historical nonfiction

SwissAir Flight 111: A Tragic Tale Told with Skill and Compassion

/ Lynne Melcombe / 1 Comment

Full disclosure: Gina Leola Woolsey, author of Fifteen Thousand Pieces: A Medical Examiner’s Journey Through Disaster (Guernica, 2023) was a member of my cohort (class of 2015). That’s how I know that, before signing up for the MFA program in Creative Nonfiction Writing, she had already completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts in creative writing at UBC. 

Gina’s extensive skill and training show in every word. From page 1, I’m hooked. It’s a rainy Wednesday evening—September 2, 1998—when the phone on Dr. John Butt’s bedside table rings. Swissair Flight 111 has gone down, killing all 229 souls aboard. Butt, Nova Scotia’s Chief Medical Examiner, takes a moment to absorb the news.

“The information doesn’t go straight to the action center in his brain,” Gina writes. “His plausibility muscle bats away the news so his mind has a minute to rev the mental engines.” In a classic example of writing so well the reader forgets they’re reading, her use of metaphor is so smooth that, after forty years as a writer and editor, I barely notice it. And when I do, I’m impressed.

Within the first chapter, she’s laid down an immense amount of exposition without ever slipping into information dumping. In a scant seven pages, she introduces nine characters, including just enough about each to make them memorable. Throughout the book, she most often refers to the multitude of people she interviewed by their first names, no doubt a deliberate choice to create intimacy in a story that might more easily be kept at arm’s length. 

She uses verb tense to set mood: present tense when she writes about the disaster, conveying anguished immediacy, switching to past tense to for her present-day relationship with Butt. When done without thought, tense-switching can be jarring; I’ve critiqued dozens of editing clients for doing it unconsciously. In Gina’s hands, it’s as smooth as glass. 

Focusing on Gina’s facility with the small choices a writer makes is not intended to minimize the skill with which she tackles larger issues. I remember her talking in class about a unique problem this story presented. Invited by the central character to write this book, he requested that it tell not only about the disaster that ended the lives of 229 people, forever changing life for countless bereaved friends and family and leaving an indelible imprint on everyone involved in recovering and identifying 15,000 bits of bodies instantly torn apart on impact with the cold, dark Atlantic. He also wanted to share his own story, that of a sensitive but difficult man, raised in an oppressive environment, who repeatedly alienated friends, family, and colleagues until coming to terms, late in life, with his homosexuality. 

I recall wondering how she’d reconciled these two stories as I began reading. But I quickly forgot about it as I devoured the book, barely noticing the two disparate stories unfolding.

To say Gina’s writing is seamless, visually rich, alive with detail doesn’t do it justice. I wish I could find one passage, short enough to include in a blog post, that would show everything that impresses me about it. The following is just a taste:

A Sea King helicopter transports John from the morgue-in-construction at Shearwater to the Preserver. Above the scene of destruction, he gets the first glimpse of debris. Small boats dot the surface with larger boats stationed at the edges of the scene. The entire area, a portion of the sea that many fishermen call their workplace, is closed to all but those working on the recovery operation. 

The ship’s doctor shows John to the bridge where Commander Town is waiting. During the night, it was Commander Town who managed the fishermen, military personnel, and other helpers on the water. Rick Town was the beacon in the dark. After a night receiving one horror after another from the small vessels on the scene, Town might need a guiding light of his own. From the Preserver’s bridge, John gets a closer look at the water. To the untrained eye, it’s a largely unidentifiable mass of scattered debris, but John sees the human remains for what they are. Floating viscera mingles with hunks of caramel-coloured foam from the seat cushions, clothing, teddy bears, and luggage. Now he understands why they don’t know how to deal with the situation. It’s not as easy as putting bodies in bags and counting them off in whole numbers. 

In lesser hands, this could have been an impossible story to tell. Instead, it’s a deeply personal, profoundly compassionate, extensively researched, and intimately told tale of one of the worst air disasters in Canadian history, and the enigmatic man who had the grizzly task of sifting through the eponymous 15,000 pieces of humanity. I can’t recommend this book highly enough.

For more on disaster, read my reviews of: 

Chasing Smoke: A Wildfire Memoir, by Aaron Williams.

On Borrowed Time: North America’s Next Big Quake, by Gregor Craigie.

For more Canadian history, read my reviews of:

Acadian Driftwood: One Family and the Great Expulsion, by Tyler LeBlanc.

Cod Collapse: The Rise and Fall of Newfoundland’s Saltwater Cowboys, by Jenn Thornhill Verma.

Craigdarroch Castle in 21 Treasures, by Moira Dann.

Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference and the Pursuit of Justic for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, by Jessica McDiarmid.

Murder on the Inside: The True Story of the Deadly Riot at Kingston Penitentiary, by Catherine Fogarty.

Understanding the Acadian Expulsion: A Personal Journey

/ Lynne Melcombe / 3 Comments

It’s a story that’s been played out thousands—no, tens of thousands of times in thousands of locations over many centuries. It’s a story of imperialist colonization, most often in the last 500 years by the British Empire, that led to the expulsion or oppression of countless souls. 

Book cover of 'Acadian Driftwood: One Family and the Great Expulsion' by Tyler LeBlanc, featuring a map background and illustrations of coral-like red branches.

I confess that, until I read Tyler LeBlanc’s (class of 2018) book, Acadian Driftwood: One Family and the Great Expulsion (Gooselane Editions, 2020), I knew nothing about the Acadian expulsion. I can’t feel too badly about that as LeBlanc himself confesses to knowing little about it, much less his family’s connection to it. Then one day, a fellow bicycle tour guide along Nova Scotia’s South Shore who knew a lot about the subject, provided LeBlanc with enough information to pique his interest—especially about how his French surname suggested a very personal connection. 

LeBlanc’s subsequent historical and genealogical research led to his participation in the University of King’s College Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Nonfiction, and his writing of this book. In the introduction, the author describes the historical background:

“After more than one hundred years of successful settlement across a tract of land that spread over the modern-day Canadian provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island and part of the American state of Maine, the French-speaking settlers who called this place home had become a distinct people situation on the edge of what was quickly becoming the largest imperial battlefield of their time. Their realm was known as Acadia (Acadie in French) … They had forged positive relationships with the Indigenous People who had called the land home for thousands of years. Allies in battle, and friends and traders in times of peace, the two groups coexisted in greater harmony that nearly any other settler-Indigenous cultural interaction of the time.”

But Acadia sat on a piece of land inhabited by the French but coveted by the British in their ongoing quest to make the world English. 

“The land was British, at least on paper, given by the French to the king of England during the settlement of a war earlier in the century. Because of this legal ownership, and in response to the fear of an Acadian uprising against them [the Acadian settlers and the Mi’kmaq people greatly outnumbered the British], colonial administrators drafted a plan to remove all the French-speaking colonists—and waited for the opportune time to implement it. Toward the end of the hot summer days of 1755, the chance presented itself. After a brief battle on the border between Nova Scotia and New France … Charles Lawrence, the then lieutenant-governor of the British colony of Nova Scotia, set in motion a great crime against humanity, the after-effects of what are still felt today.”

The expulsion was brutal: men were called to meetings and imprisoned. Women and children were burned out of houses they’d called home for generations and forced to flee, often with little more than the clothes they were wearing. According to this short video, “half of the total Acadian population died of starvation, drowning, and violence,” while this longer video describes this event as the “first state-sponsored ethnic cleansing on the continent.” 

The survivors were scattered elsewhere in North America, many ending up in Louisiana (where they became known as Cajuns, giving rise to a whole new culture, language, and cuisine), while others sailed back across the ocean to France. The author’s family were among those who survived and stayed in what is now Nova Scotia, where their history was obscured until LeBlanc’s encounter with a co-worker, who happened to be an Acadian historian. 

LeBlanc tells this story in ten chapters, each one sharing a part of the overall story from the perspective of one of the ten siblings who lived through this dreadful period in their previously unremarkable lives. It would be a compelling piece of historical nonfiction regardless, but telling the story from ten different personal perspectives makes it all the more so. 

LeBlanc received multiple honours for this book: in the Nova Scotia Book Awards, he won the Evelyn Richardson Award for Non-Fiction and was a finalist for the Dartmouth Book Award for Non-Fiction and the Margaret and John Savage Award for Best First Book (non-fiction). He won the Democracy 250 Atlantic Book Award for Historical Writing. And he was selected for the Hill Times’ 100 Best Books in 2020 list and was included on Canada’s History’s Bestseller List. 

National Acadian Day is celebrated annually on August 15.

Here’s another book about injustices done in Canada’s history:

Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, by Jessica McDiarmid.

And a book about trying to do things differently:

Ring of Fire: High-Stakes Mining in a Lowlands Wilderness. by Virginia Heffernan.

The Rise and Fall of Newfoundland’s Cod Fishery

/ Lynne Melcombe / 1 Comment

I can barely remember a time when I wasn’t intrigued by Canada’s easternmost province, Newfoundland and Labrador. I’ve never been there, but it calls to me in much the same way many distant parts of Canada, like Haida Gwaii and the far north, call to me. I hope someday I’ll be fortunate enough to visit more of our country’s far corners. 

