Frank MacDonald is travelling from one far-reaching coast to another to accept an award for his first novel and to give a reading at Powell River’s Breakwater Books and Coffee while he’s at it.
MacDonald is a Cape Breton, Nova Scotia author and newspaper man whose first novel, A Forest For Calum, published in 2005, has been chosen by North Island College Reads competition as its 2011 Book of the Year. MacDonald is flying from one coast to the other to give readings at the college and in Powell River. This will be MacDonald’s first trip to Powell River and only his second time to Vancouver Island. He said he has been to BC a few times but that it’s “such a massive province” compared to Nova Scotia he hasn’t had the chance to explore everywhere.
The novel is set in Cape Breton during the early to mid 1960s and centres around a young man growing up just as the area’s culture is going through massive changes as it moves away from its Gaelic roots. The book received a nomination from the 2007 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Awards and has received wide acclaim.
“I was quite delighted,” said MacDonald of the attention. “I’d always been picking at fiction and poetry...It took me a long time to put it together.”
As a founder and writer for 30 years of the weekly Inverness Oran newspaper MacDonald said he had a great opportunity to immerse himself in Cape Breton life and develop a pool of stories and characters to draw on for his novels.
“It’s like 30 years of research or something like that,” said MacDonald. “I think if you have talent the leap isn’t impossible to make.”
He retired as a newspaper writer two years ago to focus more on his fiction and said he’s thinking of his unemployment insurance as a Canada Council for the Arts grant. He said that after taking 20 years to write his first novel he knew he would have to make more time and get serious about fiction.
MacDonald’s second novel, The Possible Madness, will be published in June. Set once again in Cape Breton, MacDonald said the story has to do with rural communities and the challenge of making them economically stable without losing their roots. He said the themes have a lot of resonance in Cape Breton and are relatable in small towns throughout Canada.
MacDonald will be at Breakwater Books on Monday, March 28 at 7 pm.
