I suppose I found my way into St. John's with Ev too, although I had begun discovering Newfoundland through Kevin Major's books years ago. Major is one of Newfoundland's most successful literary exports-certainly the most celebrated of its children's authors. And with good cause. His early novels of adolescence and community-Hold Fast (Clarke Irwin, 1978), Far from Shore (Clarke Irwin, 1980), Thirty-Six Exposures (Delacorte, 1984), and Blood Red Ochre (Doubleday, 1989)-are as utterly uncompromising in their handling of complicated family and social situations as they are deeply rooted in the geography, history, culture, and speech of rural and small town Newfoundland. His more recent novels-Dear Bruce Springsteen (Doubleday, 1987), Eating between the Lines (Doubleday, 1991), and Diana: My Autobiography (Doubleday, 1993)-have Newfoundland roots perhaps less extensive but no less deep than those of the early books. Only The House of Wooden Santas (Red Deer College Press, 1997), his newest children's book and his first picture-book, with carvings by Imelda George and photographs by Ned Pratt, has no overt reference to Newfoundland. This deplacing doesn't reduce quality, however. The House of Wooden Santas is a striking book. The prose is typical of Major, crisp and clean; the design and illustrations are beautiful. I was slightly skeptical when I heard that tough-minded Major had written a Christmas story, fearing it might be too bleak for the likes of me. But while it is never sentimental and, characteristically, acknowledges the difficult configurations life can take for children, The House of Wooden Santas is-like many of Major's books-intimately concerned with hope.

Major is also one of the country's most innovative writers for children, a risk-taker; each book reaches in a new technical direction. He experiments with multi-voiced narration, with metafiction, with time travel and fantasy, with the epistolary novel. Thirty-Six Exposures is constructed as a series of prose photographs, The House of Wooden Santas like a literary Advent calendar. Most recently, Major has experimented with adult fiction: No Man's Land (Doubleday, 1995), a historical novel of the Newfoundland regiment's tragic losses at the battle of Beaumont Hamel, is his most straightforward book in years, and Gaffer (Doubleday, 1997) is a strange voyage through Newfoundland's present into its past and future with a boy who becomes a sort of merman. I found the idea of Gaffer much more intriguing than its realization. Major's toughness seems less cohesive and directed in this book than in his others, and the writing so terse as to be almost staccato at times. For whatever reason, he has so far been better able in his children's works to balance insight and ire, better able to maintain the energetic forcefulness of his prose. Despite moments of rawness, these are among the most accomplished and daring children's books produced in Canada.

For many people, Kevin Major is Newfoundland children's literature. Tell people here you're doing a piece on Newfoundland writing for children and the almost inevitable answer is: "There's not much, is there ... Kevin Major, of course." Some add Joan Clark or Janet McNaughton. But I am constantly surprised at the modesty with which people regard this thriving literary community. Perhaps I shouldn't be. Modesty seems commonplace in St. John's; so are astonishing ability and versatility. I've never before been to a city blessed with so many talented people per capita. As the many-hatted Ed Kavanagh (writer, musician, actor, editor) says: in St. John's, even the dogs on the street write good poetry.

The dogs, in a short piece, must go unsung. As must poetry, self-published works, and the products of some tiny presses, though I leave them out reluctantly. But I must at least nod toward the wonderful poetry by Tom Dawe, Al Pittman, and Ellen Bryan Obed. Dawe's Angishore, Boo-Man & Clumper: A Newfoundland Folk Alphabet (Harry Cuff, 1983) and Alley-Coosh, Bibby & Cark: A Second Newfoundland Folk Alphabet (Harry Cuff, 1987) are charming explorations of the distinctive vocabulary of Newfoundland, and Obed's Borrowed Black: A Labrador Fantasy (Breakwater Books, 1988) is a local favourite that should be nationally known. Pittman's delightful poetic caricatures of local fish and birds are found in Down by Jim Long's Stage: Rhymes for Children & Young Fish (Breakwater, 1976) and On a Wing & a Wish: Salt Water Bird Rhymes (Breakwater, 1992). Walk into any Newfoundland souvenir store, and you'll find title after title of "non-literary" children's literature. There's Linda Bath's Peggy series, about a young girl in Bonavista, acquainting readers with traditional fishing practices. And Terry Morrison's simple stories, including one about being lost at sea in the fog, and another, a playful revision of the life of Cabot, or Cathy Simpson's There are No Polar Bears Here, one of the strongest local picture-books now available. Some of these books aren't great, but they have their place in a larger whole, the telling of Newfoundland. They deserve serious reading as cultural phenomena.

