The Old Lost Land of Newfoundland: Family, Memory, Fiction, and Myth
by Wayne Johnston as part of the Henry Kreisel Lecture Series

I was interviewed live by the CBC television station in St. John’s. I was in Toronto, wearing headphones and staring into the blank, dark circle of a camera. No one else was in the entire studio.
The questions from St. John’s began, the first being something like, “Did you know, Mr. Johnston, that the Smallwood family is quite upset about your book?”
Up to that point, I hadn’t known and said so. I was then told by the interviewer what I had not been told before the interview, which was that he had just interviewed, live, as they sat on a sofa in one of their homes, several members of the Smallwood family, who had said many uncomplimentary things about me and my book.
I tried to keep my composure, never having been so blatantly blindsided by a journalist in my life and unable to rid my mind of the thought that the Smallwood interview and mine were on live TV.
I fumbled my way through the interview and went home in a daze where I found that there were twenty-seven messages on my answering machine, most of them from friends of mine in St. John’s who had called to commiserate, and some from strangers in St. John’s who, somehow having got hold of my unlisted number, had by no means called to commiserate.
There was a message from a woman who identified herself as a Smallwood and, weeping profusely, declared that Charlie Smallwood was a saint who had never taken a drink in his life. I felt lower that the lowest bit of vermin that had ever crawled the earth. As my sense of self-worth plummeted further, the voice changed to one that said, “Hi, Wayne. This is your friend, Claire. I hope you weren’t taken in by my impersonation.…”
When I toured the United States with The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, I was much less apprehensive, especially in certain places where it seemed impossible that anyone who had even heard of Smallwood would be in the audience for a reading or book signing.
I read at Amherst College in Massachusetts, Amherst being famous for nothing but that it was the place where the poet, Emily Dickinson, was born and had spent her entire life.
As I read, now and then looking up to make eye contact with the audience, I peripherally saw several objects looming and swaying in mid-air. I kept on reading, not looking to my right or left but straight ahead. And those amorphous objects kept on looming and swaying.
Finally, I looked left to see, in the front row, three women holding in, political-convention-floor fashion, life-sized effigies of Joey Smallwood affixed to pieces of wood, complete with bow tie and horn-rimmed spectacles.
I stopped reading and asked for an explanation.
“We don’t know anything about Newfoundland,” one of the women said. “But, after we read your book, we went there. We went to Gambo where Mr. Smallwood was born. There’s a kind of museum there and we bought some miniature Smallwood dolls. Our hobby is making life-sized likenesses of American presidents, which we place in chairs around our houses, but we decided, in honour of your book, to make some of Mr. Smallwood, too.”
I left the reading picturing the houses of these women, the rooms in which there were chairs in which there silently sat likenesses of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt, among others, and, sitting among them, as he would so dearly have liked to do in life, Joey Smallwood, Premier of Newfoundland.

To read more of Wayne Johnston's poignant and enlightening lecture, be on the lookout for The Old Lost Land of Newfoundland, making its much-anticipated debut in March 2009.