Red: The Island Story Book is a Celebration of Storytellers
by Mo Duffy Cobb
It's a Friday evening at Charlottetown's Y Lofts and Red: The Island Story Book is
launching its 9th issue. The soft light glows and the house is packed, with
frontman and Editor David Weale introducing readers, musicians, and Chef Michael
Smith's Red holiday cookie recipe,
from his column "Home Cooking". There's something in the air here, or maybe
it's the warmth of Prince Edward Island hearts.
Weale has started a movement on PEI, and people are
seeing Red. Styled after a third
generation family magazine, Weale released the first issue in the fall 2010,
and it now has a distribution of over 4,000 copies and over a hundred
subscribers. With its long oversized pages, black and white photos and large
fonts, Red has a unique style all its
own. And wait until you hear its stories.
Weale welcomes the crowd and introduces his first reader,
an older man with greying hair with an anecdote called a "Ferry
Tale". Time is a common theme for Red,
and so is finding home. We are here to celebrate storytelling tonight, and I
drop my head in quiet reflection as the man reading speaks to the ice boat, the
car ferry, the bridge or the airplane that brings us to Prince Edward Island,
but more so to the mystical sense of home we carry within us, adding
thoughtfully, "Sometimes I wonder if we ever left."
These stories of home are in the narrative style of
Prince Edward Islanders: folklore of Tignish, up West or down East, tales of good
neighbours, and the smell of hot baked beans and biscuits in a country kitchen.
The politics, humour, stories, and photographs taken in our homes and gardens
stand in the magazine as a testament to who we are, and to where we've come
from (even if that's the outhouse or the bootlegger's). In four short years, Weale has built more than
just a magazine; he's built a community on the stories that have shaped our
lives, and a platform for sharing them. And he's not done yet.
Weale's writers are marching into the future, and
Weale is proud of that. He said that Red pays
attention to particularities of place, especially as we enter the age of
cultural voyeurism and touting the mass networks of YouTube, Facebook, and
Google. Red pushes back, Red asks for more. "Without the
story, nothing exists, and PEI is our grain of sand."
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| Launch of RED: The Island Story Book #9 Source: RED's Facebook page |
We break to snack and mingle, and Weale's
daughter-in-law serves sushi and flatbread. An artist herself, Chloë Weale is Red's
illustrator and graphic designer, while Weale's son, Davy takes care of
advertising and distribution. Red truly is a family business, and as Chloë bounces
Weale's granddaughter on her hip between preparing apps, it reminds me that she
is continuing the traditions of our grandmothers, feeding the hungry men in
from the potato (\pə-ˈdāe-dā-\) fields.
Author Jill McCormack and I share a glass of wine and
she tells me the famous story about her first piece in Red. She brought
a piece down to David, whose editorial eye scanned critically, confessing that it
just wasn't ready for Red.
Infuriated, McCormack went straight home and wrote a new story called,
"Rejected by Red", an impassioned tale of injustice and betrayal. The
next day, she brought it back down to David, who countered her with, "Now there's your story!" and agreed to
publish it straight away.
I ask her what the thrust of Red is, and she
holds her arms out to encompass the whole room. “It gives writers in PEI a
voice," she says, “and an opportunity to be heard, to share our Island's
stories. There's nothing more important that that.”
Writers, yes. But not all Weale's protégés are craft
writers like McCormack. When I asked Gary Evans how long he's been writing, he
shakes his head. “I'm a lawyer,” he says casually, “I've always been a
storyteller, but I never wrote them down before.” He tells me about his abrupt transition
from “Toronto, Ontario to Morell Rear”
(a back road behind Morell) when he was nine, and the shocking
transitions he went through as a young person learning the ropes on PEI.
He tells me how David Weale, his Canadian Studies
teacher at UPEI in 1980, recognized in him the inherent qualities of a good
storyteller: attention to detail, clever impersonations, and you got it, classic
moments of truth. Weale solicited a story from Evans for his first issue, and by
Red's next issue, Gary's stories will
have been in eight of ten issues.
Something Evans says really sticks with me. Evans
calls it, “the life footprint”, and he illustrates it in several small stories,
cutting himself off from one to go into the next. He says that in Toronto, his
life footprint was small. He hung out with three Italian kids, in a small
neighbourhood and his parents struggled to get by. He says he didn’t know much
about life, and that living on PEI has given him a real education. “It's a full
community spectrum, here,” he says, “you know old people, you know babies, you
know sick people, farmers, jewelers, potters. You know everyone. We live
together and we die together. Our stories are as alive as we are intertwined.”
I'm tapped on the shoulders by a grade school friend's
parents and I turn around for a quick hug, suddenly intertwined myself. The one
question Gary doesn't ask me is, "Who's your father?" although by the
end of the interview, the answer is clear. He has identified my clan.
It's time for more stories and songs and David Weale
is back at the mic. He introduces Mary MacGillivray, and
while her gentle Celtic voice sings softly, "Brother, don't give up, love will carry up, ignites the spark to light
the dark and guide us home," I look around to all the sparks that Red
has made here, tonight.
And I'm reminded that somewhere, another island story
has made its way from St. Peters to Miscouche, in the willows and the wind and with
the magic of intrigue and laughter¾and I'm
happy to say that I was part of it.
To learn more about Red: The Island Story Book and purchase issues of the magazine
visit:
You can also
purchase copies in stores from the “Tignish Co-op to Souris Pharmasave and
everywhere in between.”
Mo Duffy Cobb lives in Charlottetown PEI, a place
where art and culture soar. She is a voracious writer, an English teacher and a
graduate of Vermont College of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction.
http://furthermo.com/
