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Books by Harry Vandervlist There's a long and fascinating history of creation and adaptation behind the success of the film Margaret's Museum and the current stage play The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum. Antigonish writer Sheldon Currie has spent 30 years living with versions of his original story, as it has been adapted and exported to most provinces in Canada, across the Atlantic and to the U.S. Meanwhile, the characters and what Currie calls the "spirit of the story" have shown remarkable integrity. In Calgary recently for the opening of the play, the author reviewed the story of his story, so to speak, in a telephone conversation. This is one piece of work that goes back so far it even has a pre-history. It starts with a song Currie wrote in 1964, "The Ballad of Chalie Dave," while teaching himself to play the guitar. He was in Alabama working on his PhD at the time (he returned to Nova Scotia to teach, and retired from St. Francis Xavier University last year). At first he saw his song about a Nova Scotia miner as "a fit of nostalgia or something." Years later, when he began to write the short story that became "The Glace Bay Miner's Museum," he remembered it. "I realized, God, this fits right in " he recalls. "I guess it shows that your mind is sort of processing stuff when you're not even looking." The song now appears in both the film and stage versions. The finished short story appeared in the Antigonish Review in 1976. Wendy Lill then adapted it as a radio play. When screenwriters Gerry Wexler and Mort Rancen saw its film potential, they wanted more material for the middle of the story. So, as Currie puts it, he obligingly "belted out everything I could think of.". Revisions to the 90 pages of "reckless" writing he provided as background for the film project then yielded The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum – The Novel. Meanwhile, Lill also looked over Currie's additions, thinking about a stage play. So in a couple of decades, what began as a song had morphed into short fiction, radio drama, film, "novelette" (as Currie dubs it) and stage drama. Throughout the evolution of his most famous work, Currie continued to publish stories in magazines like The Antigonish Review and Canadian Fiction Magazine, and published the collections Company Town and The Story So Far. It might seem surprising that his writing, which has the Canadian Maritimes stamp all over it, is often compared to that of Southern U.S. writers like William Faulkner – but Currie says he learned much from studying Faulkner. He also felt at home in Alabama, and figures that like Nova Scotia, the U.S South has the same kind of feeling of a culture that lives away from the centre. "There's an alienation there that I think you get in the Prairies and you get in the Maritimes, because they're away from the centres of power and they get overlooked for a lot of things." Currie also gets compared to Flannery O'Connor, although he says he didn't discover her until well after he'd begun writing. Works like her novel Wise Blood (also memorably filmed) convince Currie that she's "just the greatest writer of the century." He loves the daring of her work. "She'd do anything," he says. Currie has taken a few risks himself, in stories that capture the unnoticed strangeness of small-town life. He has a flair for the plausibly surreal: wise ingenues, surgically skilled ladies in odd hats, and families of twins with mismatched intermarriages, for example. Now he's at work on both a play and a novel about the war-time internment of Italians in Cape Breton. The historical material is promising. "One of the guys from Waterford was interned for two years while his brother was in the Cape Breton Highlanders in Italy, fighting over his grandfather's land," Currie says. You couldn't make that up, he agrees. But while Currie's writing is full of invention, it also creates the impression that reality, when observed from the right imaginative angle, offers so many ironies and strange significances that making things up is hardly necessary.

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