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Air Canada, and not the ferry, now carries most Newfoundlanders to and from the island, though even the new highway of the skies has not changed the island's unalterable fact: Newfoundland is a place you drift towards more easily than you part from it. In its very genesis, this landmass, with its fantastic grasping shape, was born of "chunks of three continents fused together," wrote Michael Winter in his debut novel This All Happened.

Newfoundlanders wait for what comes their way because they know that home is a place where most things, including themselves, wash up eventually: The artist Rockwell Kent in Winter's second novel, The Big Why. The drowned passengers of the Titanic. The jet-born human flotsam of the planes diverted to Newfoundland's safe haven after 9/11, and the Russian refugee and cruise ships of Lisa Moore's Giller Prize-nominated Alligator. Bad news from fishing boats, or the oil rig Ocean Ranger.

So Newfoundlanders have seen all they have to see, and are surprised by little. The place is contained, and the newest generation of writers free to write about whatever they please — to benefit from the island's history and not be seconded by it. The word that most Newfoundland writers were using on the visits that I made was "now."

"This is the moment," said Winter, "but don't think about it long. As soon as it's familiar, then it's something that's been and gone."

A popular T-shirt (boxer shorts, if you wish) supports the "Newfoundland Liberation Army," and shows the silhouette of a gang on the crest of a hill brandishing not guns but flutes, guitars, and fiddles. A wealth of colloquial expressions, and a body of lore tied to the land every bit as directly as are the stories of First Nations, emphasizes the integrity of the place.

In Newfoundland, the role that culture plays in a vigorous and confident society is understood. Stories are in the bone. On this island that still bears the marks of an oral society, songs fishermen used to sing contain in their lyrics directions around the difficult shore. The names of towns and villages here — Heart's Content, Heart's Desire, Heart's Delight — are among the most poetic in the world — songs in their own right. In the way that they relate the memory of a place, rather than using the name of some Old World monarch to stake a claim, they are closer in nature to aboriginal names than to settler ones.

Newfoundland even has its own lexicon. The Dictionary of Newfoundland English is to the province as The Mahabharata is to India, or as Shakespeare's plays are to England — work that contains not just the words, but the soul of the place. Idiom is proof of Newfoundland's difference, and of the unambiguous nature of the place as a nation, this sentiment as strong for the islanders as it is for Canada's francophones.

In St. John's, the ugly red-brick buildings of the federal ministries, the distant authority, carry the insignia of the Canadian government and suit the landscape least of all. They are an imposition, for there is no historical project of the kind that Quebeckers scoff at in English Canada needed here. Newfoundland is where folk gather in kitchens, sing songs, recite poetry, and read to each other, in a part of the country that was, for too long, ridiculed.

Newfoundland knew its own Ages of Invention and of Mapping, and on the Rock you will hear Harold Horwood and then Kevin Major described as authors who proved that it was possible to be a writer from Newfoundland — and make a living by it. You will hear other novelists described, as happens across the water, as writers who were not ashamed to name the place and set their stories on the Rock. And now, in its Age of Argument, you will hear some wonder about stories that no longer seem to need to be set in Newfoundland at all. This is a far cry from the period that immediately followed Confederation, in 1949, and culminated in the morally devastating cod moratorium of 1992 — bad years for Newfoundland, in which the shock of annexation made the province forget the cultural borders that had made the society distinct.

It was this forgetting of the island's distinct character that made a second mapping of the province necessary. In the period now remembered as Newfoundland's cultural renaissance, new stories charted its history, championed its culture, extolled its dialect and manner of speaking.

Poetry, song, comedians, and the novels, to name a few, that Horwood, Major, Bernice Morgan, and Robin McGrath wrote, put Newfoundlanders back on the map — for Canadians but also for themselves. The movement, at its peak in the 1970s, was the hard-done-by territory's fight back against the cultural erasure put into play by the process of Confederation that almost half of Newfoundland voted against in 1948.

"If you asked people whether it is possible to have a nation without politics, most would probably say 'no,' but I think that Newfoundlanders would say that you can," said McGrath, the author of Donovan's Station. "In part that's why we didn't resist giving up political control to the British, in the 1930s, when we had Commission government — our connection to where we live was so strong that it didn't change anything."

McGrath is a cultural chauvinist — a nationalist, really, whose fiction, essays, and even printing reflect her love of home. Hers is the political purpose of a generation that fought for recognition, the attainment of which allowed a subsequent generation of Newfoundland writers to enter freely into the province's Age of Argument. Even her quiet house on Portugal Cove is an exhibit in her defence of Newfoundland, its extraordinary hearth a tribute to local architecture and ingenuity. The chimney of the house is an enormous funnel, its stone foot large enough to accommodate the fire, a baking oven, and short benches on two sides.

