“Unlike anywhere else I’ve ever been in Canada,” Michael Crummey says of his home province of Newfoundland, “the past is
who we are.” It is to this profound presence of the past that Crummey
attributes his interest in historical fiction and poetry (“Latest Novel”). The “visceral” awareness that “we have been made by the people who came before us” permeates Crummey’s work, not only in setting but in recurring themes of loss and home. This is not to suggest, as the province’s own tourism ads sometimes have, that Newfoundland is an anachronism — that it is somehow stuck in the past, immune to change and the influence of the rest of the world. Crummey’s work is invested in history not only as a record of what has been, but also as a narrative of change. Much of his writing grapples with cultural and ethical questions about how the past is remembered and preserved, and how we come to terms with it as a part of who we are.

Sweetland sat on the dock with a cup of tea from the thermos, waiting for the sun to lift the cove out of shadow. Walked up onto the beach then,strolled aimlessly across the hillside. The community’s remains might have been a thousand years old for all that was left of them. There were depressions to show where the houses and root cellars had been, the overgrown outline of shale foundations. Not a board or shard of glass or shingle otherwise, all of it scavenged or rotted or blown to hell and gone. He tried to imagine the buildings in their places, tried to unearth the names of the people who’d lived in them. Dominies and Barters and Keepings.