When people use the term, they are referencing this feature article, by Sandra Gwyn, published in Saturday Night magazine in 1976, wherein she coined the phrase:
“Destruction of the outports has unexpectedly spawned Newfcult, the miraculous and exciting revival of art and theatre on Canada’s poor bald rock
“The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin,” says Bob Joy, “thinks Codco is ‘damn well rib-splitting funny, with enough subtlety and intellect to make it far more than ordinary farce.”‘ “The Daily News,” says Andy Jones, “thinks Codco is ‘spawned in the same humorous hatcheries that produced Second City and Monty Python.”‘ “The Inquirer.” says Mary Walsh, “thinks Codco is ‘sheer madness from north of the border.”‘
This conversation takes place over hoagies and a pile of newspapers in a greasy spoon across from the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia. Joy and Jones and Walsh are three/sevenths of Codco. The other four are Greg Malone, Diane Olsen, Cathy Jones,  and Tommy Sexton. (They’re vegetarians – Rastafarian vegetarians – and philosophically opposed to hoagies.) When the Canada Council sent this commedia dell’ outport company to Philadelphia for a week last October, as a rakish footnote to the Festival of Canadian Performing Arts assembled for the US Bicentennial, I flew down from Ottawa to catch it. When Codco wound up getting the best reviews of the whole lot, the performers weren’t surprised – and neither was I. The first time I encountered the Codco people, almost two years ago, they told me they intended to turn St John’s into “the centre for comedy in North America.”
Cut to Badger, pop 2,000, a dreary, featureless, defeated-looking town in central Newfoundland. It’s a dark, blowy evening deep in November, and I’m having supper with the Mummers. They’re a troupe with the same nerve-of-a-robber’s-horse quality as Codco. The play they’re doing tonight is called IWA. International Wood-workers of America. It’s about the 1959 strike by Newfoundland loggers that Joey Smallwood broke. The strike that Joey, the one-time socialist, still can’t bring himself to talk about. Newfoundland’s equivalent to the Winnipeg General Strike.
The cast is having a bad case of the jitters …”

This special 96-page issue also includes essays, artwork, interviews, graphic art, and fiction exploring The Newfoundland Renaissance – what is its legacy, where are the gaps, and is ‘renassance’ even the right description?

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