Can you tell us a little about yourselves?
We are brothers, born in Pushthrough, where we received our early education. Our family was part of the resettlement program, and in 1969 we relocated to Hermitage, where we completed  our high school education before heading off to Memorial University. We both studied to become teachers. Hayward began teaching in Dover, and then a few years later, Raymond joined the teaching profession with a position in St Anthony.
A few short years later, our paths diverged.
Hayward has been a lifelong educator, working as a teacher, Vice Principal, Principal and a school district executive in the K – 12 public education system before becoming an instructor and administrator in the Faculty of Education at Memorial University. He completed graduate studies at Memorial and the University of Toronto. He was recognized for his leadership within the K – 12 system with a Readers Digest Leadership Award and was named Canadian Principal of the Year by the Canadian Association of Principals. He was also awarded the Principal of the Year designation by the Newfoundland Labrador Teachers Association School Administrators Council. Hayward has considerable international education experience. He has been an active volunteer within his community and at the provincial level, serving as a member of the Memorial University Board of Regents, Town Councillor in Harbour Grace, and co-chair at the SPLASH Centre, a community youth network.
Raymond completed graduate studies at York University and is now Professor of History at the University of Regina, after teaching at several universities in Canada and abroad, including  University College Dublin, where he twice held the endowed Craig Dobbin Professorship of Canadian Studies. He has published more than 20 monographs and books, and numerous articles on Canadian and Newfoundland history. One of his most acclaimed works, Canada’s Prime Ministers and the Shaping of a National Identity, was awarded the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing in 2025 by the Writers’ Trust of Canada, recognizing it as an exceptional book on political writing in Canada. His publications have earned numerous other honours, including the Pierre Savard Award from the International Council of Canadian Studies and the Clio Prize from the Canadian Historical Association. He is Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, co-president of the Canadian Studies Network– Réseau d’études canadiennes, and a frequent commentator on Canadian politics and contemporary affairs.

Congratulations on your new book! How did it come about?
Thanks very much. We are delighted the book has been published. We live in different parts of the country, and whenever we got together, we often talked about our life in Pushthrough and Hermitage and how our mother navigated her life. She was a single mom for much of her life, having been widowed twice with young children on both occasions, and we wondered how she managed in such situations and without much support. She had to deal with living in a small, isolated fishing outports of Saddle Island, Pushthrough and even in Hermitage and, later, the uncertainty of resettlement. We believed it was a story worth sharing, and around the time of Covid, we said to each other, “Let’s see what we can do with our mother’s story.” Once we committed to writing it, we soon realized that the life she lived — except perhaps for the loss of two husbands — was similar to that of many other women in outport communities.

Raymond B Blake

It seems to have a personal feel – how does that differ from the more academic history one co-author is well associated with?
Yes, the book is very personal on one level but also very much the story, more generally, of women in outport communities and life in Newfoundland through the 20^th century. We never saw our mother as exceptional in the sense that many biographers see their subjects as eminent figures, or in the  way people, such as television personalities, sports figures, and other cultural figures, seem to believe they have to write their memoirs because their lives are so exceptional and so important.  We share personal moments from our mother’s life in the book, such as her experiences with the loss of husbands, children, and siblings, but the beauty of how we reconstruct her lived experience is that it places her experiences, relationships, challenges, and personal experiences within a clear historical and cultural context that was shared by many other women. The book is not simply a detailed and factual account of the life of Minnie Blake; it offers readers, we believe, an accurate understanding of the lives of so many women and others, especially in outport Newfoundland.
The book is well-researched, but our mother did not leave correspondence, diaries, or other materials. We researched various documents in a number of archival collections in Newfoundland and saw the experiences of women like Minnie as critically important in telling her story. Her experiences of resettlement, for instance, were shared with countless others, and even if those experiences were not identical, or did not happen at the same time in the same community, they became shared moment in the life stories of many Newfoundlanders. We also depended on the rich published history of Newfoundland and Labrador for our research.
Our approach is both similar to, and yet different from, academic history. We hope readers will see in Outport Woman, the life of a particular individual, but also a history of the world she lived in. The life of Minnie Blake, and her experiences, choices, and circumstances she lived through, will help readers understand the broader time period in which she lived. Writing about the experiences of a single individual, and the times in which that person lived, reveals much about a society and the people in it. We believe an in-depth understanding of history, and in our case the 20th-century history of outport Newfoundland and Labrador, makes it necessary to devote attention to the ordinary people who lived through those times and in those places, and one such exemplary ordinary person was Minnie Blake. Yes, one of us has written ‘academic’ history, and that experience is shown in our commitment and fidelity to accuracy and clarity in our writing. And, yes, the stories we weave in the book might reveal our mother’s sprawling life across many subjects and over a long period of time, but we believe we have presented a credible version of her life. What we did come to understand as we wrote the book is that her life was always lived forward, but we believe it could only be understood by looking back.
We believe that Outport Woman helps readers understand not only specific moments in history in some abstract sense but also lets them learn about events in a more direct and human way. This can be as emotional as the loss of a loved one to an industrial accident, the process of resettlement, or the loss of child at birth. History and the past become  human-centered, which makes them more relatable and more memorable. And when we learn about the past through a single life, it not only expands our historical knowledge but also encourages us to read the past with empathy.

