Theme: From the Archives
All I Ask: Review
BY Paul Chafe
All I Ask by Eva Crocker House of Anansi 320 p $22.95 Reflect for a moment on the title of Eva Crocker’s first novel, All I Ask. It is a…
Baked in a Nice Oak Desk
BY Matthew Hollett
I WONDER IF a grumbling stomach was the inspiration for this delightful Recipe for a Composition Cake, concocted by a student at St. Bride’s Academy in February 1905…
Horseless Carriages and Cars on Rafts
BY Matthew Hollett
In trawling through older issues of Newfoundland Quarterly, I’m particularly looking for writing about landscape and place, stories about technology, and things that make me laugh. So far, the most perfect triangulation of those three things is The First Automobile in Bonne Bay.
“Walking Even Where No Flowers Grow”
BY Matthew Hollett
IF WE ALL walked a little more, how would the city change?
The Codfish Splitting Machine
BY Matthew Hollett
IN THE FALL 1922 ISSUE of Newfoundland Quarterly, anchored between a lament for the drowning of a local businessman and a brief history of Puerto Rico, I found a curious article titled “The Iron Splitter for Dressing Codfish.”
The Southside Hills in History and Song
BY Matthew Hollett
I’M NOT SURE who first referred to them as the “Dear Old” Southside Hills, or if anyone still calls them that. Possibly the name went out of fashion when the huge oil tanks were built. But the nickname seems to have stuck for a while in the early 1900s, a curious term of affection for the imposing hillside that gives shape to St. John’s Harbour.
Arch Rock, Catalina, Trinity Bay
BY Matthew Hollett
FLIPPING THROUGH older issues of Newfoundland Quarterly, I’ve started to notice many of the same photos popping up over and over, sometimes decades after they first appeared in the magazine. A distinctive silhouette keeps catching my eye…
Sending Up Kites
BY Matthew Hollett
NEWFOUNDLAND QUARTERLY was founded in 1901, the same year Marconi flew a 500-foot kite on Signal Hill and intercepted the first trans-Atlantic wireless transmission. The second-oldest magazine in Canada, NQ began as “a literary magazine of interest to Newfoundlanders at home and abroad,” which is not far off the way it describes itself today, as “a cultural journal of Newfoundland and Labrador.” That’s a remarkable persistency of purpose over 116 years.
When Newfoundland Saved Canada: the 2017 remake
BY Michelle Porter
THE MOMENT I READ THE HEADLINE I knew I had to get some of the province’s newest writers on it.