system was sub-standard when it was installed and got worse over the years, but they wouldn´t put out the money to fix it up properly” (Crummey 1998: 59). Thus the exploitative nature of mining companies is emphasized. The company did not invest money in order to improve the working conditions underground which shows that the bosses of the company do not care about the conditions in which the miners have to work. Also when the accident happened in one of the mines and a man died, the company did not really care about the fact that the man was dead: “That´s what I can´t understand still, how they just didn´t give a fuck. I knew they were at fault, the union knew it. But the Company simply would not admit it” (Crummey 1998: 60). For Ian´s father it is still hard to understand that the mining company did not care at all about a man dying underground. It also makes him angry that even after this tragic incident they did not improve the working conditions, which were not only very harsh, but also very dangerous: “Blasting powder in the air, sparks flying off the equipment. There was always a chance of something setting off an explosion” (Crummey 1998: 59). This statement stresses the immense danger of working in one of the mines. Most of the people who were lucky not to die or to get injured underground, got severe health problems over time. Many people suffered from lung diseases due to the dusty and moist air underground. Mining, however, was what made up the culture in Black Rock. When the mines were closed, also part of Black Rock´s culture disappeared. This is what Ian realizes when he comes back after almost ten years: “His birth place. A town like a tree with dutch elm disease, something dying from inside out” (Crummey 1998: 54). Mining was a huge part of the life and community in Black Rock and this industry being gone leads to the town slowly dying. With the mines being closed, one of the main industries of the region disappeared and numerous people lost their jobs. Therefore, the region suffers an immense economic and social decline (cf. Löschnigg 2014: 112). Even though the working conditions in the mines were very dangerous and incredibly harsh, the people of Black Rock at least had the opportunity to find work, which after the closing of the mines was probably a lot more difficult. Thus, Crummey depicts the economic difficulties Atlantic Canada has suffered from and the economic decline that has taken place on the East Coast.

Another theme in the story is, as the title implies, the search for one´s roots. Ian has lived in a big city for almost ten years before returning to Black Rock and has never seemed very interested in his roots. It rather seemed that he had tried to cut off the connection to his parents and the place where he grew up and thus he “desperately tried to free himself from his heritage” (Löschnigg 2014: 110) until the point where he decides to go back to write a journal about the mining history of the town (cf. Löschnigg 2014: 110). A reason for his sudden interest could be that his father is an old man with weakened health and has already suffered a stroke. Knowing that his father will probably not live many more years might be one of the reasons why Ian decided to go back and to collect his father´s experiences as a miner. “While he has (semi-) officially returned in order to do a report on Black- Rock´s mining history, the actual reason for his homecoming is a need to connect to his roots, to find out who his father is, and thereby who he himself is” (Löschnigg 2014: 110). Thus, through his return Ian gets to know more about his father, the place he is from, and eventually about himself. Within the theme of Ian´s search for his heritage, the relationship between Ian and his father is dealt with. The relationship between father and son is a topic Crummey often focuses on in his short stories (cf. Löschnigg 2014: 110). The conversations with his father do not only make Ian more aware about his heritage, but also give an insight into a more personal account of the life as a miner than the official documents in the mine museum do. Thus, “the juxtaposition and interconnection of official and private history” (Löschnigg 2014: 110) is shown. Even though during his stay in Black Rock Ian learned more about his father, the lives of miners, which is part of Ian´s heritage, and thus about him himself, the ending of the short story is rather sad. Ian is described to be standing in the doorway watching his weak father sleeping and realizing that his father could die any time. Thus, “[e]ven though his investigation into his hometown´s history and into his father´s past may, on one level, have brought him closer to his parent and acquainted him with his heritage, the prevailing notion at the end of the story is that of irretrievable loss” (Löschnigg 2014: 111). Ian knows at that point that sooner or later he is going to lose his father and he cannot do anything about it. Ian might also have realized that when his parents die, his heritage dies with them because prior to his visit at Black Rock he knew hardly anything about his roots and even afterwards his knowledge and understanding for his heritage seem rather limited.

To summarize, “Roots” portrays the harsh working environment of miners and the dangers and exploitative nature of the job as well as the economic and social decline that comes with closing the mines. Further, the importance of being aware of one´s heritage is focused on in the story. Throughout, the story deals with loss, such as the loss of one of the main industries of the region or the loss of one´s parents.

4.2.3 “That Fall” by Michael Crummey

“That Fall” is the last short story in Michael Crummey´s collection Flesh and Blood. The main characters in the story are Grace, a divorced nurse, and her mother, whose health is worsening continually due to diabetes. Because of the mother´s diabetes her kidneys are deteriorating and because she refuses further treatment, her body poisons itself slowly. Grace works as a nurse in St. John´s but as the condition of her mother gets worse, she moves to her mother´s house in Twillingate to look after her. One evening, two nurses she works with in St. John´s come to her mother´s house and tell Grace that she needs a night off and therefore they take her to a bar. In the bar Grace gets to know the barkeeper Ed, and eventually, after some dates, falls in love with him. Grace´s mother dies exactly one month after her seventy-eight birthday and the story ends with the mother´s funeral (cf. Crummey 1998: 259-77). The main topic in “That Fall” is the worsening health condition of Grace´s mother and her death at the end of the story. Watching her mother´s health getting worse and worse reminds Grace that our lives are transitory. While living at her mother´s house and caring for her, she learns new things about her mother, such as the fact that she hates the sound of the foghorn. This makes Grace wonder if her mother actually liked the place she has lived in her entire life. With regard to this, the short story juxtaposes different generations of people and their different ways of life. While the older generation, such as Grace´s mother usually live in the same place their entire life, the younger generation of people, such as Grace often move around, want to see the world and rather tend to move to urban places, such as St. John´s. Thus, the different ways of living are depicted in the story. Because the main industries of Newfoundland, such as the fishing- and mining industry are not that prominent anymore, the younger generation of people is often forced to move to urban places in order to find a job. Therefore, two difficult aspects Atlantic Canada is facing are portrayed in the story, namely the economic decline of the region and 55 outmigration. As already discussed in the second chapter, the economic situation in Atlantic Canada is still rather problematic and there is a lack of jobs, which leads to numerous people leaving the region every year. Another theme that frequently appears in Atlantic Canadian short stories is the return theme. Also in “That Fall” the return theme is included. Grace, who has long moved away from the place she grew up in to the city of St. John´s, comes back to rural Newfoundland. Obviously the life in rural Newfoundland is completely different from the city St. John´s. As already mentioned, being back at her mother´s house she starts to wonder if her mother has even liked to live very close to the ocean where she used to hear the sound of the fog horn, which she said to dislike. This indicates that prior to her return she simply assumed that her mother liked the place she has lived in her entire life. This could be interpreted as Crummey referring to the perspectives people have on certain regions. As described in the second chapter, many people see Atlantic Canada only as a picturesque holiday destination. However, they often do not realize the difficulties the region and the people living there are facing. Also Grace had never thought that her mother could have not only disliked the sound of the foghorn, but her life in Twillingate in general. A further theme in the story is the breaking up of families. This is described through Grace´s reflections on her life with her first husband and the guilt she felt when she had to announce to her son Isaac that they would get divorced. Also this theme is frequently dealt with in various Atlantic Canadian short stories. The breaking up of a family is also visible when Grace becomes more and more aware that her mother will die soon. Thus, “That Fall” is, as many other short stories by Michael Crummey, characterized by the experience of some kind of loss. In “That Fall” Grace experiences the loss of her mother and realizes that our lives are finite. All in all “That Fall” deals with certain aspects that are characteristic for Atlantic Canadian short stories, such as the return theme, personal loss, the breaking up of families, the lifestyles of different generations of people, economic decline and outmigration from the region.

4.2.4 “The Boot” by Wayne Johnston

The short story “The Boot” by Wayne Johnston is written in the first person singular from the perspective of a forty-six year old man looking back on his childhood in St. John´s. The unnamed narrator is born on Christmas Eve in 1900 as the first of thirteen children. The narrator´s father is called Charlie Smallwood, but everyone calls him by his last name which he hates because it reminds him that he is the son of David Smallwood, the owner of a shoe and boots shop on Waterstreet. Due to the fact that he does not want to work for his father, Charlie Smallwood unsuccessfully goes to Boston to find work there and after some time has to return to St. John´s. Charlie and his father obviously do not have a good relationship at all. Also the relationship between Charlie and his wife does not seem very strong because she constantly thinks that he will leave her one day. Throughout the story the family moves from one place to the next and each new place is described as a worse neighborhood than the last they lived in. Additionally, Charlie is an alcoholic and spends most of his earnings on alcohol which contributes to the family´s social and economic relegation. Even though sometimes when he is sober he says that he would stop drinking, his son knows that it is just a matter of time until he drinks again. In the end of the story, the family lives in the “Brow”, the worst neighborhood of the city (Choyce 2001: 35-42). The main theme in “The Boot” is the father and son relationship. Charlie Smallwood and his father David have a terrible relationship and it seems that they not like and respect each other at all. His father might have wanted Charlie to work in his shoe shop to become his successor after he retires. Charlie however, does not want to work for his father due to their bad relationship. Charlie wants to be independent from his father and tries his luck to find work in Boston. This, however, does not work out and he has to return to Newfoundland. The kind of relationship David and Charlie have is already visible in David´s response to Charlie´s return: “[...] his father, who had predicted he would come back to St. John´s from Boston with ‘his tail between his legs’ [...]” (Choyce 2001: 35). David clearly does not think very highly of his son who is financially by far not as successful as he himself. Charlie works as a lumber surveyor. However, he spends most of his earnings on alcohol and therefore the family has to live in rather impoverished conditions. Charlie´s bad relationship with his father can also be seen when he burns all the shoes of his family, which they got

57 from David Smallwood´s shoe shop. This is definitely an act of protest against his father. Further, Charlie buys his shoes at the other shoe shop in town even if he could get the same shoes in his father´s shop for free. It is likely that the relationship between father and son has always been bad and maybe his father gave Charlie the feeling to be not good enough from a very early age onwards. This would be a possible reason why their relationship is so tense on the one hand and it would also be a reason for Charlie´s alcoholism on the other hand. Charlie might try to suppress his feelings of not being good enough with alcohol. The statement of not being good enough appears several times throughout the story, always being said by Charlie. Also the father and son relationship between Charlie and the narrator of the story is rather problematic. Even though they do never actually fight in the story, it is visible that the narrator does not think very highly of his father and vice versa. Not only the relationship between Charlie and the narrator is rather negative but the relationship with the rest of his children is similar. Charlie shows his children that he does not value them very much. This is obvious at the very beginning of the story when the narrator remembers his father commenting on the number of children he has, “’Thirteen,’ my father said, ‘a luckless number for a luckless brood.’” (Choyce 2001: 35). The feeling of not being good enough that Charlie might have received from his father is passed on from Charlie to his own children. He simply might not know another way of treating children as he had never experienced positive encouragement from his own father. The big black boot that is hung up in front of David Smallwood´s shop could be interpreted as a symbol for the oppression that Charlie feels coming from his father. Boot-like images also often haunt Charlie´s dreams. This again signifies that he feels oppressed by his father and that the relationship between him and his father subconsciously strains him. Charlie wishes to free himself from his father´s negative opinion about him, but is not able to do so. Also the relationship between Charlie and his wife is rather problematic. She constantly thinks that he will sooner or later leave her and his children: “My mother was always predicting his imminent disappearance. She had never known a drinker not to run, sooner or later.” (Choyce 2001: 38) Due to Charlie´s alcoholism the atmosphere within the family is tense and the mother is very uncertain if he will leave them and thus not provide for his family at all anymore. It does not seem that she would be heartbroken if her husband left her, but rather that she is worried about the

58 financial situation without his earnings. It is very visible that the love between the two of them has been fading away for a long time. The story also portrays the difficult economic situation in Newfoundland where it is very hard to find work. Not willing to work for his father, it is very difficult for Charlie to find a job that pays off enough in order to provide for his family. This tough financial situation could be another reason for his alcoholism. He might try to suppress the continuing deterioration of his social life with alcohol. It seems that Charlie does not know where he belongs because he does not hide his dislike for Newfoundland, but he was also not happy or successful in Boston. Even though he does not like St. John´s, it seems that he also does not have the courage to leave the city for good. He and his family move from one neighborhood to the other within the city, but nowhere they can find happiness and as the neighborhoods get worse, also their entire social situation gets worse. It seems that Charlie is never happy no matter where he is: “My father would go out on the front deck at night and alternately extol and curse the city across the harbour, one minute bemoaning our exile from it and the next bidding it good riddance, one minute declaring it too good for us and the next declaring us too good for it.” (Choyce 2001: 41) This passage shows that Charlie cannot really decide if he likes or hates the city, even though throughout the story it seems that he is rather unhappy with it. Newfoundland is the place in which he grew up – his home, but it is also the place where he is constantly confronted with the bad relationship to his father and where he cannot manage to provide a stable life for his family. At the very end of the story, “’They should have called it Old Lost Land, not Newfoundland but Old Lost Land,’” (Choyce 2001: 42) Charlie emphasizes his feeling of being lost in his home.

4.2.5 “Grace” by Lisa Moore

“Grace” is one of the stories in Lisa Moore´s short story collection Open which was published in 2002. The protagonist in the story is the young woman Eleanor and the story is set at the wedding of her friend Constance. The short story includes various flashbacks and references to other happenings. Eleanor experiences a personal crisis due to the fact that her husband Philip has told her that he might leave her. Eleanor however, loves Philip deeply and refuses to accept the fact that their lives might separate. Further, Philip already had a little daughter when they started their 59 relationship and the three of them Philip, Eleanor and the little girl Gabrielle became a family. Therefore, the possibility to lose both Philip and their daughter is even harder for Eleanor. Eleanor goes through the typical phases of someone who is expecting to be broken up with. Firstly, she is very worried about her future and does not want to imagine it without her husband and daughter. From the very beginning of her relationship with Philip she has known that it is true love and therefore she has devoted herself fully to a life with him and their daughter. She also thinks back that she has given up travelling for her relationship even though she was planning to travel the whole world with her friend Sadie. Of course she also gets angry about her husband´s thoughts about leaving her. As a protest reaction she considers starting an affair with Glenn Marshall, an old friend who is also invited to the wedding and who has always been interested in her. Even though she thinks of starting an affair with Glenn, she does not do it in the end because she knows that she is not actually interested in him. In various flashbacks she thinks about times when Glenn tried to get closer to her. At the wedding Eleanor watches Philip chatting with a beautiful young woman from British Columbia called Amelia Kerby. Obviously, Eleanor is jealous and angry about the fact that her husband could fall in love with someone else than herself. During the day she thinks back multiple times to the day when Philip and she got to know each other. She also reflects on how fast the three of them, Philip, Gabrielle and herself, became a family. She also thinks back to her life before she was in a relationship with Philip and especially to her adventurous travels with Sadie in which one of them they even became part of a Bollywood movie. As the day of the wedding goes on Eleanor gets continually drunk. At night she has to watch her husband dancing with Amelia, which again makes her angry and worrying about her future even more. Because of her intoxicated state of mind she and her friend Sadie go over to Amelia to tell her to stay away from Eleanor´s husband. Later, Eleanor goes home alone because Philip wants to stay at the party and when he comes home in the morning completely drunk, she stands up to turn off the light and he tells her to stay there and thus it becomes clear that he probably is not planning on leaving her anymore (Moore 2002: 153-215). As already described in the first chapter of the paper, Atlantic Canadian writing is still considered as rather rural. However, there is a big shift in this respect among the younger generation of writers, especially in Newfoundland (cf. Wyile Interview

2014: 6). Lisa Moore as one of the contemporary writers from Newfoundland contributes to this shift. According to Susanne Marshall (2008: 80),

Moore presents the inseparability of the regional and the global: if her work is to be read as regional, it must be read as work that explores and redefines what is commonly understood to be regional literature – that is, literature that emphasizes what are considered to be region´s cultural attributes: a distinct sense of place, a shared social and economic history, a common sense of tradition, a shared dialect.

This means that Moore emphasizes in her texts that region is constantly in contact with the global. Herb Wyile explained this when he mentioned that contemporary Atlantic Canadian writers, such as Lisa Moore, try to emphasize “that there is still a lot about the region that is sort of traditional, but our sense of traditionalism is very much in dialogue with modernity, progress and globalization” (Wyile Interview 2014: 8). Further, the characters that are presented in Open live in urban Newfoundland. Therefore, “their understanding of place is quite different from the historically rural, outport stereotype of Newfoundland landscape, and connected instead to busy streets, backyards, bars, and chain stores that both are and are not discernibly local” (Marshall 2008: 81). Additionally, in Open Moore focuses on middle- and upper-class Newfoundlanders for whom travelling and encounters with other cultures is totally normal (cf. Marshall 2008: 81). In “Grace” this can be seen when Eleanor reflects on her travels with her friend Sadie. They travelled a lot and planned to see the entire world. Thus, they got a good insight into other cultures and lifestyles. “Grace” focuses, as many of Moore´s other stories, on “the intricacies of individual relationships” (Marshall 2008: 81). Obviously, in “Grace” this is shown through Philips announcement that he might leave Eleanor and her reaction to it. Even though she wishes that he changed his mind, she knows that if he really wants to leave her, she cannot do anything to hold him back. This is emphasized in the following passage: “He does not believe in weathering through, or for the children, or because you promised. He believes, simply, in doing what you want.” (Moore 2002: 170). Thus, Philip is portrayed as an independent man with a very modern thinking. Also jealousy plays a part in their relationship from Philip´s announcement onwards. When he spends much time with Amelia at the wedding, Eleanor gets worried that he might fall in love with someone else. She cannot imagine her life without her husband and it would break her heart to see her daughter only every second week. In the end 61 however, when Philip comes home drunk and repeats the phrase “stay here”, it is clear that he has made up his mind on not leaving his wife. In “Grace”, Moore shows “opposing views of the ‘locatedness’ of culture” (Marshall 2008: 87). This is visible at the wedding when Eleanor considers starting an affair with Glenn Marshall. She wants to tell him the story of when she saw the Taj Mahal, however then remembers that she had already told him the story another time and he was “mildly interested”.

But Glenn loves Newfoundland. He doesn´t like the heat, prefers cool weather. He wouldn´t want to be on top of the Pink Palace with lithe monkeys. She has told him before, she suddenly remembers. She has told him that story before, about the Bollywood movie. Glenn Marshall had been mildly interested. He had listened, but he shook his head and said he´d never go there. Why would he? He loves Newfoundland. As if there were just the two choices: the Taj of Little Island Cove. (Moore 2002: 170-71)

Thus, Glenn is portrayed as the most regional character. While Eleanor is open to explore other places and cultures, he prefers to stay in Newfoundland. It seems like for him there really are only two choices either to like Newfoundland and to stay there or to prefer other places and therefore travel the world. Obviously, Eleanor does not share his opinion because even though she likes living in Newfoundland she also has the wish to see other places (cf. Marshall 2008: 87). Glenn however, is further described as a person who loves the nature of Newfoundland: “He loves being in the woods by himself, he has a cabin, can build a lean-to, set snares; he does some ice fishing, he likes the quiet” (Moore 2002: 171). Glenn thus, is “the one most representative of the traditional cultural identity of Newfoundlanders: he is associated with wilderness, self-sufficiency, outports and wihtdrawl from the world, with a perspective that divides the world into the two choices of here and everywhere else” (Marshall 2008: 87). In “Grace” “land and location are deployed [...] to subvert stereotypes and suggest a changing sense of regional identity in close conversation with global forces” (Marshall 2008: 88). Eleanor can be interpreted as the total opposite of Glenn Marshall. She has travelled many places and during the wedding, she often refers to adventures or experiences she has had abroad. On the one hand this emphasizes that she is open towards other lifestyles and not narrow-minded at all. On the other hand, however, 62 her ongoing reference to her travels could also be seen as a way to show off (cf. Marshall 2008: 94). Thus, she uses “cosmopolitanism as a commodity to enhance her own social status” (Marshall 2008: 94). As already explained in the second chapter of this thesis, the image of a region is created mainly by people living outside of the region. The created clichés are then held up by both, the people from outside of the region and the people living in the region. In “Grace” the “paradoxical functioning of cliché and its limitations” (Marshall 2008: 89) is shown in the paragraph about Eleanor´s screenplay, which is first rejected by the producers due to it being too stereotypically: “a big record producer from the mainland sweeping a local girl off her feet was a cliché” (Moore 2002: 184). Thus, Lisa Moore shows that

the value of overdetermined representations of culture, for the purpose of commodification, has its limitations: that even while global forces continue to demand a quick, conventional sketch of regional cultures, that very stereotype has to evolve to reflect an increasing engagement with global forces themselves to remain believable, and marketable (Marshall 2008: 89).

When Eleanor tells the producers her original version of the screenplay about a girl falling in love with a naked skydiver gliding down from the sky, they agree on producing it. According to Marshall, the story of a girl falling in love with a random guy that flies down the sky emphasizes “the close, changeable and instant relationships” of our time (cf. Marshall 2008: 89). How quickly time changes, is described in the passage where Eleanor thinks back to Constance´s stories about her upbringing.

Constance grew up around the bay, an only child, raised by her grandmother. She says she was bathed in the kitchen in a big galvanized tub in front of a wood stove. Can this be true? She remembers when television arrived in Newfoundland. They all gathered in one house to watch (Moore 2002: 157-58).

