Crummey set to sail in for author chat

Michael Crummey knows of the struggles of finding your literary voice. When the author comes to the St. Albert Public Library on Tuesday, he could probably spin a good yarn about the time he was first in university not knowing what to do with his life when lightning hit. He had suddenly become a writer.

The son of a working class family in a small mining town in central Newfoundland is still baffled by the writing bug and how it bit him. Somehow, it all started with that entry-level poetry course.

“Writing was not a big part of our lives, let’s just say,” he admits. “I didn’t know what poetry was. I was just struck by it. I wanted to try and write something that would make other people feel the way these poems were making me feel. I can’t even say what that was. It felt like a door into a world that I didn’t have access to in any other part of my life.”

He simply started writing verse “for some reason” and hasn’t stopped.

“It’s really the only thing I’ve ever committed myself to, or been interested in. I went with it because nothing else presented itself to me – not something even remotely interesting. I have no Plan B. If this writing thing doesn’t work out, I’m in big trouble,” he joked.

His commitment shows. The author now claims nearly a dozen titles to his personal bibliography, with a fair balance between novels, books of poetry and short stories, plus a book of non-fiction to boot. That one is half-historical account and half-pictorial essay about the province of his birth and life, and its transformation from a fisherman’s paradise to another place of focus from the oil and gas sector.

Newfoundland, it seems, is not just his residence. It’s a major quadrant of his heart that he can’t help but wear on his literary sleeve.

“I was made by that world. Most of what I learned about what’s right and what’s wrong comes from that place and those people,” he notes. “I’m trying to figure out what it means to be from this part of the world. The novel is one of the best places to try and take on a question that large, I think.”

His latest novel is Sweetland, set just off the coast of Newfoundland. The psychological setting features a government resettlement program that attempts to decree that some small communities are economically unviable while encouraging residents to take a buyout package to move to cities, all as a part of some stimulus program. The only term for the townsfolk is that everybody must agree.

The program is real, originating in the 1950s and 1960s but is making a comeback these days, Crummey continues. His story is about one such community that has one dissenting voice and that person’s attempt to hang on to the one place where he’s ever wanted to live.

No one said that writing the truth would be easy.

“It’s tough. You want to get it right as much as possible. The biggest thing for me is trying to get it right and not misrepresent the place itself. I do feel that tension between the world as I present it and the real world out there. It’s only an approximation.”

That book came out just this year while his latest book of poetry, Under the Keel, came out just a year ago. No one could argue that this writer doesn’t have the tenacity of a true fisherman, always out there, trawling for the big catch.

He came close once. River Thieves, his 2001 dĂ©but novel, caught a lot of attention, getting on the shortlist for the Giller, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Books in Canada First Novel Award and even made the longlist for the IMPAC Dublin Award. In 2011, his novel Galore was on the IMPAC shortlist.

Perhaps the writer was born to the task after all, just needing a bit of academic stimulation to set the gears in motion. While raised in “working class” ethos, he was still surrounded by the vibrancy of a tale well told. He grew up around storytellers, he says, and that is reflected even in his narrative poetry.

“My dad was a great storyteller. For me, a story has always been at the heart of what I’ve written.”

While the substance might be the same, or at least similar, the process of writing is different between “meditative” poetry and prose, which he likens to “digging a ditch.”

“Doing that for three or four hours a day is as much as I can manage, and then I have to do something else because I’m exhausted.”

He looks forward to this, his first stop in St. Albert, a day that he doesn’t openly acknowledge is his 49th birthday. Regardless of sentiment, he will be ready for a reading or a question and answer – his favourite part of these presentations. He is ultimately cautiously hopeful for a good crowd.

“I always say: low expectations are your friend. Any reading where the audience outnumbers the readers is a good reading,” he laughed. “That’s what I’m going with.”