DETAILS
Best Kind: New Writing Made in Newfoundland
Edited by Robert Finley
184 pages
$19.95
Breakwater Books
A summer launch party for Best Kind and four other Breakwater Books’ titles will be held on Thursday, June 28 at the Johnson Geo Centre in St. John's, N.L.
Michelle Porter lived in St. Albert on and off throughout her childhood but it’s been many years since she moved away for the last time. Some memories have never faded though.
The author, poet and editor of online news source TheIndependent.ca uses the city often as the setting in her writings. She recalls her childhood vividly and poignantly for a short non-fiction piece that has just been published in Best Kind, a collection of essays by some of the best writers now living in Newfoundland and Labrador.
“I’m a poet who has turned to journalism as an alternate outlet, which means that I approach stories a little more slowly than you’re ‘journalist’ journalist,” she laughed.
There was a creative writing class that she took with her favourite instructor Robert Finley who, she said, does “writing classes for introverts,” which helped her to fall in love with creative non-fiction and all of its possibilities.
“I think non-fiction and poetry really go together.”
Finley ended up being the editor of the book, choosing pieces from 12 of the eastern province’s strongest essayists, including Porter. This wonderful anthology is filled with powerful writing including She Gets a Paper Route so She Can Save Up for a Bicycle, Porter’s story that hearkens back to a time when she was young and discovering the world, beautiful and treacherous, all around her and her young sister.
The story takes place here in the St. Albert of her youth and, while it doesn’t name the city, it sure describes the setting to a T: the apartment complex on Rivercrest Crescent and the neighbourhoods and natural areas around lower Braeside and the Sturgeon River. While her family moved around a lot when she was a child, she still calls the city her hometown.
“I remember different things so clearly. It had a big impact on me. When people ask me where I’m from, I say St. Albert even though I was born in Calgary and I lived in a whole bunch of other places.”
Remarkably written in the third person, She Gets a Paper Route uses the author’s voice when she was that age, giving a dream-like and nostalgic feel to her writing. That atmospheric quality lends a soft brush to paint the picture of that time in her life, but there are some sinister elements that lurk. Even fairy tales have wolves in sheep’s clothing, after all.
“It’s the difference between a selfie and a self-portrait in that you’re writing a lot about yourself because that’s the non-fiction that you bring to it a lot of times but it’s really thinking more about how that relates to what’s going on in the rest of the world.”
The story is a tale of empowerment in the face of danger. It includes details about how she would innocently take her little sister and go around to people’s houses to collect for the newspapers that she delivered. There are some people she encounters, however, who are far too devious for her to completely understand, trying to take advantage of her innocence. Reading it as it unfolds, with the youthful and innocent voice of the narrator trying to make sense of things as they happen, is enough to make your heart race and put a lump in your throat as you stifle a scream to them to run away.
“I really felt like using that child’s point of view was really important for that story because many of those kinds of stories are told from the adult’s point of view, which doesn’t even quite get at some of the joy of being a child and some of the struggles that they have and are thinking about or dealing with.”
Porter’s writing career is on an upswing. She made the longlist for the CBC Poetry Prize for the last two years in a row and won the 2017 Arts and Letters Award in the senior poetry category as well as the 2005 Atlantic Journalism Award for feature writing. She has been published in The Malahat Review and has a book of poetry due out next year while she is currently conducting research for another project. She won funding from the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council to create a poetry manuscript about the mobile, overlapping, historical and contemporary meanings of Métis home. She is the president of the Writers’ Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador.
