Award-winning!

The Evelyn Richardson Non-Fiction Award was first presented in 1978. It is named in honour of Evelyn Richardson, who in 1945 won the Governor General’s Non-Fiction Award for We Keep A Light, her memoir of life in a family of lighthouse keepers in Shelburne County.

Last week the incredibly kind and brilliant team and mystery-jury of the Atlantic Book Awards recognized Notes for the Everlost with the Evelyn Richardson Non-Fiction Award, in a category with two incredibly talented authors.

Through the porthole in St. John’s, facing the odd sensation of my book being shortlisted and assessed by a jury.

The ceremony—a room full of some of our Atlantic region’s most enduringly funny, poignant, and deeply talented novelists, poets, and book-creators. They call my name!

Happy with fellow nominee Leslie Lowe, author of No Place To Go, and bookseller Alice Burdick of Lunenburg’s Lexicon Books.

The south shore was well-represented! With fellow nominee and winner Alison Smith, whose book This Kind Of Thinking Does No Good won the J.M. Abraham Poetry Award.

What a group! Atlantic Book Awards winners, surrounded by a vibrant circle of mentors and peers in our incredible region.

The after-party party, walking through the St. John’s mist to an excellent brewpub for shop talk about the lonely, wonderful, challenging slog of being a writer with fellow authors and nominees Lezlie Lowe (No Place To Go) and Ryan Shaw (Louisbourg or Bust:  A Surfer’s Wild Ride Down Nova Scotia’s Drowned Coast).

It only took one day to fall in love with Newfoundland fog. The North Atlantic as seen from Signal Hill, after the bank rolled in to the ringing of the horn.

On behalf of Nova Scotia, Newfoundland is kind of a show-off. huh? Two-hundred year-old ruins of a British garrison pub as baby icebergs float by. Big heart for this wild northern land. Thank you, St. John’s!

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Best of all was to spend two days in Newfoundland, heads-together with poets and novelists and mentors, figuring out the trick of making art. Sharing space with these people is an award in itself, and the recognition is the cherry. It made me feel so grateful for everyone who made this book possible—my agent Amy Tompkins at Transatlantic, and my beloved Shambhala Publications team—including editor-in-chief Sara Bercholz and editor Beth Frankl in faraway Colorado!

Thanks so much to the Atlantic Book Awards and the Writers Federation of Nova Scotia for all their hard work bringing us together, and many cheers for all the nominees and winners! Our region is ridiculously overflowing with creative talent. I’m thrilled to be a part of it, and to walk among some of the people I admire so much. In the fog.