This morning, coffee in hand and a leftover pancake in the other (this is what happens when you live alone – leftover pancakes??) I read this interview on CBCs Canada Writes with Lisa Moore. Want to be inspired? Read it. http://www.cbc.ca/books/canadawrites/2013/02/lisa-moore-takes-the-magic-8.html

I think I first heard of Lisa Moore as curating a painting exhibition probably in St. John’s years ago. Then I saw her book February in the window of Pages Bookstore on Queen St. West and I wanted it. But melancholy was seeping through its pages I could tell, and I couldn’t bring myself to read it. Later I bought Alligator which takes place in St. John’s and I loved it, but I knew I would.

I can’t tell you why, I am DRAWN to Lisa Moore. In the same way I was and am DRAWN to Newfoundland – in the very same damn inexplicable way. Her name gives me goose bumps. Her interviews leave my jaw dropped. I know it is her preoccupation with the heart of things, her intensity at digging to get to the heart of things that gets to the heart of me. The stuff of life–longing, vulnerability, all-consuming love, bravery, magic, risk, her search for what she says are the essentials of human existence.

I finally bought February at the Word on the Street book festival in Toronto in October. I carried it around that day, a thin good looking Anansi book in my little good looking Anansi bag like it had the weight of gold. Weeks passed and it was packed in a box along with 9 other boxes of books and loaded in a truck and driven across from Ontario to the east coast. It crossed a ferry and sped up and down windy, hilled roads in the middle of the night in November. And then I forgot about it.

And then one day I sat at my desk in Newfoundland in my new home and I sketched and I listened to Shelagh Rogers The Next Chapter and there was Lisa Moore – talking about February and my jaw dropped and my heart leaped, and my stomach tightened and my eyes watered and after, I jumped out of my chair and tore through my books and February was missing.

February is STILL nowhere to be found. There is something about that – like something out there is making sure it’s not in my hands until the right time. Just like something out there made sure I waited 6 years to make this island my home. So I’ll wait and it will turn up and in the meantime I’ll continue to love it without ever having read it.

February is about a woman who loses her husband when the oil rig Ocean Ranger sinks off the coast of Newfoundland during a Valentine’s Day storm in 1982. 

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