The Many Reinventions of Atlantic Canadian Fiction: A Roundtable
It’s notoriously difficult and downright foolish to attempt to define the literature of an entire region, particularly a region with as much diversity and as rich a storytelling tradition as Atlantic Canada.
It’s notoriously difficult and downright foolish to attempt to define the literature of an entire region, particularly a region with as much diversity and as rich a storytelling tradition as Atlantic Canada. While the region remains fixed in the minds of many Canadians as a place frozen in time—perhaps because of the success of so many mainstream comedy shows that play off familiar tropes: the harangued, chain-smoking bingo queen; the slick-talking, out-of-work fisherman; the passionate punk rock fiddler—its increasingly diverse and dynamic literature highlights the passions and complexities of a place firmly rooted in the contemporary moment.
Atlantic Canada is home to beloved fictional underdogs and spunky literary heroes, from the quiet solitude of Alistair MacLeod’s hard-working Cape Breton miners and fishermen to the take-no-holds-barred spirit of Lynn Coady’s brawlers or Joel Thomas Hynes down-and-out n’er do goods. Yet it’s also a place of fierce literary innovation, from George Elliot Clarke’s Africadia to France Daigle’s aphoristic Acadian tales. There’s the powerful work of El Jones and Shauntay Grant in the burgeoning Halifax spoken word scene. And then there are writers and storytellers you don’t know about, artists that Kerry-Lee Powell says have “little to no interest in achieving commercial recognition, who nonetheless dedicate their lives to their practice or to supporting artistic communities.” There are Atlantic Canadian literatures, in other words—some known, some still under construction. Some books are now bursting into the national consciousness, like Joel Thomas Hynes’s Governor General’s Award-winning We’ll All Be Burnt in Our Beds Someday and Giller-finalist Michelle Winters’s surrealist novel I Am a Truck. Over the course of the fall, I spoke at length with four fiction writers who are based in or originally from Atlantic Canada, and whose work has been recently recognized on the national stage. Over email, we chatted about craft, place, influences, and belonging in the Atlantic Canadian lineage. Though our experiences of East Coast reading and writing are varied, we each grapple in our own way with the challenge of describing East Coast literature.Trevor Corkum: Are there particular features, quirks, birthmarks, telltale signs, secret clues or common tropes you would ascribe to writing from Atlantic Canada? Amy Jones: I don’t want to say something like “the ocean” or “fiddles,” except that those kinds of things do turn up in my writing, regardless of how much I try to resist them. I wrote a whole story about Alexander Keith’s grave. I can’t exactly claim to be above all the usual tropes. One thing I guess is that as East-Coasters we all on some level identify ourselves as outsiders, and this informs our work to different levels. Atlantic Canada is kind of an afterthought of a geographical area. When you grow up with people talking about “cross-Canada” as being Vancouver to Montreal—like so many touring bands I wanted to see as a teenager—you get a bit of a chip on your shoulder. At the same time, it gives you a kind of freedom. If no one’s paying attention, you can do whatever the fuck you want. I have always had kind of an obsession with the idea of “home,” and the push and pull of leaving/staying. So many people I know, including myself, have left Atlantic Canada for one reason or another. Some of us couldn’t wait to get out, some of us left reluctantly. But I think whatever you end up doing, there is always this imbalance within you. You stay, you long for adventure; you leave, you are homesick. It’s either “Sonny’s Dream” or “Barrett’s Privateers.” Yeah, I went there. Kris Bertin: To me, East Coast writing is any writing about the region, which does have several features that reflect the real Maritimer experience. But writing from Atlantic Canada isn’t quite the same. What about all the other work we do—the stuff about cosmopolitan cities and ghosts and mutants? Are those coloured by our time in Fredericton or St. John’s or Halifax? Does the place where I sit and imagine humans flying through space looking for alien planets really have a bearing on it? I’m not sure if it does. I find it irritating whenever I hear someone’s identity or work get summed up by some ethnic, regional, racial, religious or political affiliation. We are so much more than any of these things. Maybe it’s silly to feel the need to make this distinction, but writing from the East Coast can be anything! Writing about the East Coast, however, shares a number of common features, like a particular focus on landscape, jobs, or family. Kerry-Lee Powell: I’m not from Atlantic Canada. When I first