COADY SPEAKS

So what’s required first is some relentless honesty and self-interrogation. First, we are writers. We are petty, mean-spirited begrudging souls in essence. Also, cowardly, hypocritical and wildly inconsistent in our opinions.

In the safety bubble of your kitchen, the wood stove crackling away, me drinking the above-referenced, you drinking something absurd and fizzy, probably with an umbrella in it, we set up straw-men, you and I. This is very easy to do when you are feeling secure in the knowledge that the person from whom you are sitting across the table agrees with you pretty much a hundred percent. So we are free to get all fired up. We set up “The Writer from Away,” that we may knock him down. Corpulent, sniffy, fastidious. Monocled perhaps—the typical bigcity boogeyman of we hicks. Some kind of vaguely European accent. This person is a dink, natch. Not like us, who are salt of the earth. Here are some other of qualities we tend to inure him with:

1) Pretension!

2) Independent Wealth.

3) . . .Actually the remaining qualities tend to be sub-categories of Independent Wealth, i.e. a) privilege b) entitlement and c) obliviousness to those lacking #2, and what it can possibly mean to try and be a writer in this country when you possess a singular lack of #2, and the way small communities who have never possessed nor can hope to possess #2 tend, much like individuals, to organize themselves along attitudes of humility, conformity and self-defeat. And then people who have never known a life without #2 swan in and wonder why these people don’t realize what riches they possess, why they don’t just pull up their socks and figure out how to mine said riches, and then decide, Oh well, if they can’t do it people like me and my fellow #2s will just have to do it for them.

Ah, now we’re getting to it. I’m building up a head of steam even in the midst of this faux-distant, pseudo-ironic David Eggers schtick I’m doing.

What exactly is our problem? We have chips on our shoulders. We come by those chips honestly, I think. We have a right to those chips. Let’s delve a little into the chips.

Me: Cape Breton girl, a Coady of the multitudinous Margaree Coadys. Founders of the co-operative movement—those Coadys. My dad’s family lived on a hill overlooking the Margaree river, across from the countless other Coady factions who lived perched on the other side (along with our many differently-named cousins—the Tompkins’, the Stewarts, the Campbells, the MacFarlanes) for generations. Dad has a story about his father working on the opposite side of the river when my uncle Larry was born. A relative ran out of the house and stood at the top of the hill, screaming into the valley for my grandfather to return because the baby was coming. In this way, everyone on the river—all the relatives—heard the news and celebrated as my grandfather splashed across the river and tore up the hill. It sounds cute and quaint—I don’t give a shit. This is a real thing.

In or around 1982 you’ll remember, interest rates shot up. My dad, hitherto making his way as a small businessman, came shuttling to earth like Icarus. Gone was our house, gone were the businesses, gone was the generations-old family homestead in Margaree.

It was bought by a woman from Germany who wanted to live out a lifelong dream of raising horses on Cape Breton Island. She lives there still. We also had a cottage on Lake Ainslie. A man from Germany snapped that up. Last I heard he now owns most of the lakefront.

The point (or the ‘pint’ as Gramma would say):

Our problem with the supposed literary appropriation of what we consider our ‘home turf’ has to do with a lot more than academic concerns of creativity and literary imagination. Our problem is bound up, I think, not just with the idea of cultural appropriation, but actual physical, geographical appropriation, and what that does to the character of the communities so prized and fetishized by (and I hate this expression) the ‘come-from-aways’. What I’m getting at are real-life experiences of getting nudged (or sometimes summarily chucked) out of your home turf by people with more resources than you, who are then able to luxuriate in those riches too—the only riches you, on the other hand, have never had access to. So to see a version of this played out in the literary world can put one’s hackles up whether or not this is a rational response. Of course the rising of hackles is rarely an intellectual process.

We both know this response is, in essence, wrong, don’t we? We don’t want to tell other writers what they can and can’t write about. That’s a road we don’t wanna go down. In fact there’s nothing I hate more than dogmatic attitudes about what topics are legitimate and illegitimate with respect to a given author’s craft. To me, such attitudes are anti-art, anti-creativity. If you immediately start building fences around a creation, it is no longer art, by my account. It’s a mall; it’s a factory. It’s school. It is not what we’re concerned with here.

