{"id":40368,"date":"2025-07-05T09:01:11","date_gmt":"2025-07-05T09:01:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/40368\/"},"modified":"2025-07-05T09:01:11","modified_gmt":"2025-07-05T09:01:11","slug":"heidi-wickss-new-novel-here-imagines-a-century-of-st-johns-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/40368\/","title":{"rendered":"Heidi Wicks’s new novel, Here, imagines a century of St. John’s history"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Heidi Wicks was researching for Here, she experienced a chance encounter that might\u00a0have made a fitting entry for the book. It happened the day she toured the heritage property\u00a0on Circular Road in St. John’s that \u2014 in effect \u2014 became the book’s central character.<\/p>\n

“I came out of the house,” said\u00a0Wicks. “I was walking home, and I ran into a friend on the\u00a0street, and I said I was working on something about this house in the neighbourhood. And she\u00a0said, ‘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?'”<\/p>\n

A few weeks later, Wicks spent several hours chatting with the former occupant of Canada\u00a0House,\u00a0collecting stories the woman had heard from her mother.<\/p>\n

“The ballerina storyline\u00a0that recurs throughout is inspired by her,” Wicks said.<\/p>\n

Released in June, Here is Wicks’s second collection of short stories. Her first book, Melt, was\u00a0released in 2020 and named one of The Globe and Mail’s hottest reads that summer. It also received a\u00a0silver medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards.<\/p>\n

Wicks, who was born and raised in St. John’s, describes Here as a “family connection book,”\u00a0identifying the ways she has drawn on influences from her parents to inform the stories of\u00a0Newfoundland history and culture honestly.<\/p>\n

“My dad did a history degree, so we grew up\u00a0hearing the stories. And mom is a music educator, so we grew up with music from\u00a0Newfoundland,” she said.<\/p>\n

In her family lore, there is a grandmother who worked as a house servant in\u00a0the same neighbourhood where Here is set.<\/p>\n

Living in the past, present, and future<\/strong><\/p>\n

Does Heidi Wicks have a preoccupation with the past?<\/p>\n

Although the historical and somewhat\u00a0magical elements of Here distinguish it from Wicks’s first book, both books share a spirit\u00a0of nostalgia.<\/p>\n

\"Heidi<\/p>\n

Wicks believes her stories deal with resilience in the face of change. (Submitted by Heidi Wicks)<\/p>\n

“Maybe I’m a bit obsessed with how the past shapes who we are in the present\u00a0and the future,” she said.<\/p>\n

In her engagement with the past, Wicks can track her own development as a writer. Melt, also a\u00a0collection of interconnected short stories, is concerned with the evolving relationship of\u00a0childhood friends growing into adulthood.<\/p>\n

“That’s how you start to learn to write, is to write\u00a0about your own experiences. So, my experiences at that time were relationships ending \u2026 being\u00a0a new parent, and friends starting to deal with parents who were ill, those kinds of things that\u00a0start to happen when you’re in your 30s,” she said.<\/p>\n

For Here, by contrast, she explains, “I went deeper into that, and I tapped into my interest in\u00a0history and folklore and music and the culture of Newfoundland and how that weaves into how\u00a0we interact with each other.”<\/p>\n

The colonial-era architecture on the streets surrounding downtown St. John’s provided the\u00a0inspiration for the interconnected stories in Here. In turns historical fiction, magical realism, and\u00a0Newfoundland folklore, but they all provide a nostalgic framework for a contemporary story of\u00a0St. John’s life.<\/p>\n

Her short stories imagine the perspectives of those who might have occupied the\u00a0house during different eras \u2014 a troop of suffragette house servants, a crew of Blundstone-wearing musicians, the province’s first premier, and even a pet crow.<\/p>\n

\"In<\/p>\n

Heidi Wicks imagines the various eras in the lifespan of a St. John\u2019s house built at the turn of the last century. (Submitted by Heidi Wicks)<\/p>\n

Although the house and characters in Here are fictional \u2014\u00a0or fictionalized \u2014\u00a0Wicks based her\u00a0stories on actual events in Newfoundland history and set the stories inside the house located at\u00a074 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.<\/p>\n

Wicks said\u00a0the writing process for Here brought her down many avenues of learning.<\/p>\n

“A lot of it\u00a0was researching, watching old documentaries, going deep into the Heritage N.L. website, the\u00a0Boulder book\u00a0Birds of Newfoundland, I had that next to me all the time. And the Jenny Higgins\u00a0book [Newfoundland in the First World War]. The old footage with Smallwood, Waiting for Fidel, all that stuff.”<\/p>\n

In the stories set closer to modern day, Wicks says she draws to some extent on her own\u00a0experience. Of the story titled Birdsong,\u00a0she said, “that was me during the pandemic, wandering around the\u00a0neighbourhood and looking at the birds and trying to escape what we were dealing with down\u00a0here.”<\/p>\n

Despite the Birdsong\u00a0connection, she pushes back on suggestions that her stories are literal\u00a0depictions of her personal life.<\/p>\n

“The emotions that I have felt in my life are connected to some\u00a0of the characters, but that’s really it,” she said.<\/p>\n

Download our\u00a0<\/strong>free CBC News app<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0to sign up for push alerts for CBC Newfoundland and Labrador. Sign up for our\u00a0<\/strong>daily headlines newsletter here<\/strong><\/a>. Click\u00a0<\/strong>here to visit our landing page<\/strong><\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Heidi Wicks was researching for Here, she experienced a chance encounter that might\u00a0have made a fitting entry…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":40369,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[1022,171,32088,32089,67,132,68,32090],"class_list":{"0":"post-40368","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-heidi-wicks","11":"tag-newfoundland-history","12":"tag-united-states","13":"tag-unitedstates","14":"tag-us","15":"tag-wicks"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114799816437698851","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40368"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40368\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}