Canadian Commonwealth Book Prize contender inspired by drowned town

TORONTO – It’s not quite the lost city of Atlantis, but a tiny New Brunswick town has part of its history hidden beneath its river waters.

Hawkshaw, population of about 35, was deliberately flooded in the mid-1960s when the Mactaquac Dam was built across the St. John River to generate hydro-electric power. Homes and buildings near the valley shores had to be moved or demolished, but some parts of the old town still exist under the flowing waters.

Author Riel Nason, who grew up in the town, used the area’s watery chapter as inspiration for her acclaimed debut novel “The Town that Drowned” (Goose Lane Editions), which recently won the Commonwealth Book Prize for Canada and Europe. It’s now in contention for the main award (worth 10,000 British pounds, or nearly C$16,000), the winner of which will be announced Friday in London.

“Growing up I heard stories of it happening and, of course, there were still after-effects,” Nason, 42, said in a recent phone interview from her home in Quispamsis, N.B.

“There were bits of the old highway that would just end in the water; whenever we went down fishing we would stand on bits of the old road that went right into the water.

“Sometimes in the springtime, when they adjusted the levels of water at the dam, the water would go low and a little old highway bridge that was normally underneath the water would re-emerge and we would see it.”

Bits of old road and bridge are still in the water to this day, as are parts of the old brick high school, added Nason.

The setting and time period are similar to those in “The Town that Drowned,” a fictional coming-of-age story that follows 14-year-old outcast Ruby Carson and her bullied younger brother, Percy.

When Ruby falls and hits her head during an embarrassing ice-skating incident, she has a vision of her whole town under water. She starts to wonder whether she’s psychic after town officials announce the construction of a massive dam will flood the area in two years and that a new town and highway will have to be built.

A former antiques business owner who started her writing career in non-fiction, Nason penned “The Town that Drowned” over about seven months in 2008 after her agent tried but failed to get her short stories published as a collection.

“It didn’t work out and that was actually the motivator to write ‘The Town that Drowned,’ because I just kind of said to myself: ‘Look, you’ve got an agent and she’s good and she’s on your side and I’d better have something else written, I’d better take another shot at this,'” said Nason, who has had some of her short stories published in various literary journals and writes a newspaper column about collectibles.

“I was determined to write the novel, so I wrote myself a little motivational note and stuck it on the wall. In different books, like how-to-get-published books, I’d read that it was as hard to get an agent as it was to get a publisher, and I didn’t want to miss my window of opportunity.

“I didn’t want to be, like, 80 and regret it and think, ‘Why didn’t you try?'”

Now a Commonwealth prize regional winner, Nason’s book is in hot demand.

“They’re down to, like, a handful in bookstores. The reprint is coming,” she said. “I don’t know the exact turnaround on it, but it’s a great situation in a way, that everybody liked it and bought it. But I’m anxious to get them back and out in stores.”

The mother of two young children is also thrilled with the feedback she’s receiving from near and far.

Because the story is her interpretation of a real event, Nason was worried some Hawkshaw natives wouldn’t approve of her version of it. But that hasn’t turned out to be the case, she said, noting residents affected by the flooding have told her the story “really captured something.”

“When people from where I grew up, parents or friends, people who I haven’t seen in years … they’re saying that they’re proud of me — there’s been a couple times, some emails I’ve actually been a little bit choked up just because it is great,” said Nason.

Other contenders for this year’s overall Commonwealth prize include Jacques Strauss of South Africa for “The Dubious Salvation of Jack V”; Sri Lanka’s Shehan Karunatilaka for “Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew”; Alecia McKenzie of Jamaica for “Sweetheart”; and Australia’s Cory Taylor for “Me and Mr Booker.”

Nason beat out two other Canadians who were on the Commonwealth regional short list: Johanna Skibsrud for her Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning novel “The Sentimentalists,” and Jamaican-born, Toronto-based Olive Senior for “Dancing Lessons.”

Her success as a novelist wasn’t something she always dreamed of, said Nason, noting she excelled in English in high school but “wasn’t the little kid that was determined to be a writer.”

“I wasn’t a big reader either,” added Nason, who’s now writing a second novel that’s also set in roughly the same area of New Brunswick, about 10 years after the time period in “The Town that Drowned.”

“Actually, when I go visit high schools I tell the students I really didn’t read any fiction from probably the age of 10 to the age of 30, which is not good, and I tell them, ‘I missed out, that’s bad, that’s a bad idea.'”