moved here a few years ago, I just read random writers that I came across—poets mostly—like Allan Cooper, Lynn Davies, Harry Thurston, and Alden Nowlan. I had read and really admired Alistair Macleod and consider him to be probably my main inspiration. When I read Alex Macleod (who I also think is amazing) I didn't know they were related, so that gives you an idea about how clueless I was about the scene out here! Since then I've read a lot of contemporary writers whose work defies categories (including Amy, Kris and Eva and also Christy Ann Conlin and many others). I only recently became aware of the clichés associated with writing in Atlantic Canada—fiddles, rum, shacks. I think there’s a kernel of truth to some of them, that a lot of folk traditions are still alive and kicking out here. But I think also there’s a lot of insidious snobbery towards poorer regions, a tendency to be reductive. New Brunswick reminds me of Wales, where I lived for 16 years and went to university. It’s a poor country with a lot of resource exploitation that is frequently the butt of English jokes. I wonder if perceptions of Atlantic Canada are shaped by that kind of snobbery. I think some people forget that you can have an inner life when you’re poor, and that culture and books and education don’t belong solely to the upper or middle classes. I did a reading not long back where the presenter was grilling me about the more unsavoury aspects of my book. I was yammering about how I was influenced a lot by the plays of Samuel Beckett and the way he strips a lot of the civilizing elements out of a situation to question what we are as humans. But all the presenter wanted to know was if I’d really worked in a strip club! If I was to pick out a characteristic that many East Coast writers share—the ones that I like, at least—it’s that they often write with a high degree of compassion and humanity, even when the material is really twisted. I wonder if that is borne out of the communities here, and a greater awareness of hardship. The idea of identifying as an East Coast writer makes me feel a little nervous, as though it carries a kind of burden, a set of obligations or scenarios and conventions that must therefore be dealt with. I know quite a lot of writers struggle with that sense of obligation, and risk losing their readers, publishers, prizes, and grant money if they stray too far. I worry that if we try to define a regional literature, the innovative, anarchic voices or brilliant outliers will be left by the wayside. Cultures need new ways of seeing in order to thrive, and it’s a little worrying that many CanLit publishers seem to favour regressive, conventional, middle class voices. Eva Crocker: The last two Atlantic Canadian books I read were Kerry and Kris’ short story collections. They both revel in describing the disgusting, with a remarkable talent for capturing the rotten and slimy in all its stinking glory. Willem DeKooning’s Paintbrush and Bad Things Happen have powerful things to say about class. In both of these books, characters’ economic realities subtly influence their relationships with co-workers, siblings, and lovers, as well as their proximity to the grotesque. I’m reading Joel Thomas Hynes’ We’ll All Be Burnt in Our Beds Some Night, and there’s this great scene where the protagonist pukes his guts up shortly before going down on his soon-to-be-girlfriend. Somehow, it’s romantic. In this book, there’s also a correlation between economic hardship and the repulsive sublime. So I’m tempted to say new Atlantic Canadian fiction is interested in transcendent repulsion, in the people who understand that state intimately and what that says about their position in society.
Mi’kmaq poet Shannon Webb-Campbell believes that Atlantic Canadian writing comes from the lands and proximity to the ocean. “I write with my ancestors. In terms of a quality, or particular birthmark of East Coast writing, the Atlantic is inherent. It’s a life force, threat and reckoning each writer tackles, even if you don’t explicitly, or ever write a single word about the ocean.” Alexander MacLeod, chair of the Atlantic Canada Studies program at Saint Mary’s University, considers the ways in which Atlantic Canadian literature, as a regional literature, has developed in recent centuries in relation to writing from central Canada. He also considers the impact of geography and larger social forces on writing from the region. "I think the tropes most people associate with East Coast Writing—the poverty, the alcoholism, the gothic violence, the humour, the ironically ‘simple’, ‘authentic,’ or ‘traditional’ culture, the lack of privacy, the large dysfunctional families crammed into tight spaces, the portrayal of aging or traditional gender roles or sexuality, the reading of nature, etc ... is actually caught up in real world conflicts that aren’t easy to address and really aren’t going away anytime soon.”