Anyway, that’s what lay at the bottom of my chip. Tell me about your chip.

CONLIN HOLDS FORTH

Alrighty then. Well, first off, let me say that I have never known a local who calls someone from away, a “come from away” or the more annoying “CFA”. It's always just “from away”. As in, “that bastard is from away.” No one says “he’s a come from away” unless they are from away. See, this is what I don’t like—a part of the vernacular strikes someone from the outside as quaint and then it enters the lexicon and suddenly we are using it ourselves—a parody of our own culture.

So, now that's out of my system, let me join you at our virtual kitchen table and respond.

Yes, I agree, we do have chips on our shoulders. Mine is, at times, enormous and crippling. It weighs me down with subjectivity and cynicism. And I agree with what you say—it originates with the geography, the land, being dispossessed of it, if you will, and then, at times (and it’s not all the time but at times) projecting this chip onto the literary map, creating boundaries and lines and sense of possession.

I find it odd to use the term dispossessed seeing as we are of European descent but we are in the time of gentrification and soaring property taxes so I really don’t see how it is anything else, to touch upon the reality of the poor and working class in this day and age. It’s like lobster—it was the poor person’s food for a long time and now it’s too expensive for the fishermen who fish it. The land you were born and raised on is purchased by people from somewhere else with a whole lot more money. It’s hard not to be resentful when you can’t pay your property taxes on the humble family home because the next door neighbours from Germany have built a ginormous year round paved driveway “cottage”.

My family come from the Annapolis Valley which is much different than Cape Breton similar only in that everyone is related in one way or another (that explains why my eyes cross from time to time). I have married into the Morse family, one of the original Valley families and my partner and I are sixteenth cousins or something like that. We’re not as closely related as the Royal Family though so don’t worry.

The Valley has always been Nova Scotia’s breadbasket. Agriculture and fishing define the life here. The fertile land dyked by the Acadians is ideal for farming. And when they were brutally deported, the English brought in the Planters, English settlers. Now we weren’t English. We’re a mix of German, Scottish, Irish (and the mystery blood that no one talks about that makes us so dark). My mother is a Schaffner and this mass of the family came from the Western end of the Annapolis Valley, Schaffner’s Point at Port Royal to be exact. It’s close to Annapolis Royal. Port Royal was the first French settlement in North America and now the fort is a national park and historic site. Supposedly this is where apple trees were first introduced to North American. But I digress.

Schaffner’s Point was where the lighthouse was built and it’s there to this day. My people, the Schaffners, kept the light. As charming as this makes for cocktail chat when I happen to be in Toronto, rich people weren’t lighthouse keepers. It’s quaint and twee from the outside but the reality is much different. Back when I was a child I once asked my grandmother what my great grandparents did and she said they were crofters. I had to go to the dictionary to look that one up and of course I was hoping it meant princes or wealthy merchants or absentee landlords but alas it did not.

Anyway, my grandparents ended up in the central part of the Annapolis Valley in the 1930s, in Berwick, which was the centre of the thriving apple industry right until the 1940s when the bottom fell out of the market. My grandmother was a nurse and my grandfather did a little bit of this and a little bit of that and a whole lot of rum drinking. My mother and her sisters grew up in a variety of tenement houses and apartments in Berwick. And I was born in Berwick and was raised outside of the town and over on the Bay of Fundy shore. When I was a teenager I read The Mountain and the Valley by Earnest Buckler and fled to France when I was 18. The protagonist in The Mountain and the Valley, who wants to leave and see the world, manages only to crawl up the North Mountain and die at the top as a partridge—not an eagle or a raven or even a crow or a seagull but a partridge— flies up into the sky.

I was away for years and it was while away that I rediscovered Nova Scotia. This re-acquaintanceship was through the literary landscape of my writing. The writer in me forced a return, a creative return. It was here in this place where I’d come of age, where I’d first glimpsed into the dark and mysterious soul of humanity, and it was here in my artistic work I returned to explore these dark secrets.

