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My Nova Scotia Books 6

📚 Purchased from the Strange Adventures Comics & Curiosities shop in beautiful downtown Halifax, NS

Small History Nova Scotia: A Year of Historical News, Volume 2

The second in a series of three pamphlets compiled by Sara Spike, with Volume 2 published in 2020. As she says in her introduction, the series “shares real daily news from [over four dozen] historical newspapers across the province between the years 1880 and 1910.” It also includes illustrations of old advertisements and notices, which break up the grey and add a lot of nostalgic charm to the package. You can view a sample page from volume 2 on the Small History Nova Scotia site.

Spike started tweeting these news items from rural and small-town newspapers in 2014. Twitter turned out to be a perfect medium, as she explains:

Local news columns were frequently long lists of short bits of news. The tweets, like the daily entries here, are entire news items just as they appeared in the original newspapers.

Here are a few examples:

  • The coast was enveloped in fog nearly all day. Yarmouth Jul 3 1893
  • The picnic on Moose Island consisted of baked beans, canned salmon, cake of all kinds, pie of every description, hot tea and coffee. Five Islands Jul 8 1895
  • Mr. Jon Vaughan has a cat that is rearing two young minks and a black kitten. Anyone passing may see the lithe forms racing about in a very happy mood with kitty as a frolicksome companion. Mr Vaughan has recently added a wood chuck to his menagerie. Gaspereau Jul 11 1890

Spike acknowledges that these excerpts exclude lots of voices and descriptions, but I agree with her that they do capture the flavor and texture of a specifically, almost intensely, local way of life.

On a personal note, I loved reading this booklet because it reminded me of my first real job out of college at The Rocky Mount Evening & Sunday Telegram in Rocky Mount, NC. At that time – 1984 – the Linotype machines were only recently consigned to the backrooms and the “women’s and features” page regularly consisted of one-paragraph summaries of the local women’s, civic, and church groups. (Try writing meaningful headlines for these squibs beyond “Club Met on Sunday”). We also ran odd little endearing notices like Mr. and Mrs. Smith will be on a cruise or traveling to meet their new grandchildren in Lompock, or whatever. (Burglars, take note!)

Reading these hundred-year-old Nova Scotia news items just made me smile and sparked my imagination for living in that place and time, the same locales that Millie of the Maritimes would have lived in. And they also put me in mind of my own early days, where that tradition of newspapering remained intact, though not alive for much longer.

As a devotee of autobiographical comics, I’m ashamed to say I’d never heard of Keilor Roberts before this trip. But we’ve liked Julia Wertz’s comics, and I thought Liz might also enjoy Roberts’ deadpan and Sahara-dry wit.

And we did. These were fun books to drop into and encouraged me to seek out interviews with Roberts and pursue copies of her other work. Highly recommended, especially for her interactions and dialogues with her daughter Xia, who looks at the world as brightly and eccentrically as her oftentimes less-happy mom.

Where does the phrase ‘cold turkey’ come from? | Merriam-Webster

It may be that the original cold turkey was a combination of cold (“straightforward, matter-of-fact”) and the earlier talk turkey, which dates back to the early 1800s and refers to speaking plainly. Regardless of its ultimate origins, the phrase manages to vividly capture the initial dread and discomfort that comes from immediately quitting something that’s addictive, from drugs to dating apps.

Signed up with a dietician to try to lose that last stubborn 20-30lbs. Spent a week keeping a food log and sleep log and now food is all I think about and my sleep has been terrible. What the …???

My Nova Scotia Books 5

📚 Purchased from a gift/souvenir shop in Chester, N.S. Sadly, I cannot recall the name and cannot find it in Apple Maps.

Of all the books I got in Nova Scotia, this was the most powerful. The Expulsion of the Acadians – also called the Great Deportation – which occurred from 1755-64, is one of the great scars of history on this beautiful place, perpetrated by the brutal British colonial government on a peaceful agrarian population whose crime was that they spoke French. The Expulsion echoes still in this region and its local culture.

There are a great number and variety of books on the topic of the Great Deportation; the Grand Pré Visitors Center had books covering all aspects of the event, ranging from academic histories to fictional retellings. Longfellow’s poem “Evangeline” exists in many different formats.

But this book felt different. Acadian Driftwood, despite its slim profile, is packed with thorough research and scholarship, imaginative storytelling using the known facts, and a deeply personal exploration by its author, Tyler Leblanc.