Trevor Corkum: Kerry-Lee, you’ve touched on your first encounters with Atlantic Canadian literature as someone who didn’t grow up in the region. For those of you who found your voices as writers on the East Coast, how do you feel East Coast writing has influenced your own work? Eva Crocker: One of the first Atlantic Canadian books I remember reading is Jessica Grant’s Come, Thou Tortoise. It totally blew my mind. It was the first time I encountered magical realism. The first time I went to New York City, I couldn’t get over how weird it was to actually be in a city that had only existed for me as the backdrop for blockbuster movies. Reading Come, Thou Tortoise was the opposite experience; the small city I grew up in was suddenly a fictional world. It made me want to write about my own surroundings. Amy Jones: When I was just starting to play around with the idea of actually taking this whole writing thing seriously, I read Christy Ann Conlin’s Heave and was like, Okay, yes. I can do it. It was the first time I had ever read something that made me feel like my voice and point of view was valid, that I could have something to offer someone. But the very first “Atlantic Canadian” writing that I encountered wasn’t fiction—it was actually poetry. When I was 12 or 13, I went to the Christmas at the Forum Festival in Halifax with my grandmother. I wandered off and found myself in front of a table full of books. The woman sitting behind the table gave me the warmest smile and asked me if I wrote poetry—which of course I did, terribly—and she was so nice about it that I bought one of her books. The woman was Dartmouth poet Maxine Tynes and the book was called Borrowed Beauty. I don’t think there is a single text that had more influence on me as a writer than that one. I mean, I don’t write anything like Maxine Tynes and I don’t even write poetry anymore, but I had met a woman from my actual town who wrote books. Those were her words on that page. Words that she wrote. A woman I had met. It was, honestly and truly, the single most important event in my young writing life. Kris Bertin: I had a Canadian Literature course in the 11th grade. We read Bliss Carman and Alistair MacLeod, and I discovered Thomas Raddall and Annie Proulx. All of it was rewarding in so many ways, but the first time I read something that resonated with me and reflected the world around me was David Adams Richard’s For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down. I remember hearing about Alan Legere when I was a kid—the Monster of the Miramichi—but that wasn’t what really struck me about the book. It was something about class, about the way Jerry Bines was spoken to and about by a social worker. It reminded me of the interactions I’d seen or been a part of in my life, where someone was regarded as less-than by someone who thought themselves superior. I think it helped me understand that there was narrative potential everywhere, and that the complex human interactions happening right in front of me held tremendous value. I also have a pretty large collection of Maritime folk mythology. Though it’s not fiction, the works of Maritime ethnographer Helen Creighton are so full of compelling and imaginative stories—like reading the secret history of the world around me. It’s been a massive influence on my graphic novel, The Case of the Missing Men, which takes place in a fictional Nova Scotia village and is about fairies and “forerunners” and secret caves Trevor Corkum: How much writing do you currently read from or about Atlantic Canada? In what ways do you see these writers in conversation with one another, or with other writers in Canada and beyond? What excites you about current writing from the region? Amy Jones: To be honest, I’m kind of avoiding it. I can’t just read it objectively. I’m too emotionally involved. In some ways, it kind of feels a little like stalking an ex on Facebook or something. I want to look, but I don’t want to look. Because what if they’ve gone and really got their shit together, and they’ve got a cool new job and have been travelling the world with their new supermodel girlfriend? Or what if things have just completely fallen apart, and they’re just sitting around playing video games all day in a Cheeto-dust haze? I’m joking, but only kind of. I read Kris Bertin’s collection and thought, Okay, Maritimes. You’re in good hands. And from what I’m reading and seeing in the media, it’s not just Kris—there are so many other writers who are getting such great buzz across the country. Atlantic Canadian fiction has really matured since we were together. And I’m really happy for it—I’m not even just saying that. Eva Crocker: I’ve been reading a lot of books from Newfoundland lately. I loved Shannon Webb-Campbell’s Still No Word, Megan Gail Coles’ Eating Habits of the Chronically Lonesome, Sara Tilley’s Skin Room, and Robert Chafe’s Two-Man Tent. These books address what it means to either grow up or find yourself in an isolated place, and grapple with Amy’s description of the “push and pull of leaving/staying.” I don’t experiment with form a lot in my own work, but I’m interested in trying to learn from books that do. Two-Man Tent does some really cool things with structure; the book alternates between short stories and chat logs from a real-life online romance Chafe had with a man in the States. Little details from the chat