The Stories behind the Story
The Gasper’s Cove Mystery series is set in my home province of Nova Scotia, but that’s not where it really lives. Gasper’s Cove is a parable for the crafting, creative life wherever it is located. Nova Scotia just happens to be a place with an exceptionally active, deep, and historically rooted community of makers (there are more quilters in this small province than in any other region in Canada). Situating the Gasper’s Crafters here just seemed logical.
Those who make things are their own community. In every book in this series, I try to explore what the culture of that community looks like. In Crafting a Deadline I write about the timelessness of creating as an activity without deadlines, where the process takes as long as it takes, and even where the end result can live well beyond the lifetime of the maker, possibly expressing for generations who she was.
As a result, Crafting a Deadline explores two different views of time: one defined and one more significant. On one hand, in the book there is the very modern deadline of the rush to secure federal funding for the remediation of an aging lighthouse. There is also an editorial deadline for a young journalist to finish a book on time management (I was pleased with the title of this Under the Wire), and Stuart Campbell, Valerie Rankin’s love interest, must face the pressure of a deadline to decide if he stays in Gasper’s Cove with Valerie, or leaves to advance his career in Ottawa. In these elements of the book I think I reflect the world of pressures and decisions most of us now live with: 24/7 news, social media alerts that ping in the night, and emails that accumulate faster than any of us can answer them.
This is not, however, the only possible reality. And that’s not how life is done in Gasper’s Cove, or among its creative inhabitants.
I tried to make this point by juxtapositioning different views of time and how much time matters. In writing this book I considered slow communication, indeterminate intentions, and less definite purposes. I thought of projects that maybe didn’t have to land anywhere, but whose purpose was only to be, and for that reason, were more powerful.
So, I wrote about lighthouses. What a crazy idea they are. A solitary person, and perhaps a family, all alone traditionally maintaining a light, a beacon of rescue and orientation, not because there was any guarantee it would be needed, but in case it was. I also remembered Rex, the famous Royal Canadian Airforce carrier pigeon who, at a place a few miles from where I live now, trained flocks and flocks of other pigeons to carry messages across enemy lines in WWII. No one knows how he did it. Rex would attract a flock, they would disappear for days, and then he would return them to base, fully trained to be heroes. A mystery matched only by the faith of fighting forces who trusted birds released into the sky to keep them safe. Rex, by the way, can be viewed at the Canadian War Museum, stuffed in front of a note that describes him as a “friend to birds and airmen alike.” And to Rex’s story I added messages in bottles recovered from the sea. Tell me, what is the timetable for a heartfelt wish, a worry, or a cry for help (as is the case in this book) thrown into the waves buoyed only by hope?
Where is the deadline there?
I feel anyone who has ever made anything will understand that acts of faith and grace don’t need deadlines. Just think of the tiny town of Digby in the southwest of Nova Scotia and of the women there who made and sent 20,000 comfort quilts to displaced families during the London Blitz. This number represents a quilt for every inhabitant of that community. Think of all the hours spent stitching love and support, all for people those quilters would never meet. Notes in a bottle, lights tended to to not go out, like words tied to tiny legs and thrown into the air. Acts of creation defy deadlines because they transcend them.
That’s the message of Crafting a Deadline and why I wrote this book.
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