My focus on fiction from relatively established presses must give way at least once. Here's an exception both in publisher and in format. Jack Meets the Cat (Sheila's Brush, 1993) is an audio-cassette so beautifully representative of Newfoundland's rich oral culture that it can't be ignored. Produced and arranged by Sheila's Brush Theatre Company, which originally formed in 1979 "to produce original plays using traditional songs, dance, and music", it's the zany modernization of a traditional simpleton-makes-good tale learned from Pius Power of East South Bight, Placentia Bay. And like all folk-tales or children's books generally, this is not just for children. So far, Sheila's Brush has developed five Jack tales for theatre and radio. I've heard of plans for other Jack tales, and possibly a film version of Jack Meets the Cat, but right now only this one is available on audio-cassette.

This is marvellous story-telling-no surprise given the calibre of the people involved, including the writer-actors Andy Jones, Agnes Walsh, and Mercedes Barry, and the musician-actors Geoff Panting and Philip Dinn. Jones as narrator, in a version of his Uncle Val character, is brilliant. His pacing, intonation-everything-are perfectly controlled and eloquently lunatical. He holds the whole together, but his collaborators are no slouches. They are wonderful performers; their flawless rapport and timing are resoundingly evident.

It's the writing that makes Jack stand out for me, since its success comes down, finally, to the crafting of its language. Some of the best writing I've come across in Newfoundland has been in plays performed at the LSPU Hall in St. John's, like Torquil Colbo's delightfully insane Beyond Zebra or Jody Richardson and Liz Picard's wickedly funny Our Religion and Domestic Bliss. Initially a tale layered inside of Sheila's Brush's Jaxxmas and shortly thereafter a separate production, Jack Meets the Cat has been a standard of Newfoundland theatre for almost twenty years. Pliability and exuberance of language are part of what keeps it going. Here is one of the parts I most love: "So he walked and he walked and he kept on walkin', and he didn't stop walkin' and he walked some more. He did walk. He did walk. He didn't not walk. He didn't not walk and he walked and he walked until he stopped...." This phrasing, with its wily near-repetitions and non-repudiations, beautifully complements the story's satiric excess, and is typical of the way the story always almost, but never quite, goes over the top. That balance is a mark of true artistry.

Another worthy re-imagining of Newfoundland's folk culture is Bud Davidge's Mummers' Song (Groundwood Books, 1993), whose lyrics are accompanied by the pictures of the renowned Canadian children's book illustrator Ian Wallace. Since the text of this picture-book is a song, its language is considerably different from that of Jack Meets the Cat. It lacks Jack's wit and crackle. These words don't have to do all the work, though they do what they need to well enough. Wallace's illustrations are lovely, full of movement and light, but their pale colours strike me as slightly out of tune, perhaps because they dull the panic edge that mummers or jannies sometimes held. Compare these with the artist David Blackwood's jannies, for instance; the costumed delight remains in Wallace's, but the discomfiting mysteriousness of disguised neighbours is lost. Of course, that's true to the spirit of Davidge's song; it remembers the innocent fun of Christmas revelling, not (as is often mentioned in recollections of mummering) the potential for a fine fright like that afforded by a good Christmas ghost story.

