Canada Reads...The Birth House!

Welcome to 2011, everyone! I hope you've had a great New Year's and Christmas holiday and are settling back into the regular routines of your week.

As I mentioned in my last post, there are going to be a few changes to Bloomingwriter in the coming weeks, especially as the end of this month will mark 5 years of me bathering on here. One of the changes I have been sort-of implementing of late is the publishing of book reviews and author interviews. Although these will mostly be of books pertaining to gardening, botany, and such, I also plan to drop in the occasional review of a favourite fiction book, and a talk with its author.

CBC Radio has a program on each winter called Canada Reads, where five 'celebrity judges' debate the merits of five recent works of Canadian fiction. The show will run in early February, but there's been a lot of hype and chatter in recent weeks and days. This year marks ten years of the show, and the books were selected from works published in the past ten years. To my great delight, one of the books in the top five is The Birth House, by Scotts Bay resident Ami McKay! This is one of my favourite novels of all time, and not just because it's by a writer who is a friend and is set in my community. It simply reads like a dream. Chapters/Indigo included it as one of their best books of the decade, and it's been published in numerous other countries, including the USA, Great Britain, Germany and the Netherlands.

The Birth House tells the story of young Dora Rare, only daughter in a family of seven children, and her development into the apprentice, and ultimately the successor of the community’s midwife, the Acadian wise woman Marie Babineau.

Set at a time when so-called modern medicine had some less than modern ideas about women’s health and wellbeing, and limned by the war in Europe and of the Halifax explosion at home, The Birth House is a lyrical and provoking exploration, written with courage and tenderness. It's one of those novels that you can read over and over again, and gain something more from it with each reading.

It’s a long way from either the corn belt of Indiana where McKay was born and raised or the bustling pace of downtown Chicago to a rural Nova Scotian community of some 150 people. But Scots Bay has become the place that Ami McKay wants to live for the rest of her days, with her husband Ian and sons Ian and Jonah. So much does she love her community, that when she began writing her novel, she never considered changing its name or setting her book elsewhere. The Birth House even mentions our famous landmark, Cape Split, and the mighty riptides that roar around it twice daily in what some call 'the voice of the moon.'

Writers draw inspiration for their works from any number of people, events, or locations. In McKay’s case, her journey from private writer to published author began before she moved to the house that inspired her novel.

Like many of us, Ami had kept journals, written poetry and short stories since she had been a child, but “had kept them secret forever.” In 2000, after a series of life events led her from Chicago to Nova Scotia to marry a longtime friend, she decided to write a note to the Oprah Winfrey show, about a book she had read while recovering from a terrible car accident several years earlier. This note led to an appearance on the Oprah show, focusing on when bad things happened to good people.

“I learned from that accident that you can’t just put things off; you’ve got to do it now because you probably won’t do it next week or next year. So I walked away from that experience determined to devote myself to my writing. I knew that I needed to get out and tell stories in my own way.” 

Having recognized, through support by friends and family and positive responses to her writing, that she needed and wanted to be doing more, she felt drawn to the story of Mrs. Rebecca Steele, a longago former midwife who had lived in the house where Ami and her family now make their home, and wondered more about her story and the stories of women in small rural communities in the early part of the twentieth century.

“There’s a modest history of Scots Bay, written by a Mr. Jess,” she says, “which talks about the things men were interested in at the time. But there’s very little recorded in that book about women’s interests, cares, concerns. How did they manage in such isolated communities? How did they care for each other, look out for their health? I felt that the women’s’ voices were unheard.” 

Initially, driven by her interest in the former midwife, she thought she would do a book of nonfiction. But as she researched and wrote, she found her words sculpting themselves into a novel. She never considered changing the community's name in her novel. 

“Geographically, this place is like no other, and to change its name was to do a disservice to the community," she told me back when I first interviewed her for several articles I wrote about the book and its author. "People have been very generous in sharing their lives and their stories, and I’ve been honoured to listen and reflect some of what I learned. I didn’t want to capture one person or an individual character, but I wanted to capture the heart of the community so I’ve used family names that founded Scotts Bay. The names I didn’t change in any way, however, are those veterans who were killed in World War 1; I mentioned them in the novel as a tribute to the sacrifice they made.” 

What I loved most about The Birth House is the very realness of its characters. Perhaps I recognized echoes of personalities from the present in some of the characters, and perhaps in a small part it was knowing the landscape as intimately as I do that brought the novel even closer to my heart. But above all, it is Ami's ability as a storyteller that seals the deal. Other readers and reviewers have talked about how fresh and honest the book is, playful at times, chilling at others, celebratory of women's lives and abilities at all times without ever descending into earnestness or political correctness. Dora, the apprentice midwife and only daughter in generations of the Rare family, isn't a perfect character, but she feels like someone we have all met. Her battles with the obnoxious obstetrician Dr. Gilbert Thomas, who has his own ideas about women's bodies and health, will cause readers to chuckle in one spot and grit their teeth in outrage at others...and ultimately cheer with glee at the struggle's outcome. 

Even though I've read the book numerous times, each time I've picked it up again I haven't wanted the story to end. Like the rest of Ami's legion of fans around the country and beyond, I'm waiting patiently for her next novel to come out, which hopefully will be later this year after a delay by the publishing house. 

Although I've only read one other of the five finalists in this year's Canada Reads--Unless by the late, great Carol Shields--I wish all the authors and their defending judges the best of luck in the competition. They're all winners because more people will become acquainted with their works, of course. But naturally, I hope our hometown Ami McKay carries the day!