Through this part Moore emphasizes how quickly cultural things can change and how unreal old habits or traditions can seem (cf. Marshall 2008: 90). Due to modernization and globalization the world changes even faster.

All in all, “Grace” portrays the lives of urban Newfoundlanders. In her stories, Moore often “challenges our perceptions of ‘reality’” (Löschnigg 2014: 120) by using different literary strategies. In “Grace”, Moore does that by “an extreme textual deceleration” (Löschnigg 2014: 120). Textual deceleration can be very well seen in “Grace” where the entire story takes place in one day. However, through the various flashbacks and focus on detail it sometimes seems as if time stands still. The frequent use of flashbacks is another of Moore´s literary strategies through which the happenings of the story are no longer in chronological order. Further, Moore includes “visions which allow unusual perspectives and constantly change” (Löschnigg 2014: 120-21) into her texts. In “Grace” these visions are Eleanor´s flashbacks and memories, such as about her travels or the beginning of her relationship with Phillip. “Grace” depicts, as many other stories by Moore, how “regional identity and global influences are played out in the minute actions of our everyday lives” (Marshall 2008: 81).

In the analyses of Nova Scotian and Newfoundland short stories it is very obvious that writers deal with the struggles their region is facing. On the one hand these are economical problems that have to be overcome by the characters in the stories. Therefore, in the stories there is a big focus on the dangerous and harsh work of fishers and miners. Also the daily lives of farmers or lumberjacks are dealt with in certain stories. As described in the second chapter, the fishing-, mining-, agricultural-, and lumber industries were the main fields of work in Atlantic Canada. However, after the First World War those industries were not that profitable anymore and an economic decline took place. Further, the stories deal with what it means for the families when the male family members have to work in such dangerous conditions because there are simply no other jobs available in the region. Thus, in the stories the difficult economic situation of Atlantic Canada is emphasized. Often families are even confronted with the death of family members and thus, the breaking up of families is depicted. In the stories families do not only break up as a result of death, but also because often the father in the stories has to work far away from his family or the younger generation of the families emigrate the region. However, for many of the characters in the stories it is not easy to leave their region as they are often expected to take over their family business or in certain stories they are even pressured by their parents or the community they live in to stay or to live a traditional

64 life. Therefore, some of them give in and stay in the region while others choose to leave, which once more leads to the breaking up of their family. Additionally, there often is the theme of tourism included in the stories. As already described in the second chapter, tourism is one of the main industries in Atlantic Canada and has many advantages as well as disadvantages for the region and the people living there because many of them rely on this industry. Another theme that frequently appears in short stories written by Atlantic Canadian authors is tradition and heritage and how important it is to preserve that. It is emphasized that for the younger generation of people heritage and its preservation are often not that important. Thus, each generation knows less about their heritage until it is lost completely. Atlantic Canadian writers draw attention to this topic and try to emphasize the importance of heritage preservation. Often also the stereotypes that exist towards Atlantic Canada are addressed in the stories. This is very obvious especially in Lynn Coady´s short story “Jesus Christ, Murdeena”. Especially the new generation of writers critically reflect on the negative image of the East Coast and talk back to it through their literary works (cf. Creelman Interview 2014: 4). Additionally, people who live outside of Atlantic Canada in many cases only recognize it as a pretty place to visit, but do not see the region in any other contexts. This topic is also addressed in various short stories analysed above. Further, the attitude and stereotypes of the people living within the region towards people from somewhere else is focused on in the stories. This can be seen for example in “The Vastness of the Dark” by Alistair MacLeod.Lastly, also the attitudes of people who live in small communities towards different people or different lifestyles are investigated in the stories. This topic is addressed in Lynn Coady´s “Jesus Christ, Murdeena”. Through the stories analysed above, it is also visible that there is a shift in Atlantic Canadian writing from being set predominantly in rural places to being set in urban areas as well. This shift can be very well seen especially in Newfoundland works by writers, such as Lisa Moore. All in all, it is visible through the short stories that Atlantic Canadian writers include themes into their works that are important or problematic to their region.

5. Expert Interviews

For this thesis, I have conducted interviews with the leading experts on regionalism and Atlantic Canadian literature. The people interviewed are Herb Wyile, Tony Tremblay, David Creelman, Jennifer Andrews, Gwendolyn Davies and Alexander MacLeod. All interviews were done orally and in person except for the interview with Alexander MacLeod, which was done in written form via email. In the following chapter I shall outline various essential questions and answers with regard to regionalism and the Atlantic Canadian short story. The first question the interviewed person was usually asked was how they came to work on regionalism and Atlantic Canadian short stories. As regionalism is a rather specific topic, it was very interesting for me to find out why and how experts came to work on that field. In the interview with Herb Wyile, which took place on October 25th 2014 at Acadia University in Wolfville, he said that he came to work on regionalism while he was doing his Master´s degree at McGill University. First, he planned to write his thesis on literature by David Adams Richards. However, while reading criticism on Richards´ work the topic of regionalism came up various times and therefore Herb Wyile´s thesis turned into a thesis on Maritime regionalism instead. Wyile also wrote his PhD on regionalism. After this, he did not focus on regionalism for a while until he started to teach at Acadia University (cf. Wyile Interview 2014: 1). In the interview with Tony Tremblay, which took place at St. Thomas University in Fredericton on December 5th, 2014, his answer to this first question was that he had always been interested in regionalism. However, when he started as a university professor he taught classes on African and South Asian literature and literature from the South Pacific. Becoming more aware of the effects of globalism had a big influence on his later focus on regional literature. With regard to that Tremblay stated:

[...] I came to the conclusion that the only way that we could preserve and protect our local places, which were being considerably diminished by the overtures of globalism to move things away from rural places or particular places generally; and this was done of course through advertising, through television, through various modes of cultural persuasion. As I saw that pattern developing it forced me to kind of retrench and consider the importance of place and home and region and so half way through

my career I made a fairly radical shift and started working on local or regional literature (Tremblay Interview 2014: 1).

Thus, globalism and its negative effects have had a big influence on Tremblay´s focus on regionalism (cf. Tremblay Interview 2014: 1-2). Jennifer Andrews was interviewed on December 1st, 2014 at the University of New Brunswick. Because of the fact that she grew up in Ontario, the question of how she came to work on regionalism and especially on Atlantic Canadian literature is especially interesting. She mentioned that as she grew up in central Canada, she was not very conscious about region. However, she already became aware of Atlantic Canada as a marginalized region during her studies at McGill University. Andrews worked on magic realism as a graduate student and during that, as she said, the topics of regionalism and marginalization kept coming up. She moved to Atlantic Canada when she was hired as a professor at the University of New Brunswick.

[...] [A]s soon as I moved here I became immediately aware of region because there was such a bias about Atlantic Canada as a place where people were stereotypically lazy, unemployed, dull, or things that seemed really inappropriate. When I was looking around and examining people who I knew in the community, people seemed very educated, very hard-working, very diligent [...] (Andrews Interview 2014: 1).

Jennifer Andrews´ statement shows the stereotypes that exist about Atlantic Canada. Additionally, from the central Canadian perspective, Atlantic Canada does often not really exist, except as a place to go to on a holiday. She also mentioned that Atlantic Canada heavily depends on tourism, which provides jobs and thus money for the people living there. Therefore, the nostalgic images of certain regions are kept up. However, in keeping up those nostalgic images of the region, “you may actually undermine the viability of it as a kind of place of the future for Canadians.” (Andrews Interview 2014: 2). She also stated that for her it had always been interesting how Central Canada and parts of Western Canada see themselves because of the economic privileges they have. Andrews also claims that Atlantic Canada has numerous highly educated people. However, there is a lack of jobs in the region. Therefore, people have to go to different places in order to find work and, according to Andrews, “one of the challenges here is to figure out how to keep people here” (Andrews Interview 2014: 2). David Creelman, who was interviewed on November 67

20th, 2014 at the University of New Brunswick, answered the question about how he came to work on regionalism that it was probably due to some kind of homesickness. He did his PhD in Toronto, which was the first time he lived away from Atlantic Canada for an extended period of time. He then realized that not much had been written on the Maritime region and therefore decided to write his dissertation on Maritime literature, a field he had been thinking a lot about for some time (cf. Creelman Interview 2014: 1). For Gwendolyn Davies, interviewed on October 30th, 2014 at the University of New Brunswick, the reason for her interest in regionalism was a very personal one. She grew up in a family that was very interested in history and this influence from her family led to her initial interest in regionalism. Later, her interest in the topic was increased through school and university (cf. Davies Interview 2014: 1). Alexander MacLeod, from whom I received the answers to my questions via mail on January 26th, 2015, answered the question about his interest in regionalism as follows:

I have always been interested in the relationship between cultures and the ‘places’ they seem to come from. My family moved back and forth quite a bit between the rural setting of our home in Cape Breton and the industrial landscape of Windsor, Ontario where we also lived and went to school, etc… When you experience two different places on a very deep level, I think that teaches you that ideas and geography have a more complex relationship than many people realize (MacLeod Interview 2015: 1).

Through his experience of living in both central Canada and Atlantic Canada, MacLeod could see the attitude central Canadians have towards Atlantic Canada and vice versa. Thus, on the one hand he has experienced the stereotypes that exist about Atlantic Canada, the economic difficulties in the region, and its reliance on tourism. On the other hand he also experienced life in central Canada, which is economically flourishing. Living in those two very different places might have made him even more aware of the marginalization of Atlantic Canada (cf. MacLeod Interview 2015: 1). Another question the experts were asked was if they found it difficult to find relevant sources to study Atlantic Canadian regionalism in depth. The answers to this question varied a bit. While Jennifer Andrews and Alexander MacLeod answered that it was not difficult to find sources, the other experts answered that it was rather difficult. However, Jennifer Andrews added that today there are definitely more books 68 available than when she started to focus on the topic. For Tony Tremblay it was very difficult to work on regionalism in depth because as a student at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia he was advised by some professors that he should not focus on regional literature or Canadian literature at all because “it was a secondary literature” (Tremblay Interview 2014: 2). Later, when he studied at the West Coast of Canada his professors again suggested that he should not focus on Canadian literature. This emphasizes that Canadian literature and especially regional literature is still frequently seen as not so important as literature from Britain, to which the West Coast still has a colonial tie. When Tremblay started to focus on literature from Canada´s East Coast it was very hard for him to get supervisory support and there were hardly any books available on that topic in the library. He also mentioned that trying to study literature from the East Coast at a university located on the West Coast made it even harder. Tremblay realized that for people in British Columbia the country ended in Montreal and there was no East Coast for them. He sees the reason for this in Canada as a country being simply too large to imagine.

Canadian federalism is just this idea of a united country. [...] And it is this idea that goes against logic because it is so difficult to maintain an entire country dispersed across a landmass like we have with a few main ideas, with a sort of coerced sense of a shared heritage. [...] So when you go out there and you try and study Atlantic Canadian literature as I did maybe foolishly on the West Coast and find no resources and encounter the idea of Canada as this country that stops in Montreal [and that] there is no East Coast, it is very challenging (Tremblay Interview 2014: 3-4).

This shows that Canada as a country does not exist due to its immense land mass and, as already explained in the first chapter, because of the fact that there is no shared heritage across the country. Also Herb Wyile says that for him it was not easy to study Atlantic Canadian regionalism in depth. However, he also agreed that it is getting better and the work his generation has done on regionalism serves as a basis for a new generation that is interested in literature from Atlantic Canada. He mentions that for instance Alistair MacLeod is an internationally known author, but still there is not that much on the internet about him in comparison to other authors, such as Margaret Atwood (cf. Wyile Interview 2014: 2). Another question was if Atlantic Canadian literature was taught at the universities the experts teach at. Tony Tremblay said that when he came to St. 69

Thomas University there was one person who was teaching Canadian literature and another person who was teaching it half time. This indicates that even at universities located on the East Coast of Canada, Atlantic Canadian literature has been neglected. Further, Tremblay mentions that the curriculum at St. Thomas University was designed with a focus on canonical literature, which means, to a large extent British literature. He criticizes that literature is often seen as something that “happens by the centuries” (Tremblay Interview 2014: 4). Such a perspective obviously excludes Canadian literature because even though very early aboriginal Canadian literature and oral literature very likely existed in Canada, we do not have access to it. Therefore, if literature is limited to a print culture, this limitation automatically leads to a focus on British literature. To sum up, Tremblay has encountered a strong focus on British literature at the university he teaches at. However, he himself teaches several classes focusing on Canadian literature (cf. Tremblay Interview 2014: 4). David Creelman, who teaches at the University of New Brunswick in St. John, answered that he is responsible for Canadian and modern British literature and once in a while he also teaches classes on literary theory. He stated that he alternately does classes on Canadian short stories and classes on Maritime fiction (cf. Creelman Interview 2014: 2). Thus, Canadian and also Atlantic Canadian literature is dealt with at the University in St. John. Jennifer Andrews said that in her literature classes she always tries to include writers from the East Coast (cf. Andrews Interview 2014: 8). Thus, it can be seen that the experts who are very well aware of the great literature that comes from Atlantic Canada do try to include works from that region into their teaching and thus show their students that the East Coast on which they are studying, has various talented writers who produce texts of very high quality. Further, the interviewees were asked how they would define regionalism. The answers of the experts to this question were very similar in certain aspects, but of course there were also some slight differences. Tony Tremblay argues, for example, that there is never going to be a definition of regionalism that everybody agrees with. He additionally mentions that, in his opinion, it is probably such a complicated topic that it is not worth defining. He compares the definition of regionalism to the definition of culture thus emphasizing the complexity of the topic. Furthermore, he says that a definition of regionalism depends on who is defining it. It depends on whether you have an insider or an outsider perspective of the region as well as on the person´s “own particular bias” (Tremblay Interview 2014: 6). Tremblay explains that

70 regionalism and regional literature were seen negatively for years. As already explained in the first chapter, this view on regionalism started to change in the 1970s (cf. Tremblay Interview 2014: 6-7). Also Herb Wyile points out that there was a big shift in the view of regionalism (cf. Wyile Interview 2014: 3). Alexander MacLeod defines regionalism as follows:

In my work I define regionalism as the cultural geographic or, if you prefer, the socio- spatial index of all lived experience. Since all space is social - even spaces that seem untouched by people - it follows that all experiences of geography are inescapably cultural and all experiences of culture and inescapably geographical. No people outside of places (even cyber space is geographical) and no concept of place without a correspondingly specific understanding of a person (MacLeod Interview 2015: 2).

This means that for Alexander MacLeod there is an interrelation between place and culture. Regionalism is interrelated with various economic, historical and political aspects and therefore cannot be seen only from one perspective but has to be seen as something multidimensional. Another question of the interview was if there were certain characteristics that distinguished Atlantic Canadian short stories from short stories from other places. Gwendolyn Davies answers that she thinks that “a strong sense of place and to some extent a strong sense of history” is visible in Atlantic Canadian short stories (cf. Davies Interview 2014: 6). David Creelman holds a similar view adding that works from Atlantic Canada “are more often aesthetically anchored in realism than some other regions tend to be” (Creelman Interview 2014: 7). Creelman finishes his statement in saying that there are not enough differences between texts from the Maritimes and texts from other parts of the country to say “’this is a Maritime writer and therefore you know what you´re getting [...]’” when you read this text (Creelman Interview 2014: 8). Jennifer Andrews mentions the brutality, harshness and bleakness as main characteristics of Atlantic Canadian short stories and gives as an example “As Birds Bring Forth the Sun” by Alistair MacLeod, in which a dog is brutally mauled (cf. Andrews Interview: 14). Herb Wyile states with regard to characteristics of Atlantic Canadian short stories that “there is probably less experimentalism” in them. Further, he says that “it is in general a kind of more accessible and realistic literature. That is a bit of a stereotype of Atlantic writing as well and one has to be careful about that, but I think that it is fairly true when you look 71 at the body of work that is out there” (Wyile Interview 2014: 6). In this, he agrees with Creelman who also mentions that Atlantic Canadian short stories tend to be rather realistic. However, both of them hesitate a bit as they say this because they do not want to reinforce the existing stereotypes about Atlantic Canadian literature. Alexander MacLeod says about the characteristics of Atlantic Canadian short stories:

[...] Atlantic Canadian stories, rather than being rooted, traditional and old-fashioned, as many people maintain, actually demonstrated a real knowledge of the complex, globalized world. Many of the characters in my dad’s work, for example are Cape Bretoners who work for international mining companies or often have to travel great distances in order to “make a living” for other people who are actually “doing the living” at home. This is a complex political, cultural and economic terrain, and l think At[lantic]-Can[adian] short stories have always demonstrated an awareness of this (MacLeod Interview 2015: 2).

This means that in the works written by Atlantic Canadians, the economic difficulties the region was and is facing, are included. Additionally, MacLeod´s statement shows that the harshness of life or “the brutality” as Jennifer Andrews calls it, is often focused on in Atlantic Canadian short stories. Apart from questions concerning the characteristics of short stories from the East Coast the experts were also asked what they find especially interesting about Atlantic Canadian short stories. Herb Wyile claims that he finds the sense of humour in Atlantic Canadian short stories great and names Wayne Johnston and Michael Winter as authors who are very humorous in their writing. He also mentions Lisa Moore and Michael Crummey, who are rather serious writers but who still have “great funny moments” in their works (Wyile Interview 2014: 6). Jennifer Andrews states that she really likes the mythical quality which appears especially in the short stories by Alistair MacLeod, which often are about human suffering, experiences people have and about relationships (cf. Andrews Interview 2014: 12). David Creelman points out that he really likes “how the contemporary short story fights closure” (Creelman Interview 2014: 7). Concerning this, he names authors, such as Alistair MacLeod and Lynn Coady who “lay out the problems and then leave the open ends so that they resonate quite beautifully. Lynn Coady is just amazing for saying just enough and not too much” (Creelman Interview 2014: 7).

The very last question of the interviews was if the people interviewed had a favorite author with regard to Atlantic Canadian short stories and, interestingly, most of them gave the same answer. To be precise, Gwendolyn Davies, David Creelman, Tony Tremblay and Herb Wyile answered that their favourite author with regard to Atlantic Canadian short stories was Alistair MacLeod. All of them agree that Alistair MacLeod´s style of writing is simply beautiful. Gwendolyn Davies for example mentions that MacLeod “handles language so beautifully” (Davies Interview 2014: 7). David Creelman adds that he loves to teach MacLeod´s short stories (cf. Creelman Interview 2014: 8). Tony Tremblay states additionally that he also likes the stories by Lynn Coady very much (cf. Tremblay Interview 2014: 12). Jennifer Andrew´s favorite Atlantic Canadian short story authors are Lynn Coady and Alistair MacLeod (cf. Andrews Interview 2014: 15). Alexander MacLeod´s favorite short story authors are Jessica Grant, Lynn Coady, Lisa Moore and Michael Crummey (cf. MacLeod Interview 2015: 3). In the answers a recurring pattern of favorite authors is visible and especially Alistair MacLeod, who was definitely a very gifted writer, is named frequently. As Alistair MacLeod was one of the most-known and most successful Atlantic Canadian short story writers, it was very interesting to find out if his career as an author had influenced his son Alexander MacLeod, who works as a professor at St. Mary´s University in Halifax and who has become a writer as well. Alexander MacLeod states that he thinks that his father being an author made him initially interested in pursuing a literary career himself. Additionally, he adds that it is a lot of work to work as both a professor and an author, but he enjoys that as a writer he can work on his own projects and can work in the ways that feel best for him. He says that his father always worked on his literary works in the way that worked best for him and Alexander tries to do so too (cf. MacLeod Interview 2015: 3). As already mentioned in the third chapter, Alistair MacLeod usually wrote his works during the summer holidays in a cabin in Cape Breton where he spent a lot of time planning each of his stories.

6. Questionnaire for Canadian Students

For this thesis, I conducted a questionnaire to be filled out by Canadian students in order to evaluate various aspects concerning Atlantic Canadian literature. The main goal of the field study was to find out if students who are studying on the East Coast are familiar with Atlantic Canadian literature and if they were taught Atlantic Canadian literature at school. Thus, I wanted to find out if teachers on the East Coast of Canada try to include literary works from their region into their teaching. It was also important to get an insight into the opinions of students from the East Coast about the importance of learning about regional literature and whether the concept of region itself is important to them. The questionnaire consists of eleven questions about Atlantic Canadian short stories, about the importance of teaching regional literature and the importance of region itself. There were multiple choice questions where the participants could decide to answer either “yes”, “no”, “I am not sure” or “I couldn´t care less”. Additionally, there were also more open questions where the participants had the chance to briefly explain their own thoughts on the topic. Further, the students were asked to indicate their age, gender, citizenship, the province they grew up in and the university program they are taking. In total 69 students of Canadian origin took part in the survey and all of them were studying at the University of New Brunswick or the University of St. Thomas2.Three different groups took part in the survey. First, the questionnaire was handed out in the class “English 2473: Atlantic Canada in Literature, Film, and Art”, which was taught by Tony Tremblay. This group, which will later be referred to as the Tremblay-group, consisted of 12 people. The ages of the participants varied from 18 to 55 years and with regard to gender there were eight female students, three male students and one person of other gender taking part in the survey. As they were attending a class with a focus on Atlantic Canada, I wanted to see if this focus had an influence on their answers compared to the answers of the other two groups. Texts and films the students had discussed in the class before taking part in my survey were the documentary Empty Harbours, Empty Dreams, pre-confederation poets and satirists, the novel Anne of Green Gables, the poets E.J. Pratt and Milton Acorn, the novel The Mountain & the Valley, the film Margaret´s Museum and selected short stories from The Lost Salt Gift of

2 The University of New Brunswick and the University of St. Thomas are both located in Fredericton, New Brunswick and share one campus. Therefore the survey was not influenced by being done at different locations. 74

Blood (cf. Tremblay, Fall 2014: Syllabus). Thus, the participants of the survey had already got an insight into various literary works from Atlantic Canada, which made it very interesting to find out whether their answers on the importance of regional literature differed from the answers of the other two groups. The second group, which in the following will be referred to as the Andrews-group, consisted of 37 people, 28 female students and nine male students, between the ages of 18 to 25. The members of this group were attending either “English 1000: Introduction to Modern Literature in English” or “English 2901: A Survey of English Literature to 1660”, taught by Jennifer Andrews. As those two classes are introductory classes to literature with a focus on British literature, it can be assumed that the students attending these classes might have an interest in literature but have probably never dealt with Atlantic Canadian short stories at university. The third and last group that took part in the survey consisted of 20 students, eight female students and twelve male students, between the ages of 19 to 27, who all lived in the same residence called McLeod House. Therefore, this group will be referred to as the McLeod-group. In this group the majority of the participants studied subjects such as business, nursing, kinesiology and mechanical engineering, which means that they had probably never taken a literature class at university. Therefore, it was very interesting once again to find out if and how their answers differed from those of the other groups. In the following I shall summarize the outcomes of my survey, show the different results of the three groups and present the most interesting ones in using graphs.