What gaps does a story like this fill in NL history?
We began with a simple question: why should Minnie Blake be of interest to a wider audience? Why the subject of a book? Because history is too often about the big events and big people in the “big picture.” Of ordinary or “regular folk,” like Minnie Blake who carried on their day-to-day lives away from the limelight, history is largely silent. The prevailing presumption remains that ordinary people are of no significance in the social, cultural, political, and economic development of the worlds in which they find themselves.
We disagree: Ordinary women and men contribute to the making of history. Societies and nations survive only through the consent of the nameless, ordinary women and men who comprise them. To ignore ordinary women and men, the people around us who live worthy, rich, and full lives, if in obscurity, and after their deaths disappear entirely except from family memory, is to miss the real story of humanity and the unique societies in which people have lived. The story of Minnie Blake’s life in her times provides a necessary counterweight to the attention historians pay to society’s elites.
We believe we cannot fully appreciate the history of Newfoundland and Labrador or, indeed, any nation or community, without closely examining the histories of our own parents, grandparents, and their ancestors, as well as that of their friends and neighbours – in short, the experiences of the people who never make it into the nation’s history books and official accounts. The fact that former Premier Clyde Wells and music and cultural icon Bud Davidge and former educator Joe Rideout, who resettled from Pass Island, endorsed our work on this book solidified our belief that this was a story that needed to be told and would resonate with a larger audience.
We make a case for women. Ordinary women are historical actors, bearing and raising children, making, and remaking families, managing and maintaining households (particularly in societies marked by fathers absent for lengthy periods, as in the Newfoundland fishery), supplying domestic labour, and contributing to the household economy. These ordinary women upheld a moralized social order, both in their families and in their communities. Silent and without a presence in the annals of history for far too long, their stories need telling. We delve into what we call a ‘people’s history,’ offering a history as seen through the life of one ordinary, yet remarkable, woman.

Hayward C Blake

What do you hope people take from it?
Outport Woman: Life on the Ocean’s Edge is a life story, and it preserves a story that might otherwise fade away and eventually disappear. Outside of our immediate family, no one much cares who Minne Blake was, but a book like this captures the messy life of an individual and brings those fragments together into a narrative that helps future readers understand  the past and the people who lived it. Most individuals never write about their own lives; some leave behind only fragments. A biographer studies these pieces and assembles them into a narrative so future readers can understand who the person was and why their life mattered.
We began writing our book believing that that the personal is historical. By the time we had finished writing it, we turned that phrase around: history is personal. A life, as lived and experienced by an individual in a particular geographical setting and in a particular time, tells us much not only about that person but also about place, the wider society she was a part of, and the people with whom she interacted. A focus on an individual such as Minnie Blake gives agency to those left out of history; yet, at the same time, as fascinating and exciting as an individual life may be, it must be acknowledged that for that life to have greater significance, it has to be situated in the context of the wider environment in which it was lived. Context makes individuals such as Minnie Blake important figures in history. Through their histories, we can come to understand the human condition.
Our hope is that our book, Outport Woman, becomes an invitation for others to start their own conversations about the lives of their families in outport Newfoundland and Labrador and, indeed, in communities everywhere. We encourage readers to reclaim their own journeys, to share their family’s stories beyond their immediate family, and thereby acknowledge the important role of ordinary people in our collective experience and history —  the people whose stories have too often been discounted as unimportant and trivial. The lives of ordinary people, like Minnie Blake and like countless other families, matter and must not be allowed to disappear from our shared histories. Minnie’s life story,  like that of so many parents,  was an admirable life and, indeed, it is one for the history books.

Outport Woman: Life on the Ocean’s Edge is published by Flanker Press.