Novel celebrates the healing power of music
On his daily, 90-minute walks along the Cobequid Trail, not far from his home in Truro, Leo Mckay Jr. thinks a lot about his literary ideas and fictional characters; sometimes, he unexpectedly finds himself writing.
Mckay was on a walk, still about 45 minutes away from his house, when the last two pages of his fourth book, What Comes Echoing Back (Vagrant Press) came to him. He didn’t have a piece of paper, a pen or a recording device with him, so he resorted to repeating the words over and over again to himself.
“’Oh no!’ I can’t forget this’,” he said to himself. “I was literally talking out loud to myself to make sure I did not forget the thing that had just popped into my head.”
The words became the contents of a text message sent by a teenage girl to her friend, one of the novel’s main characters.
“It’s Morganne. I got your number! Stalker extraordinaire! DO NOT F ****** REPLY TO THIS TEXT !!!! This is my mom’s phone. Do not even reveal that you know this number. I’m sending this and deleting it,” the beginning of the text reads.
Mckay Jr. has a knack for capturing the way teenagers act, text and talk to each other. He credits this to having spent close to 30 years in high school classrooms and raising
his own three children. When he’s not writing, Mckay Jr. is an English teacher at Cobequid Educational Centre in Truro.
“I’ve had three decades immersed in teen world. I’m talking to, listening to teenagers all day, every day,” Mckay Jr. said during a recent interview. “The specific job of being an English teacher is to read what teenagers are writing. When you read what people are writing, you are getting a glimpse into their mind.”
In his new novel What Comes Echoing Back, Mckay Jr. follows two high school, social outcasts as they navigate through their traumatic pasts.
Sam and Robot share things in common. They both became infamous for the worst tragic events in their lives; events that were captured on video, shared on social media and never seem to go away. Both want to put the past behind them, but for Robot, a talented musician who once taught music lessons, the small town he lives in makes it hard.
“I think one of the effects of social media is that things happen to people now, and they never go away,” he said. “Sometimes people do mess up and social media can just keep echoing that over and over again.”
Sam and Robot meet in music class, after Sam moves to Robot’s town to start a new life at a new high school. A friendship forms and through music they find a way forward together, trying to overcome the terrible moments that made them notorious.
“He (Robot) valued and respected music. Revered it, even. He hoped his students knew who he was. He’d made a grievous error. But music went beyond that. It was something awesome and powerful, something that put people in touch with what was best in themselves and in the universe,” Mckay Jr. writes.
In What Comes Echoing Back, Mckay Jr. takes readers back and forth in time to reveal the truth about what happened in Sam and Robot’s lives. He does this with humour and sensitivity. Throughout the story, he interweaves ideas of how things can echo and reverberate in our lives and the healing power of music.
“Music is a way people connect to each other and to themselves,” said Mckay Jr., who plays guitar. “Playing music and singing is a way to connect with your real self.”
Originally from Stellarton, Mckay Jr.’s fiction debut was a collection of short stories, Like This, which became a finalist for The Giller Prize in 1995. His first novel, Twenty-six, was a national bestseller and won the Dartmouth Book Award.
Writing a book is a long undertaking for Mckay. It typically takes him about a decade. He gets the majority of his writing done during the summer months when he isn’t teaching. He sets himself a strict daily schedule and immerses himself in his characters and the plot.
“My fiction is a reflection of my deepest most real inner self,” he said. “The book reflects what has been going on in my mind for 10 years.”
For Mckay, releasing a new book to the public is a bit scary; there’s the risk it won’t be liked or even worse, ignored. Despite his trepidation, the fear is worth it.
“If there is no risk in what you are doing there is no creativity,” he said. “You have to be willing to take an artistic risk, try something you haven’t tried before.”
RUM BULLETS AND COD FISH
Author Paul Doucette has a new book set in 1924 in Nova Scotia during Prohibition. Rum Bullets and Cod Fish (BWL Publishing) is part of a Canadian historical mysteries series.
Doucette’s book follows undercover officer, Jerome Conway as he works to find out who is running illegal liquor from Saint Pierre and Miquelon to the Caribbean for an American mob.
“The November night sky was clear, black, moonless; the only lights a myriad of brilliant white stars glinting like so many pinholes in an ebony canvas. Beneath them the sea rolled with long three-to-five-foot swells pushed by a fresh nor’easter wind, which was unusual for this time of year. The small fishing boat plowed its way over the sea at ten knots, riding up and down with an easy roll,” Doucette writes in the book’s prologue.
“Ken Joudrey stood at the wheel, his trained eyes looking from the small magnetic compass set in the frame of the woodwork to the window of the wheelhouse, straining to see any sign of a signal in the blackness.”
NOVA SCOTIA 1-2-3
Halifax-based illustrator Yolanda Poplawska has a new baby board book that celebrates the province’s bestknown landmarks.
Nova Scotia 1-2-3 (Nimbus Publishing) helps teach young readers to count from one to 10 by seeing how many moose they can find in Kejimkujik National Park and how many tulips grow by the gates of the Halifax Public Gardens.
BOOKMARKS
On May 30, join author and publisher Pat Thomas at 5 p.m. at the Chester Art Centre for the launch of Raven: Get a Grip (Windywood Publishing), the first of a three-book series on ravens. Sharing her wonder about ravens, Thomas’s “mashup” book combines writing, photography, and artwork by numerous contributors. The book launch event will include a talk and an opportunity to meet local artists who contributed to Raven: Get a Grip.
■ Join Chris Benjamin, along with special guests Jon Tattrie, Sal Sawler, Kate Inglis, and Dane George on banjo —on June 3 at 2 p.m. at Halifax’s Glitter Bean Café for the launch of his latest book, Chasing Paradise: A Hitchhiker’s Search for Home in a World at War with Itself.
■ On June 4, join Jane Doucet at 3 p.m., at Halifax’s Open Book Coffee for the re-launch of her debut work of humorous fiction The Pregnant Pause. Vagrant Press has rereleased it with a fresh new cover. Doucet’s third novel, Lost & Found in Lunenburg is set to be published in the fall.