Now while I was away, my homeland was discovered by the outside world and the land started to be bought up, not just the shorefront property but the North Mountain and Valley floor itself. So I returned to a place where I couldn’t afford to buy a house. And I felt this enormous sense of stewardship for the land and the culture which I think extends to a sense of literary possession. This is our territory, this is our geography, physically and literarily so hands off. It’s an act of desperation to try to put up creative boundaries around a literary domain, to fence off a landscape and a view.

It makes me think of Teodor Józef Konrad Korzeniowski who we know as Joseph Conrad. He didn’t even speak English until he was sixteen and then he didn’t even publish a novel, god bless him, until he was in his mid thirties. And he is considered to be a fine English novelist. He adopted English culture and I think he was able to see into the heart of it, if you’ll pardon the phrasing, in a way few from England could.

To address the quote you so sweetly started our discussion with—the quote is taken from a Globe & Mail review I wrote of Linda Little’s wonderful book, Scotch River. Little is not from Nova Scotia and I opened her book with that bristling sense of territorialism we’re talking about. But her book was great. It transcends place and culture. It’s bigger than that. She does nail contemporary Nova Scotian culture as though she’s from here. She’s like Conrad.

But that said, I’ve read some very bad fiction set in Nova Scotia, you know, a bunch of stepdancing losbtermen all named John Hughie MacPherson dealing with the trials of life in a rotting fishing village. And while a lot of this writing is by people from Nova Scotia, a whole lot of it is by people who have moved here and are taken with the culture and the land and the writing of say, Alistair McLeod. And frankly, the attempts to imitate it or make it their own result in a garish and sentimental and inauthentic pile of paper. My advice is always that they’d be better off writing what they know best.

But let me be clear: my problem is not with historical fiction set in Nova Scotia or for that matter, historical fiction set anywhere the writer has never been. For example, I give you the writer with agoraphobia, Stef Penney and her debut novel The Tenderness of Wolves which recently won the Costa Award. The book is set in Canada, in Northern Ontario, but the author has never been to this area. She researched it from maps and charts and documents at the British Library (a double challenge as she was terrified to leave the house, let alone write a novel in a place she'd never been to). I haven’t read it but from but I hear it is a great book that captures the sense of the land.

My concern regards contemporary fiction. The Tenderness of Wolves is set in 1860 so we can immediately move to my theory that it's easier to set historical fiction in places one has never been to rather than contemporary fiction. I think that historical fiction allows the author great leeway as that time is lost in history and is left to the writer for recreation, for rediscovery. The same goes for speculative fiction. The creation of the fictional world is somewhat different than with contemporary fiction. Of course all fiction, whether historical, speculative or contemporary must be believable and authentic.

The world of contemporary fiction surrounds us. I speak of the physical and societal and cultural world that defines the sense of the place, the world of the novel, the geography and society that form, and inform, the world of the book. My personal feeling is that people don't always feel the need to research a contemporary setting and then, missing the details, the nuances, it rings false and lacks the authenticity of place and time that is just as important to contemporary fiction as it is to historical fiction. This is what drives me bonkers. Frickin bonkers. I don't find it with historical fiction.

Flannery O'Connor in her essay, "Writing Short Stories" says that there are two qualities that make fiction: 1. mystery and 2. manners. She says, "you get manners from the texture of existence that surrounds you." O'Connor describes the American South as being rich in contradiction, irony, in contrast and especially in its speech. She calls these "gifts of the region". She admonishes the Southern writer who fails to use them. Of course she admonishes the Southern writer who overuses them.

So the question is can anyone use these gifts of the region in their writing? Would O’Connor consider a Northerner writing fiction set in the South as a Southern writer? Is there something to being born and raised in a place, to having a long ancestral history in a place that gives unique perspective and feel for the culture, which allows an intricate and innate knowledge of the mysteries and manners of the region that make good fiction?

Let us also consider Joyce who, for instance, had to leave in order to write about the world that inspired all his fiction. It seems to me that being Irish, being from Dublin, was integral to all his work. Could someone not from Dublin have written Ulysses? The Dubliners? Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man? Was his very nationality, his formative experience in this place, linked absolutely to his writing, to what creatively drove him as a writer?

Too many umbrella drinks. While I’m in the outhouse you pen your reply.