Geoff Butler's two picture-books-The Killick (Tundra Books, 1995) and The Hangashore (forthcoming, Tundra, 1998)-build on other aspects of Newfoundland tradition: community and self-sacrifice. Butler seems to strive for an expansive embrace like that of Barbara Cooney, whose picture-books gently enliven the landscape and history of Maine with finely detailed pictures and complex narratives. His illustrations, clearly indebted to folk art, offer eloquent glimpses of outport life, and his stories are intricately developed. Butler has a fine sense of how to build a story. Re-reading The Killick, for instance, one sees that its sad outcome is inevitable, has been prepared from the first page. Such thoughtful construction demonstrates a narrative sophistication not nearly as common in children's literature as it should be. All this makes it regrettable that Butler's prose, though competent, lacks the cadence and polish needed to animate his stories.

If I have another quibble with Butler's work, it is the unabashed didacticism. He isn't shy about presenting overt messages of pacifism, tolerance, and self-sacrifice. I bridle at moralizing, even when I share the moral vision, and I suspect most children are better readers and thinkers than many adults will credit. Butler's grandfather who speaks of tolerance, his laze-about who draws attention to the nature of true dignity-these characters are thoughtfully drawn and well-placed to provide instruction; it's the necessity of that instruction I question. Perhaps Butler should give a listen to Jack Meets the Cat; the narrator's parody of The Moral reminds a listener just how funny a heavy-handed lesson can be: "Oh, he's a very tame horse now. Yes: formerly a bad horse, now a good horse. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, it gives us hope for change in our own lives here today. Our future is brighter because of these events."

Janet McNaughton, who was born in Toronto, came to St. John's to study folklore and stayed. Combining knowledge of life in two very different places, her historical fiction grows out of her Ontario family's background and her studies in and experience of St. John's. Two of her novels-Catch Me Once, Catch Me Twice and Make or Break Spring (Tuckamore, 1998)-are set in St. John's during World War II; the third, To Dance at the Palais Royale (Tuckamore, 1996), is set predominantly in 1920s Toronto, but maintains an interesting and telling Newfoundland connection. McNaughton is wonderfully adept at evoking time and place; her rendering of Toronto is dead on, and to my mainland eyes and ears she is equally successful in recreating wartime Newfoundland. I've heard occasional, gentle comments that even with all the facts right, her first novel is slightly "off". It's the sensibility of her characters-subtle intonations that don't strike some Newfoundlanders as quite true.

There's a justifiable sensitivity in Newfoundland about those from away who write the island's stories. Appropriation of voice is a complicated issue and no less important in the context of culture-especially one as unique as Newfoundland's-than in the context of race. To provoke a heated response in Newfoundland, whether pro or con, just mention E. Annie Proulx's The Shipping News. Whatever one thinks of McNaughton's fidelity to place, she has done her homework. And then some. She is living the life, clearly committed to this island.

What draws me to McNaughton's work is not the development of characters (always nicely realized, but stronger with each new work) or her plots (thoughtfully constructed and often gripping); what draws me most is her use of folklore. It would be easy to borrow bits of folklore to achieve a feeling of quaint remove, but that would be just the sort of lean into exoticism, sacrificing richness and variety to the hackneyed Newfoundland stereotypes common on the mainland, that fires concerns about appropriation. McNaughton is never guilty of such simplification. Her Ph.D. in folklore serves her well.

Folklore is part of the texture of her books: midwifery, boatbuilding, gardening, weather sayings, singing-all this grows naturally out of her interests and expertise and into the lives of the people she creates. And there are, of course, the fairies that led me to her first book. A fairy encounter on Signal Hill, a friend said, and I was off to Granny Bates Children's Books. The fairies in Catch Me Once are so ordinary, so real to the characters, and, for me at least, completely true. McNaughton associates her fairies with death and the uncontrollable in our world-they're part of the story one character makes up for himself to gentle his mother's death in childbirth, part of the belief of another character that she might somehow influence the randomness of life and the chaos of war. McNaughton's story of children using folk wisdom to ease death's sting (for the fairies sometimes return those they have taken) strikes me as heartbreakingly honest; it's an often subtle rendering of how children, or grown-ups for that matter, mourn.