logs sometimes show up in the stories and vice-versa, revealing something about the flimsy divide between the author’s reality and his fiction. The narrative fragments are powerful on their own, but the overarching structure enriches the prose, making it even more meaningful. Kris Bertin: I read a lot about the region, but I don’t tend to go looking for fiction just because it’s made on this side of the country. It’s what I’m supposed to say, but I’m ambivalent about where the artist is from, or even who they are. I’m a lot more concerned with the work itself. I think the current generation of East Coast authors are maybe a bit less lyrical and a little more prosaic and personal than those who came before us. I think it has a lot to do with globalization, the Internet, the collapse of community, and the rise of social media and mass culture. All that stuff. But by its very definition, it’s happening everywhere else, too, so the East Coast seems a bit less removed from the rest of the world in Kerry-Lee Powell or Amy Jones’s stories. I think everyone on the East Coast is also pretty invested in the idea of honesty in their work. If you’re living in an era that’s as artificial and strange as this one, it’s probably more important to write something truthful than beautiful. This might account for some of that ugliness we were talking about. Kerry-Lee Powell: We have brilliant poets out east—Allan Cooper, Lynn Davies, Harry Thurston, M. Travis Lane, Peter Sanger—whose work barely gets a nod outside of Atlantic Canada. But I think Canada has a lot of separate communities. There’s a whole scene out west, for example, that we don’t hear much about over here. It’s a big country. One nice thing about regional scenes is that once you’re involved, you come across the work of writers you might not otherwise hear of. The best writers aren’t necessarily the ones with publishing contracts or interviews on the CBC. I’ve met a lot of artists out here with little to no interest in achieving commercial recognition, who nonetheless dedicate their lives to their practice or to supporting artistic communities. In New Brunswick, there’s a subversive quality to some of the Chiac and Acadian artistic communities that’s really intriguing, where you have art galleries with no signs and large concerts held on farms or in backyards that you only hear about by word of mouth. Trevor Corkum: Kris, you resist the notion of some kind of homogenous East Coast writing. But can you all talk a bit about Amy’s idea of “outsider” fiction and the East Coast’s relationship to Toronto or other large cities? Do you recognize what Eva calls “the rotten and slimy in all its stinking glory” in your own work, or the writing you admire from the region? Kris Bertin: Slime has value. Not to wallow in it, not to rub people’s faces in it, but to remind them that no picture is complete without the litter and the trees growing up through the basement and the black stuff that accumulates on windowsills. There’s something about the reality and our bearing on it that these things end up representing. For all of our architecture and landscaping, the real, messy, uncaring world is wiggling in all around us, and we can’t stop it. This isn’t unique to the East Coast, but it’s useful. Slime can help shatter a lot of illusions. I think the Maritimes can be ugly in different ways. Harper’s comment about a “culture of defeat” incensed the region, but I’ll be damned if you can show me that he’s not right. For every local, sustainable, sunshiny coffee shop/art gallery you can point to, I have a dozen more whole villages that have given up. People who are proud not to know something, who hate each other, the government, the French, the Indigenous, etc. I grew up in that world, and it’s not going away. We owe it to the reader to present the world as it is, not as we want it to be. Amy Jones: I feel a little unqualified to answer this question, now that I live in the belly of the beast. I often worry that the longer I am away from Nova Scotia, the more my perspective of it becomes nostalgic, sentimental, and that my writing about Nova Scotia is no longer tethered to its present reality. Halifax especially has changed so much in the past ten years that I don’t even feel like I know it anymore. My version of Halifax will always include my old house (which was torn down) or my old high school (which was torn down) or my old stomping grounds (which have all been closed or torn down). I feel like I am writing about an old photograph. I feel like I don’t have anything to add to the story. I’m just some Toronto jerk who doesn’t get it. But I’m never going to be a “Toronto writer” either. In Toronto, I will always be considered a Maritimer. I’m going to be an outsider no matter where I go, and my writing is always going to reflect that. In terms of “the rotten and the slimy”—a description I love—I think we all have a compulsion to expose the underbelly of our community, in reaction to the way the rest of the country thinks of us, which I am increasingly convinced is that we all live in a tourism ad. Showing the lives of Atlantic Canadians as messy and complex—and, yes, rotten and slimy—shows that we are real human beings and not just shiny-faced bagpipe players running hand in hand along a beach. And if we’re not in some shitty tourism ad, we’re in Trailer Park Boys, which is just as