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Kathleen Winter’s Primordial Landscapes
Detail of the cover of Annabel.
Today, author Kathleen Winter describes the strange, primordial landscape of Labrador, the setting of her new novel, Annabel. Winter, who hails from Newfoundland, first encountered Labrador while making a CBC documentary on a local Innu singer, but it was some time before she decided to set a novel there. Once she started, though, there was no looking back.
I have tried to put Labrador’s deep, magnetic energy into Annabel, my novel about a child born beyond gender in that land, and people have responded to this in a way I did not expect. I did not realize the landscape and culture in the story would feel pre-Modern and unknown, or that people would ask me how I was able to enter that world and write about it, but they have. On the novel’s first page I describe the village as having “that magnetic earth all Labrador shares. You sense a striation, a pulse, as the land drinks light and emits a vibration.”
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