Michael Crummey's Blog - Posts Tagged "newfoundland"
Galore-y Be: Writing Newfoundland
A few years ago my wife and I bought a little house in my father’s hometown on the north shore of Conception Bay. We’ve been spending as much time there as we can, which means we get to see a lot of John and Mary Fitzgerald, old friends of my parents. They retired back to Western Bay in the 80s after working almost forty years in the mining town where I was born and raised.
It was John and Mary who told me the story of a man up the shore who woke in his casket halfway through his own funeral. Climbed out and walked home. He used the wood in the coffin to build himself a daybed, napped on it beside the kitchen stove for years before he died the second time.
Every Newfoundland outport has at least one story of a dead man sitting up in his coffin during the wake or at the funeral. Usually it’s offered up as simple fact, with a ‘can you believe that’ shake of the head. Improbable but not outside the realm of possibility altogether. In the isolated rural and oral culture of outport Newfoundland the line between life and death, between the real and the otherworldly, is more porous than most of us are used to. And that makes all kinds of outlandish notions seem perfectly likely. Ghosts and fairies, spells and charms and curses, prayers and folk cures. The Old Hollies, which are the voices of drowned fishermen calling out on stormy nights. Miraculous recoveries in the aftermath of disaster when all hope has been lost.
The people who became Newfoundlanders—the Irish and West Country English, the Jerseymen, French, Scots and ‘Jackie-tars’—occupied more than just a physical space here. Their country existed somewhere between the stark landscape and a nether world of lore and superstition and fear and wonder, each as real as the other. It was that country I was trying to recreate in Galore.
What amazed me most while writing the book is how much of that old nether world still lurks beneath the high definition televisions and coffee shops, the university degrees and SUVs of modern day Newfoundland.
After trying to explain the book I was writing at a lunch meeting—folklore, I said lamely, spells and charms—a friend told me about his sister who was born covered head to toe in warts. She went back and forth to doctors for years, he said, but they were no help. His mother heard about a woman on the other side of Newfoundland who was said to have the gift of charming warts and tracked her down by phone. What’s the girl’s name, the healer asked; then, How old is she? That was all she wanted to know. I’ll take care of this, she said. His mother offered to send money but the healer wouldn’t hear of it. I’ll take care of this, she said again. The next morning the girl woke to find the warts loose in her bed sheets, enough to fill a quart jar when they were gathered up. And not a mark on her to say they were ever there.
He shook his head to say ‘Can you believe the like of that?’
Do you mind if I use the story in the novel, I asked him.
Be my guest, he said.
I’ve spent a lot of time inviting myself into other people’s stories over the last four years. I pored through archival documents and community histories and collections of folk songs, looking for material I could adapt to the little universe I was shaping out of my own sense of Newfoundland. Among many other things I found defrocked priests with a weakness for drink and Protestant women, a witchcraft trial, peculiar baptism rituals, storms and shipwrecks and merwomen, a lunatic who claimed he was God’s nephew and the rightful heir to the English throne, a four-legged chick, mummers, merchants, livyers and bushborns, cures for toothache and rheumatism and a dozen other ills, sectarian brawls at polling stations, English evangelists and American doctors and a visionary political reformer with a dirty little secret, an alcoholic opera singer, love and murder and heartbreak and revenge. And, of course, a man swallowed by a whale.
All of these things found their way into the book, in one form or another. But it’s the ubiquitous story of the dead rising from their coffins I kept coming back to as I was writing Galore, it was the charge in the novel’s engine.
So much of Newfoundland’s story seems tied up in it, the unlikely resurrection after all hope has been lost. Loss and heartbreak and grief, yes. And otherworldly resilience in the face of it. Rebirth. Wonder.
It was John and Mary who told me the story of a man up the shore who woke in his casket halfway through his own funeral. Climbed out and walked home. He used the wood in the coffin to build himself a daybed, napped on it beside the kitchen stove for years before he died the second time.
Every Newfoundland outport has at least one story of a dead man sitting up in his coffin during the wake or at the funeral. Usually it’s offered up as simple fact, with a ‘can you believe that’ shake of the head. Improbable but not outside the realm of possibility altogether. In the isolated rural and oral culture of outport Newfoundland the line between life and death, between the real and the otherworldly, is more porous than most of us are used to. And that makes all kinds of outlandish notions seem perfectly likely. Ghosts and fairies, spells and charms and curses, prayers and folk cures. The Old Hollies, which are the voices of drowned fishermen calling out on stormy nights. Miraculous recoveries in the aftermath of disaster when all hope has been lost.
The people who became Newfoundlanders—the Irish and West Country English, the Jerseymen, French, Scots and ‘Jackie-tars’—occupied more than just a physical space here. Their country existed somewhere between the stark landscape and a nether world of lore and superstition and fear and wonder, each as real as the other. It was that country I was trying to recreate in Galore.
What amazed me most while writing the book is how much of that old nether world still lurks beneath the high definition televisions and coffee shops, the university degrees and SUVs of modern day Newfoundland.
After trying to explain the book I was writing at a lunch meeting—folklore, I said lamely, spells and charms—a friend told me about his sister who was born covered head to toe in warts. She went back and forth to doctors for years, he said, but they were no help. His mother heard about a woman on the other side of Newfoundland who was said to have the gift of charming warts and tracked her down by phone. What’s the girl’s name, the healer asked; then, How old is she? That was all she wanted to know. I’ll take care of this, she said. His mother offered to send money but the healer wouldn’t hear of it. I’ll take care of this, she said again. The next morning the girl woke to find the warts loose in her bed sheets, enough to fill a quart jar when they were gathered up. And not a mark on her to say they were ever there.
He shook his head to say ‘Can you believe the like of that?’
Do you mind if I use the story in the novel, I asked him.
Be my guest, he said.
I’ve spent a lot of time inviting myself into other people’s stories over the last four years. I pored through archival documents and community histories and collections of folk songs, looking for material I could adapt to the little universe I was shaping out of my own sense of Newfoundland. Among many other things I found defrocked priests with a weakness for drink and Protestant women, a witchcraft trial, peculiar baptism rituals, storms and shipwrecks and merwomen, a lunatic who claimed he was God’s nephew and the rightful heir to the English throne, a four-legged chick, mummers, merchants, livyers and bushborns, cures for toothache and rheumatism and a dozen other ills, sectarian brawls at polling stations, English evangelists and American doctors and a visionary political reformer with a dirty little secret, an alcoholic opera singer, love and murder and heartbreak and revenge. And, of course, a man swallowed by a whale.
All of these things found their way into the book, in one form or another. But it’s the ubiquitous story of the dead rising from their coffins I kept coming back to as I was writing Galore, it was the charge in the novel’s engine.
So much of Newfoundland’s story seems tied up in it, the unlikely resurrection after all hope has been lost. Loss and heartbreak and grief, yes. And otherworldly resilience in the face of it. Rebirth. Wonder.
Blogcritics Q&A
For those of you interested, there's a new Q&A about Galore up at Blogcritics.
my link text
The book is out in the U.S. on March 29th.
my link text
The book is out in the U.S. on March 29th.