fucked up. I’m really happy to see so much Atlantic Canadian fiction that counteracts both of those things. Eva Crocker: I really relate to what Amy said about the “push and pull of leaving/staying” in Atlantic Canada. It’s definitely a theme in my collection. Almost all my characters either grew up in Newfoundland or live there, and many of them are preoccupied with a desire to get off the island or a longing to get back to it. I understand the feeling of being isolated from the rest of Canada, especially growing up on an island. The idea that there might be any definable Canadian identity or values feels false to me. But as a white cis-woman, I don’t really feel comfortable calling my work “outsider fiction.” Even though my stories are about being from a place outside the physical center of Canada, in many ways my perspective is one that’s privileged in Canadian fiction. Trevor Corkum: Let’s go back to the question to the question of class and opportunity. On the one hand, Kerry-Lee talks about “the insidious snobbery towards poorer regions,” while Kris talks about the impact of globalization and the Internet on how culture is being produced locally. In each of your collections, we can find “outsider” characters who feel left behind, and those who up and choose to leave of their own accord. How do the current economic and political concerns in the region—say, the huge demographic challenges related to aging and outmigration, increased immigration, the decline of rural areas—filter through your own work? How do you see them being taken up by other writers? Kris Bertin: I think our job is to write about people, about the real, messy, weird, and contradictory course of our lives over time. It’s important to mention the forces bearing down on us, but they’re never singular—they’re numerous, varied, and voluminous—and they’re never, ever simple. If your work is solely focused on a hot topic, it can so easily just become a didactic little morality play—or worse, a form of propaganda. If we’re writing about a certain time or place, certain concepts or situations will come up—like say, gentrification, useless university degrees, and rampant unemployment. But writing about some specific societal concern isn’t nearly as bad as thinking you have the answer to it. You don’t, and that’s not your job anyway. This is a terrible sin, and one that must be avoided. Amy Jones: I was just in Red Deer, Alberta giving a talk about the similarities between Red Deer, Thunder Bay, and the Maritimes. So many smaller cities in Canada are facing the same problems, and I think it’s interesting to look at the correlation between the type of art that’s being created in these cities and the type of people who choose to stay there to make it—their tenacity, fierceness, and passion for their communities. I think that where you choose to live and work necessarily influences your writing and the type of characters you write about. If you choose to stay in a place like Halifax, your writing can have a much deeper impact on the community, in a way that you never would be able to in a place like Toronto or Vancouver. You can define what Halifax writing looks like. It’s an exciting position to be in, and I think a really important one. If all our artists move to the big cities, who will tell the rest of our stories? Of course, I left and will likely never move back. The reality is, it’s a struggle. I admire the people who are able to do it, while acknowledging that I tried and failed. Eva Crocker: In Barrelling Forward, I wanted to look at Newfoundland in the wake of the boom and bust of the oil industry. A lot of my characters are on the brink of transitions, they’re moving house, breaking up, changing jobs—but not necessarily because they want to. I was interested in those scenarios because I wanted show how financial precarity and a lack of job security leads to a lack of control over your circumstances. I think the collection’s title is fitting because many of my characters are charging ahead without a plan for the near future.
It’s also important to consider who is missing from particular conversations about literature, either because of historical omission, intentional neglect, or otherwise. When asked this question, MacLeod points to the rich spoken word community in Halifax. He highlights the work of those who have served in the role of Halifax’s poet laureate for the last ten years, especially Shauntay Grant, El Jones, and Rebecca Thomas: “New writers are re-writing this place but they aren’t necessarily denying those older conflicts or saying that they aren’t there anymore. Grant and Thomas, in particular, are plugging into some pretty ancient conflicts between white Halifax and the Mi’kmaq and African Nova Scotian communities, but they are bringing their own amazing artistry into the mix and that changes everything.” Webb-Campbell notes the ever-evolving nature of East Coast fiction, as “many folks move away, and move back (repeatedly), sometimes writers get lost in the fold.” She feels more space needs to be made for Black and Indigenous voices: “From a bird’s eye view, the East Coast trumpets a few voices, and sometimes forgets to bring the flock along. There are many more bedroom poets, café novelists, and barfly essayists working than any of this list suggests. Let’s invite them into the conversation, and broaden our perspectives.”