The first question of the survey was, “Have you ever heard of Atlantic Canadian short stories?” I anticipated the majority of students to have heard about short stories from the East Coast and the outcome was pretty close to what I had expected.

Have you ever heard of Atlantic Canadian short stories? 100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% Yes. 40% No. 30% 20% I am not sure. 10% 0% Tremblay- Andrews- McLeod- group group group As expected all twelve people in the Tremblay-group answered that they had heard about Atlantic Canadian short stories, which was not surprising as they were attending a class that partly dealt with Atlantic Canadian literature. In Jennifer Andrews´ classes, 26 people answered that they had heard of Atlantic Canadian short stories, while six answered “no” and five said that they were not sure. In the McLeod-group eight people answered that they had heard of Atlantic Canadian short stories, nine had not heard about them and three were not sure. The answers to this question were as expected. The students, who attended a class with a focus on Atlantic Canada, had all heard about them. The majority, to be precise 70,27%, of the students of Jennifer Andrews´ class, who could be assumed to be interested in literature as they were taking one of the two introductory classes on literature, knew about Atlantic Canadian short stories. In the McLeod-group, however, only 40% of the participants had heard of Atlantic Canadian short stories, which is considerably less than in the other two groups. This confirms the assumption that the participants of this group were, in general, not that interested in literature. The second question in the questionnaire was if the participants had ever read Atlantic Canadian short stories. 83% of Tony Tremblay´s class stated to have read Atlantic Canadian short stories. In Jennifer Andrews´ classes 72% claimed to have read short stories from Atlantic Canada. In McLeod House, 30% of the participating students had read Atlantic Canadian short stories. For a better understanding, the outcomes are illustrated in the following graph.

Have you ever read Atlantic Canadian short stories? 100,00% 90,00% 80,00% 70,00% 60,00% Yes. 50,00% No. 40,00% 30,00% I am not sure. 20,00% 10,00% 0,00% Tremblay.group Andrews-group McLeod-group

Here again, the group of McLeod House had the lowest rate of being familiar with Atlantic Canadian short stories. The next question in the survey was addressed to those participants who answered that they had read Atlantic Canadian short stories, asking them why they had read those short stories. In the Tremblay-group eight people said that they had read Atlantic Canadian short stories for high school or university and two answered that they had read Atlantic Canadian short stories out of a personal interest. In the Andrews-group the explanations why the students had read Atlantic Canadian short stories were very similar to the answers in the Tremblay-group. 22 people out of the 27 students claimed that they had read the stories for university or high school. Five students said that they had read the stories out of personal interest. In the McLeod-group four people said that they had read Atlantic Canadian short stories for high school or university and two said that they had read them out of a personal interest. What is striking is that in all three groups the personal interest-motif is represented in a similar proportion. Another interesting question was if the participants thought that Atlantic Canadian short stories were famous. In the Tremblay group, only one person answered “yes”, six people said “no” and five people were not sure. In the Andrews- group seven students answered “yes”, nine answered “no” and 21 answered that they were not sure. In the McLeod-group only one person thought that Atlantic Canadian short stories were famous while nine thought the opposite and ten were not sure.

Do you think Atlantic Canadian short stories are famous? 100,00% 90,00% 80,00% 70,00% 60,00% Yes. 50,00% No. 40,00% 30,00% I am not sure. 20,00% 10,00% 0,00% Tremblay-group Andrews-group McLeod-group

As can be seen in all three groups, a high number of students were not sure if Atlantic Canadian short stories were famous. One possible interpretation is that even though many of them had heard about short stories from Atlantic Canada, the majority of them had heard about those stories through school or university and not out of a personal interest or because Atlantic Canadian short stories were hyped. Therefore, the students while sensing there must be some kind of importance to these stories as they were included in their syllabus, doubted that those stories were also popular outside of school or university. It was very important for me to find out if Atlantic Canadian short stories were taught at school. I advanced the hypothesis that the majority of students had not dealt with Atlantic Canadian short stories at school based on the assumption that teachers rather focus on British literature. Regarding this question, five out of 12 people in the Tremblay group had been taught Atlantic Canadian short stories at school, five participants had not focused on short stories from the East Coast at school and two people were not sure. In the Jennifer Andrews group, 22 people had been taught Atlantic Canadian literature at school, eleven were not sure and four had not been taught short stories from the East Coast at school. In the McLeod-group five people answered “yes” they had been taught Atlantic Canadian short stories at school, ten people answered “no” and five were not sure. The following graph illustrates the outcomes of this question:

Did you deal with Atlantic Canadian short stories at school? 100,00% 90,00% 80,00% 70,00% 60,00% yes 50,00% 40,00% no 30,00% I am not sure 20,00% 10,00% 0,00% Tremblay- Andrews-group McLeod-group group

As can be seen, in the Andrews-group there was the largest number of students who had been taught Atlantic Canadian short stories at school. My hypothesis was thus refuted because only in the McLeod-group did the majority not deal with Atlantic Canadian short stories at school. Therefore, it can be assumed that whether students deal with Atlantic Canadian short stories at school depends largely on their teacher. However, it is great that such a high number of students had already dealt with literature from their region at school. The McLeod-group was the only group in which the majority of the participants had not been taught about Atlantic Canadian literature at school. Also, this group was the only group in which the majority of the participants were enrolled in programmes in which literature is not dealt with at all. Therefore, the conclusion could be drawn that students who are exposed to Atlantic literature at school are more likely to develop a further interest in literature and thus are more likely to choose programmes at university, which include some kind of literary studies. The students who answered that they had not dealt with Atlantic Canadian short stories at school were additionally asked why they think that they had not been exposed to Atlantic Canadian literature at school. In the Tremblay-group four of the participants gave very similar answers, saying that Atlantic Canadian literature or Canadian literature in general was not considered as “important literature”. The other two people were not sure why they had not been taught about the literature from their region. Also in the Andrews-group the answer that regional literature was not

79 considered as important appeared twice. In the McLeod-group four people answered that they were not sure why they had not been exposed to Atlantic Canadian short stories, four students stated that they had done other, more popular literature instead and one person said that there were no good story tellers in Atlantic Canada. The answers of students make it clear that it is a widespread thought that regional literature is not as important literature that is known all across the world. The next question “Would you feel deprived of something if you had never read an Atlantic Canadian short story?” was answered very differently by the three groups. The answer categories to this question were “Yes, I would feel deprived”, “No, I would not feel deprived” and “I couldn´t care less”. In the Tremblay-group eight participants answered that they would feel deprived and four answered that they would not feel deprived. In the Andrews-group nine people answered that they would feel deprived, 16 answered that they would not feel deprived, 11 said that they could not care less and one person did not answer this question at all. In the McLeod-group two people answered that they would feel deprived, 11 stated that they would not feel deprived and seven claimed that they could not care less. The following graph shows the evaluation of this question, illustrated in percent.

Would you feel deprived of something if you had never read an Atlantic Canadian short story? 100,00% 90,00% 80,00% 70,00% 60,00% Yes, I would feel deprived. 50,00% No, I would not feel deprived. 40,00% 30,00% I couldn´t care less. 20,00% No answer. 10,00% 0,00% Tremblay- Andrews- McLeod- group group group

As the graph illustrates the results of the three groups differ greatly. While it is very obvious in the Tremblay-group that the participants are highly interested in Atlantic Canadian literature, the majority of the other two groups state that they would not feel deprived if they had never read an Atlantic Canadian short story. Additionally, the participants were asked to explain why they chose a certain answer. People in the 80

Tremblay-group who answered that they would feel deprived explained their answer by claiming that it was important to know about one´s culture and that literature was a part of their culture. Others said that they would want to support regional authors. In the Andrews-group people who answered that they would feel deprived said that it was simply important to know about the literature of one´s region, that Atlantic Canadian short stories were part of their culture, or that they enjoyed literature and therefore would feel deprived if they had never read an Atlantic Canadian short story. In the McLeod-group only two people answered that they would feel deprived. They explained their answers saying that they wanted to know of local authors and they would feel deprived of something because a lot of good literature comes from Atlantic Canada. Thus, in the answers it can be seen that students realize that literature is part of their culture and that knowledge about regional literature increases their knowledge about their own culture and about themselves. Also the people who said that they would not feel deprived had to explain their answers. In the Tremblay-group people who answered that they would not feel deprived said either that all short stories were the same no matter where they came from, or short stories were not that important, or if you were not exposed to Atlantic Canadian short stories you did not know what you were missing. In the Andrews-group, 16 people answered that they would not feel deprived. Some of them mentioned the exact same aspects as the participants of the Tremblay-group. Additionally, the participants claimed that Atlantic Canadian short stories did not offer a unique literary experience, that history and tales were important but no one should have to learn about these kinds of things if they were not interested, and some said that even though they would not feel deprived if they had never read an Atlantic Canadian short story they would still find it nice to read some Atlantic Canadian literature. In the McLeod-group the eleven people who answered that they would not feel deprived answered that this was either because they felt no personal connection to Atlantic Canadian literature, or because they had read a lot of other great literature or because they did not like the Atlantic Canadian short stories they had read and therefore would not mind to never have read them. Further, also in this group students gave the same answer which also appeared in the other groups, namely that they would not know what they were missing if they had never read an Atlantic Canadian short story and therefore would not feel deprived of something. Lastly, the answers of people who chose to say “I couldn´t care less” are to be summarized. In the Andrews-group eleven people

81 answered that they could not care less if they had never read an Atlantic Canadian short story. To the question why they chose to give this answer, they said that while literary texts as such were important it was irrelevant where they came from, that they could also learn about their heritage from other sources and that it simply would not affect them to have never read an Atlantic Canadian short story. In the McLeod-group seven people answered that they could not care less and mentioned that Atlantic Canadian short stories would not change their outlook on anything, that they did not like short stories in general, that they were not interested in Atlantic Canadian literature or culture and that a lot of the Atlantic Canadian folk stories were passed on orally so they would still have been exposed to them without having read an Atlantic Canadian short story. Even though certain answers appear more often, there is still a wide range in different answers. This shows that literature and especially regional literature has a higher value to some students than to others. Again in the McLeod- group the majority of participants would not feel deprived if they had never got in touch with Atlantic Canadian short stories. The reason for this might be that the majority of the McLeod group does not have any literature classes at university and therefore might as some people in their answers phrased it “not know what they are missing”. The next question, “Is it important that students are taught about their region´s literature”, was a very interesting one for me. I wanted to find out if students see a connection between their region´s literature and their culture or if they simply are or simply are not interested in learning about literature from their region. This question was answered as follows:

Is it important that students are taught about their region´s literature? 100% 90% 80% 70% 60% Yes. 50% No. 40% I don´t care. 30% No answer 20% 10% 0% Tremblay-group Andrews-group McLeod-group

It is visible that especially for the participants of the Tremblay-group it is essential to be taught about their region´s literature, as all of them answered the question with “yes”. In all three groups however, the majority of the participants agreed that to be taught about their region´s literature was very important. What is obvious though is that in the McLeod-group 30% of the people answered that they did not care. This again shows that in this group the participants are probably not as interested in literature and might not value literary works as highly as the participants of the other two groups. Further, the participants of all groups were asked to state why they chose a certain answer. In the Tremblay-group all participants answered that it is important to be taught about their region´s literature. Many of them explained their answer saying that it was integral to an understanding of their home, culture and history. Another person said that if students were not taught about their region´s literature it would seem as if their region was not important. Further, another person said that literature showed a region in a different light. In the Andrews-group 32 people answered “yes” and thus said that being taught about their region´s literature was important to them. They explained in their answers that it was important to have some knowledge about the region you come from, that regional literature was part of their culture, that it was important to show that people from any region could be successful, that regional literature created pride, that Canadians should be taught about all kinds of literature and especially about Canadian literature that it supported local writers, that regional literature could teach local history and that reading regional literature might open the eyes of a student looking to pursue local writing as a career. 83

In the McLeod-group the eleven people who answered that it was important that students were taught about their region´s literature said that it was important to have some basic knowledge about one´s region, that regional literature was part of their culture and that it created pride about their region. All those answers show that for many students it is important to be taught about their culture, their history, their heritage through literature from the region they come from. Various people stated that reading regional literature helped to make them more aware of where they came from and it also helped to create pride about their place of belonging. Another essential question of the survey was to find out if region is important to the students. Thus, I wanted to find out if the students feel more connected to the region they grew up in than to Canada as a country. This question was asked openly so that the students had the chance to explain their answer. However, first of all they all answered with “yes”, “no” or “I don´t know”, which is illustrated in the following graph.

Is region important to you? 100,00% 90,00% 80,00% 70,00% 60,00% Yes. 50,00% No. 40,00% I don´t know. 30,00% No answer. 20,00% 10,00% 0,00% Tremblay-group Andrews-group McLeod-group

The outcome of this question was again very interesting. While in the Tremblay- and Andrews-group the majority answered that region was important to them, 55% of the participants in the McLeod-group answered that region was not important to them. Thus, it could be assumed that the interest in Atlantic Canadian literature might be connected to how much region is valued by the participants. Again, all the participants were asked to explain their answer. In the Tremblay-group, the nine people who answered that region was important to them, explained their answer by saying that the region they grew up in shaped who they were and that region was 84 important to them because they were proud of where they came from. In the Andrews-group 29 people claimed region to be important to them. They stated that region created a sense of community, that it was important to know where you were from, that the region people were from helped to define who they were, that region was important because it was their home and that region was important to them because they were proud of the place they were from. In the McLeod-group nine people stated that region was important to them. They explained their answer by saying that region helped to define who they were, that it was important to support people and literature from one´s region, that region was important to them because they were proud of where they were from or because it was their home. It is visible that among the people who find region important many participants share the reasons for their answers. Regarding the people who said that region was not important to them the two people in the Tremblay-group who answered this said that Canada was Canada and region did not matter to them. To them region was not important because they wanted to be open for all cultures. In the Andrews-group five people answered that region was not important to them explaining that they had no strong connection to the region, that they could not care less where they lived or that region was not important but rather the people who defined the region were important. In the McLeod-group, in which eleven people answered that region was not important to them, the participants mentioned that they did not have a personal attachment to the region, rather they felt more part of the country than the region, that region was not important to them because they tried to keep an open mind to places and that region was not important to them because they lived in a time were people moved a lot. All in all, the survey provides very interesting insights into the opinions of Atlantic Canadian students. Additionally, it emphasizes that how highly students value regional literature depends on their own interest, and whether they have dealt with regional literature at school. It was shown that students who dealt with Atlantic Canadian literature at school value regional literature more and are also more likely to develop a further interest in literature. Thus, also the program the students are taking at university might be influenced to some extent by their early literary education. This is confirmed by the fact that the Tremblay-group and the Andrews- group show rather high rates of interest in literature. The majority of the participants in those two groups had dealt with Atlantic Canadian literature at school. As a result,

85 the participants of these groups seem to see literature as important for the development of the human being they become and also as an essential part of their culture. The McLeod-group is the only group in which the majority of the participants had not dealt with Atlantic Canadian literature at school. In contrast to the other groups, the McLeod-group consists of students who are enrolled in studies, such as business, kinesiology, nursing, mechanical engineering and is characterized by a lower interest in literature. Many people of this group tend to see literature as not that important for themselves or influential on the human being they become. Thus it can be seen that the early literary education could have an effect on the further interests of the students and also on the field of study they pick at university. It was also very interesting that the question whether region is important to the students yielded such different results in the three groups. While for the majority of the Tremblay-group and the Andrews-group region is important, the narrow majority, to be precise 55%, of the McLeod-group said that region was not important to them. This indicates that the interest in literature might be connected to an interest in region. Thus, students who are aware of and interested in their region´s literature might be more likely to feel a personal connection to their region. Further, it could be seen that the students who attended Tony Tremblay´s class and were already made aware of literature, film and arts of Atlantic Canada had a very positive attitude towards regional literature and region. Thus, it can be suggested that the more knowledge students receive about their region and what comes from their region the more they might value their region.

7. Conclusion

In the second chapter of this thesis a theoretical approach to regionalism was provided. First it was described that most Canadians feel rather connected to the regions they are from than to Canada as a whole, due to the immense landmass of the country and due to the fact that there is no shared heritage across the country. Then, the history of the study of regionalism was dealt with briefly and the shift in how regionalism is seen is described. Further, it was described that the image of Atlantic Canada is constructed by the people living in the center of the country and being kept up by the people living in the region. In the first chapter also the cultural background of Atlantic Canada was being focused on and the Depression in the Maritimes was

86 concentrated on. During the Depression there was a decline in the main industries of the Maritimes and numerous people emigrated from the region. Then, the first chapter briefly concentrates on literature from Atlantic Canada. Some of the main themes that appear in Atlantic Canadian works and some characteristics of Atlantic Canadian texts were shown. Additionally, certain Atlantic Canadian authors were mentioned and the shift in the writing style, themes and settings of the older generation of Atlantic Canadian writers to the new generation of writers from Atlantic Canada was depicted. The last aspect of the first chapter was to give a definition of regionalism. Regionalism was defined as a social construction, which is created by people living in the center of the country in the way they see the region, and by people living within the region in the way they keep up the constructed image. Further, regionalism is the construct of the social, economical and political history of a region. The third chapter of this thesis concentrated on the province of Nova Scotia. First, some factual information about the province was given and then the biographies of certain Nova Scotian authors were focused on. Thus, it was shown that those writers do not only write short stories about Nova Scotia, but actually have a personal connection to the province and a great understanding of what it is like to live in Nova Scotia. Not only is the everyday life dealt with in the short stories, but also the main struggles and the harsh environment of the province. The analyses of the short stories provided an insight into the lives of Nova Scotians, their heritage, the main industries of the region, such as the fishing- and mining industry and the economic difficulties the people living in the region suffer from. The next chapter dealt with Newfoundland. At the beginning of the chapter some Newfoundland authors were focused on. Again, the focus on their biographies emphasized the cultural context in which the authors have lived and thus their insider perspective on the province. Then, various short stories were looked at in detail and were analysed in terms of regional aspects. Thus, the mining and culture of Newfoundland, the lives of Newfoundlanders, outmigration from the region and economic- and social difficulties were dealt with. It was shown that through their short stories, the authors give an insight into the lives in the region and the main struggles of the region. In chapter five, the interviews I had done with experts on the field of regionalism were summarised, compared and analysed. The interviews provided

87 interesting insights into the opinions of Canadian scholars who academically studied regionalism. Certain questions of the interviews were focused on in this chapter and it was interesting to find similarities and differences in the answers of the experts. The last chapter was based on the survey I conducted during my stay in Fredericton, New Brunswick. In this survey 69 participants of Canadian origin took part and there were three different groups of participants. One group had already gotten an insight into literature from Atlantic Canada, the second group had attended one of two introductory classes on literature and the last group simply shared the same residence. In the last group (McLeod-group) many participants were enrolled in studies in which they do not have to take literature classes and therefore it was assumable that they had never attended a literature class on university level. The answers of the three groups were evaluated and partly illustrated in graphs. Against the hypothesis the majority of the participants showed an interest in regional literature and Atlantic Canadian literature in particular. Many students found it important to know about the literature from their region because it is part of their culture and the knowledge that there are successful authors in their region can help to create pride for their place of belonging. It was interesting to find out that the McLeod-group was the only group in which there was a rather limited interest in regional literature. Also with regard to the importance of region in the McLeod-group more people answered that region was not important to them. In the other two groups, however, the majority stated that region was important to them. Therefore, it could be interpreted that firstly, the literary interest is connected to the value for one´s region and secondly that the program students are enrolled has an influence on how highly they value regional literature and region itself. To conclude, I hope that my thesis has helped to show that regional literature has often been wrongly associated with hinterland and narrow-minded authors. On the contrary, there are various facets of regional writing and also urbanity finds its place in regional texts, which could be seen for example in the new generation of Atlantic Canadian short story writers. The short stories dealt with in this thesis provide an insight into the lives of Atlantic Canadians. They show on the one hand the way in which Atlantic Canada is framed from the outside and also the way in which Atlantic Canadians present themselves. Additionally, through the stories the authors, who are all Atlantic Canadians themselves portray the social- and economic difficulties people are facing in the region. Thus, the stories are frequently

88 characterized by a focus on the theme of loss. Not only do the characters in the short stories often lose their jobs, but also the loss of family members or the loss of the people´s heritage is dealt with in the stories. Thus, many of the challenges in Atlantic Canada, such as being a marginalized region that depends on tourism and on its picturesque and peaceful image, a region that is often characterized as a have-not province and that is confronted with immense economic difficulties and outmigration, are depicted through literature. Even though rather negative topics are dealt with frequently in Atlantic Canadian short stories, the authors never miss a chance to show their sense of humour in their stories.

