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Shelburne Writer Creates Beautiful Characters
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It’s the 1950s and the peaceful, time-ordered lives of an elderly couple are disrupted when they have to fight government plans to turn their Nova Scotian fishing community into a provincial park. What happens to ordinary people when they come into conflict with officialdom is the question underlying Deep Roots, Kathleen Tudor’s highly readable novel. The author, who is in her 80s, said that parts of the book were written long ago, but the story began to take shape after she became interested in how provincial parks were designed and built and what happened to the people who lived in them. “I researched these parks where people had lived and I saw these people were uprooted,” Tudor said from her retirement home in Pleasant Point Village in Shelburne County, where she was born and raised. “I thought about how they felt about being removed and having their homes razed. It made me think, ‘My God, supposing they decided on putting a park in this area.’ ” Tudor draws on her own childhood to create the fictional community of Collupy Point. The story centres on Ira and Lydia Hardy, both in their 70s. They are beautifully drawn as are the rural patterns of life, the tough but lovely landscape and the vitality and humour of the characters’ conversations. As the fight against the park becomes increasingly bitter, Ira, Lydia and their large family come under great stress. The older people in the community struggle to learn the language of politics. In some very touching scenes, Ira escapes his angst by exploring nature with his young granddaughter, Rosie. Tudor is skilled at portraying the nuances of relationships. Her characters misunderstand each other, things are left unsaid, people sulk. Ira struggles to relate to his feminist daughter Sal. Lydia dislikes Sal’s intellectual boyfriend Scott. Ira finds his American relatives, “Amusing, child-like in a way. Showing off their youth – even when they were as old as he and Lydia… . But he didn’t have to worry about it. He could just enjoy them, sit back and smoke one of the fine cigars they brought him. Funny crew, though.” At times, Tudor’s layering of detail feels a little dense and she relies on telling rather than showing the story’s action but on the whole, the book is a success. The author is a former professor of literature at St. Mary’s University and has published short stories and one former novel, Getting Away, released in 1992 by Roseway, the publishing house she founded and which is now an imprint of Fernwood. She is currently working on a murder mystery having become interested in the genre just a few years ago. “I was very snobbish. Being a professor of literature you get very snobby about what is good literature,” she joked. She also runs Community Books, a self-publishing venture that helps local authors publish their work.
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“I want to take the vanity out of vanity publishing,” she said, “I think anyone who wants to publish is vain – I certainly am.” - Review by Carol Moreira for The Chronicle Herald, Sunday 29 November 2009. Carol Moreira is a freelance writer who lives in Glen Haven.