Finding the write stuff
Forget fiddles, Cape Breton becoming a hub for the literary set
A group of students take a night off from their studies and go out for drinks in Montreal. Over the course of the evening they talk about where they would like to eventually live and write and it’s decided that Cape Breton would be their ideal destination.
It may sound like the basis for a novel but it’s a dream that has come true for a group of acclaimed Canadian writers who studied in the master’s program at Concordia University in Montreal.
Cape Breton’s combination of beautiful landscapes and attractive housing prices lured them here but good looks and a less expensive lifestyle only go so far.
According to one of the writers, Rebecca Silver-Slayter, there’s something much deeper that keeps them here.
“If I came for the landscape, I stayed for the people.”
The New Glasgow native moved here in 2010 and now lives in St. Joseph du Moine with her family.
“And even though the dream of it all began as the kind of wild, romantic dream cooked up over late-night conversations in Montreal cafés that could easily have turned out to be foolhardy, we all feel grateful every day to be here,” she states in an email interview.
Silver-Slayter goes on to describe how she ended up here.
“Back in Montreal, Sarah Faber, Susan Paddon, Catherine Cooper and I had had a monthly dinner party/workshop (along with a couple of other friends and writers), and we all proved to have connections (or wanted to have!) to Cape Breton/Nova Scotia.
“Sarah’s father lived in Inverness and she and her husband, the writer Oisin Curran, owned land in Southwest Margaree. The first night she and I really got to know each other, I explained that I was from Nova Scotia (New Glasgow) and planned to return there after grad school, but my partner and I had been looking for years for just the right community to join — somewhere rural, by the sea.
“She told me we mustn’t make our decision until we saw Margaree. So that summer, my partner and I drove out there, fell in love with the area, and bought the first house we looked at, a little north of Margaree Harbour, in St. Joseph du Moine. We were married there the following summer.”
Since moving here SilverSlater has seen her novel, “In The Land of Birdfishes” publish to critical acclaim in 2013. She’s also taken over the helm of the Cabot Trail Writers Festival and is working on another book.
While Catherine Cooper has moved on to New Zealand (she does visit in the summer), the rest of the group has since settled in Cape Breton and in the summers are joined by a Giller Prize winner who’s now based in the U.S.
“Johanna Skibsrud, who had been my best friend since we were 13, first saw the area
when she was maid of honour at my wedding, and she visited again a couple times over the years, though she and her husband live in the U.S., where he is from. She too loved the place and the people and ended up buying the house next door to me, where she and her husband and daughter now spend the summers (they are professors in Tucson, Ariz. and have the summers off).”
Award-winning poet Susan Paddon is originally from St. Thomas, Ont., but now calls Big Brook in the Margaree area home. She lives down a long dirt road with her husband and 11-month-old daughter and when she’s not working on her novel, she works part time at the library in Margaree. For her, it’s the ideal situation.
“I think it is easier for me personally to be a writer here at this moment in my life. That has a lot to do with the fact that
I am able to balance working part time at the library in Margaree with writing and being a new mom.
“We don’t have the same expenses you have in a city so we live very well — in a very beautiful place — without the frenetic working schedule that I have had to have living in other parts of the world. We have other expenses, of course, and things that gobble up time, but at the end of the day, I live in a place that excites me and gives me energy. For me, it’s like being on retreat constantly — and I like that.”
Cape Breton’s remoteness is a plus as well.
“I love living on an island,” she said. “… You feel like you are in a world that is somehow separate — somehow at a great distance from other parts of the planet.”
Sarah Faber, author of “All Is Beauty Now,” and her husband Oisin Curran, author of “Blood Fable” are both up for this year’s Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Prize, along with award winning novelist Carol Bruneau, that will be awarded May 10 in Halifax.
Although Faber is originally from Toronto and Curran from Maine, Faber spent her summers in Cape Breton and she and Curran met here. It wasn’t a stretch to get them to move here on a full-time basis.
“I always wanted to move back east,” said Faber. “From a writer’s standpoint, it’s so much better here. The landscape, fewer distractions and it’s a lovely place to work.”
Curran says he also enjoys living here and says it reminds him of the west coast of Ireland. “I like the rural setting.” For Faber, it’s exactly where she wants to be, a sentiment echoed by the others.
“I feel at peace here. It’s home.”