Leblanc did not even know his ancestors were Acadian until he traced his genealogy back to Joseph LeBlanc (his great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather). The book tells the separate histories of Joseph and his 10 siblings who were expelled from their homes and lands and quite literally scattered to the four winds. Each chapter follows the trail of an individual sibling, where they ended up, and how they possibly fared. Some of them died at sea, others who made their way to France, England, Philadelphia, and yes, Louisiana, and even some who hid out and escaped the clutches of the British soldiers. The book describes the type of life and living conditions Leblanc’s ancestors would have found in these unsafe and openly hostile environments, so different from the green and peaceful Acadia they had known.

A short, powerful book that tells you what you need to know factually about the Great Deportation and what you should know emotionally, personally, about how that event played out in these individual lives. And then ponder how the world treats refugees today and ask yourself: is it any better? Is it any different?

Acadian Driftwood - The Band - YouTube

Acadian Driftwood - Wikipedia (background on The Band’s song)

How Tyler LeBlanc looked into his Nova Scotia roots and uncovered a connection to Acadian history | CBC Books

My Nova Scotia Books 4

📚 Purchased from the Grand-Pré National Historic Site Visitors Center. The Center has lots of CDs of Acadian and traditional music, and many books on Acadian history and culture, with a focus on the British government’s deportation from 1755-62 of the Acadians from Grand-Pré. The Center also has lots and lots of versions and retellings of Longfellow’s “Evangeline,” which I really must get to one day.

These Good Hands by Carol Bruneau

From the bookflap: “Set in the early autumn of 1943, These Good Hands interweaves the biography of French sculptor Camille Claudel and the story of the nurse who cares for her during the final days of her thirty-year incarceration in France’s Montdevergues Asylum.”

Still on my to-read shelf. I bought this early in our trip thinking I’d get back into reading a real book (by which I mean, a good novel). Even though the novel does not have anything to do with Nova Scotian or Acadian culture, I loved the description of the book from its flap and that’s why I bought it.

Minnie of the Maritimes by Judith Tait

Also not a book with Acadian themes, but it sweeps from one end of Nova Scotia to another, and is a fine first novel. The author’s bio on the last page says this:

Investigating her ancestors led to the fictional life of a real person, Minnie Healy, born in 1864 outside the village of Port Williams in Kings Co., Nova Scotia. No other details of her life were recorded.

Set in the late 19th and early 20th century, the book follows young Minnie as she is cast out from her family’s home. Her pregnancy has cast shame on her family in the community and so she is sent to Montreal, where she delivers the child in a Catholic-run facility for unwed mothers – who are not allowed to keep their children. From there, she lives on Prince Edward Island with her aunt’s family, marries and moves to Halifax, and then ends her days in Wolfville.

It packs a lot of incident for a short book, and there are tinges of melodrama here and there. But the descriptions of those times – along with vintage photographs of the era that help inform the book’s atmosphere – are bracingly physical with great details. Minnie’s train ride to Montreal, the cold stoniness of the Catholic facility, the summers and winters of PEI as she grows to young womanhood – there are so many lovely episodes that the book is a joy to read.

But it’s not just nostalgia for a lost time. I’d heard about the Halifax Explosion but Tait’s description of its aftermath, as Minnie wanders through a neighborhood scorched and scraped bare, was unsettling. The book may appear to be a cozy, but its report has claws.

A small book, maybe a minor book, but a perfect little gift of a book for anyone who loves Nova Scotia and wants to know what life 100+ years ago felt like.

Finished reading: Growing Pains by Emily Carr 📚

The bedtime book I read to Liz before lights out. We knew nothing of Emily Carr; this was a used book I picked up in Annapolis Royal and it proved to be wonderful. Carr’s descriptions of her early life and her times in San Francisco and London as an art student are brisk and readable. She exhibited such strong character, and withstood such vicious and determined opposition from her family and neighbors, that her occasional lapses of collapsing self-doubt are really heart-breaking. That she powered through so much opposition to make her work and suffered several bouts of what she calls nervous exhaustion (but were likely heart attacks) make it easy to understand why she stopped believing in herself. Until the pictures she’d made brought the world to her door. A remarkable life and this – her last memoir, finished just before her death – covers the sweep of it with unsparing anecdotes.