8. Bibliography

8.1 Primary Sources

Choyce, Lesley ed. (2001). Atlantica: Stories from the Maritimes and Newfoundland. Fredericton: Goose Lane Editions.

Coady, Lynn (2000). Play the Monster Blind. Canada: Vintage Canada.

Crummey, Michael (2003). Flesh and Blood. Canada: Anchor Canada.

MacLeod, Alistair (1976). The Lost Salt Gift of Blood. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Ltd.

MacLeod, Alistair (1986). As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and other stories. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Ltd.

MacLeod, Alistair (2000). Island: The Collected Stories. London: Vintage Books.

Moore, Lisa (2002) Open. Toronto: House of Anansi Press Ltd.

8.2 Secondary Sources

Cohen, Erik (1988). “Authenticity and Commoditization in Tourism”. In: Jafar, Jafari, ed. Annals of Tourism Research. Vol. 15, no. 3. USA: Pergamon Press plc. 371-386.

Conrad, Margaret R. and James K. Hiller (2001). Atlantic Canada: A Region in the Making. Canada: Oxford University Press.

Creelman, David (2003). Setting in the East: Maritime Realist Fiction. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen´s University Press.

Davey, Frank (1997). “Towards the Ends of Regionalism”. In: Christian Riegel and Herb Wyile eds. A Sense of Place: Re-Evaluating Regionalism in Canadian and American Writing. Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press. 1-18.

Draper, Gary (1999). “Fairly Ordinary Lives: A Conversation with Michael Crummey”. In: Pamely Mulloy ed. The New Quarterly. Waterloo: St. Jerome University. 24-32.

Epprecht, Marc (1991). „Atlantic Canada and ‘the End of History’: Postmodernism and Regional Underdevelopment”. In: Dalhousie Review. Vol. 70. Halifax: Dalhousie University Press Limited. 429-458.

Fuller, Danielle (2001). “Living in Hopes – Atlantic Realities and Realisms”. In: Canadian Literature. Vancouver: The University of British Columbia. 199-202.

Hodd, Thomas (2008). “Shoring against Our Ruin: Sheldon Currie, Alistair MacLeod, and the Heritage Preservation Narrative”. In: Jennifer Andrews and John Clement Ball eds. Studies in Canadian Literature Études En Littérature Canadienne. Fredericton: The University Press of New Brunswick. 191-209.

Löschnigg, Maria (2014). The Contemporary Canadian Short Story in English: Continuity and Change. Trier: WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier.

Marshall, Susanne (2008). “As if there were just the two choices”: Region and Cosmopolis in Lisa Moore´s Short Fiction”. In: In: Jennifer Andrews and John Clement Ball eds. Studies in Canadian Literature Études En Littérature Canadienne. Fredericton: The University Press of New Brunswick. 80-95.

McKay, Ian (1994). The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia. Montréal: McGill-Queen´s University Press.

Radcliffe Rogers, Barbara and Stillman Rogers (2009). Travel Adventures Newfoundland. Montréal: Ulysses Travel Publications.

Reiter, Daniela (2014). Interview with Tony Tremblay. Unpublished.

Reiter, Daniela (2014). Interview with Gwendolyn Davies. Unpublished.

Reiter, Daniela (2014). Interview with Herb Wyile. Unpublished.

Reiter, Daniela (2014). Interview with David Creelman. Unpublished.

Reiter, Daniela (2014). Interview with Jennifer Andrews. Unpublished.

Reiter, Daniela (2015). Interview with Alexander MacLeod. Unpublished.

Tremblay, Tony (2008). “Lest on too close sight I miss the darling illusion”: The Politics or the Centre in “Reading Maritime””. In: Jennifer Andrews and John Clement Ball eds. Studies in Canadian Literature Études En Littérature Canadienne. Fredericton: The University Press of New Brunswick. 23-39.

Tremblay, Tony (2014). “English 2473: Atlantic Canada in Literature, Film and Art.” Unpublished course handout. Fall term 2014. University of New Brunswick.

Wyile, Herb et al. (1997). “Introduction: Regionalism Revisited”. In: Christian Riegel and Herb Wyile eds. A Sense of Place: Re-Evaluating Regionalism in Canadian and American Writing. Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press. ix-xiv.

Wyile, Herb and Jeannete Lynes. (2008). “Surf´s Up! The Rising Tide of Atlantic- Canadian Literature”. In: Jennifer Andrews and John Clement Ball eds. Studies in Canadian Literature Études En Littérature Canadienne. Fredericton: The University Press of New Brunswick. 5-22.

8.3 Online Sources

Chafe, Paul (2008). “Lisa Moore“. The Canadian Encyclopedia. [online]. http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/lisa-moore/ [2015, May 20].

Choyce, Lesley (2013). “About Lesley”. Lesley Choyce. [online]. http://www.lesleychoyce.com/ [2015, May 13]. 92

Dragland, Stan (2002). “Michael Crummey (1965-)“. Heritage Newfoundland and Labrador. [online]. http://www.heritage.nf.ca/articles/arts/michael-crummey.php [2015, May 20].

HighbeamTMResearch. Inc. (2015). “Newfoundland and Labrador (province, Canada)”. The Columbia Encyclopedia. 6th edition, 2014 [online]. http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Newfoundland_and_Labrador.aspx [2015; May 19].

Giannetta, J. (2011). “Nova Scotia - facts”. The Canadian Encyclopedia. [online]. http://www.aitc.sk.ca/saskschools/canada/facts/ns.html [2015, May 13].

Government of Newfoundland and Labrador (2015). “Mines”. Department of Natural Resources. [online]. http://www.nr.gov.nl.ca/nr/mines/index.html [2015, May 19].

Johnston, Wayne (2006). “Author Biography”. Wayne Johnston. [online]. http://waynejohnston.ca/authorbio.html [2015, May 20].

Munroe, Susan (2014). “Nova Scotia Facts: Key Facts About the Province of Nova Scotia, Canada” [online]. http://canadaonline.about.com/cs/provinces/p/novascotiafacts.htm [2015, May 13].

McCullough, J.J. (2015). “Atlantic Canada”. [online]. http://www.thecanadaguide.com/the-maritimes. [2015, March 10].

Newfoundland and Labrador Tourism (2015). “Geography”. Newfoundland Labrador Canada. [online]. http://www.newfoundlandlabrador.com/AboutThisPlace/Geography [2015, May 19].

Parini, Jay (2014). “Alistair MacLeod Obituary”. The Guardian. [online]. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/28/alistair-macleod [2015, May 14].

Wyile, Herb et al (2007). “Alistair MacLeod - Biography”. Waterfront Views. [online]. http://waterfrontviews.acadiau.ca/flash/macleod/macleod_bio.htm [2015, May 13]. 93

Wyile, Herb et al (2007). “Lesley Choyce - Biography”. Waterfront Views. [online]. http://waterfrontviews.acadiau.ca/flash/choyce/choyce_bio.htm [2015, May 13].

Wyile, Herb et al (2007). “Sheldon Currie - Biography”. Waterfront Views. [online]. http://waterfrontviews.acadiau.ca/flash/currie/currie_bio.htm [2015, May 13].

Wyile, Herb et al (2007). “Lynn Coady - Biography”. Waterfront Views. [online]. http://waterfrontviews.acadiau.ca/flash/coady/coady_bio.htm [2015, May 13].

Wyile, Herb et al (2007). “Michael Crummey - Biography”. Waterfront Views. [online]. http://waterfrontviews.acadiau.ca/flash/crummey/crummey_bio.htm [2015, May 19].

Wyile, Herb et al (2007). “Wayne Johnston - Biography”. Waterfront Views. [online]. http://waterfrontviews.acadiau.ca/flash/johnston/johnston_bio.htm [2015, May 19].

Wyile, Herb et al (2007). “Lisa Moore - Biography”. Waterfront Views. [online]. http://waterfrontviews.acadiau.ca/flash/moore/moore_bio.htm [2015, May 19].

8.4 Images

http://www.lannan.org/art/artist/don-usner/P50 [2015, June 14].

http://canpoetry.library.utoronto.ca/choyce/ [2015, June 1].

http://waterfrontviews.acadiau.ca/flash/currie/currie_bio.htm [2015, June 1].

http://www.barcelonareview.com/19/e_lc.htm [2015, June 1].

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/may/04/galore-michael-crummey-review [2015, June 1].

http://www.mun.ca/gazette/past/issues/vol39no12/newspage17.php [2015, June 14].

http://www.cbc.ca/books/canadawrites/2014/04/gabriel-garcia-marquez-remembered- by-michael-crummey-and-lisa-moore.html [2015, June 1].

9. Appendix

9.1 Interview with Herb Wyile

(October 25, 2014)

DR: How did you get to work on regionalism and on Atlantic Canadian short stories?

HW: That came about actually during my Master´s because I was studying at McGill University. I wasn´t sure you know I had an idea of what I wanted to do, but I couldn´t find a supervisor and one of the professors there basically said to me, “You are from New Brunswick. Why don´t you do something on David Adams Richards?” It was a time when David Adams Richards was just starting to become nationally known as a writer. I sort of went, “Yeah, why don´t I do that?” and as I started kind of looking at the criticism on Richards there was not much, but book reviews and so on. The topic of regionalism just kept coming up again and again and so the thesis turned into a thesis that wasn´t just about Richards but in fact was about Maritime regionalism and from there I went on to write a PHD about regionalism. So it ended up being a meta- critical dissertation about regionalism. So I was writing about how people write about regionalism. How people use the term. Then I stopped writing about regionalism and about the Maritimes for quite a while but then I got a job here [Acadia University] and then I thought “since I am here I should get back into Atlantic Literature”. My predecessor was in fact Gwen Davies. So she moved to UNB and it was very lucky, but I won´t take up time talking about that, but it was very lucky a position came up.

DR: Are there also classes on regionalism?

HW: Not on regionalism, but we have a course on Atlantic poetry and Atlantic fiction.

DR: Nova Scotia and the Maritimes are beautiful. Is that what kept you grounded teaching here rather than elsewhere?

HW: Well, I came along with my wife who actually got a job here first. Neither of us is originally from the Maritimes, but we both more or less grew up here. I studied at 96

UNB and then we moved out West because she wanted to study at the University of Alberta. After we both graduated we were looking for jobs and she got a children´s literature job here. We were very happy about that. Then I was figuring out what I was going to do. I almost quit Academia to tell you the truth because there aren´t a lot of jobs, but the position came open and I was lucky enough to get it. To come back to your question more specifically though, we are very happy to be back in the Maritimes. We really like the climate, the geography, it is sort of socially more intimate and it is by the sea. Those are all very nice things.

DR: Yeah that is great indeed! Did you find it difficult to study Atlantic regionalism in depth or did you find there is a lot of easily accessible knowledge?

HW: No it is not easy, no. It is getting better and I think that now there is a whole sort of new generation that is interested in Atlantic Canada, is sort of galvanized by the work that the generation of us have started doing. There is a granting agency called SSHRC. I won´t get into the details about it but I got a SSHRC grant to do this project on Atlantic Canada and Atlantic Canadian literature specifically. This is what turned into Anne of Tim Horton's, I don´t know if you have come across that yet, and also the website “Waterfront views”. What I found doing the groundwork for that was that there were a few articles about some of the contemporary writers but even somebody as famous and as accomplished about Alistair MacLeod. There is not all that much written about him when you compare him to someone like Margaret Atwood right? So one of the reasons why I put together the website was to make all that information available. As I did the research that I had to do for Anne of Tim Horton’s I decided “okay I am also going to put this website together so that this research isn´t just for me, it is for everybody”.

DR: Yes that is great! I already took a look at the website and it´s very helpful.

HW: It was kind of an afterthought to tell you the truth. My main priority was to write this book, but the website turned out to be quite useful. I don´t have any money to expand it. I would love to do more interviews like I did when I had funding. I would like to expand it, but that requires money to hire students and it is also a question of

97 time. But what I do try to do is update the bibliographies. I have a student working with me this year just through the department and I try to keep up every couple of years. So that people don´t look at it and say “Look, Michael Crummy has published two novels since that”. The short answer is there is still not that much, but I published Anne of Tim Horton’s, David Creelman published Setting in the East, Danielle Fuller published Writing the Everyday: Women´s Textual Communities in Atlantic Canada and it is about Atlantic women writers and it is about poetry and some short fiction. That is kind of a major publication in Atlantic literature. I think she writes about some Newfoundland women writers that might be useful to you. All that stuff like the most main publications are there on “Waterfront views”.

DR: As you know I have started reading about regionalism in the last weeks and to me it seems that regionalism is mostly about traditions, heritage (Scottish, Gaelic), the old vs. the new, the youth vs. the old generation of people, the harsh environment in which people live and work, such as in the mines or on boats. Would you agree with my current view on regionalism?

HW: I would agree up to a point. I think that the main thing I would want to say to you about regionalism before you really embark on this project is that how critics view regionalism has shifted in the last 20 to 30 years. This is an international phenomenon, but it has also happened in Canadian literary criticism as well. Before that people would talk about regionalism as a very fixed thing. To use a famous metaphor, Canada was often seen as a mosaic of regions. You have got the Maritimes, Central Canada, the Prairies, the West Coast, the North. Those are the basic regions. They were seen as having these sort of fixed and distinctive characteristics that made them separate from each other. And it often took the form of this very reductive analysis. What has happened over the last 20 to 30 years is that critics have questioned that. They pointed to the fact that regions are internally very diverse, they are very often overlapping in a very broad sense. Region has shifted from being something very concrete, socially and culturally material to something that is essentially constructed. It is a way of thinking about place. We kind of looked back at those traditional notions of regionalism and see that is being

98 constructed consensus rather than the reality. That is part one of my answer to your question. Part two is that at the same time I do think that there are certain recurring features of life in the Maritimes, in Atlantic Canada that do make it a very different place to live than elsewhere in the country. One thing that you have got to wrestle with is the relationship between the Maritimes and Newfoundland because the idea of Atlantic Canada is a very recent one. The reason for this is that Newfoundland only entered confederation in 1949 and so the Maritimes had been sort of this entity with a fairly long historical background. It was only in the second half of the 20th century that people started thinking about the East as Atlantic Canada. And what you find is that some critics really draw a line, and I would say especially Newfoundland critics, between Newfoundland and the Maritimes. They really aren´t that comfortable with the idea of Atlantic Canada. Other critics and I am one of them feel that there is enough that is shared and similar across those four provinces that it makes it very compelling to talk about them altogether. I certainly recognize those important differences between the Maritimes and Newfoundland and I understand why say David Creelman when he wrote Setting in the East. He basically said the Maritimes and Newfoundland are very different so I am going to write about the Maritimes. And in Anne of Tim Horton’s I sort of said that I think there are these important characteristics running through the whole region so I am going to talk about Atlantic Canada. It is not necessarily a strong disagreement, but you do have to be aware that it is a point of dispute. I think certainly Newfoundlanders feel very strongly about being a different place geographically, culturally, historically and probably socially as well.

DR: Yes, it´s a very complex topic isn´t it?

HW: It is. It is more complex than I think people tend to credit. And the concept of regionalism has gone through a kind of revolution I would say and it is very important to be aware of that.

DR: What do you find interesting about regionalism and Atlantic Canadian short stories?

HW: Maritime short stories or Atlantic Canadian short stories? [Laughs] It is funny, people even do it here. In the rest of Canada that slip happens all the time. They go “whatever! Atlantic Canada or the Maritimes- what is the difference” and of course if you live here you go “Sorry but there is a difference!” Like if I said, “Ontario, Quebec – what is the difference!” [laughs]

Okay...I think you have to ask me that question again now. [laughs]

DR: What do you find interesting about regionalism and Atlantic Canadian short stories?

HW: Do you want me to talk about the region or about the literature? DR: Well first about the region and then about the literature.

HW: Well obviously the personal connection makes a big difference. What I tend to find is that people who work on Atlantic Canadian literature tend to have some personal connection. Either they have lived here, teach here or they have some kind of family connection. It doesn´t just tend to happen through the literature itself, which I find kind of interesting. Uuuhm yeah it is a really good question! [Laughs] Well I can´t help to think that part of it is the identification with the underdog that you really come up against when you live here. I don´t think it is as bad now but 30 years ago when you travelled from the Maritimes elsewhere in the country people were pretty patronizing and disparaging. They had and I think they still have these incredible stereotypes about the region. I think part of it is about trying to give credit to what is a very complex and interesting place. That is one point. Another point is that the region obviously is at a very challenging point in its history. It is dealing with severe financial challenges, outmigration, it´s kind of paddling against the political current in the sense that people elsewhere in the country don´t give much consideration to it in terms of national political issues. Atlantic Canada for a lot of Canadians just doesn´t really count. Except that they see it as this quaint and beautiful and culturally rich place to go to visit. You know that is all bound up with it as well. A third thing I just find Maritimers, Newfoundlanders are very rich people. They are interesting people. They are not bland. There is a bit of a stereotype of

100 them as naturally friendly. If you live here you know that that is not always the case and it only goes so deep with some people. But I think that life to a point is more laid back here and it isn´t about business all the time and being occupied and being busy. To suggest that that is the case in other parts of the country is also a stereotype, but I think comparatively it is probably true. I think I will leave it at that. DR: And do you want to say anything about the literature?

HW: Oh yes. Well I think that a lot of that manifests itself in the literature as well. I would say one thing I like about Atlantic literature in a very broad sense is its humor with writers who are predominantly funny like someone like Wayne Johnston in Newfoundland. But also with writers who are seen as more serious like Michael Crummey for instance. He is a pretty serious writer. But there is a lot of really good humor. Michael Winter is a very funny writer. Lisa Moore is sort of more serious, but there is just a lot of great funny moments in her work as well. So that would be another thing. I would say that it is a less pretentious literature. I think that is a quality that is there.

DR: What would you say are characteristics of Atlantic Canadian short stories? You already said the humour. But is there anything else that you would say that especially characterizes Atlantic Canadian short stories?

HW: Well I think this is true to Atlantic Canadian literature as in general, but certainly true of the short stories is that I think compared to the rest of the country, say B.C., the Prairies, Central Canadian writing there is probably less experimentalism in Atlantic Canadian short stories. It is in general a kind of more accessible and realistic literature. That is a bit of a stereotype of Atlantic writing as well and one has to be careful about that, but I think that it is fairly true when you look at the body of work that is out there. I would have said and I think I will still say that it tends to be more rural. There is greater level of attention to life in rural areas but that is shifting in a big way, especially in Newfoundland. When you look at the new generation, like Lisa Moore, Ed Riche, Michael Winter and Jessica Grant - those are all very urban writers.

DR: Do you have a favorite author with regard to Atlantic Canadian short stories?

101

HW: [laughs] You are going to get me in trouble here! [laughs] Well, I have to tip my heart to Alistair Macleod. I mean I look at the stories that are in Island and I have said this before, we had Alistair here for a conference that I organized last summer introducing him and one of the points that I made is that his stories are going to last. They are stories that are going to stand the test of time, they are incredibly rich. No story is timeless, but I think that some fiction is more tied to its time than others. His I think is literature for the ages as far as I am concerned. But I also would like to give special mention to Lisa Moore whose stories are really aesthetically rich. Her style is just shimmering and there is just so much going on there at the level of sentence.

DR: Yes, I also love the stories by Alistair MacLeod. HW: They are just beautiful! DR: Indeed! And I really like his style of writing. HW: Yeah, it is a very lyrical style, but also very rich. The argument that I made in Anne of Tim Horton’s about his work is that it is a lot more biting and serious than I think he is often given credit for. There is a lot of pretty critical commentary in the work. Not just in the stories but in The Great Mischief as well. His son is an excellent writer as well. His stories are set in presumably Windsor so they are kind of urban Ontario, but they are great.

DR: Are there any recent articles on regionalism? Are there any new ones to be published soon?

HW: No. One thing I would point you to is a new book on Newfoundland literature by Jennifer Bowering Delisle. What she is writing about is the Newfoundland Diaspora. So basically she is writing about Newfoundlanders who have moved away from Newfoundland. That I think is another key aspect of the Atlantic Provinces. I mentioned outmigration. What that means is that there is a whole sort of Diaspora of Maritimer’s and Newfoundlanders.

DR: Do you have any advice for me as I am writing my Master´s thesis on regionalism?

102

HW: I guess I would answer that question with a question for you. What are you interested in? Are you interested in politics, culture or sociology? All three of those things are kind of intermingled obviously, but you might prioritize one or the other. For me for instance, in Anne of Tim Horton’s I was particularly interested in the political edge that I see emerging in East coast writing. I see a bit of a spirit of defiance. I see writers who are much more culturally confident about their place and being willing not to be looked down upon anymore, being quite willing to make fun of those who are looking down at them. That is what interested me. I am asking what interests you.

DR: For me it is probably more the cultural aspect.

