Congratulations on your new book!  Where did the idea for The Smiling Land come from?
In an interest in writing a love letter to home, And about how I thought I could write a book about my own backyard, the way some of my favourite travel writers do, you know, like Bill Bryson is one of my favourite writers. I love how he takes people along on his journey and just doesn’t try to tell everything, but just tells people what he sees and then how it attaches itself to observations, about the people and the place. My sort of elevator pitch for this book was: Follow me around Newfoundland and Labrador. Because I knows everything about Newfoundland Labrador. Only to discover that I actually don’t know very much about it at all. And, you know, along the way, I could probably pass some commentary and observations about what I think makes our province a special one and our people, with all their quirky oddities and historical weirdnesses and all that. I guess, at the end of the day, I would love for it to be a catalyst for making people decide to go check it out for themselves.

It’s nice how you manage to avoid the word quaint entirely.
Petty Harbour gets described as quaint all the time. And I’m not even sure I know what it means. That’s not a word I would use to describe the rugged rock of Penny Harbour. If you stood on the new bridge in Petty Harbour in February, like I did every year, quaint is not a word that comes to mind.

I really liked how you contextualized of things too, giving a little background, a little bit of the history. Did you do a lot of research yourself? Did that come naturally into the way that you sculpted the writing?
Most of the research I did was after [the travel]. I wanted the first thing to be just very naked-eye discovery. What do you see? When you come over the hill, going into Harbour Grace – what does your eye see? Because that’s how people see it, right? And so I wanted to put myself in that kind of [frame], and then afterward, fill in historical bits as accurately and as interestingly as possible, But the book is really more about why I think Newfoundland and Labrador is worth checking out.

And you also wrote just about travel more broadly.: “Anytime I go somewhere I’ve never been before, it feels like a victory.”Can you expand on that a little bit?
That’s totally from growing up in Petty Harbour, in a family without a car, through the 1970s and ’80s, long before the internet, and just daydreaming about what else there is, right? And, I swore, the two things I wanted to do the most in my life, if you asked me when I was 13, would be play music and travel. That’s the two things I would have picked. And, you know, lucky, lucky me. I’m 56 here today, and I’ve done lots of both of those things, and if you ask me what I would like to do for the next 20 years of my life, I would say play music and travel.

Do you have destinations on your wish list, places you haven’t been yet that you really want to see?
Yeah, my joke all the time with Great Big Sea was always, like, we only got popular in cold places. We left Newfoundland in January and went to Oslo. I’d joke with Louis Thomas, my manager, for years, saying, Louis, people play concerts in Barcelona too. Like someone is playing in Athens right now. So there’s big swaths of the world that I’ve never been to. I’ve never been anywhere in Asia. I’ve never been anywhere in Africa. I’ve barely been to South America, and, you know, if you ask me where I want to go, it’s everywhere. I would like to see everything that there is to see. I’ll never get to it. I also love going back to places. I love the fact that if, if I get off a plane in Newark and I take the train to Manhattan, I have six places I want to go right away, because that’s my New York.

You include a lot of personal stories too, and that felt very effortless to me, that structure. How carefully blocked out was that, or did you find that one story would flow into another and then bring you back to a new destination?
Most of the sort of autobiographical stuff was really an attempt to figure out, how do I deal with St John’s? I can’t write about St 
John’s, like I’m visiting it. Like the way I write about Battle Harbour. So what do I do? And I can’t really write a book encouraging people to come to Newfoundland and Labrador and not include St John’s. Like, that’s ridiculous. And I, honestly, I kind of struggled with how to do that until It struck me that I could just tell my story. Like, tell my story of how I discovered St John’s and in the order that I discovered it. And in doing so, I could do like a little series of snapshots that led me to living [in the city]. And, whereas travel writing is kind of new for me, doing autobiographical storytelling isn’t, and that part was far comfortable for me to do, far more familiar.

Do you have any top travel tips for people?
You don’t need half as much stuff as you think you do. I haven’t checked a luggage bag on an airplane, I’d say, in 22 years. I just don’t own more clothes than fits in a wheelie suitcase. And I’m never gonna, I don’t want it. You don’t need as much stuff to travel. A backpack and a wheelie suitcase, and you can go, I’ve gone to Australia for a month and a half, hiking and playing on live television, with a backpack and a wheelie suitcase. That’s always tip number one for me is stop taking so much stuff.

Besides travel and autobiography, I wonder if you’ve got another project in mind in terms of writing.
Now, honestly, I’ve never really written something that’s kind of perform-ative. I’m one of the co-creators on the musical Tell Tale Harbour. And I was mostly in charge of the song column. 
Whereas Ed [Riche] was in charge of the dialogue and book column, and Bob [Foster] would have been in charge of the arranging column, and we all helped each other, of course, but I would like to write something that I perform, and maybe I have already and I just don’t know that I have. Just watching Ed write dialogue for Tell Tale Harbour fascinated me because even with the books I’ve written before, I was shocked at how difficult it is to write dialogue properly. And how if you write it the way you would say it, it doesn’t read very well. It doesn’t read the way you say it. So the way someone like Ed so effortlessly, and economically, writes dialogue is fascinating to me. if I was to do something next, I would probably lean in that direction.

Is there something that I haven’t asked you about the book that you like to share with us?
Just, it was a bit of a passion project for me and Joanne and Henry, to show our son the place that he’s from, And really, like I say, ultimately, it’s a love letter to home and in a perfect world I would love for it to be the reason why anyone who was thinking about taking a trip to Newfoundland and Labrador ultimately did, That would be a great result, I figure.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

The Smiling Land: All Around the Circle in Newfoundland and Labrador is published by Penguin Random House Canada.