(Today in Books@Torontoist author Kathleen Winter describes the strange, primordial landscape of Labrador, the setting of her new novel, Annabel. Winter, who hails from Newfoundland, first encountered Labrador while making a CBC documentary on a local Innu singer, but it was some time before she decided to set a novel there. Once she started, though, there was no looking back.)
I have tried to put Labrador’s deep, magnetic energy into Annabel, my novel about a child born beyond gender in that land, and people have responded to this in a way I did not expect. I did not realize the landscape and culture in the story would feel pre-Modern and unknown, or that people would ask me how I was able to enter that world and write about it, but they have. On the novel’s first page I describe the village as having “that magnetic earth all Labrador shares. You sense a striation, a pulse, as the land drinks light and emits a vibration.”
The title of that chapter is New World, and I have tried to set before the reader the Labrador that I have seen and known. In a way, I should not be surprised when someone responds to that world as if it were primordial and startling: when I experienced Labrador myself the first time I visited it, something happened that I can only describe as an intense electrical presence in the land which charged and transformed me. This energy has affected me every time I have been in Labrador, and I don’t completely understand it, or even begin to understand it, really. But I have a lot of experience writing down things as I see them, and the Labrador of Annabel is not researched. It is the Labrador that has met me, generously and with a power in the land and the people, each time I have gone there.
While my account of Labrador is subjective, I do not think for a minute that I am the only person who feels this way about the place. Even thinking about it as I write this in Montreal, I feel the memory of a current coming out of the Labrador land and sky. The first few times I went there were to co-produce a CBC documentary about a young Innu composer and singer, and subsequent visits were times in which I taught workshops in writing as part of Labrador’s annual creative arts festival. I also visited for purely personal reasons, and in all those times I found that the people of Labrador were quietly aware of the same power in the land that I felt. It is in the northern lights, the mountains, the water and the land, in a way I find much wilder and more powerful even than the Newfoundland wilderness that I inhabited for many years. At no time did I ever intend to write a novel set in Labrador, until the story of Annabel began to present itself to me. Then the energy of the place came forward and imbued the novel.
I have been asked what were the challenges of bringing the pre-Modern world of Annabel to a 21st-century readership, and my answer is that I think there is a channel connecting each of us to a whole, inner, pre-Modern world. The inner world of our own bodies is the same as it has been for thousands of years, and I think a reader connects to primordial energy right away, without having to worry about psychological acclimatization. We are ready, at all times, as readers, to dream the human dream. I enjoy the paradox that no matter how modern and urban we become, we yearn for connection and simple glory.
So I feel there is an easily made connection between the modern, urban being, and the charged landscape in Annabel, though the novel is set in a place that appears worlds away from modern life. I also think we have a connection to the dual-gendered character of Wayne/Annabel in the story: this is also a paradox I wanted to explore, and it connects with the landscape in that it has to do with an expansive reality that challenges duality and division. At no time does the novel present Wayne as any different from other people in the book, though he is the only one born both male and female at the same time. In a key passage in the book, Wayne, having moved to the city, watches men and women downtown: “Everywhere Wayne looked there was one or the other, male or female, abandoned by the other. The loneliness of this cracked the street in half.”
I feel Labrador distils a magnetic energy that hums beneath the feet of its inhabitants, but also beneath other feet right now; feet in the centre of urban places; and I also feel the body of Wayne, both male and female, holds a tension familiar to anyone. Annabel may appear to be a tale of an extraordinary person in a strange, wild place, but I don’t look at it that way at all.
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