Pathways of Creativity in Contemporary Newfoundland and Labrador ed. by María Jesús Hernáez Lerena (review)

To steal a phrase from Herb Wyile and Jeannette Lynes, the last few decades have witnessed a consistent "rising tide" of literary and artistic depictions of Newfoundland and Labrador.¹ Riding this wave, of course, have been countless critical and scholarly responses to the work, a select few of which, like María Jesús Hernáez Lerena's Pathways of Creativity in Contemporary Newfoundland and Labrador, attempt to contemplate at once all the forms of creativity flowing through the province. One of the earliest broad stroke approaches was Sandra Gwyn's "The Newfoundland Renaissance," which appeared in the April 1976 edition of Saturday Night. Gwyn's heart is in the right place, but one cannot help but feel she is a little too amazed to discover such art can come from such a place, especially when she coins the phrase "Newfcult Phenomenon" to describe "the miraculous and exciting revival of art and theatre on Canada's poor, bald rock" (38). Gwyn identifies "the decline of the fishery [and] the decay of the old outport way of life" as parts of a "collective tragic muse" she claims informs and inspires the artists "all over the rock" who are inexplicably "popping up in sweet and splendid profusion. Like the wild harebells you find every August, bursting out of sheer granite cliffs" (40). Gwyn's gushing overview borders on the condescending and reductive, as Newfoundland artists are depicted as anomalies existing in spite of (and ever preoccupied with) a legacy of loss, as denizens of a landscape hostile to their creative efforts. While Gwyn is partly correct—this current continuing growth in artistic production is not "miraculous" but it is remarkable—the legacy of her article has arguably been decades of critical responses to the art and literature of Newfoundland and Labrador that must first address the harsh realities and foundational failures of a culture of loveable losers; responses that are compounded over the years into an all-too-familiar Come From Away come-on that sounds a little like "What's a poem like you doing in a place like this?"²

So one hopes critical collections such as Pathways of Creativity in Contemporary Newfoundland and Labrador resist such pandering and exoticizing and contain meaningful essays that consider what is unique about the arts in Newfoundland and Labrador but also move beyond this uniqueness to examine what is universal, and universally good, in this boom of production. Of course, academics have for many years been writing very seriously about Newfoundland and Labrador culture and culture producers, and Hernáez Lerena does well to include in her collection many of the most qualified experts, scholars, and analysts focusing on the art and literature of Newfoundland and Labrador. Notable among these is Noreen Golfman, whose "Filming Ourselves: The Challenge of Producing Newfoundland" is a timely and thorough consideration of the film industry in Newfoundland. Golfman's essay also works as a counterpoint or even a corrective to Gwyn's "The Newfoundland Renaissance," since Golfman frames much of the art she is examining as not as regionally restricted or obsessed. Discussing the 2009 film Love and Savagery, Golfman notes that it "might then be fair to offer" that such a film produced "sixty years after Confederation, signals a fresh and confident perspective on the local/global margin/centre oppositional framework that has dominated cultural narratives of the province for so long" (213). There is no singular "collective tragic muse" inspiring these actors, writers, and directors, as Golfman points to "the expanding cinematic spectrum of Newfoundland stories" as evidence that "there is more than one version of place, more than one historical record or narrative pathway of what Newfoundland is in the twenty-first century" (226).

In a similar vein, Adrian Fowler's "Townie Lit: Newfoundland Refocused in the Writing of Lisa Moore and Michael Winter" examines a turn down another "narrative pathway" as...