Articles

Random Passage

St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada: Breakwater Publishing, 1992 Although Random Passage is not a brand new book, this fictional account of one family’s emigration from England to a remote outport in rural Newfoundland nearly 200 years ago has a habit of staying in print and selling regularly. The book’s popularity is in part due to its

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Waiting for Time

St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada: Breakwater Publishing, 1994 Waiting for Time is the sequel to Bernice Morgan’s Random Passage, but it does not pick up where the first book left off. Instead, Morgan begins her next part of the story about the Cape Random people in modern Ottawa, a few generations later. Readers of the first

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O’Leary’s Best Christmas Present

Dark was just approaching that Christmas Eve when 11-year-old James was helping his grandfather and uncle get in some wood for the stove. The three were hurrying to beat the encroaching darkness, because in 1924, Little Travis’s Cove, part of the settlement of Argentia, Newfoundland, had no street lights. In fact, Argentia had no electricity.

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Message in a bottle

It’s not just the title of a rather silly movie filmed largely in Maine and starring Kevin Costner: the message in a bottle is also a time-honored method by which humans attempt to communicate. But with whom? Such a marine missive is often a class project or a lark in which the writer includes an

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Attempt to change lobster limits fail

Near the end of April, a bill in the Maine legislature threatened to undo nearly 20 years of struggle toward agreement on limited entry into the lobster industry by amending license eligibility requirements to allow a small number of state residents to bypass a mandated two-year apprenticeship program. The bill, “An Act to Amend the

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