HW: Alright. I definitely do have one piece of advice for you to start. That is to be fairly careful about not being too preoccupied with traditional culture on the East Coast. It is what people find attractive, but it is also politically quite complicated and problematic. In the sense that it is part of the stereotype that people have of the East coast that it is still a very traditional place and really not much has changed since the 19th century. Well, a lot has changed since the 19th century. What I think writers are increasingly emphasizing is that there is still a lot about the region that is sort of traditional, but our sense of traditionalism is very much in dialogue with modernity, progress and globalization. To like quote Michael Winter for instance, he has said in an interview that there really is not such a thing as the purely local or the purely regional anymore because it is all in this kind of dialogue with the present, with globalization and with the global modernism. So he will talk about going down the road from his house in rural Newfoundland and talk into some ancient old-timer there. But that guy would have a satellite dish on his shack and he will just have finished skyping with someone in some far flown part of the country. Certainly if you look at the work that has been done more recently on Atlantic literature by David Creelman, by myself, by Danielle Fuller you will see an engagement with this idea and the name that will keep coming up is Ian McKay and his book The Quest of the Folk. I am not necessarily suggest that you read it, but if you are going to be reading about Atlantic regionalism and contemporary Atlantic Canada chances are you are going to come up against it. I summarize it in Anne of Tim Horton’s, I am pretty sure David Creelman engages with it in Setting in the East. In a nutshell what he argues is that in the early 20th century urbanites, people from urban centers, middleclass people went

103 out into rural Nova Scotia to discover what they thought of as the folk. Essentially, the rural peasantry. To try to discover and preserve this very pure and authentic traditional folk culture. He makes the argument that they sort of created this very powerful stereotype that arguably has continued to the present and in a lot of ways the tourist industry in the Atlantic Provinces still dines out on that image. It is kind of troubling because it is a certain presentation of culture on the East Coast for consumption by others. So it becomes a kind of consumable stereotype. That is one thing that you will see quite a few of us are writing about. There is another collection that is not so fresh, that is called Surf´s Up that might be useful for you, especially the introduction. Susan Marshall for instance has an interesting article in there about Lisa Moore “Regionalism and Cosmopolitanism”. That is a good one for you. There is also a special issue of Canadian literature that is on East Coast writing Literature of Atlantic Canada 189 it might be even available on the website “Waterfrontviews” by now.

DR: Thank you! That is great to know!

HW: Another point related to the things that I have said already is the idea of cultural change because of outmigration, globalization, modernization; the whole region has been undergoing profound cultural change and there is a certain amount of anxiety about that change and the disappearance of traditional culture. Two examples: Newfoundland culture really has been sort of driven by a rural identity and by the history of the fisheries. Huge impact on what people think of as Newfoundland culture. Of course the fisheries is a dying industry. Most of the rest of the Maritimes even though they are sort of a strong rural component it is becoming more urbanized and culture is becoming more urbanized. Newfoundland is one example and the other example is Alistair MacLeod. Running through his work is this anxiety about the disappearance of culture. On the one end people love Alistair MacLeod because it is so culturally rich but story after story they are about a culture on the wing and there is a strong sense of nostalgia and mournfulness that runs through it as a result.

HW: You should talk to multiple people to get multiple perspectives. Because those of us who spend a lot of time working on the area, have a lot of shared interest and

104 shared perspectives. One thing that I really like about working in this area is that there is a pretty good sense of cohesion which is really nice, but at the same time we don´t agree about everything and you are going to see all those different perspectives and I think that would be very helpful.

9.2 Interview with Gwendolyn Davies

(October 30th, 2014)

DR: How did you come to work on regionalism and what made you interested in it in the first place?

GD: It is very personal why I was interested in it. My father was very interested in history. So all the time I was growing up my father and my mother and I and my brother would go out on Sundays for picnics, but we would go to areas such as the Tantramar marsh, or in New Brunswick or when we lived in Cape Breton out to the ruins of the fortress of Louisbourg and we would have picnics there, but explore the ramparts, or explore the remains of the old ship railways and read and talk and so on. So I had a very contextual sort of growing up where my parents were interested in history and also my family on my mother´s side had been in New Brunswick since 1760 and then in 1783 at the end of the American revolution also as loyalists. My family were Quakers, they were pacifists in the 18th century and so they had to leave the United States at the end of the revolution because they had refused to fight. So I grew up in a family here in New Brunswick where my great-aunts, all elderly schoolteachers, and my grandmother´s cousins and so on would talk about the history of the family so I was surrounded by history. So I think I grew into an interest in regionalism partly just because of family influence and then through school and university.

DR: Interesting! What did you study at university? GD: At university I did English and history. I entered in honors history, moved into English as well and then as a graduate work I moved into English. I have often wondered whether I should have gone into history but I have been able to combine the two in my career I have been very lucky and do the kind of research that actually 105 combines both and I have always enjoyed it. My students have always put up with me teaching it. [laughs]

DR: How long have you dealt with regionalism? You said from the very beginning. GD: Yeah from the very beginning and so you know when I did my PhD, which was on 18th to 19th century Atlantic literature, periodical literature, but I was exploring the way in which in a sense it helped us start to create a sense of cultural identity and cultural regionalism. I was very fortunate that after I finished my PhD I got a position at Mount Allison University in Sackville in Canadian studies and also in the English department, which meant that I was researching Atlantic regionalism, working with people who were doing that but also teaching in that area. It was a lovely time! [laughs]

DR: Did you find it difficult to study Atlantic regionalism in depth or did you find that there was a lot of easy accessible knowledge?

GD: Of course, I wasn´t really studying Atlantic regionalism per se I was looking at historical texts and had fun finding and discovering literary texts that people had not been looking at. So all of them I suppose had something to do with an emerging sense of regionalism in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, but Atlantic regionalism was not my primary focus. Actually, a cultural identity underneath a rubric of Maritime or Atlantic regionalism was certainly a focus. And I was also particularly interested in the role of women developing a sense of cultural self. Well, I work on literary texts, I also work on the 18th century with textiles and how a woman´s sampler in the poem that she will write and then work into her sampler which she would frame and hang on the wall; What women teachers had their students write on their commonplace books or their slates, often they were local poems, or the teacher´s poems, or poems about religious background. The quilts women made. There is a quilt from the 18th century, from the American Revolution which records one of the battles in the American Revolution, in which the British were dramatically defeated in 1781. That´s one of the things that led to so many people having to become refugees in loyalism. I was surprised - I would have thought that loyalist women would not have brought that quilt pattern with them because it was a quilt pattern which pronounced their defeat and it is a white quilt and it has circles in blue and in red. The red are the British army in

106 their red uniforms being surrounded by the blue uniforms of the Americans. And all the various arms leading into that quilt are in different colors to suggest the ages of the battle. So I thought that probably women at the end of the late 18th century would not bring that particular piece of cultural historicity in textiles with them into the region, but I have found that that pattern survived and even has been made well into the 21st century. In fact, when I was teaching at Acadia one of my students, who went on to became an RCMP officer, went home at Christmas and he told his mother apparently he was studying all this early historical literature and history and he was very interested in it and she was a quilter and she made me a quilt of this 18th century loyalist or non-loyalist quilt design according to the battle. So she still knew that pattern. So you know my work is not typical because I am working in a lot of different milieus in addition to traditional poetry and fiction.

DR: How long have you been teaching for? GD: Uhm 50 years. I started teaching high school in Toronto. I did that for quite a few years and then I went back and did my graduate work and then I taught in Canadian Studies at Mount Allison, then at Acadia and then I came here. I came here at administration not as a professor in a department so much, but as a person at administration.

DR: So you have taught at various places, that is interesting!

GD: Yes and I have been very fortunate. And I taught for a year at the University of London as well. I taught Canadian Studies there. So I haven´t really taught classes about regionalism, but regionalism would have entered into everything I taught in the university. Because you can´t teach Canadian literature or Atlantic literature and not in a sense address that issue and not have your students discuss it.

DR: When I started reading about regionalism and the stories by Alistair MacLeod it seemed to me that the reoccurring themes are heritage, the new versus the old, sticking to the roots and so on.

DR: Have you seen the film Empty Harbours, Empty Dreams? It is an old film. It is dated, but it will help again to give you a little bit of contextualization I think for these

107 issues from the end of the 19th century when it was an era of perceived prosperity and shipbuilding and whether this region should have entered confederation. And once they did enter confederation of course the way in which jobs were drawn off and the tariffs didn´t support the growth of the area and so on. There is a lot of mythologizing going on in this DVD Empty Harbours, Empty Dreams. I mean it romanticises the past and you have to keep that in mind. They talk about a golden age in the sense of the late 19th century. That being said after World War 1 there was a tremendous depression in the region. In every province people poured out to work in the United States. I mean it happened even before World War 1, but in the early 1920s there are strikes in Cape Breton in the mines, there are strikes in the steel mill, forces brought in with the RCMP, people dying. There are no jobs and people leave. And you have these churches around Boston and around other areas of Massachusetts because people go down and they get jobs in a watch factory and then their cousin goes down and they get a job and they say to their boss “this is my cousin he is a good man bla bla bla” and so Maritimers, Newfoundlanders separately because they are a different nation, they are a nation, they are part of Britain they don´t have anything to do with the Maritimes. People that go to churches and say some churches around the Boston area for example and other parts of Massachusetts it is just nothing but Maritimers. So they marry and we joke about it that they would all come home in a box because they die down there and would be brought back to be buried in a cemetery here in New Brunswick or in Cape Breton or whatever. As part of my regionalism I used to read the obituaries regularly for a long time and noticed how people [were] dying in some places like Maine or Massachusetts in a company town and they´d be shipping the body back to some place on the south shore, Nova Scotia or whatever. So the pattern continued into probably the 1960s and 70s. I mean my generation we no longer went to what we call a Boston State - you went to Toronto. And now this generation goes to Alberta. But there has always been that outmigration. So Empty Harbours, Empty Dreams I think is something you should look at but you also should be reading – I have to look that up to get the title for you. But there are a couple of key books about the post World War 1 period in the 1920s and the 1930s and what economically has happened to the region and it is very much the Maritime region because again Newfoundland is still totally a different story then. And it will help you I think understand some of the kind of interaction that starts to emerge in

108 some of the literature as well. Not in the stories you are looking at, but a writer like Charles Bruce is a short story and novelist writer and a poet - same generation as Ernest Buckler. And Charles Bruce is somebody you should read – beautiful writer, but his poetry gives you that sense of outmigration and great longing and it helps in a way to give you a sense of the mythologization that took place that helps to create a sense of regionalism. Because a lot of that sense of regionalism in the 1930s and 1940s and into the 1950s is based on a kind of mythologization process. Whereas now you know Tony and Herb are writing about it being created by a political resistance to neo-liberalism and so on. You were talking about trying to keep up the heritage here.

DR: Yeah it seemed to me that it is one of the themes of regionalism.

GD: It there very strongly is in Alistair. I am not so sure it is there in some of the other writers that you are focusing on. See in Wayne Johnston it is there. He is the Newfoundland writer that fits your thesis the most, but he is not a short story writer. He is a novelist. He writes like Alistair. He writes about what makes the Newfoundlander regional including political gobble [babble]. I think Wayne Johnston is, even if you don´t write about him you probably would find him very useful to read. See Anne Marie MacDonald and Lynn Coady are those names familiar to you?

DR: I am more familiar with Lynn Coady than Anne Marie MacDonald.

GD: They are both people that Herb Wyile has written about and Anne Marie MacDonald wrote a novel about growing up in Cape Breton and New Waterford and she is really writing about the immigrant – I can´t remember if it´s Lebanese I think she writes into that novel – marrying into the highland Scottish group. I mean her novel is filled with incest and violence as well as love. In a way it challenges and breaks down everything that a writer like Alistair MacLeod writes about which is about family, tradition, language, the economy, or old age, the modern world. Whereas what she is writing about is in a sense the hollowness of that core in the modern world – you know of sexuality and of the economy and of, you know, being in New York one day and Cape Breton in the next and how that breaks that down. Lynn Coady, I don´t know how much of Lynn Coady you have read, but she is another one

109 who is writing really about the dismantling rather and that there isn´t at the heart some sort of cultural sense, there isn´t at the heart some sort of coherence, there isn´t at the heart the regionalism you are talking about. It is a contemporary world of shifting different parameters and that happens on the level of language and on the level of sexuality and on the level of madness versus perceived sanity and so on. So I mean there is very contemporary body of writing now which is sort of challenging any kind of I think traditional sense of regionalism in a way that Alistair still writes about but he is such a wonderful writer and such a wonderful handler of language. He has been so revered by everybody but he stands alone. He is rather unique whereas these other writers that are challenging regionalism. And in Herb Wyile´s book which you have read you can see that he does that.

DR: What would you say are characteristics of Atlantic Canadian short stories? Are there for example certain similarities in short stories from Atlantic Canada or are there differences to short stories from other places?

GD: I mean I am old-fashioned in saying this but I do think that a lot of the writers are aware of geography and how that geography is dealt with. You know there is a kind of folk culture that may be sort of set up or whether you´ve got a more traditional writer who might see folk culture as being a unifying force is really not the issue. I still think there is a very strong sense of place and to some extent a strong sense of history. I find that most people do know whether or not they have got Scottish decent or Acadian background, or they know where their grandparents had come from or whether they have got a working class or whatever kind of background. And the two wars have had a big impact on regions that were self-contained, like this you know because a lot of young men – more young men than young women at least in the first war – a lot had never had a chance to leave the region or never had the experience of going outside from where they had grown up and they managed to live through the war. It exposed them to different influences of course as is with all wars; it is a horrific experience, but it did change and to some extent radicalise I think a lot of the young people who came back - especially after the first war, and war did help to break down the class system somewhat. Certainly in Britain the class system wasn´t as pronounced here perhaps, but there is always a class system. One of the things at the end of the second war in particular was there were opportunities for the retrained

110 veterans to go through university. That changed many people´s lives because it opened up employment possibilities.

DR: If you had to choose your favourite author with regard to Atlantic Canadian short stories who would that be?

GD: Alistair MacLeod.

DR: That was a fast answer! Yeah I love his stories too.

GD: Yeah he handles language so beautifully! It is just the way in which he´d create an effect. When he died I sat down and read The Closing Down of Summer and if you remember that story it is the one about the old man who is the keeper of the Gaelic song tradition. When you hear the recordings they just go on and on and on of course they were working songs because they were doing the wool and so on - and of course as you remember in that story the young get the chance to go on television and in the end I mean he has to give in, in a way, to the young but at the same time at the end they come with a case of beer for him and he doesn´t drink beer, but he realizes that that would never occur to them and also that it is a gesture. I mean they´ve gone through all this trouble and all this expense too and it is their way of saying “we know you stand for something that is so terribly important but at the same time we do what we have to do because we are who we are but we know” and that is the last line of the story. So his life in a sense, this old man who has no one now, his life is somewhat validated by that moment of crossing the bulk of time and changing culture, patterns. I read that because it just seemed to me that that is what Alistair had stood for so much in his writing. He had been like the old man that he created in that story and he created it for all of us. That moment where we say “I know, we really know” and if a writer can do that for the audience - what a wonderful gift.

GD: Did you ever get a chance to hear him read?

DR: No unfortunately not.

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GD: There must be a recording around here somewhere that would do that. Because he spoke with a Gaelic kind of lilt although he was not a speaker. His wife was a speaker. She was born and grew up speaking Gaelic in Cape Breton. But Alistair didn´t. He was born in Saskatchewan. His father had gone out West to get a job as a miner because the mines had closed down in Inverness. And so Alistair was born in Saskatchewan and the family moved back later on. Alistair still had his grandparents´ house and that´s where he and Anita, of course they were living in Windsor, Ontario because he taught all those years at the University of Windsor, but they would come back every summer and spend it in Cape Breton. They had as their summer place his grandparents´ house, but the children I think gradually got places around there as well. So Alex MacLeod has the place up where his parents were and where his father is buried. But Alistair spoke, even though he wasn´t a speaker of Gaelic as his first language, he spoke with the rhythms and the kind of softness of somebody who was a Gaelic speaker.

DR: Interesting!

GD: And he was always very shy speaking to groups. I mean he grew more confident over the years, and so he had a kind of lovely puckish sense of humour but he was always kind of shy in his relationship with his audience. So this combination of the shyness and this wonderful puckish sense of humour he had and the Gaelic intonation in his speaking really made his readings quite unique. He set up a kind of relationship with the audience that, well, people just warmed him because he was so genuine. Each writer of course has a relationship with an audience but people would line up afterwards to talk to him or to get him to sign something and so on. I was so moved when he died because I had students, I hadn´t heard from them in 20 years, I had no idea where they were and they wrote me when he died and said things like “do you remember the day at Mount A[llison] or at Acadia when we talked about The Boat?” and I thought what a great legacy for a writer that somebody at 19 or whatever remember the day they discussed his story in class and still remembered all these years later. So I thought what a great tribute to him. So yeah, I am glad you´re working on him. I think he would definitely be my favourite author in that sense.

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DR: Yes, he is my favourite author too!

GD: And I am sure the more you read about him and with his interviews and so you will find that they are helpful in informing his stories and so on.

DR: Yes, I think so too. Thank you for the interview!

GD: You are very welcome!

9.3 Interview with David Creelman

(November 20th, 2014)

DR: How did you come to work on regionalism? What made you interested in it in the first place?

DC: Uhm I think it´s probably something as mundane as homesickness. I went to do my PhD in Toronto. It was the first time I had studied and lived a life outside of the Atlantic region. Being away from home made me aware of the fact that I really didn´t understand home at all. So I was doing my doctor in York – wonderful place to study, great courses and gave me whole wide range of Canadian literature but I soon realized there hadn´t been a lot written about the Maritime region in the sense that it was an area that was sort of open and also one that I was thinking a lot about I just decided that it might make a good dissertation project. Then having established the base in the area, I thought “well, there is still lots to do. In part of my mind I always thought well, at some point I´d go off and study prairie literature as well but I haven´t got to that stage yet and may not at this point.

DR: How long have you been studying Atlantic regionalism now?

DC: Oh dear! I guess it is 25 years – maybe 24. I would have started my research what eventually became the book Setting in the East. The earliest research for that probably started around 1990. So I guess I have been plugging away for 25 years. I am nowhere near as productive as people like Tony [Tremblay] and Herb [Wyile]. 113

They are very sort of hot and productive scholars. I am sort of a much slower nature, but still it has certainly been my research interest.

DR: That´s a long time! And did you find it difficult to find resources when you started focusing on regionalism?

DC: The core resources were there in the sense that the study of history and economics to a lesser degree the politics of the region - those kinds of core resources that you need to do a place-based literature study - were around though it took me a while to locate them. A lot of the work had been done. The gap always comes with literature is that we inevitably turn our minds towards the more recent writers as well and historians are always dealing with time periods where the documents are actually available and so the most recent historical, political, economic trends are always a little harder to find material on. It is harder to do for example the literature of the last 15 years if you have an economic or historic base because those things are still coming out. I started going to the history-political conferences, particularly the Atlantic studies conference for that reason I was trying to find out what the historians were working on most immediately. There is sort of ways of finding things – it´s not that hard. It is a pretty good community where people are pretty happy to share their ideas with you.

DR: I read that you are teaching at UNB in St. John.

DC: Yeah, I teach in the sister campus of the Fredericton campus. We are about half the size of the Fredericton campus.

DR: How long have you done that?

DC: That has been 23 years. I started there in 1991.

DR: Have you also taught classes on regionalism or on Atlantic Canadian literature?

DC: I am actually responsible for Canadian and modern British and occasionally I get to do literary theory which is just sort of for passion´s sake. But I do a course in

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Canadian short story every other year and then I usually teach a course in Maritime fiction every other year. And I have also done three graduate courses on Maritime fiction which is an even happier experience because you get to tie back to some of the political-historical texts.

DR: That must be interesting!

DC: Yeah that is a lot of fun! You know 12 people and a lot of times they get into the archives here. There is a lot of interesting stuff available.

DR: When I started focusing on regionalism it seemed to me that it deals with saving heritage, sticking to the roots and the old versus the new. But now as I have read more about regionalism seems to me that it is about how people of the city see the region and what image they create of the region. Would you agree with that?

