In the house I grew up in books were as scarce as hen’s teeth but stories were everywhere, the air thick with their telling. Not that we ever engaged in anything as formal as storytelling – what we did had no name, was organic, intermittent, full of threads abruptly snipped only to be tied together later. I especially remember the voices of my mother and maternal grandmother going on and on, a dialogue of intersections, each revealing bits of shared history. Out of all the pieces a larger, more coherent narrative emerged, and here is the gist of it: they’d been through it all, the hardest times, war, the Great Depression, the dissolution of a neophyte nation, epidemics, boils and other nastiness, tidal waves and assorted natural and unnatural phenomena, and they’d come out laughing. In the worst of it, they turned dresses and hats inside out, trimmed them with curtain lace and fabric flowers and trotted off to Mass in laboriously preserved shoes. So they were brave, as I saw it; survivors. And because I too wanted to be brave – to take things on – I was enamoured of their stories.

Some survived for me only as vague snippets, but others stayed with me whole and in living colour. The beautiful summer during the thirties when capelin turned the shore silver and boats heavy with cod hung low in the water. The price of fish going down that fall, all too predictably. My grandmother rewarded for a season’s labour in the fishery with enough credit to fit herself out with a pair of hard boots and a hoe. The boxes of oddities sent every Christmas from an eccentric relative in Boston. These are the elements that came together over 30 years later in my book, The Boston Box.

But before that happened the stories went through other permutations. Several years ago, I worked on a series of books for the Writers’ Alliance/ABE Social History Project. One of my subjects was life during the Great Depression, and suddenly a series of questions came to mind: How much of my grandmother’s stories were grounded in factual truth? How much was tall tale? Did the summer of the abundant fishery exist in recorded history? Did dole inspectors really search through trunks in search of hidden food? I began to trace the stories I’d heard through archival sources and, sure enough, one type of record bolstered the other. The oral and the written, the tale and the official record. It was the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War that ruined the promise of a golden season. Dole inspectors estimated the amounts of cached raisins and berries, and put it all in their accounts. And hard boots and a hoe were an accurate representation of the adjusted value of my grandmother’s labour. Story and research were becoming one; more and more during that project, what I eventually wrote began with something I’d heard.

The project ended. But the voices I’d been listening to all over again stayed with me. I tried to incorporate those old stories into fiction, but my usual process didn’t work. And there was a real dissonance between the material and what I’d come to think of as my writing style, otherwise known as what I was stuck in at the moment. Failed draft followed failed draft. Then one day, it hit me. It’s a fairy tale you want, a Newfoundland working-class sort of fairy tale. After that, a full draft of the manuscript emerged in a single morning. Children became my main characters, because a child’s capacity for imagination and belief puts the rest of us to shame. In the manner of fairy tales, a handsome Spanish merchant emerged to fill the role of prince. After all, had the War not interfered with the global fish trade, he would have been well placed to do the princely thing of offering a price much higher than West Indie. The boxes from Boston entered the story too, an opportunity to have fun with detail and introduce objects to be transformed by the imagination. “Tell me, what was in them?” I used to ask my mother, and I couldn’t get enough of her lists. I used her objects and made up more that suited me. When I saw Rochelle Baker’s rich illustrations of these objects, I felt that I was opening those same boxes again and finding new treasures.

Writing itself is, of course, an act of transformation. And of translation. Moving from the oral, where all story starts, the author, singular, is the scribe who tries to capture what was said in the persistent narrative of voices through time. And listening to such voices, I did not so much write a book as close a circle of collaboration. Close? No, that’s not accurate. When I read The Boston Box in public now, people tell me stories of their own boxes and barrels and crates from Boston and elsewhere. They show me boys fishing in golfing togs and young girls walking outport roads in improbable gossamer dresses. They make me see the silver service surrounding the fishcakes. And in these ways, my mother’s and grandmother’s stories go on, meet up with others and make their way in the world.