Maritime writers explore grief, tragedy in Governor General Award-nominated pieces

Aaron (Zach Faye) wakes from a nightmare of the night he rushed out to rescue survivors in the play "Downed Hearts." (Source: Stoo Metz)

Twenty-seven years ago, Swissair Flight 111 crashed off the coast of Peggy’s Cove, N.S., killing more than 200 people. In the following days, rescue teams comprised of local fishermen scoured the site of one of the worst aviation disasters in Canadian history.

Catherine Banks, a Nova Scotia playwright, was interested in how the crash affected those fishermen after listening to an interview with one of them.

“For the first five or six years after it happened, people were focused on the victims and the families,” Banks said. “Then they started interviewing the fishermen who were horribly impacted by it. Some of them never went fishing again.

“I listened to an interview with a fisherman and I wondered what would help him heal. I had a vision of a woman on an island waving at a fisherman.”

Banks, inspired by that vision, wrote the first draft of a play in 2006, but soon put it away in her drawer, feeling it was still too soon since the tragedy. More than a decade later, she was asked to bring a new play to a workshop in Newfoundland and dug out the piece.

“Downed Hearts,” which follows an island fisherman struggling to recover after an air-sea disaster, debuted in 2023. Its exploration of grief and tragedy has earned it a spot as one of the finalists in the Governor General’s Literary Awards in the drama category.

Banks previously won the literary award for her plays “Bone Cage” and “It Is Solved By Walking” in 2008 and 2012, respectively.

“Every time you’re nominated, you can’t believe it happened,” Banks said.

Fellow Maritime-based writer Fawn Parker, who is the current poet laureate of Fredericton, is also nominated for a Governor General Literary Award. Her novel “Hi, It’s Me” is one of five finalists in the fiction category.

“I was shocked, partly because of the timing,” Parker said. “My book came out right at the start of the window for submissions. This was a long time so it wasn’t top of mind. I also never have high expectations.

“The real compliment is that I do really admire the other writers.”

Parker’s novel follows a woman also named Fawn who goes to a farmhouse shortly after her mother’s death and tries to archive her writings. Parker drew on her real-life experiences to explore the themes of grief and moving on.

“It was about two or three years after my mother’s death, I started writing it and it felt like it closed the book on that grief,” Parker said. “Getting it out on the page allowed me to move forward with my life.

“The memories are mine and the story is fiction. I’ve put myself in this fictional world and that was what exciting.”

Parker and Banks will find out if their works will receive their respective awards on Nov. 6. For now, Banks is taking a break before launching into her next project.

“I want to catch my breath,” she said.