COADY’S GOT THE PUCK

I’m glad you happened to be on the topic of Ireland and Irish writing when the muse of the bladder descended. The case of Ireland is instructive to look at, because what culture, and literature, in the English-speaking world, has been more fetishized and, might we not even say, colonized? You and I have a mutual friend from Ireland who—to put it mildly—looks askance at North American writers who set books in her homeland. A lot of writers from this side of the pond do, and they do so in a way that annoys her to no end. More often than not, they’re people who are smitten with Ireland—who adore the culture, revere the landscape and cherish its language and people. These are not, strictly speaking, good things. Such feelings are motivated by the same infatuation that’s erecting those big-ass ‘cottages’ you mentioned on the Bay of Fundy, that’s systematically kicking all the Tompkins’ off Tompkins Mountain in Margaree.

The problem is, they’re thinking of Ireland as “a setting” as opposed to, simply, “the world; the place where it is to be human”. The latter way of seeing a place is both mundane and profound. The former sees it as exotic backdrop; ready-made atmosphere. That’s the crux of the matter—that’s where the dishonesty creeps in. That’s what’s driving you bonkers.

It’s not that such writers aren’t well-meaning, or motivated by something pure. But we’re talking about the difference between love and infatuation. The difference is honesty. Contrary to popular opinion, love is not blind—love is what you have for the father who was so drunk during his own birthday party he doesn’t remember you giving him the macaroni portrait you spent all week on. It’s what you have for the brother who constantly insists on correcting you and never acknowledges all the times you’ve paid his rent. They call it love because it forces you to tolerate multiple intolerables, which is to say, reality. You’re helpless against the inevitability of it. It drives you crazy.

Patrick McCabe does something extremely cheeky with his new book, Winterwood. He begins the story in a narrative voice that is, at first glance, as “Irish” as the Guinness Brewery. A man is returning to his ‘old mountain home’ for a festival. There’s feasting and dancing and, at the center of it all, sweet old Ned the Fiddler, a simple man from a better time, telling stories of days of yore and delighting the children with the traditional songs of ‘our people.’ The narrator gives a loving, lyrical account of the pleasant evening he spends in the company of this same Ned, drinking whiskey in front of the crackling fire and listening to his plaintive fiddle. And then, something weird occurs. Something dark and strange in Ned’s demeanor. Just a flash, and then its gone, but it sets the tone for what’s to come in the rest of the book. Gradually we understand that the rhapsodic narrator, using liberal glops of sentiment, is deliberately constructing a story for himself as a means of paving over multiple horrors that the reader can only intuit—so deep in denial and delusion is he. And Ned the Fiddler? You don’t even want to know what kind of monstrosity lay behind those smiling eyes.

I love it. I can’t think of another instance when a writer has so vehemently chomped what might well be considered the hand that feeds him. (I remember trying to hold my head up in a pub in Dublin while a writer from the North was declaiming: “No country anywhere has sold its blood like Ireland!” He was talking about its culture—for what else can the idea of a nation’s ‘blood’ refer to? This is a whole other problem to be addressed at a later date: the feeling that, as a local writer you are somehow complicit in the construction of a twee, fakey stereotype simply by having written what you know best. Then the meanies in Toronto make fun of books set on the east coast for being full of caricatured, kilt-wearing alcoholic fisherman and you remember your last novel and think, Oh shit. Then the phone rings and it’s your drunk uncle Pete slurring something about how he dropped his sporrin over the side of the lobster boat.)

You say: “My personal feeling is that people don't always feel the need to research a contemporary setting and then, missing the details, the nuances, it rings false and lacks the authenticity of place and time that is just as important to contemporary fiction as it is to historical fiction.”

I thought about ‘The Shipping News” when I read that. Annie Proulx is as good as they come, and I think she has spent a lot of time in Newfoundland and has a deep connection to the place, but that book got me down. It’s that quality of ‘ringing false’ you mention. I wonder if the members of the Gay Cowboy Novelists Society of Wyoming feel the same way about Brokeback Mountain? Perhaps they are all sitting around right now bemoaning how patently ‘off’ the scene in the tent was.

See? And I think this is the point where we have to back off. This is the line, as fellow writers and faithful readers, we cannot cross. Annie, we have to say, get your gun. Be a cowboy. Be a gay cowboy. Be a gay cowboy in love. Be a gay cowboy in love in Wyoming, in a tent. Go there. Do that. We won’t fence you in.