DC: I think something you´re heading towards is going to be very helpful which is this idea that regionalism probably is the product of a variety of different perspectives, both from within the region and the way that we are framed outside the region. Both the way in which we frame ourselves for the exterior but also the way that the exterior frames us. The thing I have always tried to avoid in my own work about regionalism and I noticed the same trend in the work of people like Tremblay and Wyile and Fuller, is I think we all tried to avoid the notion that there is somehow some essential quality to any of the regions. I think if you go looking through Canada it is very clear we don´t have a national identity per se, we have a series of regional experiences and the temptation is then to try and essentialize what is coring about that particular region. But I think those kinds of essentializing concepts of region which in the East Coast are much more likely to be things like we are slower paced, we are not as industrialized, we are more tied to the land, we have got a stronger traditional culture, we have got a stronger sense of memory, we are a have not province and then the most egregious stereotypes would be we are all in rubber boots and fishing poles, you know, all those kinds of things. All those kinds of images while useful for tourism and marketing they all tend to under represent the complexity of the region. So I think that a region is shaped by its own historical patterns and economic experience. I mean I have got enough of a Marxist chord to me that I really think that the core of

115 cultural experience is related in some ways to economic and social questions. Those patterns imprint themselves in the society and shape the culture that emerges from it. Not in a deterministic way but they just become forces which influence it. So I do think there is local experience that shapes cultural production, literary production, but at the same time the way that that local experience is then perceived by power structures elsewhere. A test case here would be: we used to be the industrial center for the early Canadian experience at the time of confederation. We had the six of twelve steel mills, two rolling mills, glass plants, rope factories we made pianos, soap, clothes, shoes – I mean it was the whole sort of self-contained, very vibrant finance section. There is no question that that is lost after the First World War with the postwar recession, with a centralization of economic powers by the federal government with the emergence of Ontario`s industrial base, the opening of the West as an agricultural society. All of those things made our economy slower and less productive in terms of our competition. But the way in which the region then gets framed as a “have-not-place”. It is unique in Canadian history [that] all the regions of the country go through a period of losing their tradition on core, moving off of the land into the urban centers. We all go through that. We all experience that sort of modernist shift towards the industrial experience and every province has an element of nostalgia about that loss. It is just typical of the way modernism worked in Canada, the States, in Britain and you know everybody had that – through the 30s and the 40s everybody was nostalgic for the earlier days. And that gets played out quite differently politically from region to region, but we all go through that sense of loss. What is kind of unique about the Maritimes is that every other region in Canada met that nostalgia with increasing economic prosperity. So Ontario feels a loss for its pioneer days, but it experiences this huge industrial growth in the golden triangle, from Toronto down to Hamilton and up to London. Québec feels this loss of the traditional French-Canadian identity, but in the quiet revolution the this notion of coming into our own feels a new kind of national confidence within Québec. The Maritimes is unique in that we recognize what we have lost, but it is very hard through the 20th century to point towards whatever is a replacement for that. So probably the short form of my theory of regionalism is that we are caught between two tensions. One, this sense of memory, the loss of the sense of hesitation – and that´s more of a 20th century experience than it is 21st century experience. I think Herb Wyile´s analysis is very astute because he points out [that] late 20th century

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[and] early 21st century Maritime writers become increasingly good at talking back to their marginalization. So the writers – and I think he picked up the Atlantic writers, Newfoundland writers particularly Moore and Crummey – are very good at recognizing this dynamic but also speaking back to it. Particularly in any ways that it diminishes the East. You know, they don´t buy this we are the lesser cousins and the third wheel. So I think regionalism is very much the product of the discourses of the society, both locally – what we say about ourselves and how we manage our own issues - but also the way that we present ourselves nationally, sometimes to get what advantage we can locally. And then the way that we respond back to the nation when it talks to us. All of those things become sort of threads in this fabric of regionalism. It makes it very hard to say the Maritime regions is about this and it becomes much more I think productive to say we have these kinds of tensions and anxieties and issues, which become a characteristic of how we see the world but it never quite boils down to everybody on the East Coast is friendly or you know. [laughs] And I think there is still a fabric here that is unique to the local experience. At the same time as we are all on YouTube plugging into John Oliver and watching John Stewart. That is also part of our local experience in a sense is to be the participant in this global economy. And Wyile I think is pointing out that the most recent writers are getting very adapted to that kind of conversation– playing with it in a different way. I think that would probably be it. [Laughs]

DR: That is very interesting! How would you say the definition or the understanding of regionalism has changed in the last years?

DC: I think the work of the 40s or 50s, maybe even into the 60s was to start looking for these sort of – the term is sometimes called geographic determinism –how does your geography determine your economy and therefore your culture. That was certainly the major way in which regions were perceived. Evidence for that would be when they set up the national park system in Canada during the 1920s. And they went looking for national parks in various parts of the country that would be represented of that region´s experience. They actually required national parks in the Maritimes to be on saltwater. It was an actual requirement. You know from driving around New Brunswick sea-based, saltwater-based is a relatively small part of our experience we´re inland and freshwater. But the national parks that were first

117 established all had to be on saltwater. That was very much the nation reflecting the regions on the sense that “Who are Maritimer’s? We are sea people.” So I think there was a sense for a period of time where geography was kind of a determinant factor. Certainly once Forbes, the Acadiansis group, the scholars working out of Dalhousie - once they start paying attention to how our experience as a region is not shaped by our decline in economy. [It] may be much less shaped by our local production of apples or whether or whether or not we have the climate for it. A lot of it has to do with government policies were they moved resources into the center of Canada on purpose in order to make sure that area of the country flourishes. Forbes has got great articles; he maps out how even during the Second World War the refurbishments of ships, which was a huge need for the war effort, that shipyards in the East Coast: Halifax, St. John, Cape Breton were routinely underused - they lay dormant so that the ships could go up to Montreal for refurbishment. That was where the majority of the population was; That´s where the numbers were; That´s where the economy needed to grow. So they purposely sort of turned Montreal into the ship refurbishment area; even though the river shuts that shipyard down for five percent of the year. This is Forbes argument that the intent to move the economy west is so intense that even sort of the logical moves around the war effort takes second place to regional questions. I think when the Acadiansis group started looking at region as the result, not of geography, but policy, politics [and] historical forces, I think that really did help us change the way we see the region. Writers like Janice Kulyk Keefer Under Eastern Eyes that was the study she produced – was that early 80s maybe – one of the troubles with that book is that a lot of material simply hadn´t been produced yet she is still tending to see the region in less complicated ways than later critics were able to. So certainly the emergence of this historical voice helped and then more recently people like Herb Wyile and Tony Tremblay had been really good at getting to the more sophisticated ways that media itself, cultural voices itself, the globalization, the kind of forces that are working behind that. How they play back into a local environment. So it´s getting to be quite a sophisticated dance you know how we see the local in relation to other things. But I think the geographic determinism model – it´s still popular with tourism industry, it´s still the way we market ourselves, but I don´t think it has got much play within a deeper analysis. It doesn´t prevent writers like MacLeod though from returning to that paradigm. I do find in his later stories for example he starts seeming to seek greater security, greater connection for

118 the individual than he was willing to construct in his early stories. And in his later stories he starts to adopt motifs around family, blood, geography. He does return to a more essentializing vision of identity. So the writers are often quite fluid. Currie just mocks the whole attempt to construct identity in any essentialist way, you know, and Margaret´s Museum is the great example for that. Some people would suggest that Johnston is kind of on the fence between the two that he points out all the political forces, but in some way there is still sort of something Newfoundlandish that he wants to see as running through the blood. So the writers dance a bit between the two worlds. I think the critics are past the essentialising moments.

DR: Interesting! What do you find interesting about Atlantic Canadian short stories?

DC: The quality, the number of really interesting writers we have, I love – and this isn´t unique to the region – but I love how the contemporary short story really fights closure. So compared to some of the short fiction Charles Bruce`s Township of Times: A Chronicle, the work that Buckler produced in the 30s and 40s, those were often produced for national markets that needed a sort of aesthetic finality to them and sometimes those stories close in reductive ways, they are kind of disappointing. Writers like Moore and MacLeod - when he is at his best for sure - the way that they lay out the problems and then leave the open ends so that they resonate quite beautifully. Lynn Coady is just amazing for saying just enough and not too much. I do think they are like Alice Munro, who I think of as the great short story writer, I think they do have that capacity to hold off. But again it depends on market. People like Budge Wilson, I think is a great short story writer, but she has been slotted a little bit more in the young adult market and as a result some of those stories close off a bit.

DR: What would you say are the major characteristics of Atlantic Canadian short stories?

DC: Oh dear! We can note some interesting absences. Very few Maritime writers, though a few more Newfoundland writers, have ventured very far into postmodern. Our texts are more often aesthetically anchored in realism than some other regions tend to be. I hesitate to talk about particular themes or things that Maritimer’s write about. There probably is a recurring interest in the Maritimes around individual and

119 place and history. Certainly Currie, MacLeod and Coady are very interested in that matrix of concerns. Our style is more often realist than in other parts of the country as I say. But I think there´s equal concern with I mean if we think of say prairie or west coast writers and some of their concerns about determinism in place and issues of freedom. You know we pick up those questions just as often. Some writers like Lisa Moore are very plugged into sort of the contemporary voice and how difficult it is to navigate to position yourself in language in relation to what a community wants from you. So is that different than Munro?

DR: It is hard to say!

DC: Yeah. There probably are some similarities, but probably not as much as say publishing marketers would like in terms of being able to totalise the region and say you know “this is a Maritime writer and therefore you know what you´re getting when you get this”. I think in lots of ways this is kind of one of Wyile´s arguments that contemporary writers are talking back to the whole “neo-liberalist” experience. In just the same way that all the writers who are in outlying margins are trying to talk back to the center. There probably is a characteristic of the Maritimes as not having the same cultural confidence as the really core center of the country i.e. the Toronto cultural market. We may not have quite that kind of assurance, but I am not sure how long that list of what´s distinctive of the Maritimes could be before it starts retreating back into essentialism. We are starting to miss some of the subtleties that the writers may offer. But that may be because I am not looking very closely so you may very well find trends that you see really persistent and that would be really interesting to discover!

DR: Now the very last question. Do you have a favourite author with regard to Atlantic Canadian short stories?

DC: Last Salt Gift of Blood.

DR: So Alistair MacLeod.

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DC: Yes, Alistair MacLeod – his first collection - As Birds bring forth the Sun is fine, I like it, it´s a nice collection - but yeah those early short stories, I think they are just amazing! They are so beautifully written and I love teaching them! Not only is the imagery very sort of visceral and the students can feel their way through the stories, but the way that that language is so carefully crafted to let that imagery flow with minimal interference. He is just amazingly well disciplined as a writer. Especially I find in the early stuff. He hasn´t sort of found his own hooks and patterns that will start recurring. He is still playing around with the options and I think some of those stories are just amazing.

DR: I agree. I love them too.

DC: Yeah. In The Fall, In The Vastness of The Dark those are some of my favorites. They are just marvellous. I do like his son´s writing as well – Alexander Macleod´s short stories are wonderful. I really like Lisa Moore. There´s another writer out of Newfoundland – my last name, only a distant cousin - Libby Creelman, is a short story writer. All are just really terrific but somehow there is a sort of literary music to MacLeod´s writing. It is very appealing.

DR: Yeah it is really beautiful. MacLeod was a wonderful writer. DR: Well, thank you a lot for the interview!

DC: My pleasure!

DR: It was very helpful.

DC: You are very welcome! And it sounds like you are really getting together the resources and the people you´re gonna need to write this project. I hope you have a lot of fun with it. It is a great list of writers.

DR: Yeah I´m really excited to start working with the stories. I want to start with the chapter on regionalism though because I think that´s gonna be the most challenging part of the thesis.

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DC: Yeah. And you know in some ways I think that is going to be a part that´s most rewarding because as you struggle to define a culture or a regional experience, like the Maritimes the kinds of things that you have to figure out around how any culture or experience works it´ll really be something that translates to other parts of your study and teaching. The kinds of tools you get when you do that broad work, especially if you are interested in education it just gives you better, clearer ways to talk about cultural experience to somebody who is just beginning that process.

DR: Yes, I totally agree!

DC: Well, it was a pleasure to meet you.

DR: It was very nice to meet you too. Thank you very much again for the interview!

9.4 Interview with Tony Tremblay

(December 5th, 2014)

DR: How did you get to work on regionalism?

TT: Hmmm wow! That´s a question I never would have anticipated you asking. That´s an excellent question! How does someone come to a certain professional orientation in one´s career? In my case I think regionalism or the study of region in literature is not something that I came to by way of revelation. It´s something that I always had a professional interest in. It´s something that I think was embedded by the fact that I didn´t study regional literature in graduate school. In graduate school I focused on, which everybody did at the time I was a graduate student, on critical theory. Then I went from there, because I was quite interested in one aspect of critical theory, to postcolonial literature – postcolonial theory essentially. And when I was hired here at St. Thomas I was hired as a post colonialist. The first ten years of my career I did courses in African- and South Asian literature, literature of the South Pacific and almost no literature –I mean maybe I taught the occasional course on Canadian literature – but I did not do very much of that. But as I became more and more aware

122 of the global world and I became more and more attuned to what a kind of a - I´ll call it mercantile globalism or a capitalist globalism was doing to the world and that is forcing us to move outside of our conceptions of what was local. In the interest of serving something that was larger and global I took a very activist response to that and I said, “well, this is a lot of nonsense”, and I came to the conclusion that the only way that we could preserve and protect our local places, which were being considerably diminished by the overtures of globalism to move things away from rural places or particular places generally; and this was done of course through advertising, through television, through various modes of cultural persuasion. As I saw that pattern developing it forced me to kind of retrench and consider the importance of place and home and region and so half way through my career I made a fairly radical shift and started working on local or regional literature. That was complemented by the fact that I then received a Canada research chair to focus very specifically on New Brunswick literature. That restricted me even further. So that´s a long answer to a good question. I don´t think many people come to regionalism as sort of champions of place. I think they are prompted to it by some kind of outside aggravation. And for me it was the spread, the unchecked, unhealthy and ultimately aggressive spread of globalism.

DR: That´s very interesting – and how long have you been dealing with Atlantic Canadian regionalism?

TT: For a long, long time! As I said I always retained an interest in it, but a secondary interest. As a Master student I did my first bit of graduate studies on the West Coast of Canada, in British Columbia. I worked on a New Brunswick writer there as a MA student and then put that aside as a doctoral student focusing largely on critical theories. So I have been interested in New Brunswick and regional literature for thirty years. It´s just only been in the last 10 or 15 years that it´s been the focus of my career.

DR: When you started to work on regionalism did you find it difficult to find sources to study Atlantic regionalism in depth?

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TT: It was very difficult and I´ll tell you why it was difficult. I have to give a political answer here or an answer that betrays some of my own ideology, I guess. It was difficult because I started working on regional literature as an undergraduate student when I went to St. FX University in Antigonish in Nova Scotia. I was a better than average student. I mean I say that modestly, I was encouraged to pursue my studies in literature, but I was also told by a couple of mentors that I had there as an undergraduate that I shouldn´t really focus on Canadian literature or regional literature because it was a secondary literature - it didn´t really matter in the larger scope of the world literatures. So that´s the kind of first reaction I ever received to my interest in Maritime or New Brunswick literature. So when I went to the West Coast that view point was very much endorsed and I was encouraged to study anything but Canadian literature because Canadian literature was not at all important. One of the unique features of Canada is its colonial tie to one of the two major mother countries. And on the West Coast the colonial tie is to the British, to British culture. The British culture that was still entrenched in Victoria B.C. when I was there in the early 1980s as a graduate student considered Canada still a colony of Britain. [laughs] This is a hundred years after Canadian confederation, but it didn´t matter! Many of the professors of the university in literature anyway were English or had been trained in British universities. There was very much that active process of looking down on colonial slash Canadian literature. It was hard to find resources. It was hard to find supervisory support. It was hard to find anything in the library because the way university´s library works is faculty members weigh in on what should be in the library and there is budgets that are distributed across faculties, across departments and further across faculty members to work in their particular disciplines and if nobody is working in a discipline like Canadian literature then there are very few resources in the library. So I worked with one person who was a teacher of Canadian literature out there. He was an American who happened to do a minor in Canadian literature and got a job in B.C. at the university. So he didn´t really know a lot about Canadian literature. Because of the size of this country and the complexity – the complexity of our federalism. Canadian federalism is just this idea of a united country. That is Canadian federalism. And it is this idea that goes against logic because it is so difficult to maintain an entire country dispersed across a landmass like we have with a few main ideas, with a sort of coerced sense of a shared heritage. The heritage of English

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Canadians and French Canadians and other multicultural Canadians, aboriginal Canadians has very little in common. Federalism is kind of the glue that brings all these differences together. So I say that because when I studied at the West Coast of Canada the idea of Canada as this broad country went as far as Montreal. The country stopped at Montreal. There was no East Coast of Canada from the point of view of people in British Columbia. That is because the country for all of us –and I´m not blaming them- the country is too large to imagine. And not only too large to imagine, but it´s too large to cross physically. I travel a lot in Canada and I have been to very few places. I have never been to the North, I have rarely been to the Prairie Provinces, I have been to the major cities in B.C. and Alberta but I have never been to rural places. The country is so large it can´t even be imagined. So when you go out there and you try and study Atlantic Canadian literature as I did maybe foolishly on the West Coast and find no resources and encounter the idea of Canada as this country that stops in Montreal- there is no East Coast, it is very challenging.

DR: I´d imagine that it was difficult! How long have you been teaching for at St. Thomas University?

TT: Uuuuhm since 1996. So that would be 18 years.

DR: Are there usually classes on regionalism or on Atlantic Canadian literature? Do you find that this topic is dealt with here? I mean, I saw in your class it is, but are there more classes dealing with that topic?

TT: When I joined here there was maybe one and a half Canadianists. One person who was teaching Canadian literature and another person who was half time on Canadian literature.

DR: Oh that is not a lot at all!

TT: It was not a lot and the other thing that has to be said is that the mentality that I experienced at the West Coast was very much entrenched at St. Thomas University. Entrenched in the sense that the curriculum was designed with very much a colonial bias and that colonial bias manifested itself in a certain approach to what we call

125 canonical literature – the major British literature of the canon. When you define literature as something that happens by the centuries – what is 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th century literature and so forth and so on. Then what you do is you cut out Canada. I mean Canada didn´t have a 12th century literature. Not that we know about anyway. I am sure it had an aboriginal literature or oral literature of one kind or another but we don´t really have access to it or we don´t know it. So when you put parameters on print culture as the canon does then you restrict what can be taught and that certainly was the case here. So if you define literature as having particular concentration in the renaissance period. Well, immediately you think of Shakespeare. We have to teach of course some Shakespeare. There is no renaissance Canadian literature. There is no renaissance American literature. There is no renaissance South Pacific literature of any kind. All of these things feed the necessity of teaching British literature and that´s what I encountered here and that is what I continue to encounter here and that is what many of us in the region encounter. It´s this bias toward canonical literature that treats Canada as a colonial entity.

DR: I understand.

TT: That is the reality! It is all cooked which means it´s manufactured. And the canon as we know it that emerges from Anglo-Saxon to Chaucer and up through the centuries has fairly recent history and it is not natural or inevitable - it is constructed. And it was constructed by the British when they went into India to colonize India. One of the things they did in their program of colonization was to completely reconfigure and formalize the schooling system in India. And in the late 18th century and really in the 19th century they concocted this curriculum that was designed to make compliant Englishmen of colonial South Asian students. That was the whole idea. And the success of that sort of expanded the initiative not across the world but across the common wealth world. And Canada is a member of that colonial catchment. So this is all political and if we are gonna hitch ourselves to a wagon in terms of the curriculum that we adopt I have always been in favour of hitching ourselves to, if not a Canadian curriculum, then maybe a continental curriculum. Maybe it is time for us to look at Canada and the U.S. as a construct together because our history in New Brunswick and our history in the Maritimes is much more closely aligned with the U.S. –with that New England area- than it is with Britain. And the other thing is the reality of Canada

126 is that a large number of Canadians are of French origin and there is no similar curriculum on French literature outside of Québec. I mean this is another example of the fact that these questions you´re asking about regionalism and curriculum and the canon and all sorts of things, these are all political concepts. They are all manufactured and presented to us as if they´re kind of naturally developing things, but they´re not naturally developing at all. The reason there is no French literature in our country outside of Québec is because of conquest. The French were defeated in Canada and so the power brokers, the English brought their culture, their curriculum and their values and those are the values by which we continue to live.

DR: That is really interesting! Now I would like to ask you a question about regionalism. How would you define regionalism? Is that even possible?

TT: I have to give you a number of different responses to that question. The first response is that you´re never going to find a definition of regionalism that everybody agrees with. I don´t know if that means that it is not worth defining or that it´s so complicated that it can´t be defined. You´ll have to think about that one, I am not sure. My sense is that it´s so complicated that it´s probably not worth defining. There has been attempts to define similar sorts of topics. I´ll give you a research hint here. Look up a book by Raymond Williams called Keywords and Raymond Williams attempts to define these difficult and sticky concepts. He makes an attempt to define culture for example. Regionalism would fall under the same category in the terms of the difficulty that it presents to the person who tries to define it. That´s the first thing I´ll say. The second thing I´ll say is that the definition of regionalism depends on who is defining it.

DR: Of course, it depends if you are living in the region or outside the region.

TT: Yeah exactly! It depends on what perspective you bring to this, an insider – as you say- or an outsider perspective. But it´s more than that. It depends on your own particular bias. For many, many years the idea of regionalism was considered pejorative in Canada, by which I mean it was considered negatively. To be a regional writer was to be somehow parochial or provincial. It was to be narrow in your perspective. I give you another reference that might be useful for you E.K. Brown´s

127 book On Canadian Poetry which was published in 1943 articulated this bias that the regional was somehow narrow, pejorative and that Canadian literature if it wanted to come into its own should come into its own in a way that was beyond the local - that writers should concern themselves with what was going on in the world as opposed to what was going on in someone´s backyard. In 1943 this view of anti-regionalism was also abetted by a new anthology that came out that was edited by A.J.M. Smith in 1943. So 1943 becomes an important year in Canadian criticism. He introduced for the first time a modern literature in Canada. That modern literature in Canada had far more connections to the erudite, to the technical, to the urban modernism of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf and characters like that. So it again supported the idea that the best kind of writing was not local at all, but had more universal application. And writers and critics embraced this concept until the 70s in Canada and continue to embrace the idea. In the 70s in Canada what happened was a turn toward the local again, a realization that the world´s best literature is local. Are the Brontes not local? Is Thomas Hardy not local? Is William Faulkner not local? Is Shakespeare at the end of the day not absolutely local? In his plays on British history, British society, Elizabethan society and royalism and all that kind of stuff. The best writing in the world is ultimately local. So to claim that Canadian writers should not embrace the local but should embrace writers that are differently local is to make another kind of political claim against the interest of Canada. So this was part of our colonial process once again. Anyway, Canadian writers started a program of re-examining the importance of localism in the literature. That´s when regionalism really started to blossom in Canada. We had writers identifying with particular parts of the country, we had an increase in knowledge about the country and so forth. Two events really contributed to this. The first was the development of the Canada council that came out of the Massey-Levesque commission in the early 1950s, but it took a while for that to find ground in Canada. The event that really brought it together was the Canadian centenary in 1967. And the unprecedented focus on Canada, money available for Canadian studies, encouragement around developing heritage and other local resources. 1967 the money around that, the events around that, the encouragement to express and explore Canadian identity coupled with the kind of formal infrastructure that the Massey-Levesque commission established in the early 50s meant that writers in the 70s and 80s had free reign to examine their own places.

