What a nice purse,” I say by way of small talk on meeting novelist Kathleen Winter at an outdoor cafe in Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood. Innocently, I add that I wish I could have one like it.
“Why can’t you have a bag?” she asks, suddenly serious.
“Because I’m a guy!”
“You mean because you’re a guy you can’t have a bag?” she asks. “This is a man bag, the one I’ve got.”
“You’re a woman. It’s a purse.”
“That’s not a man bag?” she asks again, staring at the item in question while drawing out the husky lilt she first picked up 40 years ago as an eight-year-old English immigrant washed up on Newfoundland’s Burin Peninsula.
“It’s a man bag,” she insists. “There’s no place for my lipstick or nothin.’”
Kathleen Winter in her back alley in Montreal on June 24, 2010.— John Morstad for the Globe and Mail
I should have known that the subject would be no small talk for Winter, who is in town bunking with her brother, novelist Michael Winter, while she meets with a representative from the prestigious British publisher that has just agreed to bring out her first novel, Annabel. The book charts the upbringing of what used to be called a “true hermaphrodite,” now more correctly an “intersex individual,” in icy Labrador, one of the most isolated settled places on earth.
Tall and debonair, with a striking resemblance to her beloved kid brother, Winter explains her unusual inspiration as if it was the most natural thing in the world. “I’ve always been interested in gender, and I was really interested in what would happen if you found that out about yourself in such a tiny place,” she says.
She found that place in North West River, Labrador, which she first visited as a journalist working for the CBC out of St. John’s. And there she heard the stories, “that there were several people born like that in Labrador.” And then she wrote one herself - a 30-pager.
The estimable John Metcalfe edited Winter’s debut collection of short fiction, titled boYs and published in 2007 to multiple awards. But he reacted badly to her story about a person with two sets of genitals being raised as the son of a hard-bitten trapper down the coast past Happy Valley. “He said it was way too unbelievable,” Winter reports.
Taking no hint, she turned her full attention to it. “Partly for doggedness, I just decided to see what else I could make of this story John didn’t want in the book,” she says.
She turned it into a novel that was quickly snapped up by the House of Anansi - a well-known incubator of literary talent, including brother Michael. More impressively - perhaps uniquely for a first-time, homegrown literary novelist - she sold Annabel to Britain’s Jonathan Cape even before it was published in Canada.
From Labrador to Grub Street via St. John’s and then Montreal is not such a long trip for Winter, who was born in the north of England and still has family there, but whose father dreamed stubbornly of building a log cabin and living off the land. “Every stick is accounted for in England,” he told his daughter. And so, the writer recalls, eight-year-old Kathleen soon found herself huddled behind the public school during every recess in Marystown, Newfoundland, where her earnest new friends “regularly gave me lessons in how to talk properly.”
Who could have guessed that those lessons would have equipped the student so well to serve an unexpected literary appetite for all things Newfoundland 40 years later? Back then, the proper language of the Burin Peninsula was known in the rest of the country only as the vehicle of cruel jokes. Things have changed so much that today, publicists are dismayed to learn that Winter is happily settled in Montreal, not the Rock.
Programmers of a recent reading in her new hometown begged Winter to provide a biography saying she lived in Newfoundland. “It was kind of a joke, but they really did want me to say that,” she says.
“Newfoundland is a seismic shock for anyone who has come from somewhere else,” she adds. “So I’m not sure if the way I write about Newfoundland is an insider’s or an outsider’s point of view. I think it’s a little bit of both. But that’s a good thing for writing, isn’t it?”
For proof, see Winter, Michael - first novelist produced by the family’s “Yorkshire pudding and moose” cultural experiment. Their symbiosis is a story in itself.
He once said he would never have been a writer had he not grown up marvelling at the example of his sister banging away on an Underwood typewriter in the back yard. But by the time he published his first novel, This All Happened in 2001, she had abandoned the craft.
At the time, she was a widow with a 12-year-old daughter living in the woods outside St. John’s, where she had nursed a husband who died of lung cancer before their daughter reached school age. “I was living on one egg a day from my hens,” she says. “I was going to food banks. I know what is means to be poverty-stricken.”
It was Michael’s example that inspired her to take up writing once again. “So it made me look at it again,” she says. “He’s doing that thing that I was going to do - then didn’t do. And I really think if he hadn’t done it, I wouldn’t have done it.”
But she did. And nobody will ever look at Labrador the same way again.
