Lisa Moore: February
On needing to tell a story…
MBP: Congratulations on being longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Are we right in thinking you were in a cabin when you heard the news?
LM: I was at a cabin with my husband on a lake deep in the woods. There was nobody but us for miles in all directions. I had been for a long,
cold swim. My husband had built a little fire in the woodstove. I was fiddling with my phone to see if I could get reception - and there was an email
congratulating me. I was very excited. In fact I screamed. Startled the wildlife.
MBP: February tells the story of Helen O'Mara, who lost her husband Cal when the oil rig, Ocean Ranger, sank off the coast of Newfoundland during a Valentine's Day storm in 1982. Why did you decide to centre a novel on his real-life event?
LM: The sinking of the Ocean Ranger was a tragedy that left very deep scars. Everyone in Newfoundland knew someone who died on the Ocean Ranger.
It was an accident that could have been avoided if proper safety measures had been respected. It was the loss of those 84 men - everybody on board the Ocean Ranger - that made me want to write about the disaster in the form of a novel.
I wanted to show what it feels like to lose someone you love, especially when that loss is unexpected and unnecessary. How that kind of grief can build and form a person over a lifetime, how love endures, how beauty and sadness are inextricable. I wanted to think about how humour, single motherhood, family, new life and new love can burst in on grief, jostle it, knock it around and make it richer and deeper.
MBP: In researching the novel did you speak to the community involved with the rig disaster?
LM: I didn't speak to the families of the men who died on the Ocean Ranger because I didn't want anyone to think the novel was his or her
particular story. February is very much a work of fiction. But I read stories collected from the family members of the men who died. I read The Report of Royal Commission on the Ocean Ranger Disaster.
MBP: Helen O'Mara is unable to 'move on' from the death of her husband. Did you find it hard to convey this grief and loneliness of a widow?
LM: My own father died suddenly of natural causes when I was sixteen, very near the time that the Ocean Ranger sank. My parents were very
much in love and I watched my mother go through that grief. My sister and I thought we had the best father in the world and we also grieved. I had
been afraid that I would forget my father, but what I learned is that memories become richer, full-blown. They change as time passes, become more meaningful. Or different meanings adhere. The memories last. Life seems sharper, more
vivid.
MBP: You could have been an artist. Why did you decide to become a writer instead?
LM: I painted big abstract paintings. I'd have to stand on my tiptoes and swing the brush over my head, reaching with my whole arm. Or I'd put the canvas on the floor and spill, spray, scratch.
When I was making representational images I'd spend hours looking at the same object or vista, trying to figure out exactly the shape and
colour of the shadow cast by the fruit bowl, the forest on the lake.
I spent a long time looking at an orange, trying to figure out its exact shape - the difference between what I perceived the shape to be and
what the shape really was.
But I found I craved narrative. In the end, I wished I could add sticky notes to the canvas describing the orange. I felt like telling the viewer: it's an orange, it came in a wooden crate with red plastic webbing over the top, the sprayers over the grocery shelf shot down blasts of mist and there was a woman standing near the oranges who had just fallen in love with a drummer. I wanted to tell a story.
