In the literary realm of things, what I dread is Nova Scotia fiction delving into the traditional way of life written by people who aren't even from the frigging province. Joyce lived in Switzerland and wrote about Ireland. David Adams Richards has gone down the road to Toronto but still writes about New Brunswick. Why can't the transplants to Nova Scotia write about wherever it was they came from?

Crap. Fat chance of getting back to sleep now.

I’d been awake for the thwuck of the Globe & Mail hitting my front porch around 3:15 a.m., and had tiptoed downstairs—pointlessly, my house is old, the stairs cranky—to retrieve it. “Is it in?” my husband called out as I stood on the stoop in my nightie, flipping through the Books section. As the Globe had requested a photograph from my publisher, a review seemed both likely and imminent.

“Er, no, but . . .”

“But what?”

“But there’s this other review of a book set in Nova Scotia . . . ”

“And?” His voice thinned with sleep. As I latched the front door the sounds of gentle snoring trickled down the stairs.

“And I think I’m in big trouble.”

Okay, it was the witching hour, and I was worried, as all authors are, about the reception of my new book. I did the English thing and put the kettle on. Calm down, Rachael. Look, the reviewer goes on to praise both the novel in question and its transplanted author. And what are the chances, really, that this particular reviewer also has The Wind Seller in front of her? Still, territorial possessiveness is hardly unique. I figured there’d be others out there who felt the same way.

When the idea for The Wind Seller first took hold, it never occurred to me to worry how Nova Scotians might react to my writing about an area I neither hailed from nor lived in. If it had I probably wouldn’t have written the book. This wasn’t born of any arrogance on my part but quite simply because once I’d camped along the north shores of the Minas Basin, once I’d walked the crumbling red cliffs and the acres of exposed tidal flats, witnessed the stealth with which the fifty-foot tides creep in, breathed in the forests and farmland, and scaled the mountain (yeah, right, we drove up one side and down the other)—I was in love with the place. Add to this the antique store find in Prince Edward Island—the box of Elinor Glyn How-to writing books addressed to Noble Mattinson, Great Village, N.S. Canada—and I felt the story was nudging me, elbowing me in the ribs (I swear Noble followed me around Parrsboro that first visit). How could I not write not about this dramatic Maritime coastline, about this tortured young man grieving the loss of his brother at Vimy? Mattinson forked over $5 for writing help back in 1922; I decided to step in and finish what he’d started. How’s that for voice appropriation?

Fiction of Displacement. The title of my favourite undergraduate English course. Understandable, perhaps, because I was as displaced, having moved country, city and/or house over 40 times, as the authors on the reading list, all of whom—Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, Doris Lessing, Jean Rhys, Ruth Jhabvala. E.M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield to name a few—wrote about places other than where they were from. Shortly after the publication of my first novel I found myself back on campus for a radio interview, and so I arranged to meet the professor who had taught the course, himself an immigrant. He looked puzzled when I began raving about Fiction of Displacement, and how it had stayed with me. Turned out he barely remembered the course which had run only two or three years. But something in that course had spoken to me. Perhaps because I always knew I’d end up writing about places I wasn’t from.

I returned to Nova Scotia again and again for research and each time found myself swept up in Maritime warmth and hospitality. Locals directed me to sites I asked about and drove me to ones I would have probably otherwise missed. They gave me maps and booklets, they drew me diagrams. Anything I needed—information on weather, history, employment, shipping, the times and caprices of the tides—they went out of their way to get for me. I accompanied a brush weir fisher out into the tidepool (he handed me a net, expecting me to help him scoop the fish. Ick.) The folks in Great Village even opened their museum for me. “Call me,” “here’s my e-mail address,” “come back and stay.” I did.

