The lush vineyards of the Annapolis Valley (not far from where she lives and where she spent her adolescence) provide the backdrop for Deborah Hemming’s debut novel, a coming-of-age story with a surprising twist.
“I think I always wanted to set a book here,” she said in an interview from her home in Wolfville. “It was a really magical place to grow up. It felt really free.”
Hemming spent her childhood years in Port Williams, a small community just outside Wolfville. Maybe it is why she is drawn to stories set in rural places. While fictional characters living in cities can find anonymity to develop and evolve through their varied experiences, those living in the country face something different, she said.
“Rural stories don’t provide that anonymity,” she said. “You are known. Characters seek out change and growth in other ways. The whole idea of pushing boundaries is different. You have to do it interpersonally.”
Throw Down Your Shadows (Vagrant Press), follows 16-year-old Winnie as she navigates growing up on the fringes in rural Nova Scotia alongside her three best friends, all boys. Their lives change dramatically when Caleb, a new boy from the city moves to town. Under Caleb’s influence, Winnie and her friends test boundaries, and in the process reveal to themselves their inner complexities, desires, and darkness.
Written in a before-and-after structure, the book centres around a fire at a local winery, where much of the book takes place.
“There is a moment when I first open my eyes. Not even a moment. It’s gone before it begins. The night before, all its destruction, the fire, a dream. Something imagined. Confusing and irrational. I blink hard, but my eyes can’t unsee. All that smoke, the heat. Don’t fool yourself Winnie. It happened,” Hemming writes at the beginning of the novel.
While the book is a coming-of-age story with a cast of teenage characters, Hemming, who works as a librarian at Dalhousie University, didn’t write the book for younger people.
“I like books about teenagers even as an adult. I think a lot of people do,” she said. “As an adult, I see it [adolescence] as such a formative time.”
In writing the novel Hemming set out to create a character who was a little different from the young women she often read in books; women who were overly emotional and disempowered by their emotions. In those characters, having strong emotions was equated with weakness, something to overcome. Instead, Winnie is detached, independent, and complex. While Winnie explores her first real feelings of sexual desire,
Hemming interweaves her personal and sexual development with work and life amidst the Annapolis Valley’s lush, sensuous vineyards.
Winnie and her friends grow up in Throw Down Your Shadows, but Hemming likes to think of their growth and transformation, not as the end but as the beginning. She ends the novel with Winnie in adulthood, not as someone who after facing a series of challenges has become the person she will always be, but as someone who is still hungry for more.
“Coming of age is a life-long endeavour,” said Hemming. “I believe we’re constantly changing.”
The N.S. Bucket List
With the pandemic forcing people to stick closer to home, The Nova Scotia Bucket List: 25 Unforgettable Experiences, Adventures and Destinations, Selected by Nova Scotia’s Best Travel Writers (Formac Publishing) might inspire you to try something new, or push you to finally do something you’ve wanted to do but never had the time.
Husband-and-wife team, Dale Dunlop and Alison Scott came up with a list of things they love most about Nova Scotia. Instead of including driving the Cabot Trail, visiting the Halifax Citadel strolling the Lunenburg waterfront, they chose less-known destinations - places and adventures that left a lasting impression on them and might not be as well known.
On their bucket list: padding the Tobeatic Wilderness Area (the largest protected area in the Maritimes), spending the night in the Fortress of Louisbourg, eating maple syrup at Sugar Moon Farm, tracing your roots at the Canadian Museum of Immigration, and touring the Bird Islands.
“The opportunity to get up close to thousands of nesting seabirds of many different species is a rare experience anywhere, yet it’s quite doable just 20 minutes away from Sydney or Baddeck. The Bird Islands, as they are usually referred to, are composed of two uninhabited islands, Hereford and Ciboux, that lie not far off Cape Breton.”
Oak Island Mystery Solved
In Oak Island Mystery Solved: The Final Chapter (Nimbus Publishing), authors Joy Steele and Gordon Fader, a marine geologist, team up to take readers on voyage of discovery, combining historical research with scientific knowledge from geological field studies.
For more than two centuries, the island, one of more than 300 nestled within Mahone Bay, has been studied, searched, and cursed. Tales of buried treasure, legends, and theories continue to swirl around it.
“Over the past couple of years, Joy Steele and Gordon Fader have been working together to solidify – if you’ll pardon the pun - Joy’s theories on the affects geology has had on the tantalizing evidence of human activity on Oak Island since the early 1700s. In the process, their collaboration has not only strengthened Joy’s earlier revelatory conclusions, but remarkably, uncovered still more manufacturing activity, to date unexplored and hardly mentioned,” the book’s editors write.
“It’s risky to call something like this final, but so confident are we in the corroborating evidence – at the nexus, as it is, of historical and scientific research – that we dare call it resolved."
In Steele’s previous book, The Oak Island Mystery, Solved (Cape Breton University Press) she made the argument Oak Island’s true treasure is not the gold that may be buried there, but its multi-layered history.
Over the years, Fader’s expertise as a geologist has been sought by numerous Oak Island explorers, treasure hunters, consultants, and researchers. “The key to understanding the story of Oak Island is the knowledge and expertise provided by geologists and archeologists,” he writes.
Poetry in Motion
Ten poets will see their writing on transit ads in buses throughout the Halifax Regional Municipality as part of this year’s public art project, Poetry in Motion. The ten poets selected are: Lorri Neilsen Glenn, Sue Goyette, Asha Jeffers, Nanci Lee, Vanessa Lent, Tiffany Morris, Nolan Natasha, Anna Quon, Samantha Sternberg, and Evelyn C. White.
This year, more than 120 poetry submissions were submitted for consideration by emerging and established writers across the province. The theme for this year’s Poetry in Motion is journeys.
