BY ELLEN SCHWARTZ
WHAT DO YOU do if
you are a young boy and
your parents want you
to become a priest, but
you have other dreams?
You lie, of course—and
that turns out to be very
good training for your
future career as a fiction writer.
As a boy growing up in Newfoundland
and Labrador, Wayne Johnston loved
books. “When I read,” he says, “I discov-
ered the one thing I wished I could do.”
His deeply religious parents had other
ideas, however, and put him in a fast-track
program to the seminary. Johnston didn’t
want to be a priest, but he didn’t know how
to tell his parents that he wanted to be a
writer, an unheard-of profession in New-
foundland at the time. So he told them he
wanted to be a doctor.
“Deep down, I knew that medicine
wasn’t for me,” he tells The Connection.
“After taking science courses for several
years, I finally worked up the nerve to con-
fess that I wanted to be a writer. My par-
ents were baffled.”
They needn’t have been. Johnston’s
first novel, The Story of Bobby O’Malley,
set in Newfoundland, won the W.H. Smith/
Books in Canada First Novel Award in ;;;;.
His fourth novel, The Colony of Unrequited
Dreams, published in ;;;;, featured a real
politician who became Newfoundland’s
first premier. The work of historical fic-
tion won or was nominated for ;; national
and international awards, including the
Commonwealth Prize, the International
IMPAC Dublin Prize, the Giller Prize and
the Governor General’s Award. Johnston
has since published four more novels and
a memoir, and in ;;;; was awarded the
Writers’ Trust Engel/Findley Award in rec-
ognition of his contribution to Canadian
literature.
Johnston’s new book, First Snow, Last
Light, is the third in his Newfoundland
trilogy. It tells the story of Ned Vatcher,
who, at the age of ;;, returns home from
school one day to find the house locked,
the family car missing and his parents
gone without a trace. From that point on,
he is driven by the need to find out what
happened to them. Was it murder? Suicide? Had they run away? Why had they
left him behind?
Johnston reveals that the character of
Ned Vatcher was based on a real person,
whom he’d like to keep anonymous. “He
was very eccentric—someone who started
out with nothing and became quite wealthy.
AR TS&ENTERTAINMEN T
First Snow,
Last Light
Novel sheds light on a family’s dark secret
© RVIKA / SHUTTERSTOCK
N
AN
C
Y
WILLI
AM
S
Wayne Johnson
THECOSTCOCONNECTION
First Snow, Last Light will be available in
most Costco warehouses on September 5.
An entrepreneur, he brought modern
radio and television to Newfoundland at a
time when the island was isolated and
insular. I used these elements to create
Ned and the Vatcher family.”
The novel is imbued with secrets—not
only the mystery of Ned’s vanished par-
ents, but also secrets involving affairs,
murder and parentage. “Society couldn’t
function if we didn’t keep things to our-
selves,” Johnston asserts, citing his own
childhood as an example. “I grew up in a
small home with five brothers and sisters,
so it was a challenge to have privacy. I found
ways to keep things a secret so I could keep
my sense of individuality.”
The Newfoundland setting is itself a
character in the book. Snow and wind cre-
ate peril, the sea claims lives and the forest
buries clues under layers of greenery. The
island’s history frames the story, which
spans from the ;;;;s to the ;;;;s. “I
wanted to create a bridge from traditional
Newfoundland life to the more modern
society of today,” Johnston says. “Ned rep-
resents the overarching of those two eras.”
Johnston’s current project is “a highly
autobiographical contemporary novel.” He
writes longhand, revising as he goes, so
that by the time he reaches the end he has
done considerable rewriting. Just lately, he
has discovered voice recognition software.
“What used to take me three months to
type onto the computer—and I could barely
read my own writing—now takes me three
weeks to read aloud,” he says with delight.
As we await Wayne Johnston’s next
book, we can only hope that he continues
to tell engaging “lies” for years to come. C
Ellen Schwartz is the author of 16 books for
children and teens. She lives in Burnaby,
British Columbia.
he is driven by the need to find out what
