Heidi Wicks's new novel, Here, imagines a century of St. John's history

When Heidi Wicks was researching for Here, she experienced a chance encounter that might have made a fitting entry for the book. It happened the day she toured the heritage property on Circular Road in St. John's that — in effect — became the book's central character.

"I came out of the house," said Wicks. "I was walking home, and I ran into a friend on the street, and I said I was working on something about this house in the neighbourhood. And she said, 'My friend lived there for 30 years, and she's going to be in town in a couple of weeks. Do you want to meet her?'"

A few weeks later, Wicks spent several hours chatting with the former occupant of Canada House, collecting stories the woman had heard from her mother.

"The ballerina storyline that recurs throughout is inspired by her," Wicks said.

Released in June, Here is Wicks's second collection of short stories. Her first book, Melt, was released in 2020 and named one of The Globe and Mail's hottest reads that summer. It also received a silver medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards.

Wicks, who was born and raised in St. John's, describes Here as a "family connection book," identifying the ways she has drawn on influences from her parents to inform the stories of Newfoundland history and culture honestly.

"My dad did a history degree, so we grew up hearing the stories. And mom is a music educator, so we grew up with music from Newfoundland," she said.

In her family lore, there is a grandmother who worked as a house servant in the same neighbourhood where Here is set.

Living in the past, present, and future

Does Heidi Wicks have a preoccupation with the past?

Although the historical and somewhat magical elements of Here distinguish it from Wicks's first book, both books share a spirit of nostalgia.

"Maybe I'm a bit obsessed with how the past shapes who we are in the present and the future," she said.

In her engagement with the past, Wicks can track her own development as a writer. Melt is concerned with the evolving relationship of childhood friends growing into adulthood.

"That's how you start to learn to write, is to write about your own experiences. So, my experiences at that time were relationships ending … being a new parent, and friends starting to deal with parents who were ill, those kinds of things that start to happen when you're in your 30s," she said.

For Here, by contrast, she explains, "I went deeper into that, and I tapped into my interest in history and folklore and music and the culture of Newfoundland and how that weaves into how we interact with each other."

The colonial-era architecture on the streets surrounding downtown St. John's provided the inspiration for the interconnected stories in Here. In turns historical fiction, magical realism, and Newfoundland folklore, but they all provide a nostalgic framework for a contemporary story of St. John's life.

Her short stories imagine the perspectives of those who might have occupied the house during different eras — a troop of suffragette house servants, a crew of Blundstone-wearing musicians, the province's first premier, and even a pet crow.

Although the house and characters in Here are fictional — or fictionalized — Wicks based her stories on actual events in Newfoundland history and set the stories inside the house located at 74 Circular Rd. Canada House, as it is known locally, was built in 1902 and served for a time after Confederation as the residence and offices of premier Joey Smallwood.

Wicks said the writing process for Here brought her down many avenues of learning.

"A lot of it was researching, watching old documentaries, going deep into the Heritage N.L. website, the Boulder book Birds of Newfoundland, I had that next to me all the time. And the Jenny Higgins book [Newfoundland in the First World War]. The old footage with Smallwood, Waiting for Fidel, all that stuff."

In the stories set closer to modern day, Wicks says she draws to some extent on her own experience. Of the story titled Birdsong, she said, "that was me during the pandemic, wandering around the neighbourhood and looking at the birds and trying to escape what we were dealing with down here."

Despite the Birdsong connection, she pushes back on suggestions that her stories are literal depictions of her personal life.

"The emotions that I have felt in my life are connected to some of the characters, but that's really it," she said.

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