A place apart: The abiding power of Newfoundland’s fierce spirit of separateness
ST. JOHN’S, N.L. — Stan Dragland fell for Newfoundland like a lover.
The Alberta-born writer was an Ontario-based English literature professor on sabbatical when he got to know the island, and found a place unlike anywhere else in the country.
He recalls an imaginative book launch in 1997 for “The Night Season” by novelist Paul Bowdring, about a spiritually lost academic who quotes memorized passages ranging from Shakespeare to Nabokov.
The reading was accompanied by a harpist, with the text read not by Bowdring but by someone who “could sing the parts of the book that were important,” Dragland said.