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Photo by Aaron Schwartz

So. How do you leave home?

Bride and Wanda think it will be easy. They accumulate the cash and then they hit the road to Toronto. They are wrong. I was wrong. More than twenty years after I moved away from Random Island, Newfoundland, I was struck down, in mid-life, mid-career, with a heart stopping case of homesickness. I felt it might be terminal.

I’d like to tell you a story—the story behind how I came to write No Beautiful Shore.

I knew that as a non-practicing lawyer I had no business trying to write fiction. I should just settle down, work, make money and breed. But I couldn’t, because I had fallen in love with two young girls named Bride and Wanda. They were full of hope, full of life and desperate to get out of rural Newfoundland. I knew that feeling too. I had been a teenager in an outport, planning and dreaming of a time when I could leave it all behind me. I understood what Bride and Wanda wanted.

It took me six years to complete No Beautiful Shore, not because it is a long and intricate story, but because I couldn’t admit to myself that it was a story about the impossibility of leaving home. Really leaving home behind.

On a grey November day in Toronto I sudden realized how much I missed home. I missed the geography, the smell of salt water and evergreens, almost three hundred years of family history on this side of the Atlantic and the beautiful, heart-rending music of what I know to be the English language. I didn’t want to be an immigrant in my own country, but Toronto didn’t feel like my own country. I wanted to go home.

There. I confess. I was homesick. I said it out loud. I realized the book that I had been writing in bits and pieces was a home-leaving story. It was the mirror refection, a contradiction, to Thomas Wolfe’s thesis that you can never go home again. I discovered that I could never leave home. It took me about a day to put the story together, after I admitted to myself that I missed home. I wrote a few missing scenes, and within a week I had I cohesive story.

What do I do now? I’m writing, but I don’t know what it is that is troubling me. So stay tuned and trust that, at some point, I figure it out. Seems to me that this is what the writing process is—the mystery of unraveling what it is that is driving you mad.

I don’t know what is to come. But I can promise you that, what ever that may be, it will be honest.