Michael Crummey on the historical novel

Michael Crummey is a Newfoundland-born poet, short story writer and novelist. He is known for his historical fiction. His multi-award winning novel River Thieves depicts the relationship between European settlers and the last of the Beothuk indians in the early 19th Century. The Wreckage tells the story of a young Newfoundland soldier and his beloved during and after World War ll.

We talk about Michael's goal of taking the bare facts of historical events and making the people in those events feel real, maintaining a spine of fact, the impossibility of seeing inside what extinction felt like, conjecture, emotional authenticity, false assumptions, the honesty of fiction, and falsehood of factual 'truth,' respect for the reality of people's lives, fiction being best at capturing rich complex weave of lived experience, marketability; The Wreckage, evil, 9/11, boom times in Newfoundland during WWll, and finally, the mistaken expectation of getting facts from historical novels.