The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

w at er lo oc hr on ic le .c a W at er lo o C hr on ic le | T hu rs da y, M ay 24 ,2 01 8 | 10 Support your local-family-operated location at: 583 King Street North (Ye's Sushi Plaza) 519-725-9800 King St N at Northfield, st North of Conestoga Mall Arrangements Kitchener has merged with our Waterloo office!Edible A 583 Kin Ki jus Follow Edible Arrangements #1042--Waterloo on Facebook for some upcoming Summer specials & giveaways! CITY LIFE Visit waterloochronicle.cafor more coverage Local author's David Ward practices a type of immersive writ- ing in his second novel, Bay of Hope, that captures his five year sojourn in a Newfoundland out- port community and does what he does best - makes you care about the future of a small fishing vil- lage. That's because Ward, who headed to the Rock to do a little self-discovery and recovery as an award-winning college instructor, became part of the community of McCallum, N.L., and formed a kin- ship with its 78 inhabitants cut off from the rest of the world except by boat and the occasional govern- ment ferry. "There's always these voices in- side us that tell us that there should be a shift here or a shift there, but it isn't always easy," said Ward, about his desire for change in his life. "That's how I ended up in Newfoundland - those voices had been leveraged long enough to tell me to do something different, and I had the freedom to do so." While there he released his first book, the critically acclaimed The Lost 10 Point Night, a piece of gonzo sports journalism that told the tale of his search for his child- hood hockey hero Jim Harrison. It established him as an exciting new voice in that type of confes- sional, non-fiction writing that was part memoir and part myth making. He decided he needed the seclu- sion to continue his writing, and the former Waterloo Region resi- dent settled on a former fishing village hit hard by the collapse of the cod fishery in 1993. You can't go much further in Canada to lose yourself, but Ward found an unique culture on the edge of a government knife that pitted residents against each oth- er over a buyout plan when the Newfoundland government decid- ed it was cheaper to pay off McCal- lum's denizens than pony up for a new ferry to keep the community afloat. Ward became an insider to the battle for the soul of a commu- nity and some of the country's lost heritage and culture as the resi- dents squabbled over the $250,000 payout that eventually signalled the death knell of a way of life, al- though a few hardy souls are still holding out. "As millions of writers did be- fore me, I get some kind of charge, some kind of value of giving voice to those who normally don't have one, and this crew certainly fits that description," said Ward. "Leadership does the math and figures giving each of them $250,000 to leave is easier than ser- vicing them for another 20 years." "The answer always come back yes, and they offered us each a quarter of a million dollars per household to leave, but they insist- ed we have 90 per cent community approval, which was an arbitrary number that pitted people against people and family against family." The number was impossible to reach, and instead bred division in the once tight knit community. What the offer couldn't do to get people to leave, the bad blood it left behind has and left Ward wonder- ing if that wasn't the government's strategy in the first place. "We got stuck at 76 per cent, and people who wanted to go decided to go anyway," said Ward. "The community shrinks and shrinks until there is nobody left, and the amount of money the government has to pay them is considerably less because all the others are gone." The local author, who had his official book launch earlier this week at Words Worth Books, has drawn the support of author Claire Mowat, wife of Farley, as a continuation of the couples envi- ronmental and sociological work of capturing the unique people's and places of Canada and the chal- lenges they face. Mowat lends her endorsement on the book cover, and Ward's creative non-fiction work is compared to the tradition of Farley Mowat's Bay of Spirits written a half century ago. "I interviewed Claire Mowat for a story I did for a Newfoundland newspaper and she encouraged me to write about my McCallum experience," said Ward. "Just like they wrote about their Burgeo ex- perience, and when Claire and Farley Mowat encourage you to consider anything writing related you owe it to yourself to look at it very closely." Ward felt like he was continu- ing that legacy of the Mowats and captured the issues and inspira- tion that they took from their Newfoundland experience. "They experienced the same geography and the same people, and had very similar experiences, only 50 years prior to mine," said Ward. "I read their stuff, there's no doubt about it, and it was inspir- ing." "One of the things I kept asking myself is what a Farley Mowat book would look like if it was pub- lished in 2018, and I kept trying to doing that." Ward thinks he captured some of the profound mixed with the nu- ance of being tied intimately con- nected with our subject and helped capture a moment that seems to be shared among small communities across Canada as that way of life gets lost to bean- counting provincial governments and the lure of the city and its ser- vices to the denizens of these once vibrant small towns. "Our current way of life has caught up with them," said Ward. What happens next is the ulti- mate question Ward asks in Bay of Hope, available at Words Worth Books and at ECW Press at ecw- press.com. Local author captures the demise of a way of life in Bay of Hope David Ward's creative non-fiction tells readers why they should care about a town named McCallum, N.L. BOB VRBANAC bvrbanac@waterloochronicle.ca David Ward's newest book is the story of the five years in spent living in an outport community in Newfoundland and the unique culture that may soon disappear. David Ward David Ward Photo courtesy of David Ward