Cape Breton Road

In March 2001, the Globe and Mail proclaimed D.R. MacDonald Canada’s best new novelist. Far from fitting the profile of many first-time novelists, however, MacDonald is a mature writer with two Pushcart Prizes and an O. Henry Award to his name; he’s also an American, a long-time lecturer at Stanford University who nevertheless spends every summer in Cape Breton where his family roots are, and finds his literary inspiration there.

D.R. MacDonald was born on Boularderie Island, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, in 1939, a great-grandson of Gaelic-speaking Scottish Highlanders who settled the land in the early 1800s. The Second World War broke out while he was still a child, and his father moved the family to a port city in Ohio to be nearer his work as an officer on the ore freighters plying the Great Lakes. MacDonald later got his seaman’s licence too and worked on the freighters to finance his way through Ohio University.

After graduating in English, he spent a year in London teaching at a boys’ preparatory school, and got married. He returned to the United States and started to pursue an M.A. at Ohio State University in Columbus while teaching full-time. It was there he was encouraged by an assistant professor to write seriously and apply for a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Fiction at Stanford.

He received the Fellowship in 1969, at the age of 29. He was writing a novel loosely based on his father, who was due to retire after 40 years on the lakes. The novel was never released but a few chapters were published in small magazines, and the fellowship led to a lectureship at Stanford. Meanwhile, he had begun going back to Cape Breton, at first to research the background for the novel. In 1971, he bought a barn and some land near the farm where he was born, with the aim of fixing the place up enough to live there. He began returning to live there every summer.

He started to recognize that Cape Breton, so foreign to him when growing up, was becoming the source of his literary inspiration. “My interest in that place and my connection to it were rekindled, and I absorbed much that I would turn into stories.” It was a gradual realisation rather than a choice. “You become more aware of it, your links to it, and you become interested in the people and you realize that part of what you are is as a result of that place… I would never have guessed that it would be the place that would really make me want to write, but it did.” In Cape Breton he would learn his craft, and find a voice and a form for his writing, though the stories he would write about people would be universal.

He was awarded an NEA grant in literature, and by the time Eyestone, he first collection of stories, was published in 1988, one of the stories had earned him a Pushcart Prize. The collection beautifully captures the personality of the isolated land and the sea around Cape Breton. Over two decades, he continued to mature as a short story writer, winning another Pushcart Prize and an O. Henry Award, and gradually began writing a novel. He put it aside for several years, working on shorter pieces until he went back to it in around 1998; when an agent encouraged him to show it, the novel was quickly sold on the basis of 100 pages, giving him the impetus to complete it.

David R. MacDonald continues to divide his time between teaching English and Creative Writing at Stanford University and summers on Boularderie Island with his wife. While he’s in Cape Breton he doesn’t have much time for writing — he’s building, planting, walking and visiting. When he leaves, however, “of course I yearn for it and that’s when the imagination starts to take over.”

When Innis steals the Cadillac of a Great Lakes freighter captain in Cape Breton Road, he is so nervous about being seen that he kills someone’s dog on the road. He realises that borrowing a car in a place where everyone knows everyone’s business is no fun at all. He also picks up the captain’s phone and hears on the party-line that he and Starr and Claire are the subject of local entertainment. Of course there are restrictions in living in a small place, but MacDonald says they are outweighed by the advantages of “the connectedness of the community. And after all, Cape Bretoners can complain and they can even move away — but they always find their way back.”