Ten years ago, in January 2009, I hopped an Airbus in Vancouver wearing new snow boots and carrying a down coat with a hood. I was heading to Saint John to read from my novel Conceit (Doubleday 2007) in the hugely successful Lorenzo Series, organized by poet-in-residence Anne Compton, the tastemaker of the Maritimes. Anne had arranged to bring me in a day early, in case of storms. Her last e-mail warned, “We are in a deep freeze here. You’ll need that new warm coat of yours.”
In Ottawa, the departures monitor showed flights cancelled to Halifax, but not to Saint John. I trudged across the snowy tarmac to board a Dash 8 55-seater, which taxied ominously into a de-icing bay to get sprayed. The 31 minute bumpathon came to a halt in Montreal.
“I wasn’t going to fly into Saint John even if told to,” confided the pilot, as we deplaned, “not in this weather.”
After four hours sleep, I was back at Montréal-Trudeau trying to fly standby. I’d missed my interview on CBC, but was damned if I was going to miss the reading. After two more aborted attempts to get to Saint John, I finagled my way onto a Dash 8 headed (after de-icing) for Fredericton. Once there, I jumped into a taxi and sped south on icy roads to the Fundy city.
Watch out for moose, a sign said. I could barely decipher the driver’s accent – soft, seductive, determined to entertain although I was clutching the door handle and straining my eyes for large mammals ahead. Soon, I had surrendered to the lilting rhythms of tales about the harsh life of the Miramichi and its famous son, novelist David Adams Richards.
I had heard him called the Canadian Faulkner. “What do you think of him?” I asked.
“I went to school with him. His books are all about us, his family and friends. A good man, well liked, still lives here.” (Richards has actually lived in Toronto for the past twelve years.)
When the taxi pulled up at the University of New Brunswick, Saint John, forty minutes late, the coffee and desserts were gone, but eighty people were waiting patiently. Chilled to the bone, I walked straight to the mike, glugged a small bottle of water, and began to read from the Great Fire of London in 1666.
Afterwards, I had my first taste of Atlantic hospitality. The enthusiastic readers lined up to get copies of Conceit signed, then Anne put me into a taxi to the Delta Brunswick, and told me to curl up in bed, watch a bad movie, and order anything I liked from room service. My tray arrived with a glass of pinot gris, poached Atlantic salmon, and a large thermos of hot chocolate.
The next morning, I caught a bus back to Fredericton, which was a balmy minus10°. Waiting to escort me to lunch was Ross Leckie, creative writing chair at UNB Fredericton. Listening to Ross talk about writers he admired, I picked up a purity of motive, a cultivation of language for its own sake, refreshing after the Vancouver writing scene. Fredericton is a city of poets, a culture going back to poet-in-residence Alden Nowlan and to the Confederation poets. Poets aren’t marginalized here as they are in the rest of Canada: they are the centre. Today, Ross’s talented students meet in the ice house where the ice-house gang, a group of writers that included David Adams Richards, workshopped in the early seventies.
Mark Jarman, the fiction half of the creative writing team, took me to dinner where we were joined by novelist-in-residence, the Irish writer Gerard Beirne. They ordered pints of beer and we dove headlong into another literary conversation. That night, I was asked to read long passages, something people squirm through in large cities, yet the audience was attentive. Afterwards, the faculty took me to Alden Nowlan’s house, now a clubhouse for grad students, where I was handed a pint of ale and taken round to look at the memorabilia by Brian Bartlett.
A 36-seat plane delivered me to Halifax the next morning. No reception committee was there to meet me. Big city, I thought, setting out to explore on my own. Lonely and hungry by late afternoon, sure no dinner would be in the offing, I treated myself to a giant steak and garlic mashed potatoes. Back at the inn, my phone rang. It was my host, Alexander MacLeod, arranging to take me to the reading. Young, hip, intelligent – it was too much to expect old-world gallantry. But maybe not – he dashed ahead to his car to open the passenger door for me.
The reading took place in St. Mary’s University Art Gallery, a fantastic backdrop, and Alexander’s introduction was superb. When it was over, he and fellow faculty member Stephanie Morley insisted on taking me out for dinner. Alexander regaled us with insider tales about local writers. Romans-à-clef, the pastoral versus the gritty, new “comers” versus the old guard, defections to Upper Canada, writing clans and outsiders, scandals and feuds—this was juicy stuff. The pints of beer were being drained and I felt, for a moment, like an honorary member of the Atlantic tribe.
I gulped down more Shiraz. “Why am I the only one who orders wine?”
“Too snooty,” they told me, grinning. “People here don’t have money for wine. It shows you’re from away, not from here.”
In my head, names of fiction writers were swirling: Wayne Johnston, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Bernice Morgan, Lynn Coady, Michael Winter, Lisa Moore, Joan Clark, Michael Crummey, Ami McKay, Donna Morrissey, Don Hannah, Mark Jarman, Edward Riche, and Alexander himself, son of Alistair MacLeod of Cape Breton Island. Add in the poets Anne Compton, George Elliott Clarke, Brian Bartlett, Anne Simpson, and Ross Leckie’s new ice-house gang. And that’s just the tip of the eastern iceberg. It hit me that the Atlantic is experiencing a boom surpassing anything across the country. A renaissance, if that isn’t too snooty a term for it.
Driving me back to my inn, Alexander detoured to the citadel to show me Halifax at night. Although I’d missed Saint John’s reversing falls, I would journey back to the other ocean buoyed up by Maritimes hospitality and the rising tide of Atlantic literature.
First published at the Random House Booklounge website