"Our national anthem — not the Canadian anthem but Newfoundland's — is one of the few that glorifies the land, as opposed to nationhood," said McGrath.

I travelled to St. John's to meet Michael Winter. We arrived at the Ship Inn, a third of the way down the steps that lead from Duckworth to Water Street. It was a popular bar, music most nights, that Winter helped give renown when he used it in This All Happened.

I had arranged for a few of Winter's close friends to be inside: filmmaker Mary Lewis was one; Lisa Moore, the Giller-nominated author of Alligator and Open (a collection of stories), and Michael Crummey, author of Hard Light, River Thieves and most recently The Wreckage, were two others. A few more members of the Burning Rock, the literary collective that Moore and Winter (though not Crummey) belonged to, were also inside: Mark Ferguson, Larry Mathews, and Claire Wilkshire. The group was founded in 1986 after some of Mathews's creative writing students at Memorial University decided they wished to continue their association.

Moore was waiting at the long table just inside the door.

"Coming in?" she asked.

"My pleasure," said Winter.

The first time I met Moore, she had taken me out to Cape Spear, Canada's easternmost point, driving badly and talking animatedly all the way. We had grabbed some sandwiches from Auntie Crae's, and whiled away the afternoon sitting on a rock beneath the lighthouse discussing unwritten plays and her impending novel. Perhaps you have the picture in your mind: grey water, crashing waves, green grass blown flat by the wind above a steep fall of rocks. A solitary figure on the cliff and a tilting house or two.

Only that wasn't the Newfoundland we were looking at. A steady stream of visitors on the banks did away with the idea that Newfoundland was far from anywhere. A cellist played at an art exhibition that had been installed by the old Second World War gun placements nearby, and all the while a helicopter was hovering above the blue sea in front of us looking for the body of a teenaged suicide. Someone Moore knew, of course. For an afternoon I had been able to see the world Moore's way — the Newfoundland of her books that was vital, febrile, and close. I found myself wide-eyed, though Moore was not fazed, of course, grilling me intently with all manner of questions, as I came to learn was innately her manner.

The beauty of Newfoundland is that the job of the writer, singer, playwright, comedian, or painter is just another trade to go along with fishing, mining, or work in the shops. In their social inclusion, and in the boozy and charismatic camaraderie of literary pals who cannot quite believe their good fortune, St. John's is the closest Canada gets to Dublin.

But the thing that distinguishes the generation of Newfoundland writers to which Winter, Moore, and Crummey belong is that crucial fact of theirs having been the first to be relatively unencumbered by the politics and lingering controversy of the referendum of 1948. They are a confident lot, able to shop and choose their influences from the island's proud and reasserted history — and also from elsewhere. You get the sense that writing is a real adventure for them, steeped in both revolution and tradition.

Fiction, the art of making things up, is far more than the pasting together of real-life incidents. Borrowing stories and their rhythms is the way the whole culture has been passed on in Newfoundland for generations, although the legacy is more likely to be communicated on the page now than in impromptu recitations usurped on the Rock, as in Igloolik of Inuvik, by television and the Internet. At dinner one evening, with family and friends of Winter's in St. John's, the television was not on. The entertainment was a recitation by Leah Lewis's sister Mary, a clinical psychologist, of Jigg's Dinner, one of the 32 "little stories" from Crummey's Hard Light.

Ostensibly the poem conveys instructions for the traditional Sunday meal, and how to prepare it and also attend Mass, but what it really honours in its few lines is a bygone world of Newfoundland living.

Later, in his own kitchen, Crummey told me this was "just the way people entertained themselves. That was how information got passed on.

"When I was away at university, I had a real sense — but it was a false sense — of Newfoundland culture being something that existed in the past, and of whatever Newfoundland was now as being something lesser.

"But since I've moved home, I've had to change that view quite a bit."

Special to The Globe and Mail

WHERE TO EAT AND DRINK
Ship Inn: 265 Duckworth St., St. John's; 709-753-3870.
Auntie Crae's: 272 Water St., St. John's; 709-754-0661; www.auntiecraes.com.

RECOMMENDED READING
Hard Light by Michael Crummey (Brick, $12.95).
Alligator by Lisa Moore (Anansi, $29.95).
Donovan's Station by Robin McGrath (Killick Press, $16.95).
The Big Why by Michael Winter (Anansi, $21.95).
The Dictionary of Newfoundland English (University of Toronto Press, $45).

MORE INFORMATION
Newfoundland and Labrador Tourism: 1-800-563-6353; www.newfoundlandandlabradortourism.com.