An Examined Life
Clearing By Dawn (Pottersfield Press, 2016) follows Miranda Murray through adulthood, first working as a costumer at Halifax’s Neptune Theatre. By chapter eight, she’s moved to rural Nova Scotia with her new husband to raise their family, and work as a lobster fisher. The city always calls to her. These two settings illustrate the main tension in Miranda’s life; she struggles to find joy in balancing social obligations—the most onerous being the brutal work of fishing—and her persona creativity.
Hull’s writing charms in a way reminiscent of east-coast humour from CodCo to Trailer Park Boys. When Miranda first falls pregnant, she calls her best friend and cousin Reeve who asks her:
“… Have you had breakfast?”
“No. I fed the cats. They were screaming. Does that mean I’d be a good mother?”
“Are you having kittens?”
“I’ll be a terrible mother!”
Though Clearing By Dawn is fiction, it draws on the author’s lived experiences and observations; like Miranda, Hull worked in theatre as a costumer, and later on a fishing boat. According to various bio notes (thank you, Google), the author divides her time between Halifax and Pictou Island where she raised her family. However, Clearing By Dawn departs from life in that its narrative is constructed like a pearl necklace. Each episodic chapter adds another bead of lustrous meaning to Miranda’s life until readers end up with a many-stranded whole that’s just gorgeous to contemplate.
Though I’ve long enjoyed rereading Hull’s first novel The View from a Kite (Nimbus 2006. It’s out of print but available as an ebook), I thought she’d quit long prose when that first, hard-wrought book dropped into, then out of, publication with very little fanfare. Perhaps Hull’s novels receive relatively little critical attention in part because she largely eschews the standard pyramidal narrative structure—exposition, rising action, climax, denouement—with its insistence on artificially compounded conflict. Unlike Chekov, Hull doesn’t believe that a gun brought into the narrative has to be used. Instead, as happens in life, in Clearing by Dawn last year’s “guns” —Miranda’s preoccupations—sometimes disappear in the welter of this year’s worries and joys. This means that beloved characters like Reeve can fade from the narrative. But others equally witty, cranky, and/or loveable come along to engage us.
Socrates said, “An unexamined life is not worth living.” Clearing By Dawn examines Miranda Murray’s life minutely, and it is found to be good.
Maureen Hull was born and raised on Cape Breton Island. She studied at nscad, Dalhousie University and the Pictou Fisheries School. She has worked at the costume department of Neptune Theatre and as a lobster fisher. She lives on Pictou Island in the Northumberland Strait.
- Publisher : Pottersfield Press (Aug. 5 2016)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 224 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1897426836
- ISBN-13 : 978-1897426838
Poet and STU prof Kathy Mac has published two books on writing (Wording Around with Prose, Wording Around with Editing), a book of essays on pop culture (Pain Porn and Complicity: Women Heroes from Pygmalion to Twilight), and three poetry books (all with Roseway Press). Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, her first poetry book was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award, and won the Lampert Award for best first book of poems in Canada. She lives in Fredericton, NB, Canada
- Kathy Machttps://miramichireader.ca/author/kathleen-mcconnell/
