Birth of a Novel

Author Ami McKay. Photo Ian McKay. Courtesy Random House Canada.

It was a blustery day in 1999 when debut novelist and Indiana native Ami McKay first saw the Bay of Fundy. She was a music teacher and single mom at the time, living in Chicago and recuperating from a terrible car accident. Hoping to raise her spirits, a friend named Ian asked her to join him on a trip up to Nova Scotia. Canadian-born, he’d done a degree in education at Acadia University and knew the area well. He took her on some hikes, including one on Cape Split near the little village of Scots Bay. There they watched the waves crash on the shoreline, the wind cool, the sky leaden grey. It was more stark than pretty that afternoon says McKay, but, “something about the place captured me. It felt like I was standing on firm ground for the first time in a long time.”

By the end of the weekend, the longtime friends not only realized that they were in love and wanted to get married, but decided to relocate from booming Chicago to quiet rural Nova Scotia. Looking for a place to live, McKay and her fiancé discovered an old fixer-upper of a farmhouse in Scots Bay, scooped it up and moved in. By the following spring she was pregnant with her second child, and stories about one of their home’s former occupants, a well-known local midwife, had begun trickling in to them. The place, it seemed, was known in the early 20th century as “the birth house” for the then-remote area. Moved by her neighbours’ stories, McKay tracked down the midwife’s adopted daughter — nearly 90 and living in a nursing home — and heard about all the many Scots Bay children who’d been “caught” there, women who’d been given a sanctuary during their labour and afterward. McKay was so taken with the daughter’s story that she decided to have a home birth herself. And what’s more, she began to scribble the beginnings of a book inspired by this rich past.

The result, a sweeping historical novel called The Birth House, has just been released by Knopf Canada (American, British, German and Dutch editions are pending later this year and next), and McKay is being highlighted in the 10th anniversary of the imprint’s celebrated New Face of Fiction marketing campaign.

Courtesy Random House Canada.

The Birth House traces the life of Dora Rare, the only girl in a large Scots Bay shipbuilding family. Growing up in early 1900s Nova Scotia, she is marked from the beginning as different, possibly even a witch. In her late teens she becomes an apprentice to the local midwife, a Cajun returned to her Acadian roots, learning how to assist births and brew herbal remedies for everything from coughs to preventing pregnancy. But she also learns about standing up for herself and other women as her personal coming of age coincides with the First World War, the Halifax Explosion, the Spanish Influenza epidemic and the ensuing political, social and economic advances for women. Of course, it wouldn’t be much of a novel if such a transformation was easy, and plucky Dora Rare runs into more than her share of troubles along the way, including a wayward husband, a meddlesome aunt, community censure and an arrogant doctor on a mission to stamp out “unscientific” birthing methods.

“The book is really about the struggle between tradition and modernization — that pull and tug between the two,” McKay explains over the phone from Halifax at the beginning of her national book tour. “Even today, I find Nova Scotia a magical place, somewhere in between and full of folklore and myth. I wanted to capture that feeling in the book.”

Using traditional narrative woven together with journal entries, letters and advertisements clipped from early 20th-century newspapers, The Birth House does indeed feel like an otherworldly artifact, a kind of “literary scrapbook,” as McKay calls it. It’s also carefully researched, full of delightfully arcane details about Nova Scotia legend, herbal tonics and, especially, early gynecology and obstetrics. In one darkly funny and disturbing scene Dora is treated for “hysteria” (shorthand, it seemed, for uppity women) by a doctor wielding a “medical marvel” called The Swedish Movement Health Generator — a shiny silver vibrator.

“I loved digging up all this old archival stuff. My husband likes to call me Nancy Drew,” laughs McKay. “At first I thought I’d actually do a book of nonfiction — about our house, midwifery. A slice of history. But I felt confined by that. There is so little archival material that explores women’s emotional lives. I thought I could add more by weaving together stories of many different women.”

She saved the ephemera she collected, though, and much of what didn’t make it into the novel appears on her website, TheBirthHouse.com. With information about the writing of the book, a chatroom, quiz (“Am I hysterical?”), the chance to have your tea leaves read, plus free art nouveau bookplates signed by the author, it’s a fitting accompaniment to McKay’s novel. Which is to say, her writing is also quirky, injected with a sly sense of humour and chockablock with vivid images (“We sat like roasting hens in flowered cotton dresses, clucking and pecking at tea biscuits... suffering through the heat and the sweet-sick smell of face powder and rosewater”).

The Birth House is deeply infused with Maritime lyricism and more than a dash of its salty roots. Scots Bay, as McKay lovingly describes it, is “perched on the crook of God’s finger... ruled by storm and season”; young Dora liked to “climb to the top of the tallest spruce tree on the hill and... study the lives of the people below... the men made their way across the mudflats, following the retreating tide to gather fish from the seine… children circled the schoolhouse playing tag, as their mothers pulled clothing and sheets into baskets, as the moon rose opposite the last pink breath of the sun.”

It makes for a novel that you can’t help thinking of as a Nova Scotia saga in the tradition of Fall on Your Knees, by New Face of Fiction (and Oprah Winfrey Book Club) alumna Ann-Marie MacDonald. Echoes of this influence are strongest when Dora strikes out on her own, forced to leave everything she knows behind and flee for Boston. It is also then that Dora — who is weighed down early on by an abundance of portents — assumes a more likeable and fully developed personality, her uncertainty, fear and outsider view making her seem much more real.

When you think about it, this isn’t exactly surprising given McKay’s own story. “As much as I love it, when you’re not born in Nova Scotia, you’ll always be from away. It’s kind of a joke now. We’ve lived here for six years, we have this wonderful community — everyone is so generous — but my neighbour down the road still asks me every year: ‘How are you liking winter? Do you think you’ll be here next year?’ It suits me, though, because I think I’ll always be an observer in a certain sense. I think it’s just who I am.”

Andrea Curtis is a Toronto writer.

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