Book cover of 'Cod Collapse: The Rise and Fall of Newfoundland’s Saltwater Cowboys' by Jenn Thornhill Verma, featuring an illustration of colorful fishing buildings and boats in a vibrant marine setting with a Canadian flag emblem.

In Cod Collapse: The Rise and Fall of Newfoundland’s Saltwater Cowboys (Nimbus Publishing, 2019), Jenn Thornhill Verma (class of 2019) paints an intimate portrait of the island portion of her home province—not only how physically beautiful it is, but where it’s come from, what its people have endured, and where it’s going. 

In the early chapters of this moving memoir, Verma depicts in vivid detail what life was like for her grandparents, Pop and Nan, and great grandparents. They raised their family in a one-room wooden house. Wood was the only fuel used for cooking and heating, in a home that lacked indoor plumbing and was lit by a kerosene lamp. Wood was also used to build the boats that kept the island’s bountiful cod fishery alive.

Fishing was a hard life, one most parents didn’t wish for their children. And indeed, Verma’s parents did not grow up to be fishers but became skilled professionals in a hospital in Corner Brook. Yet the fishing way of life is also one that many remember fondly, in spite of both hardships and risks that most of us can barely imagine. Verma writes:

When it comes to a career at sea, practice brings some degree of perfection, but luck comes into play a lot of the time too. That’s what comes to mind as I recall what Gene told me about navigating tricky weather in his fishing days. “People used to say to me, ‘It’s thick with fog. You’re not going out today.’ I said, ‘Honey, I got a compass, I knows where I’m to.’ But I said, ‘The other fellers can’t find me.’ On a fine day, yes no trouble. Anyone could go to fish on a fine day, but I often went forty days out here and never saw land. Forty days in the fog day after day after day, nothing, only fog. I could only see to the end of the boat. But I was happy. I would sooner be out there than in here.” And yet, Gene is well aware of the risks of being “out there.” He told me of one dicey situation when he went overboard.

“I went in with an anchor. One Saturday evening, it was thick with fog and mad rough. We were setting a net from here to there somewhere. I was … hauling up the anchor and I don’t know what happened. It happened so fast. Rope come off … and I went down. It got dark. I could see a rope, so I grabbed the rope. The anchor was hauling me down. When the anchor got on the bottom, I got the rope off me and I started to come up. And next thing, I could see the propeller on the boat spin because I had only just slowed the gear. Anyway, I come up and I grabbed the rail of the boat and I got a bit of air.”

The cod fishery supported Newfoundland fishers for hundreds of years. But after World War II, as fishing methods improved, drawing fleets from as far away as Portugal to the Grand Banks and taking far more fish than could be sustained, the government of Canada finally admitted that without dramatic changes, the once-teaming cod population was in danger of extinction. 

The cod moratorium, announced July 2, 1992, immediately put 30,000 fishers out of work—the largest layoff in Canada’s history. It was supposed to last two years; it lasted three decades. Within ten years, Newfoundland’s population dropped by a record ten percent. The moratorium was finally lifted in 2024, but whereas total allowable catch (TAC) at the fishery’s peak was around 240,000 tonnes, it’s now 18,000 tonnes.

Cod Collapse is a story of hardship and loss, but it’s also a story of survival and recovery. It’s a story about a young woman moving away and distancing herself from the place she grew up, not least because “Newfies,” as I remember myself (with shame, now) referring to Newfoundlanders as a kid, who were for many years the butt of Canadian jokes. It’s a story about reconnecting with a past and feeling deep pride in it. And it’s a story about finding other ways to make a sea-faring life work—other fisheries, such as lobster; other ways to use the ocean, such as the offshore oil industry; and other ways to make a living off the land, such as tourism in one of the most ruggedly beautiful corners of our country. 

I’m immensely proud to be a Canadian, proud of every corner of this country, the many I haven’t seen as much as the relatively few I have. Books like this only make me prouder. It’s an amazing land we live in, from the Atlantic to the Pacific to the Arctic. And in an era when our sovereignty is threatened by outside forces, writers like Verma help us all to build that pride by telling the stories of those who make this country what it is. 

Here’s another book about fish, with a very different perspective:

Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis, by Andrew Reeves.

And here are some books about Canada that inspire pride:

Peace by Chocolate: The Hadhad Family’s Remarkable Journey from Syria to Canada, by Jon Tattrie.

Ring of Fire: High-Stakes Mining in a Lowlands Wilderness, by Virginia Heffernan.