Under the Cover: Three big lessons from writing The Crane

The Crane is my first novel in nearly twenty years and my first-ever attempt at historical fiction, and it had three big lessons for me as a writer.

Lesson number 1: History is ornery.

My family has a cabin in the Bay of Exploits. It’s a tiny two-bedroom affair, with a well for water and the bathroom down a trail in the woods. We bought it 2012, the year we moved away from Newfoundland and Labrador for work; it was meant to be my placeholder, my little bit of home to keep me tied to the ocean. My in-laws have a cabin just across the harbour, so the area came to us pre-vetted and familiar. I knew vaguely that the islands as a whole—and there are dozens of them, with plenty of deep water for anchoring boats and shelter for kayaks—were once home to Beothuk families, which meant that many of the other islands were protected and off-limits to cabins. I knew that, and that our island had been resettled. In 2015 I went looking for books that would tell me the history of the bay in detail.

Perhaps I’m a poor detective, but all I came up with at the time was a report in the Centre for Newfoundland Studies written by a high school student. I borrowed it and read an anecdote about Vietnam War “draft dodgers” who had hidden out in a house on Exploits Island. That caught my attention. It made immediate sense to me: a resettled community, full of largely intact but empty houses, replete with rich garden plots and nearby fishing grounds, on an island that not many mainland authorities could name. It would be a fantastic place to hide out. Three years away from the province with seemingly little hope of getting back soon, the idea that traumatized people might go there and find some kind of shelter and reprieve and safety called up something deep for me. I started writing a novel.

I began concocting a plot about a young American drafted to the Vietnam war who, with his girlfriend, snuck across the border and came to this tiny island that not even he was likely to have ever heard about. He needed to be from a part of the U.S. I felt I could write. I grew up in rural Alberta, so I picked Wyoming. I applied to a historical fiction workshop at the Banff Centre with Lawrence Hill and got to work. I knew people who had spent time on Exploits; at one point I’d need to look them up to flesh out the story of the people who hid there; meantime I didn’t want to let facts get in the way of a good story, and I kept writing. Then two things happened. The first was that I bumped into my Exploits friend on Water Street in St. John’s. Turns out there were Americans who spent some time on Exploits in the late sixties, but they weren’t hiding, they were simply visiting for the summer. The second was that I started looking into how the Canadian government dealt with those who came from the U.S. to avoid the war. I tracked down a pamphlet published by House of Anansi in 1970 titled Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada. Turns out that no one had to hide. Canada welcomed war resisters quite willingly. Historical fiction doesn’t have to match history exactly, but I wanted the main events of the book to at least be plausible, so I figured I might as well scrap the work I’d done and start something completely new.

Lesson 2: Sometimes we find out what we’re writing about by writing.

Because you’re reading about the book, you’ll know I couldn’t bring myself to throw it all away entirely. The idea that someone might come to Newfoundland as an outsider and be surprised to find belonging or peace or solace still felt like something I wanted to say. So I kept at it. Maybe James didn’t need to hide. Maybe Newfoundland was a random choice, as good a place as any, or a place that was so out of the way to him that he felt he could start again there. I knew (now) that war resisters, while mostly welcomed into Canada, came with the understanding they might never be able to return to the U.S.; if they did, they could face arrest. Their families were often harassed by investigators (who could do nothing but harass).

For James to leave knowing all that, I figured he needed to be running from something really awful. I gave him a difficult father who had come home from WWII with what would later be known as post-traumatic stress disorder, and I gave him a twin brother who I killed in combat. I brought him to St. John’s, then realized he’d need a job if he was going to stay. I’ve long been preoccupied with how we come to understand things as truth, and how we respond when lied to. When Donald J. Trump became president the first time, and many of our best journalists went to work fact-checking his more outrageous statements, I knew I had the job for James. He would be a fact-checker. It would help him learn about this new strange place (much the way I learned about Newfoundland and Labrador as a reporter for CBC), and it would help him claw his way out of the betraying propaganda of the war machine.

Still I flailed. My plot was getting unwieldy at this point, and certain things were happening to women in my life that had me thinking about how women carry on in the face of selfish and destructive decisions made by men. (Sorry lads.) Then it happened. In a class on long-form journalism, I came across an article by Jimmy Breslin. In “A Death in Emergency Room One,” he describes the attempt physicians made to resuscitate JFK after he was shot. But more than that Breslin writes about Jackie Onassis looking on at the resuscitation attempt, about her coolness, her reserve, and about the terrible discipline of her face. Editors talk about goosebump moments in writing. When you read something that gives you goosebumps, you know you’ve found the beating heart of the text. That a woman who appears stone cold in the midst of an unfolding crisis of international proportions would be seen to have discipline—not grief or shock, but discipline, and that of the terrible kind—seemed to get at exactly what I’d been trying to ferret out about trauma. The easiest thing in the world would be to fall apart. Sometimes a person just bears and bears it.

This clarifying phrase also boxed my ears that I hadn’t really written any compelling female characters into the plot. (I had intentionally set out to create a sympathetic male character, having left the men in my previous novels fairly flat.) With that line I had found a compass point for the writing, and I’d found a title. Now I would rejig the plot to talk about the secondary trauma of war that women face. Women like James’s mother and the women he would encounter in Newfoundland. I finished a couple of drafts and sent it off to Breakwater and they offered me publication of The Terrible Discipline of Her Face.   

Lesson 3: And sometimes even then we’re wrong.

I knew as soon as I started working with the very astute Kate Kennedy that much of the plot in the second half of the book had to go. Kate and I had worked together before. She edited Actualities, my first book of poetry with Gaspereau Press, published in 2007, and I trusted her. Kate didn’t tell me the plot stank, but she pointed out that many of my female characters bent toward martyrdom (my words, not hers) and I realized that in trying to show their silent suffering, I hadn’t fully drawn them. Not good enough. I’d also noticed that a seemingly insignificant object in the book—a carved wooden crane, inspired I think by a frog carving a friend brought me from the Philippines—had bubbled to the surface as a kind of talisman: it was something that could be passed from hand to hand to represent persistence, survival and memory. Making the crane the centrepiece of the plot was much simpler than the original thing I was attempting, and sometimes simple is better.

I googled “The Crane book.” There was a children’s book of that name published in 1970, but other than that it seemed up for grabs. I pitched The Crane to Kate and she liked it. Sadly, it would mean losing the cover image from sculptor Luben Boykov that he had generously permitted us to use. We brought the title change to Breakwater Books. They liked it too, even though the title had already been submitted to Amazon and it meant scrubbing The Terrible Discipline of Her Face from the internet. I found some crane images in the public domain and sent them to designer Beth Oberholtzer and she put together the rich mustard and red mid-century modern cover that graces the book.

The Crane is my eighth book, written over a thirty-year publishing career spanning journalism, poetry, non-fiction and fiction, and even a radio drama. I’ve also worked on the other side of the publishing table as an editor. But every single project teaches me something. Every single project reminds me that our job as writers is to listen for what the words want.

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Monica Kidd is a multidisciplinary writer and an award-winning journalist. The Crane, an intergenerational story of how a young Vietnam war evader is drawn to Newfoundland, is her third novel — and her first work of long fiction in almost 20 years. She is an MFA student at King’s College and also works as a physician. She lives in Calgary.