Trevor Corkum: As a last question, from your perspective, what or who is current missing in discussions about East Coast fiction and literature? Are there important voices we have yet to hear? Are there questions and concerns we’re not yet addressing? Eva Crocker: I think I still have a lot to learn about East Coast fiction. I hesitate to answer this question because I’m sure there’s tons of incredible authors on the East Coast that I haven’t discovered yet. From my limited knowledge of East Coast fiction, it seems like we could do more to center and celebrate work by Black people, Indigenous people, people of colour, queer people, and trans folks. Kris Bertin: Diversity is the word in our mouths at all times, but it just plainly is important. We always need to hear from different kinds of creative people and it’s only ever a good thing. I’m interested, too, in a diversity of form. There aren’t a lot of outlets for Maritime writers who want to make stuff that’s strange, or funny. Nor for genre stuff, like science fiction and horror. There’s not a lot of gonzo, batshit-crazy fiction here, either. I think there needs to be a place for that kind of stuff, other than DIY zinefairs and craft shows. It’s a weird place, and we’re weird, and we need to acknowledge it! Literary fiction journals—especially on the East Coast—should branch out a little, and be a little more experimental. Maybe take the story that you really, really like but isn’t what we do. Why not? I guess I’m talking to the people who work at our universities, who read the slush piles and make hard choices. I know people who make marvelous, fun, and challenging work that can’t get placed because it doesn’t fit into a mold. The mold has to go! We are all Maritimers, yes, but we can dream anything, and this place can be anything we want it to be. Amy Jones: I mean, the answer to this is the same for everywhere in Canada, isn’t it? It’s not that there are voices that are missing in Atlantic Canadian literature, it’s that we’re not listening. CanLit, specifically AtlanCanLit, needs to make space for marginalized writers. Period. The table might be small, but that makes it all the more important who we invite to it.
The work of creating a literature—literatures—is ever-evolving. It’s a messy, complicated, cacophonous work-in-progress. It’s a reflection of the intersection of a wave of local, national and global forces, and how writers on the ground respond and react to these changes. But it’s also about a yearning, a longing, to engage with the wider world. For MacLeod, it’s the quality of the work itself that matters most: “It always comes back to language itself and to style. By themselves, none of these sociological, economic or political concerns are going to make great art. . . . When [East Coast writers] win these national awards or when they score these international publishing deals, it’s not because of their Atlantic Canadian material, or their Atlantic Canadian identity. It’s because of their talent and their discipline and their amazing ability to manipulate narrative in compelling ways.” With thanks to Alexander MacLeod and Shannon Webb-Campbell. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Trevor Corkum grew up on the East Coast and now divides his time between Toronto and the south shore of Prince Edward Island. He hosts the author interview series The Chat on 49thShelf. His fiction, essays, journalism and reviews appear regularly in periodicals across the country. The Electric Boy, his debut novel, is forthcoming with Doubleday Canada. Kris Bertin is a Halifax author and bartender. His first book Bad Things Happen won the Writers’ Union of Canada’s Danuta Gleed Award for the best debut book of short stories in 2017. His new graphic novel The Case of the Missing Men (ill. Alexander Forbes, Conundrum Press) is in stores now. Eva Crocker is the associate editor and chief staff writer at The Overcast, an arts and culture paper in St. John’s. Her debut short story collection Barreling Forward (House of Anansi Press, 2017) was a finalist for the NLCU Fresh Fish Award and the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers, and won the Canadian Authors Association Emerging Author Award. Amy Jones is the author of the short fiction collection What Boys Like (Biblioasis, 2009) and the novel We’re All in This Together (McClelland & Stewart, 2016), a finalist for the Leacock Medal. Originally from Halifax, she now lives in Toronto, where she is working on a second novel. Kerry-Lee Powell’s debut fiction collection, Willem de Kooning’s Paintbrush, was nominated for the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize and was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the 2016 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and won the Alistair McLeod Prize for Short Fiction. She is the current Writer-in-Residence at the University of New Brunswick
