St. John’s author Bridget Canning

by Shannon Webb-Campbell

Newfoundland author Bridget Canning believes the best advice for emerging writers is to keep building your story. With three books under her belt; including two novels: The Greatest Hits of Wanda Jaynes and Some People’s Children; and her new short story collection No One Knows About Us, she believes stories are like architecture.

“I compare writing a first draft to building a house—you have to dig a hole for the foundation before you even get started,” says Canning. “First draft can feel like digging that hole; it’s a lot of work and time before you even get a sense of the place you want to create. Just keep going.”

The stories in No One Knows About Us were written over many years, and throughout various circumstances in the writer’s life. With threads of various connections woven throughout each of the stories, Canning describes drafting a short story as much harder than working on a novel due to the challenge of balancing brevity and pressure. The structure of a short story needs to be strong and compelling on its own, while simultaneously coming together to create a whole collection.

“I think the awareness that for the audience, of course there will be some stories they like more than others, whereas with a novel, it’s more of a focus on capturing the audience’s attention and desire to see where the story goes,” she says.

As a collection, No One Knows About Us explores how we find connection in a disconnected world and what it means to be good, or bad. Canning attempts to write characters whose flaws and weaknesses can be frustrating, but also relatable.

With stories that explore secret acts of vengeance, vigilantism, grudges, yearnings, fears and

fixations, Canning believes literature, like most art, serves to build empathy, and can connects us as human beings.

“In this collection, I played around with this idea a lot, how something that feels very big for us internally can simultaneously make us feel very small in comparison with the turmoil of the world at large,” says Canning. “I guess you could say it’s my hope that readers would see and understand something of themselves in a character, even if that character is making grave errors they would never make or consider.”

Canning describes her stories “The Gutless Bravado, Part One,” “The Gutless Bravado, Part Two,” “The Gutless Bravado, Part Three” and “The Gutless Bravado, Part Four” as being the most difficult ones to write, due to the personal implications—the character’s recovery from surgery is something she went through herself. She wanted the linked stories to show the feelings of having to learn and understand one’s new boundaries when their body is healing.

“In 2012, I had a preventative gastrectomy, and the recovery period was a lot of dealing with energy loss and all the frustrations of waiting to adjust and heal. The character in these stories feels the absence of their stomach means they’ve lost much of their sense of fear; therefore, they now have little holding them back from what they really want to do.

“It was important to me that this was established and made sense throughout, so these ended up being the ones I went back to the most.”

Canning, who grew up in the Highlands, a coastal community southwest of Stephenville, on Bay St. George, spent her youth reading, writing and retreating into her imagination overlooking the Port au Port Peninsula. “It’s one of the most stunning areas in the province and I completely took the landscape for granted growing up. We could see across the water to the Port au Port Peninsula and were totally spoiled for beauty.”

Canning cites Newfoundland as a profound influence, as storytelling is inherent to the culture of the place. Living on an island that is more or less isolated, there’s a pronounced sense of things being finite, yet the only thing that may be infinite are stories.

“When you live here, you can always see where things end: the land into the ocean, the seasons, the edges of communities, the fragility of a resource, the popularity of a political party,” says Canning. “For me, living here encourages a sense of simultaneously appreciating and enduring what is happening around me, because there it is, the end.

And that is very much like a story, isn’t it?”

Canning loves reading short stories and picks up new collections all the time. She continuously returns to books by Newfoundland short story writers like Lisa Moore’s Open, Eating Habits of the Chronically Lonesome by Megan Gail Coles, Terry Doyle’s Dig, and Send More Tourists, the Last Ones were Delicious by Tracey Waddleton. Canning describes the literary community in St. John’s as an ecosystem of “gentle mentors,” who encourage new writers and expand points of view on the work created in Newfoundland and Labrador.

“It comes back to that popular James Joyce quote: ‘In the specific lies the universal.’ Being able to see one’s experiences and histories in the art and literature around them and seeing this valued is important—it grants esteem in shaping our individual and collective identity,” says Canning. “In the big picture, Newfoundland and Labrador can feel like this small place hemmed on to the edge of a continent, beleaguered by a history of misguided leadership.

“But this is what also makes our point of view and experience distinctive and ours and an important voice in the canon of Canadian and North American literature.”

Canning’s novel The Greatest Hits of Wanda Jaynes was recently optioned to become a film, and she is working on another new novel. As a morning person, she likes to write in the morning when things are quiet.

“I like to go for a ‘walk and a gawk’—go for a stroll with a journal, maybe people-watch in a café. Like most writers, it’s mostly trying to spy on life and take from it.”

Bridget Canning Breakwater Books

SHANNON WEBB-CAMPBELL is a member of Qalipu Mi’kmaq First Nation. Her books include: Still No Word (Breakwater 2015), I Am A Body of Land (Book*hug 2019) and Lunar Tides (Book*hug 2022). Shannon is a doctoral candidate at the University of New Brunswick in the Department of English, and the editor of Visual Arts News Magazine.