Caroline Kemp
asked
P.S. Duffy:
Wonderful novel...very satisfying...up there easily with Birdsong. What inspired you to write it?
P.S. Duffy
Dear Caroline,
Thanks so much for sharing your response to The Cartographer of No Man’s Land. "Up there with Birdsong" is high praise, and I’m so glad the novel resonated with you. In answer to your thoughtful question, my original inspiration was to write about the effects of transformative loss on father-son relationships, centering on a fictional tragedy at sea in Nova Scotia, a place dear to my heart. I was going to set it in the early 1920s when cod fishing was still conducted by sail. Given that WW I would have so recently ended, I began to research it as well. I was so emotionally and spiritually moved by it, especially during in-person research at the battlefields of France, that “transformative loss” took on new meaning. Among those silent gravestones, bearing witness to the inestimable sacrifice, one simply falls to one’s knees. And so it was that the real story of the novel I’d set out to write came to me.
Let me know if you have other questions,
My best regards,
Penny Duffy
Thanks so much for sharing your response to The Cartographer of No Man’s Land. "Up there with Birdsong" is high praise, and I’m so glad the novel resonated with you. In answer to your thoughtful question, my original inspiration was to write about the effects of transformative loss on father-son relationships, centering on a fictional tragedy at sea in Nova Scotia, a place dear to my heart. I was going to set it in the early 1920s when cod fishing was still conducted by sail. Given that WW I would have so recently ended, I began to research it as well. I was so emotionally and spiritually moved by it, especially during in-person research at the battlefields of France, that “transformative loss” took on new meaning. Among those silent gravestones, bearing witness to the inestimable sacrifice, one simply falls to one’s knees. And so it was that the real story of the novel I’d set out to write came to me.
Let me know if you have other questions,
My best regards,
Penny Duffy
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