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And we had as a result in this region the rise then of Alden Nowlan, Alistair MacLeod, Sheldon Currie whose work not just explored the local, but celebrated the local and made the local lyrical. Alden Nowlan has got a great quote about this. He said “no culture without localism” and it means “all culture is local”. By which of course he meant that the world is large and we shouldn´t put up walls between ourselves and the world but we always have to understand that we start from somewhere, we emerge from somewhere and that process of emergence equips us with value systems, with biases of language and perspective, with political tendencies. You name it that we´re deeply rooted first in the local. It´s not that we can´t get outside of that, but we can´t deny that it exists either. A student asked me at the end of class the other day. She was confused about this emphasis on biography. “Why professor Tremblay”, she said “why do you spend sometimes a little bit of time, sometimes more time on a writers biography. I was taught that a writer´s biography didn´t matter.” So students are still influenced by this. They are still influenced by this T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound early 1920s new critical, modernist idea that the only thing that mattered was the text on the page. But the text doesn´t appear on the page magically. The text is filtered through the psyche, the sensibility of a person who puts it there in the first place. And even T.S. Eliot who is famously in the tradition in the individual talent that really seminal essay that talked about the impersonality of the writer. Well, is T.S. Eliot telling us when he develops that theory of impersonality that as a writer he has no personality or that he is supposed to suppress his personality? If you look at his final sort of significant contribution to literature, the four quartets, there´s so much a sense of the personal sensibility and the writer´s sensibility. There is no impartiality in that. Those long poems are about a person who has gone through life and strife, they are dealing with old age, with questions of immorality, they are deeply spiritual because Elliot at this time had become humble and spiritual and thinking about questions of immortality and all that kind of stuff- that´s a bunch of nonsense. So the fact of the matter is there is no such thing as impartiality. There´s no such thing as objectivity. This is what I tell my students. I didn´t use the example this semester, but sometimes when it comes up they say “Oh not more biography!” I say “Well, if biography doesn’t matter then that means I can be perfectly impartial to you. And if you don´t come to class, when you do come to class you´re on your cell phone, if you haven´t read a book or text, if you haven´t made any contribution to class, if you sit in the back with your ball hat on backwards and you don´t care about

129 anything. You mean to say that I am supposed to suppress that in my evaluation of you?” Then they get the point. There is no such thing as objectivity. We all bring our subjectivity to everything we do. Whether my evaluation of you which is supposed to be perfectly impartial. I´m supposed to evaluate you on your work not on your attitude to the work, but if your attitude to the work contributes to the work you do I can´t erase that.

DR: Yeah, that´s definitely true. DR: Would you say that regionalist works and realism have to go together?

TT: That´s a very interesting question. Is regional literature realist? Or does realism support the development of regional sensibility? My answer to both questions is no not at all. It depends again on how you define realism, but if you define realism as a kind of facsimile or a rendering of experience or a rendering of place as [a] kind of facsimile and that is, that you are being as true to what the sensibility perceives as you possibly can by eliminating fancy, by eliminating the indulgence of dream and all that sort of thing. Then I think what you´re left with is that you can capture a regional place realistically or fancifully. It doesn´t really matter. I think about this as I speak, but just in looking at the work in our class. I did Anne of Green Gables not because I liked the novel, but because I think it establishes a really important foundation. Atop which is built a much more realistic rendering of the Atlantic Canadian condition and sensibility. My point is to suggest that a romance like Anne of Green Gables can be as thoroughly regional as a realistic portrait can be regional. Regionalism is not better represented by realism than by romance. So I can give you some romantic expressions of regionalism and one is Anne of Green Gables. Another is Frank Parker Day´s Rockbound which is very much a romance of place but place is rendered so thoroughly and so magnificently. There is hardly a better regional novel in the country than Rockbound, but it´s also an exercise of absolute romance. So the defining feature of regionalism is not in my view whether it is realistic or romantic. There are probably far more regional treatments that we would call realistic than romantic. However, there are a significant number that are romantic. Some of the most vivid expressions of place that I can think of were done by Victorian poets who weren´t writing in any kind of realistic form, [who] were embracing all kind of fancies and expressions of

130 imaginative transport - unanchored to anything at all realistic, but which rendered the place they were describing vividly and magnificently. Let me give you another perspective on this. The assumption is – David Creelman would be good on this because this is his part of the critical position – that realism is realism because it´s universally understood as the real. Accuracy or consensus of vision have nothing to do with realism. You put ten people in this office looking out that window and ask them to relate an event that happened outside that window that all ten of them saw. You would have ten different versions of it right? So realism in itself is filtered through every imagination that deals with it right? That is not to suggest that there is no such thing as realism, but it´s just to suggest that realism isn´t this sort of fixed form of abstracting information and acquiring information that we sometimes think it is. Anyway that is far too esoteric for you. [laughs]

DR: Now I would like to ask you a question about Atlantic Canadian short stories. Would you say that there are differences between Atlantic Canadian and short stories from other places? Would you say that there are major differences between Atlantic Canadian short stories and short stories from other places?

TT: Absolutely! Without question! And the major difference is, as trite as it might sound, that Atlantic Canadian short stories are written by Atlantic Canadians who have a particular perspective on the world. That perspective is not urban. That perspective is informed by the socio-economic history of the region. That perspective is much more republican than is the perspective in other parts of Canada. What I mean by republican is that there is a sense of individuality, a lack of trust of government, of forces. You know it´s that small American republicanism that we recognise where people are not gunslingers that´s how it is in the U.S., but people are quite independent of the structures of power. And we get that in the short stories. And the short story that we did that I really think is so representative of the region is the Lynn Coady short story, “Jesus Christ, Murdeena”. The response of members of her community to her kind of radical independence was really fascinating to me in that story. Because it is not the way we´re supposed to be down here, but in fact it is the way we that we are. We are very independent in terms of our perspectives, in terms of our expectations in the Maritimes. And all of that is in the short stories. The short stories as well are full of records of loss and registers of regret and breaking up

131 of families and the tremendous pain of loss and association and alienation. And this all comes to us because of the socio-economic history of the region. The fact that the region was not a participant in the 20th century´s capitalist economy to the extent that people in Ontario or Québec witnessed, or experienced, or lived through. So you get like in Alistair MacLeod the sense of terrible pain of dissociating oneself of one´s roots. Even if someone is successful in doing that then the sense of guilt that travels with the person when that person works and is a successful person outside of the region to which he or she was born. Alistair´s famous university professors who teach at big universities - he always expresses it the same way - big universities in Ontario or something and the fact that they are not content in doing that. They have one foot in Ontario and one foot in Atlantic Canada somewhere. And I would go even further and I would say that if you compare the short stories of Maritime writers with the short stories of Newfoundland writers you get radical differences as well. Maritime short story writers don´t express the same concepts of containment that Newfoundland writers do. What I mean by containment is the fact that Newfoundland writing is Patrick O’Flaherty The Rock Observed observed a kind of containment mentality in Newfoundland short fiction based on the fact that it was an island – it still is an island. But it´s a very self-contained island. So the kind of sustaining mechanisms in Newfoundland short fiction like music, like folklore, like oral storytelling, like ancestry and the kind of sense of a continuity across both generations and communities of people that live together. That´s not present in Maritime short fiction to the extent that it is present in Newfoundland short fiction. So all of these short stories emerge from the places in which they were written. It is as simple as that. And Canada is a collection of the dispersed regions. So Canada doesn´t really exist as a country. Canada is a cluster of regions. If you take nothing else away from your experience here, that is one thing I want you to take away - that this idea of the united Canada doesn´t really exist. It exists in terms of our legislation. It exists in terms of our sovereignty. It exists in terms of our trade with other nations. But in the minds of Canadians it doesn´t exist. I´m a Maritimer before I´m a Canadian. A Quebecer is a Quebecer before she is a Canadian. An Albertan is an Albertan before he is Canadian. And what do we have in common? Health care, a Canada pension plan, hockey, maple syrup. These are the things we have in common, but we don´t have a shared heritage as such.

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DR: I understand. Now I´d like to ask you the very last question. With regard to Atlantic Canadian short stories do you have a favourite author?

TT: Well, I usually probably like the short stories I read last the best. But my favourite short story author is definitely Alistair MacLeod because of his sense of lyricism combined with technical ability. My second favorite short story writer is Lynn Coady. DD: I love those two authors too. They are great! Well, thank you very much for your time. This was really helpful for me!

TT: You´re very welcome.

9.5 Interview with Jennifer Andrews

(December 1st, 2014)

DR: How did you come to work on regionalism?

JA: I think I probably started when I was working on magic realism. I studied magic realism as a graduate student and a postdoctoral student. It was a side area. It was an article that I was writing on magic realism in Canadian literature, specifically on Fall on Your Knees by Anne Marie McDonald. When I did reading about magic realism one of the things that kept coming up was discussions of regionalism and marginalization and marginality. And as someone who had been working in Ontario, studied in Ontario, trained in Ontario and Quebec because I went to McGill University for undergraduate and to Toronto for my graduate work. I wasn´t very conscious of it [regionalism] to be honest. It didn´t really cross my mind. And through my undergraduate study of Canadian literature at McGill we definitely did look at regions across Canada, but I would say particularly Atlantic Canada was neglected. So as I was reading this novel and then thinking about magic realism I kept coming back to the idea of Atlantic Canada being perceived as a marginalized region and then I think from there I actually gave that paper, when I came to do my interview for my job at UNB, which was telling [laughs]. And because of that I think as soon as I moved here I became immediately aware of region because there was such a bias about Atlantic Canada as a place where people were stereotypically lazy, unemployed or things that 133 seemed really inappropriate. When I was looking around and examining people who I knew in the community people seemed very educated, very hard-working, very diligent and my sense was that the economic basis of the region particular in somewhere like New Brunswick had essentially been eroded as resource development had changed; so the lumber industry had become less prominent in Canada or internationally so New Brunswick had suffered. It struck me that in fact a lot of the regional bias was something that wasn´t actually fairly placed upon a region. It was a way too kind of marginalize that region or to ensure that the region would be seen as an undesirable place to go. It also allowed for the kind of folk culture that you read about in Ian McKay where he says the marketing of Nova Scotia is about folk culture and tourism. I as an Ontario person who had done several trips through Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and P.E.I. and Cape Breton definitely felt that way. Well it is a pretty place to visit, would I wanna live here? What has been interesting for me over the years is the way in which I now see how dominant central Canada and even parts of Western Canada perceive themselves because of economic privilege. For example publishing in Canada is shaped by these small centers and how much immense work has to be done for a regional press or a regional author to do well in Canada because so much is against them. Just in terms of publicity, media support, just sheer options in terms of finding a publisher, getting recognized. I have a very different perception of region and a very different perception of region in particular in Atlantic Canada. I tend to be the person when someone from central Canada, my relatives are from central Canada, say “well this is a have not province and it is never gonna be any different” I tend to say “Actually we have a highly educated work force. What we don´t have is jobs.” And people travel all over the world from New Brunswick and are well employed in other places. So one of the challenges here is to figure out how to keep people here. And there have been pockets of really good innovation. Particularly in things like the IT-sector. So I tend to think that there is a kind of stereotype that operates outside of Atlantic Canada that then becomes imposed upon Atlantic Canada. And I don´t mean for Atlantic Canadian regionalism to be a passive thing, but as a region we depend heavily on things like tourism. So it is kind of a catch-22 you want to cultivate those nostalgic images of whatever New Brunswick or Nova Scotia or P.E.I. look like, but at the same time in doing so you may actually undermine the viability of it as a kind of place of the future for Canadians. It is an odd relationship, but I have to say it has totally

134 changed my idea of what Canada looks like because I didn´t pay much attention to Atlantic Canada until I moved out here and I had not really thought of Atlantic Canada as a place where a lot of literature came from. And now you know I think [laughs] of course this is where a lot of Canadian literature came from why would anyone think any different! And I think when early Canadian literature is taught there is a bias to support Atlantic Canadian regionalism. But I think that bias tends to outweighed then as contemporary writers or later writers focus on places like Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver and there is less emphasis on the fact that Atlantic Canadian writing is alive and well and particularly I mean Newfoundland is a really good example because of this kind of boom in Newfoundland which has had success all across the country and internationally. It is a hard question to answer and I think it is tied up pretty fundamentally too with economics and population. New Brunswick right now is not growing as a population.

DR: Is it not?

JA: I don´t think so. No, my sense is that it is pretty stagnant. I think there is some outmigration. I don´t think there is a lot of in-migration and there has been a boom of people coming back I think to places like Fredericton, but the difference is they are coming back because there are jobs within the government, within postsecondary education. They are not necessarily heading for example to northern New Brunswick. And the other challenge in this province as opposed to the region as a whole is the need for the knowledge of French. That´s the other catch that makes it more difficult I think as a province within a region to survive and to do well because you are expecting a lot of those employees, of those potential workers.

DR: How long have you been studying Atlantic regionalism?

JA: Well, it would have been probably since 1997.

DR: And did you find it difficult to find resources when you started working on that topic?

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JA: No, I mean there are definitely more books that have come out about Atlantic Canadian regionalism, but at the time there were works like Janice Kulyk Keefer´s book, there was Herb Wyile´s Sense of Place. So I actually think there had been work done on it through the 70s and 80s, particularly around the manic criticism in the 70s and 80s. Mostly I am thinking was beginning till late seventies. And then with postmodernism there was a kind of inclusion of regionalism in the search of picture of national irony or nationally ironic vision, so less emphasis on the region. But certainly I would argue - and people like Linda Hutcheon [have] - our real awareness of the need for a collection of works across the country trying to be representative; so people like Croach, people like Timothy Finley - I’m trying to think of other examples. There was definitely an awareness of French and English Canada and also Western and Eastern Canada to a degree. I think a lot of work has probably happened in the last twenty years particularly with things like outmigration. And Donald Savoir´s work I know he has become really important in terms of the way in which for example people either retire to Atlantic Canada or out-migrate for work and then try to come back. Basically that balance. So those are some of the things that come up in Tony Tremblay´s work, Herb Wyile´s book which of course I think was really pivotal in terms of pointing out how neo-liberalism undermines the region´s development because we have the sense that we have to kind of keep creating product to motivate people to come to Atlantic Canada. I think part of regionalism has changed by the World Wide Web and the internet because it changes the way in which communication travels across the country. So the idea of regionalism is being physically distant, is seen as less relevant, I don´t know if that seems true but to me I think it is because I think there are ways in which you can post something on a Facebook page, on a website about an event that is happening at the other end of the country and still have photos and a kind of dialogue or kind of interaction. So it changes to a degree the physical distance that one might have experienced years ago, even with flying or trains, or the way in which people travel from place to place. I mean it is faster to get to places, it is less of a barrier to travel from one destination to another. So the idea that years ago you would take a driving trip out to say Cape Breton it would be a massive undertaking to get there or you might go to P.E.I. and it would be a huge voyage. This isn´t the same because of cars, because of internet and because you can buy commodities on the internet of these places. So that is the other side of it. And you know things like - there is P.E.I. dirt shirts or cows

136 merchandise that you can buy that people would then say “well I went to P.E.I.” even if you haven’t been to P.E.I.. So there is that kind of weird regional tribalism that then gets distributed across the country. There is actually a company called “East Coast Clothing” and they just did toques. They did toques for the four provinces. So there is one for Newfoundland, one for New Brunswick, one for P.E.I and one for Nova Scotia. And it was actually a guy on Facebook saying “Why are you not doing Cape Breton? It is a region!” And I know people who moved away from New Brunswick and regularly order off that company’s internet site because they say it reminds them of being in Fredericton. It has this kind of generic nostalgic: anchor, hook. So the whole idea of how we package and market that concept of region I think is still very powerful and kind of problematic at the same time. I looked at the toques and thought “Oh I should order one because I live in New Brunswick”. So that is a very different kind of assertion of regionalism. So I think it has changed a lot over time, but there is definitely more resources and discussion of it. The only thing I would say is regionalism I find goes in ebbs and flows. Much like nationalism goes There is the sense in which when something happens in a region like for example when the RCMP officers were shot in Moncton there is national outpouring. What a terrible situation, what a terrible thing and we rally as a nation, but there is also this focus on region. And then of course, it draws back and then back into nation. I have a sense that it is very ebb and flow rather than a consistent focus on region. And certainly in Canadian literature I would say the majority of criticism now is focused on the transnational rather than the national or the regional. That would be my assertion in terms of the books that are coming out. People are most interested in either marginalized groups within Canada or the transnational meaning across and outside of Canada. In a way it is good in a way it is problematic because then regionalism just kind of disappears except for the people who are actually looking at it or writing about it.

DR: When people are writing about regionalism do they refer to Atlantic Canada as a region or is each province a region?

JA: Places. Not even provinces but I would actually say locals. Like when you read Linden McIntyre for example he is writing about a particular part of Cape Breton and a particular moment in time in the Roman Catholic Church. Or Ann-Marie MacDonald

137 or Alistair MacLeod is writing about a particular experience in a moment in time in Cape Breton. So those are very specific places within a region and within a province and I am not sure that they are always as aware of the province or the larger region so much as the individual location within that larger scope. It’s almost like the place takes on, in many cases, a mythic quality.

DR: When I read a text by Herb Wyile and he referred to region I was wondering what he actually means by region.

JA: I think when he is talking about regionalism he is talking about the construction of the whole.

DR: The whole Atlantic Canada?

JA: Exactly! But not necessarily Newfoundland. You have to think about the Maritime Provinces versus Atlantic Canada. Because Maritimes does not include Newfoundland, Atlantic Canada includes Newfoundland. I think he is theoretically talking about the entire area. But as you know from his book from his book he is very careful to kind of draw out specific examples of particular spaces within that region. And it was funny actually – just as a side note – I was listening to a radio broadcast, it was in the news. There was a lobster fisherman who was murdered. This was a little while ago. They now put the two people that are responsible on trial and they are about to issue a guilty verdict and both people said “Yes, I murdered this person” and it is quite gruesome. They actually thought that the man that they murdered – and it was in Northern New Brunswick - they thought that the man that they murdered was interfering with their traps. So they murdered him. I was listening to the story and I was thinking you know for somebody in for example Saskatchewan who is listening to this they are probably thinking it was quaint. Lobster fisherman murders co-lobster fisherman. But for me as I was listening I was thinking back to the late 90s when I moved here when there was a whole outcry in Bert Church around native access to fishing. The difficulty of negotiating native access to fishing versus non-native access to fishing, which led to actually really horrible violence in Northern New Brunswick. And the reality that for these fishermen it is in many cases a life or death situation. Their lives are on the line, but also their fortunes are on the line. They pay huge

138 bucks for these licenses to lobster fish and then as the lobster price goes up and down in the world markets they either ride the wave or lose a lot of money. I know that there are generations in Northern New Brunswick of very wealthy lobster fishermen who did well over time, but my sense now is that lobster fishing has become a much less desirable profession because it doesn’t have the same cachet as it once had and I don’t think lobster does as well on the market place. There is lots of times – especially here, I think in other places it probably does better - but you walk in a supermarket and it [the lobster] is heavily discounted and you realize okay they cannot get rid of it. There is too much. So the thing that I keep thinking about is if you live within the region you are much more aware of the kind of intricacies of those regional stereotypes. But I think those regional stereotypes continue to be circulate within Canada and have a kind of currency that then makes it difficult for people outside of the region to really comprehend the intricacies or the complexities of that region. So it is easy to say “Oh lobster fisherman kills fellow lobster fisherman” but not really to think about what is the economic motivation of this. Why are they so desperate that someone fiddling with their traps would lead to a murder? So that kind of thing is then lost. And I think what Herb Wyile is talking about is this economic decline in the late 19th century and early 20th century that has continued on. And the difficulty of living in a place where you feel that the economy isn’t turning around and yet you are producing this highly educated workforce, very smart people, well educated, thoughtful people and you don’t know what to do with them. And he is reflecting on it also I think as a professor. He is thinking about the students that you teach because much of the time you’re teaching a student you are saying “I’d love for you to stay here, but there are no jobs”, which is the reality. And I don’t know how much of that you have noticed when you’re here.

DR: Well, I think stuff like that is hard to notice when you are just spending some months here with the intention to study.

JA: Yeah and when you are not looking for a job. And particularly part-time work for students for example is very difficult to get. The pay is quite low, the jobs are very competitive, and often if you are a high school student it is really hard to land a job because university students are taking those jobs – which on a different market would be a completely different situation. And the other thing that is particularly in

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New Brunswick – I think it is also probably true of the other Atlantic Provinces but especially, particularly in New Brunswick is the literacy rate is quite low. I think it is about 55 to 60 percent. So you’re talking about 40 percent of the population that can’t actually read.