Because McNaughton won't go for easy outs, I find myself disappointed by her depictions of some relationships. She acknowledges their complexity, but doesn't always allow those complexities to resonate. This is mainly a matter of style, a need for tighter, harder-edged prose. There's only one Brian Doyle, and, compared to him, McNaughton is early in her career. But Doyle's prose offers an emotional clarity, a toughness, a lyricism that McNaughton could learn from.

Nova Scotia's Joan Clark is another fine writer who has found her way to Newfoundland. Clark may be better known for her adult fiction than her children's writing, but she has never been one to trust the uncertain distinctions between children's literature and adult literature. When she was shortlisted for the Smithbooks/Books in Canada First Novel Award for The Victory of Geraldine Gull (Macmillan, 1988), she pointed out that she had already written several children's novels. Her most recent, The Dream Carvers (Viking, 1995), again emphasizes the unreliability of such categories. Her only Newfoundland children's book, it extends the exploration of Viking excursions into North America begun in her "adult" novel Eiriksdottir (Macmillan, 1994).

Like McNaughton, Clark is a good story-teller with a strong sense of history. The Dream Carvers has a density of historical and cultural detail that is both convincing and compelling. Clark synthesizes an astonishing amount of information about both Beothuk and Greenland cultures without forcing details. Facts grow out of the story. That relationship is harder to manage than one might expect; Donald Gale's picture-book Sooshewan: Child of the Beothuk (Breakwater, 1988), despite its historical accuracy and Shawn Steffler's charming illustrations, is more a vehicle for information than for imagination. Gale is using a form that turns on compression and Clark one that allows for the gradual evolution of character and conflict, but Clark's work has an integrity that seems missing in Gale's. She gathers and integrates historical fact in a way that allows a reader to enter fully into the lives on the page.

This integration isn't, initially, smooth. The Dream Carvers is a dual-voiced story, told separately by Thrand, a Greenlander who has been captured by the Beothuk, and by Abidith, sister of the murdered Awasdasut, whom Thrand has been captured to replace. The first chapters state information that might have more naturally unfolded as Thrand contends with the fear and prejudice preventing him at first from understanding the dynamics of the society he has been yanked into. Abidith's sections never pose the problem of Thrand's early chapters, because when she begins narrating, the groundwork is all in place. And once it is, the story moves between narrators with grace and intensity. The result is a fascinating and often moving story of two people and two cultures moving toward the possibility of mutual acceptance.

I began to read my way into Newfoundland with Kevin Major; when I arrived here, I looked to his books again, and to those of McNaughton, Clark, Butler, and Davidge. There are many other writers I could claim as guides: Ed Kavanagh and Helen Fogwill Porter, among those who have written for children and young adults; Paul Bowdring, Carmelita McGrath, Gordon Rodgers, Mary Dalton, Patrick Kavanagh, Libby Creelman, and Robin McGrath among those writing for adults. In fact, Robin McGrath is about to enter into the blur that Major and Clark already occupy, having recently completed Hoist Your Sails & Run, her first book for children.

I am a reader from away, watching from the outside despite being temporarily located in the midst of an artistic renaissance in Newfoundland. This blend of ignorance and intimacy mixes advantages and disadvantages. I see the Southside Hills and the Narrows of St. John's harbour with an excitement those long used to such views may not share, but I'm sure to be blind to subtleties. I am reading, listening, watching my way into Newfoundland; still, my toes are barely over the threshold.

Second thoughts? Third thoughts? My heat-loving daughter has survived a winter in Newfoundland-though natives assure me that was no winter!-and still tolerates my insistence that she come along for any local music going at the museum, the Arts and Culture Centre, the LSPU Hall. She's tired of my exclaiming over views of the sea, but has her own favourite vantage-points and beaches. And the promise of icebergs and puffins make the slow start of spring bearable. She bikes in Bowring Park, takes pottery lessons on the weekend. Has nice friends, a terrific teacher. And in her spare time she reads: Janet Lunn, Brian Doyle. Keeping her thumb in Ontario.