All writers have a duty to get not only the facts of a place right, but the feel too, that less tangible quality. Though I’ve never posed as some kind of spokesperson for the place—and as the book is set in 1924, a long time before I was born, I was hardly setting myself up as a spokesperson for the time. And isn’t that the rub with all historical novels? We weren’t there, we are only ever trying to simulate a sense of the time and place. Don’t get me wrong, I can understand a little territorial snarling, and how someone from Nova Scotia would balk at the idea of an outsider (from Ontario of all places, who did I think I was?) adopting even the smallest corner of her home, even in the distant past. Yes, it kinda bothered me as a kid that Londoners assumed everyone from Yorkshire was a coalminer, or related to one. But however much being from Yorkshire has coloured and shaped my life and who I am—and it has—I am a long way from Bradford. True, almost everyone grows and changes, and many of us lose contact with and interest in the people we grew up with. But places change people, too. I am as much a product of the 28 years I’ve lived here as I am of the England I grew up in. Joyce was 22 when he left Ireland, I was 16 when I landed here. An odd age. I know this country far better than I know England. My formative adult years were spent here. I cry when Canadian athletes win Olympic medals, not English ones. Could I write about Yorkshire? If I felt compelled to then probably yes, though beyond a minor scene in Tent of Blue so far I haven’t. But must I write about Yorkshire? Of course not, no more than I’m obliged to write about my other homes in British Columbia, the Czech Republic, Japan, London, or even Hamilton, where I live now.

On tour, reading and signing in towns both big and small, I braced for a negative reaction. It never came. People were interested and intrigued, they were warm and friendly: they were Maritimers. Of course I was asked “how come?” How come a woman from Hamilton, Ontario (via Yorkshire and all those other places), decided to write about the north shore of the Minas Basin? I hauled Elinor Glyn’s books with me. Everyone loved the story of the antique store—the box is considerably more shabby now than it was when I bought it, but all that Nova Scotian fingering only adds to its charm. I began to relax and enjoy myself.

My last night in Halifax. My Saskatchewan friend and I were supping a Keith’s in, where else, the Economy Shoe Shop. A man perched on a stool at the bar asked if he could join us. My friend scowled, I shrugged, and “Jim” reeled towards us. Whoops, a little more drunk than his slurred request had suggested. A few seconds of chatting (the yelling variety) revealed my bastardized and shredded accent. “What the f*** are you doing here?” “Jim” grinned/leered. A salute with his glass. “I’m on a f****** book tour.” (I was on my second beer.) Clink clink. More questions, repetitions, clink clink, and then I explained where the book was set. “You’re not from here. What the f*** you doing writing about a place you’re not from?” There it was, the jab I’d been waiting for. No clinking glasses this time. But no awkward silence, either. (Remember that 2nd beer? And I mentioned “Jim” was drunk, right?) “It’s my specialty. I write about places I haven’t a f****** clue about.” Clink clink. “And while we’re on the subject, where’s your Nova Scotia accent?” Turns out “Jim” was born and raised in Sudbury, Ontario.

I’ve been tremendously buoyed by readers’ reactions—most importantly, those of Nova Scotia readers—to the book’s setting, its sense of place: “You could be Bluenoser, yourself.” “I can’t believe that you’re not a Maritimer.” Even in the town on which I modelled my fictional village, people said, “I can’t believe you’re not from here.” Not everyone does or will feel this way, but the book that pleases everyone can’t be written. If I’ve done something right in capturing the essence of the place I attribute this solely to the bewitching Fundy Coast and Halifax, the coolest city in the country. I never stole the frigging province, only borrowed it for a while.

* * *

Rachael Preston is based in Hamilton, Ontario. Her debut novel, Tent of Blue, was published in the fall of 2002 by Goose Lane Editions. Her second novel, The Wind Seller, followed in 2006.

In 2001, Rachael was nominated for the Journey Prize and won the Arts Hamilton Literary Award. In 2006, she won the City of Hamilton Arts Award for Literature. A native of Yorkshire, England, Rachael has a Master’s degree in English Literature from Queen’s University and also studied at Emily Carr College in Vancouver. Currently she teaches creative writing courses both in class and online for Mohawk and Sheridan Colleges.