DR: Wow! That is hard to imagine!

JA: Well that and the other thing is that you are dealing with a population where you don’t have a lot of people that you can tax. I think we have 700.000 people in the province. Well, that is not a lot of people. So you are taxing those people to fund the entire province. It is a very small population. So it means that there are gonna be things that have to go by the wayside that might not go by the wayside in a larger place like Ontario where you have got huge numbers of people you can tax. And people don’t think about that. They would say “Well, why have you got a 13percent HST?” I think the provincial government has been being pushed to raise the HST and GST to 15percent.

DR: I assume HST is the tax right?

JA: Oh! Yes, it is the full tax, the harmonised tax – so both provincial and federal taxes. And there has been a long and very hard push on the provincial government because we have such a bad debt situation in New Brunswick, to raise that. And there has been huge resistance because as politicians say, the average income is low here, our average person is paying huge taxes: house taxes, personal taxes and what other taxes. And if we do that we are going to impede consumer ability. And we only have 700,000 people. So it is a very different situation than a larger place.

DR: Have you also taught classes on regionalism?

JA: Uuuuhm not specifically. Although we do talk about it because when we do classes here at the undergraduate level it is usually surveys. But for example I do a section in an earlier version of the course on prairie regionalism where we look at texts that were written during great depression, people like Sinclair Ross and that kind of prairie realism and then the importance of the region to constructions of

140 realism at that juncture. I guess when I am teaching it in New Brunswick I usually try to include a couple of writers from New Brunswick or Nova Scotia or this area. The other thing is I often do a piece from Nunavut. I have done The Fast Runner a few times where we watched the movie and read the script. And that’s in part just to make them aware of the fact that regions exist. There are places in Canada where we don’t necessarily go to. So I guess when I am setting out a course I’m teaching it, but it is not always as inferred. It might not be the thematically the meta-narrative of the course, but it is always built into the course and I always include it. And I think that’s much more true in courses that take place on the West Coast or the East Coast than in Ontario.

DR: Oh is it? That is interesting!

JA: Oh yeah. I would say so because I think there is less of a concern. I mean you are surrounded by central Canadian novels and everybody is saying “well the hottest, new novel is coming out of Toronto. Why would you look east or west? So there is a different kind of perception of regionalism. And the emphasis you might put on regionalism would be I think less important. I think it would be probably pushed in the background somewhere. I mean that’s anecdotal but I’m thinking of syllabi I’ve looked at and that is often the case that West Coast universities will emphasize regionalism, East Coast universities will emphasize regionalism and central Canadian universities will be much less up to do that.

DR: How would you define regionalism? Is it even possible to give a definition of it?

JA: If you are thinking just geographically it is an area. I think what Northrop Frye talks about region as a kind of landscape or area that I think is self-defined by particular physical characteristics. It works to a degree if you are talking about for example the prairies. I don’t know if in Atlantic Canada that is transferable because you can go to Cape Breton and you will get what are the equivalents of the Scottish highlands and you can go to parts of New Brunswick and you will get forest and then you can go to the beach. I would argue it might be better to think about regionalism through – if it is paralleled with Benedict Anderson’s idea of the imagined community. I think of regionalism as being probably closer to something like that where it is an

141 imagined space that has geographic limits or geographic kind of boundaries, but that part of it is that communal commitment to that place and whatever stories that place carries [whispers:] but I don’t know if that makes sense. But that would be kind of closer to what I would think of. Because I think you could make an argument for the physical “localic” - the Northern shield in Canada, the Laurentian shield in Canada when you go up north. There is a particular rock formation that makes that area look a specific way. And I could say geographically “Yes, this is a specific region” but in Atlantic Canada it would be very difficult to do that. I don’t think even of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and P.E.I. as looking the same. If you go over to P.E.I. there is red sand and it is very flat. It is much more arguably like a prairie. So that kind of analogy would probably not work. The physical, geographical analogy isn’t gonna fly in the same way.

DR: Would you also say that regionalism and the view of regionalism is constructed by people living in the center of Canada and how they view the region?

JA: I think it is both. I think it is a combination. Ian McKay’s book talks about this. He talks quite a bit about the fact that people rely on that folk culture and absolutely there are people who collected arts and crafts, who looked at folk culture in Nova Scotia and said “okay let’s buy this, let’s promote this, let’s sell this.” At the same time I think there has also been a certain amount of what you might want to call “buy in” for people who live here who see the opportunities of marketing themselves in that way. Like I am saying with these toques that are regionally specific. I would argue that that probably is a better example of people within the region saying I can make a buck of this by presenting it and it’ll pull at the heart strings of people who live here and it may be for the person who visited here once and who loved it because it is such a pretty place in the summer. So I would say it is a kind of mutual exchange that I think over time has become increasingly manipulated, I would argue, by both those who live here and those outside of the region.

DR: What do you mean with “manipulated”?

JA: Well, in the sense that when you are within the region you do have a certain amount of the ability to present. And I am thinking more of consumer culture and the

142 way in which people present tourist brochures. You know like come back to Anne’s land or that kind of thing where it is presented in that way. There’s examples in the earlier 20th century of pamphlets and advertisements that were made for wealthy people in Boston and New York to come to Evangeline land in Nova Scotia. The idea was they were coming to this pristine, bucolic Acadian forest that didn’t ever really exist. But the people in Nova Scotia were thinking okay there is wealthy people on the East Coast of the U.S. that we can basically entice to come up. So in that sense it works both ways. On the other hand I think there is always an argument being made economically that the regional stereotype is being imposed from outside, from the center because economically that is where the majority of the dollars is set. The question is, are you going to be able to sell this so that people will come. Yes, we have some power to market things, but at the same time if a company for example settles in Toronto nobody questions it. If a company comes to New Brunswick a major corporation people will say “Why are they leaving Toronto?” So I think that is where the idea that people within the region have a lot of power becomes complicated because you have to have a fair amount of economic power to have impact on how that idea of regionalism is constructed or how you can manipulate it. It´s not as easy to manipulate as it first appears. So that would be my comment on it as I would hope that there would be some ability within the region to respond and to say “we don´t like this” or “we see ourselves differently”. And there is certainly if you look at tourist commercials or tourist ads. There has definitely been ways in which people have tried to market various provinces through different means to draw them to the province or to the area and a lot of the time it is nostalgia based, but occasionally people will try something different and my sense of that is that it doesn´t often work. So at the end of the day the power is with the consumer who can say, “Yes, I wanna come and visit, but I only wanna come and visit on my terms.” Which is “I wanna go to Anne´s land and I wanna be surrounded by a lookalike Anne of Green Gabels who will talk to me like she is Anne of Green Gabels.” Those kinds of things obviously are hugely important to the economy of a place like P.E.I. So that makes it really tricky then. It is tricky to market and I don´t think necessarily people within the Atlantic region have as much say in how they market themselves because what they have to do is really be cognizant about what is our market wanting. Like Japanese tourists in P.E.I. which are a huge market for P.E.I.

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DR: Really?

JA: Oh massive! Oh yeah! I would think Japanese tourists are the number one group probably that come to P.E.I. They spend huge amounts of money. And a lot of the tourist attractions on the island are designed to attract those people. Because of the amount of money they have, the distance they have travelled, the fact that once they are here they will spend time and a lot of it is around the kind of nostalgic vision of Anne. And frighteningly so in a sense, but on the other hand it is a way for those industries or those people to remain on the island and to be employed and to be viably employed. But when you go in the summer. For example my husband travels to P.E.I. for work quite often and in the summer he can´t stay at the hotel that he would normally stay at because the rate is three times the normal price and that´s because they make all their money in a three to ten week period between beginning of June and August. So it is a very different kind of marketing and a very different kind of vision of regional identity. JA: You haven´t been over there when the tourists were there?

DR: I was there in October so I didn´t get to see many tourists.

JA: Yeah if you go any time between June and August you will see a lot of tour busses and lots of signs in Japanese.

DR: I didn´t expect that at all!

JA: Yeah and it is huge for them and that is really, really important because it is obviously massive generation of income in a very short period of time. And the other thing they do is they raise the price of hotels, the price of the restaurant meals goes up, most things in that town when June hits, prices go through the roof. So it means that people locally won´t go to the same degree. So what happens then is you are excluding people within the region as you are attracting people outside of the region based on economic ability - the ability to pay, which can be a real problem. It is a big, big, big issue. For example we never vacation on P.E.I. in the summer because I was horrified by the price of the cottage. But Americans will come up and spend the summer in P.E.I. because they see it as relatively inexpensive compared to

144 somewhere like Cape Cod or Martha’s Vineyard. So it is also all relative according to what power structure you are coming out of or economic I guess income level you are at.

DR: What do you find interesting about Atlantic Canadian short stories?

JA: I think the thing that I most like about Atlantic Canadian short stories - and I am not as much a fan of the short stories as the novels, but there are a few short stories that I teach regularly and the ones that I probably most like are MacLeod because to me they speak of this kind of mythical quality; but it is a mythical quality that is very powerful, but it is not untouchable. It is not the kind of mythical quality that excludes people; it is mythical quality that actually draws you in because ultimately it is often about human suffering, human experience, about human relationships. So it has this very potent kind of tangibility to it that woos people and they are very compelling to students. Because they usually have very clear thematic framework, or thematic message, but they also have a kind of personal touch that means students really respond to them. The one that I like – I teach one from the Victory Meat collection – called “Bitches on All Sides”. I teach that one actually because it is not a conventional Maritime short story and people will often read it and say “Well, this has nothing to do with Atlantic Canada”, but it is set in Fredericton and it is about racism in Fredericton. When I teach it I find the students have a really hard time. They like the MacLeod stories, they like the more traditional stories, they don´t like the stuff that actually talks about racism, sexism or things in their community that they see as being unpleasant, threatening or difficult. So I would say I probably lean towards less conventional stories, but I enjoy MacLeod´s writing hugely. It is just beautiful writing. But there is this part in me too that I know when I teach MacLeod´s story it is going over well. The students are going to love it. It will resonate with them. Whereas when I teach “Bitches on All Sides” they are usually highly uncomfortable. I teach it for three classes and in the first two classes we don´t even talk about race. Or they will say “He has a problem with women or with other people, or with black people”. That will be all they say. But they won´t actually probe the kind of loyalist foundations of Atlantic Canada and the fact that there has been a long history of slavery here and indigenous oppression and all those things. So I find with the short stories you can go one way or you can go another way and once you made that choice it is people who

145 live in the region are often pretty uncomfortable with it. But I think that is probably true with any short story and any place and if you read it and it says something unpleasant about your place, the place you live in and the place you have this kind of romantic attachment to, you are much less comfortable with it. The difference I would argue is, I grew up in Toronto and I have read stories about racism in Toronto and it doesn´t bother me at all because I look at it and I think “Yeah, Toronto is very racist”. It is very multicultural, it is full of immigrants, it is also an incredibly racist place. There is something about Atlantic Canada that I think leads people to believe in the bucolic and the pastoral. So when they don´t see that, even people who live here, who probably I would argue should know better, they don´t wanna see it, they don´t wanna know about it. So that is the kind of odd twist that you encounter at least with the students. And depending on the level of the student. I mean as they get to a higher level they tend to be more self-aware, more self-conscious more able to say this is a story about racism and racism exist, we have a reservation on the north side of the river and people don´t wanna go over there because they say it is a less desirable place to live. So those kinds of things where you realize that students are aware of the socioeconomic divisions and racial divisions, but they don´t necessarily wanna encounter them. And the story I think for them makes it paradoxically real and in their face in a way that they don´t wanna actually have a conversation about.

DR: That is a good way to teach though.

JA: Yeah it works well but I usually start with “Bitches on All Sides” when I teach my first year class. And I didn´t this year and I kind of wish I had. But on the other hand I think that they would have been really uncomfortable. They don´t like being confronted by things. So I don´t know if it would have worked. Last year I did it and it worked really well, but the students were different. They were much more up to question things.

DR: Yeah it depends on the class.

JA: It depends absolutely on the class and on how you approach it and if they are going to talk about it. If they are not, then it sometimes can feel really forced. Because I will often say too “What idea are we getting of the region here?, What kind

146 of myth of the region are we encountering?” And people especially at the first year level haven´t thought about it and they don´t wanna think about it. Because then they see it as “Okay it is a package of goods” which it kind of is. But they don´t want someone to tell them that.

DR: What would you say are characteristics of Atlantic Canadian short stories? Would you say there is something that distinguishes them from short stories from other places? Or do they have something in common with short stories from other places?

JA: The one thing I can think of is the brutality of it because they are often quite brutal. I taught “As Birds bring forth the Sun” this fall and I remember the students were horrified by the brutality of the mauled dog. When you read some of the other like Lynn Coady´s short stories, they are often incredibly brutal, incredibly bleak and very disturbing. In this kind of almost, not nonchalant, but in this kind of “that´s life- deal with it!”. There is a kind of harshness and brutality to it that is supposed to be acceptable. There are other stories that bring that to mind as the novel “As For Me and My House” and the short stories by Sinclair Ross. It would be similarly brutal, but different landscape. It has a kind of “viscerality” to it, like a visceral reaction that can make it very uncomfortable. I don´t know if it is related in part to poverty, if it is related in part to, in some instances lack of technology, the fact that the people were dealing with no running water, no roads. I mean there is stories about Newfoundland in the 1940s and 1950s. There were no roads to certain villages. So that might be part of it. That´s the only thing I can really think about. I am sure there is more, but that to me is the one that stands out.

DR: My very last question: Do you have a favourite author when it comes to Atlantic Canadian short stories?

JA: I really like Lynn Coady because she is very irreverent. I like Alistair MacLeod. There are lots of other short story writers but I tend not to read short stories. I tend to read novels. I am a novel person and a poetry person. So I tend to not read the short stories as much to be honest. I do like “Bitches on All Sides”, but that is because of the place where it is set. I am not sure it is the most brilliant short story.

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I do really like Lynn Coady because she is just so ironic. There is such a kind of level of discomfort when you read those texts that is intended to make you think about where are you, what is going on, how is this usually female character being treated and what is going on in this child´s or woman´s mind. I guess to me those are the ones that stand out, but I have to say it is funny because my training in short stories we didn´t do huge numbers of Atlantic Canadian short stories. And I think even to this day I probably don´t know as many Atlantic Canadian short story writers as I should. The other thing too is as a genre short story writing is very difficult in terms of publication. It is not an easy genre to be published in. Marc Jarman has said that repeatedly. He said “People don´t want your next short story collection. They want your next novel”. So there is also this real pressure, hierarchical pressure in publishing that the novel is more important than the short story which is more important than poetry. None of that should be the way it is, but as a result I think often really talented short story writers get pushed into writing novels because they are often told “well we’ll do a two book deal with you. One will be short stories, but one will be a novel”. There are lots of Canadian authors who encountered that. I think in the case of MacLeod I think that is what probably happened with No Great Mischief. I would suspect because there was this idea that if you wrote beautiful short stories, you should be able to write a novel. Or even someone like Lynn Coady, or Lisa Moore is another one. And I like Lisa Moore´s work a whole lot. I find it somewhat inconsistent, but I like it. It just changes. She has written in very different genres. There isn´t the same consistency as with Lynn Coady where you get this similar voice. That is probably one of the things that then kind of slows the development of the short story because people can´t get it published. They are not getting audiences and they are not getting reader reaction, and they are not able to kind of keep producing because they don´t have whatever money they need to survive to keep writing. I think that is probably true of short stories across Canada and I would argue in the U.S. too with exceptions for someone like Munro or MacLeod. I think generally publishers see novels as more marketable, which they probably are because people are more comfortable with the genre. In a way it doesn´t make sense because with a short story you can sit down, read it, put it down and come back to it.

DR: Thanks a lot for your time!

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JA: You are totally welcome!

9.6 Interview with Alexander MacLeod

(January 26th, 2015)

DR: How did you come to work on regionalism? What made you interested in it in the first place?

AM: I have always been interested in the relationship between cultures and the ‘places’ they seem to come from. My family moved back and forth quite a bit between the rural setting of our home in Cape Breton and the industrial landscape of Windsor, Ontario where we also lived and went to school, etc… When you experience two different places on a very deep level, I think that teaches you that ideas and geography have a more complex relationship than many people realize.

DR: How long have you been studying Atlantic regionalism?

AM: I have been studying it for my whole career. I wrote a chapter of my dissertation about Newfoundland literature and I have been focussing on writers from this part of the world ever since. I regularly teach courses on At-Can lit and I supervise lots of theses so that keeps me close to the field.

DR: Did you find it difficult to study Atlantic regionalism in depth or do you find there is a lot of easily accessible knowledge?

AM: I find there is a lot out there. It’s not necessarily an easy-to-google field, but there are plenty of articles and books out there. If you start with Herb Wyile’s work, you should be able to build a big bibliography pretty quickly.

DR: I read that you are teaching at St. Mary’s University. How long have you been teaching there for? 149

AM: I have been here for ten years.

DR: Have you also taught classes on regionalism or Atlantic Canadian short stories?

AM: Yes. I teach a second year course called The Literature of Atlantic Canada and I regular have other more theory-focused courses at the grad level of our MA in Atlantic Canada Studies.

DR: Do you find that regionalism is a topic that is important to deal with at universities?

AM: Absolutely. As I said, we have an interdisciplinary program in Atlantic Canada Studies in our University so we are continuously making arguments that break down the sometimes artificial division that seems to separate academic research from the community. In our program we always try to show how our work is connected to the real world we live in every day.

DR: How would you define regionalism? Is it even possible to give a short definition of this complex topic?

AM: In my work I define regionalism as the cultural geographic or, if you prefer, the socio-spatial index of all lived experience. Since all space is social - even spaces that seem untouched by people - it follows that all experiences of geography are inescapably cultural and all experiences of culture and inescapably geographical. No people outside of places (even cyber space is geographical) and no concept of place without a correspondingly specific understanding of a person. There is obviously a lot more to talk about here, but that the basic theoretical approach I take. If you follow the cutting edge research on spatiality, you see that regionalist discourse is actually very sophisticated and certainly more contemporary and active than many people realize.

DR: How would you say the definition or understanding of regionalism has changed in the past few decades?

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AM: The key contributions of theorists like Harvey, Soja, Massey, Jameson, Lefebvre and Bachelard, along with texts from many, many others in different national literatures has definitely increased the sophistication of contemporary studies of regionalism.

DR: Do you find it important that teachers focus on regional literature from Canada in class?

AM: Yes I think it’s important. I’m not a nationalist at all, and I’m not patriotic when it comes to my reading choices, but I do think that readers respond well to texts that represent a world they recognize. Being able to share a set of key cultural references with the characters you’re reading about and being able to understand the forces that flow through a community is very important.

DR: What do you find interesting about Atlantic Canadian short stories?

AM: I think Atlantic Canadian stories, rather than being rooted, traditional and old- fashioned, as many people maintain, actually demonstrated a real knowledge of the complex, globalized world. Many of the characters in my dad’s work, for example are Cape Bretoners who work for international mining companies or often have to travel great distances in order to “make a living” for other people who are actually “doing the living” at home. This is a complex political, cultural and economic terrain, and l think At-Can short stories have always demonstrated an awareness of this.

DR: Are there any main differences between Atlantic Canadian short stories and short stories from other places?

AM: See above. There’s more at stake, obviously, and I don’t think it’s useful to try and find one all-encompassing “definition” for a literature that examines a specific cultural geography from so many different perspectives. The literature is as varied as the imaginations that contribute to it and a good sign of a healthy artistic community is the variety of its artists and the work they produce. .

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DR: Did your father being an author make you interested in focusing on literature rather than pursuing other careers?

AM: Yes, I think so. It’s hard work trying to balance an artistic career with an academic one, but at least you get the freedom to work on your own projects in the ways that feel best for you. That was what my dad did throughout his career and, so far anyway, that’s the model I’m trying to follow.

DR: Did the short stories and novel written by your father influence your own writing?

AM: For sure. I love, respect and admire my father’s writing and I know I would even if I had no connection to the material or the people he is talking about.

DR: Do you have a favorite author with regard to Atlantic Canadian short stories?

AM: My favourite Atlantic Canadian short writers are Jessica Grant, Lynn Coady, Lisa Moore and Michael Crummey. I have a student, Kris Bertin, who is about to publish one of the best collections of At-Can short fiction that’s ever been written, but it’s not out yet so I shouldn’t get too excited about it.

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9.7 Questionnaire

Questionnaire

Personal information:

Gender: female male Age: University program:

Citizenship:

Province you grew up in:

1.) Have you ever heard of Atlantic Canadian short stories?

Yes No I am not sure

2.) Have you ever read Atlantic Canadian short stories?

Yes No I am not sure

3.) If yes, why did you read Atlantic Canadian short stories?

4.) Do you think Atlantic Canadian short stories are famous?

Yes No I am not sure Space for additional comments:

5.) Did you deal with Atlantic Canadian short stories at school?

Yes No I am not sure

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6.) If your answer is no, why do you think New Brunswick students are not exposed to New Brunswick literature at school?

7.) Would you feel diminished of something if you had never read an Atlantic Canadian short story or could you not care less?

Yes, I would feel diminished No, I would not feel diminished I couldn´t care less

8.) Why do you feel this way? Please explain your answer of question 7.

9.) Is it important that students are taught about their region´s literature?

Yes No I do not care

10.) Why? Please explain your answer of question 9.

11.) Is region important to you? Please explain your answer.

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