CONLIN RIDES THE RANGE

The protagonist in Scotch River is a gay cowboy from Nova Scotia. Linda Little is no gay cowboy but it’s irrelevant when it comes to her compelling characterization. And I realize you have written two novels with teenage male protagonists. (From all accounts you are not a teenage male and the accounts are mostly reliable.)

The lure of setting can be powerful. I remember being in Belfast and thinking it would be the perfect place to set a novel. It seemed to be the perfect terrain to explore youth alienation, identity issues, transcending culture and politics as a necessary part of being fully human. An Irish artist asked me why I didn’t just set my story in the place I was from and explore the same issues. At first I wanted to tell him to shut up. But I did do just what he suggested and my first novel was born. Belfast seemed so much more exotic than boring old rural Nova Scotia. I suppose telling someone from Belfast this was my saving grace because, as the saying goes, the grass is always greener.

Mavis Gallant is interesting. I love her stories set in the expat culture in France. There’s a limbo to the characters’ existence that is tied inextricably to their interior struggles. I find this with a lot of colonial writing too, like Duras’ The Lover.

It seems very Canadian to see stories set in Canada as anything but exotic. But hockey can be exotic! All the sweat and flashing metal, the campy organ. I mean, Don Cherry is straight out of David Lynch movie, don’t you think. Seriously, I think the desire for a perceived exotica is just one more way a writer avoids getting to the meat and marrow we have to handle in order to do anything meaningful with the work.

Of course writers make conscious choices about setting that have nothing to do with trying to capture, or hijack, atmosphere. Ionesco’s absurdist play, The Bald Soprano, is written in French but it is set in England and features the Smith and Martin families (and a fire chief!). It seems it is set in England in order to create enough a distance that the French would see beyond their own culture and see themselves as a part of a greater culture struggling with the futility of language and communication.

Okay, I’m starting to confuse myself so I’ll leave the Old World and move back across the water to the colonies.

Actually, I remember reading The Shipping News and really liking it. It was charming. But I’m not from Newfoundland. I do also remember folks from Newfoundland, writers from Newfoundland, being upset with the book, feeling it was a misrepresentation of their culture. Again, the argument was she had done a great job with veneer, grasping the traditions and rituals but not connecting them to anything really substantial, like building a lovely exterior and only that.

So what’s the difference between setting and character? What if you’d set Mean Boy in, let’s say, Scotland? Would Scottish writers like Alan Warner take umbrage with your book because it was set in Scotland or would he perhaps have problems with your book because the main character is a young guy? It’s funny I’d pick Alan Warner off the top of my tired little head because I realize his stunner of a first novel, Morvern Callar, is told from the POV of a teenage girl. And it’s brilliant. It really is. Like Tennessee Williams and Ibsen, both masters at creating heartbreaking female characters. I swear they have crawled into the female soul and have inhabited it for a time. It’s what art is all about, I suppose, being possessed by a creative capacity that is about the work and when in that possession you become that which you are exploring.

I think it really does come back to the point that it doesn’t matter what POV you take nor where you set your stories – as long as these elements are critical to the story you are telling, if they are genuine and true to the world of the book, they can be whatever the author wants. And being it or being from, doesn’t guarantee a sense of authenticity.

Well, it’s time to get off this here old horse and pause for reflection.

* * *

Lynn Coady is the author of four books of fiction -- three set mostly in Cape Breton (Strange Heaven, etc), and one (Mean Boy) in New Brunswick and PEI. (She's never lived, or even spent much time, in PEI so is expecting bloody retribution any day now.)

Christy Ann Conlin is a writer and dramatist. Her first novel, Heave, was nominated for the 2003 Amazon/Books In Canada First Novel Award. She is currently working on her second novel, Listening for the Island, which will be published by Doubleday when she finishes it. Christy Ann graduated from the University of British Columbia with a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and apprenticed as a storyteller in Northern Ireland. Her journalism and nonfiction has appeared in various publications in Canada and the US. She is also a regular reviewer for the Globe & Mail Book Section and freelance broadcaster for CBC Radio. Christy Ann lives on a century apple farm in rural Nova Scotia with her husband and three children.