Lisa Moore is picking at old wounds. Her latest novel, February, is about the Ocean Ranger — an oil rig whose sinking off the coast of Newfoundland in February 1982 remains a painful blight on the province’s collective memory. February follows the lives of the fictional Helen O’Mara — whose husband is among the eighty-four men killed in a disaster that yielded no survivors — and her four children. Moore explores how loss is played out over nearly thirty years of slip-and-slide between past and present. With February, the author delivers what readers of her two previous collections of short stories and one novel have come to expect of her work: prose that is at once challenging and facile, richly poetic but eminently consumable.
When February came out, one critic accused it of being too Canadian. We’re at a point where “Canadian” is sometimes used as shorthand for literature that is too aesthetic or intellectual. What are your thoughts on where such “Canadian-ness” fits into our national literature?
I’m from Newfoundland, and that probably comes before being Canadian, or at least gets mixed up in it: they’re two separate identities mixing together. Since becoming a writer, I’ve travelled through Canada a lot to do readings, and that has really informed my idea of what it means to be Canadian — just travelling in the landscape and seeing how different it is and meeting the people. I really don’t believe there is such a thing as a Canadian kind of writing. I think that Canadian literature is as diverse as the country is big, and it gets more and more diverse every day. I read last night with three other writers, and each of the books that we read from was completely different. Of the three books written by Canadians, one is set in Beirut, one is love poetry, and mine is about the sinking of the Ocean Ranger. That’s a literary experience in Canada: if you go to a reading, you hear all of that.
Do Canadian authors tend more toward regionalism, then? Does writing from Newfoundland have a distinct voice?
Newfoundland is difficult to get to, and it has in the past been difficult to make a living there. Mostly people were dependent on fish. Now, of course, the fishery is gone, and we’re reaping the benefits of oil. Michael Crummey’s [recent book Galore] is about outport living, and my book is about an oil rig that sank. Both involve isolation. An oil rig is an island, too, in a way. So that’s something that we share in common: the literature is informed by geography.
You and Michael Crummey are both belong to the writer’s group The Burning Rock Collective. It seems that in Newfoundland, and St. John’s in particular, the artistic community is tightly knit. How much does the conversation taking place in that community influence your work?
Michael Winter is a very good friend of mine, and Ramona Dearing, Larry Mathews, Claire Wilkshire, Beth Ryan: these are all people whose work I’ve read and commented on while it was in progress, and they’ve read mine and offered me criticism. That experience makes literature a really living thing. It gives it another layer; it lifts it off the page. St. John’s is also a diverse place artistically. The music scene is very rich, there’s a great visual arts scene, and film is taking off. Everybody knows each other, and everyone is often collaborating.
In February, we get a strong sense of community. The Ocean Ranger sinks, and there’s this experience of communal grief that happens afterward.
When the Ocean Ranger sank in Newfoundland, it was a tremendous shock that just reverberated through the whole province. That disaster is still a raw wound there.
Why do you think that is?
It’s because it never should have happened. Corners were cut, and safety procedures weren’t followed. The men weren’t trained properly; they didn’t have enough survival suits. The lifeboats were not durable; many of them broke apart when they got in the water. Loss of the sort that occurred on the Ocean Ranger is always shocking and difficult to take, but even more so when it’s unnecessary.
It broke my heart to read the Royal Commission on the Ocean Ranger disaster. I just found it unbearably sad. It outlines the details of all the things that went wrong, many of which could have been avoided. It made me realize that people risk their lives just to make a living on a regular basis.
Do you have any personal connection to the Ocean Ranger disaster?
No, but my own father died very suddenly of natural causes around the same time. My mother and father were madly in love, and I watched my mother go through that grief. My sister and I went thought it as well.
I thought a lot about the idea of trauma when I read February and the idea — I think Hannah Arendt said this, among other people — that it can be worked through with narrative. Was writing February a kind of catharsis?
When I went to research the book there was very little material information available. There was almost nothing written: just the Royal Commission and a few books and documentaries. It was astonishing how little material there was about an event that had left such a mark on Newfoundland. Then this year another book came out at the same time as my own — a piece of non-fiction by Mike Heffernan called Rig — and a sociologist named Susan Dodd is writing a book about the Ocean Ranger as well. It feels to me like people have come to a point in the process of grieving or working through trauma where it’s becoming possible to tell the story. And also absolutely necessary to tell the story.
I wanted to show that this is not the kind of disaster that just hits the headlines and then goes away. This is the kind of thing that continues to affect people who are left behind for generations. It wasn’t just the loss of those men, as awful as that was, it was also that their families were scarred. In fact, the whole province was. It was important to me to say that with the book.
Despite that, the ending of February is very hopeful.
When someone dies, in order to honour that life you have to live joyfully. Even though the book is about grief in some ways, I wanted there to be joy in it as well. I wanted that to come through in the language, in the way that Helen experiences through her senses. I hope that it’s a sensual book, that the senses of the reader are engaged and come alive. And I wanted Helen to fall in love again. Because I think that is not, in fact, a romantic notion but a realistic notion.
(Photo by Barbara Stoneham)
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