When writer Marjorie Simmins fell for an East Coaster, she traded the Pacific for the Atlantic, and found a new home on Nova Scotia’s rugged shores
Our lives are made up of stories: tales we tell to others and ourselves. We’re born into a narrative, ever-evolving from generation to generation. Author and journalist Marjorie Simmins believes in the power of writing it down. She’s a born memoirist.
This spring, Simmins, who’s originally from British Columbia, released her first book, Coastal Lives: A Memoir, published by Nova Scotia’s Pottersfield Press. In it, she explores the rocky road to love, and how she followed her heart from the city of glass to the hills of Cape Breton to marry author Silver Donald Cameron.
Simmins believes the heart is the only compass, and obeying its rhythms led her to a whole new life on the East Coast, a successful marriage and an entire book’s worth of material.
“I am an unrepentant romantic. Someone who loves to love and be loved, and believes most people are happiest when they have a best friend and sweetheart in the same person,” says Simmins. “Love is for everyone, and for all of us at any age.”
While Coastal Lives is a book primarily about love, it’s not a glossy romance. Simmins digs deep, recollecting her family’s struggles, and exposing the sad-luck-single serenade of her late 30s in Vancouver as a freelance fisheries reporter. Her fate changed in 1994 when she met Cameron, also an author and journalist. On assignment for Trek, University of British Columbia’s alumni magazine, Simmins interviewed Cameron in Kitsilano on a spring morning, when the Japanese cherry blossoms were in full bloom.
The two writers hit it off, talking long after the interview wrapped up. Cameron told Simmins that if she ever found herself in Cape Breton, she’d be welcomed by him and his wife Lulu. They kept in touch, sending the odd letter here and there, until two years later when Cameron made the difficult call from Cape Breton to tell Simmins his wife had passed away.
That phone call lasted over an hour. Cameron offered to send her a copy of his book, The Education of Everett Richardson. In return, Simmins sent him a copy of her National Magazine Award-winning essay about her sister Karin, published in Saturday Night magazine in 1993.
Over the next couple of months, two writers on opposite coasts cultivated a friendship spanning 800 emails and countless phone calls, until Cameron proposed a face-to-face date. He could be there in a day’s notice.
At first, Simmins hesitated and rejected his invitation, politely asking him to give her space. She wasn’t ready to become someone’s long-distance lover, let alone a widower 22 years her senior. And she loved her life on the West Coast. He gave her space. She noticed his absence. Before long they resumed writing and courting across the miles. (At one point, Cameron threatened to come to Vancouver, and post a sign on her lawn, reading: “Marjorie won’t go out with me.”) After six months of correspondence he came to visit; two years later, in 1998, they married in Vancouver. Simmins packed her bags for the East Coast, and her true-love story.
Nearly 20 years later, the couple, Simmins at 55, and Cameron at 77, live together on the Northwest Arm in Halifax, and have a view of the ocean. They still correspond a dozen times a day by email from their offices—Cameron writing upstairs, and Simmins in the office on main floor—and keep a summer home in Cape Breton.
She didn’t even have to give up her first love, the ocean.
The ocean has shaped every aspect of Simmins’ life, and it’s where she feels her best, most inspired. (In the dedication of Coastal Lives, she even writes “For Don, who fell from the sky—love you big as the sea.”)
“I am always aware of the ocean’s smell, and the wind’s speed and direction. I love all the ocean’s creatures and the seabirds. I love ocean sounds and colours,” says Simmins. “My loves are always stirred up in the ocean waters. Water gives me both the peace and stimulus to write.”
Simmins has been a morning writer since she was a teenager, waking early to write for a few hours each day. Over the years, she’s been a diligent journal keeper and letter writer, penning up to three handwritten missives a day, in cursive handwriting on perfect stationery. It’s this daily dedication that led her to write Coastal Lives.
“I had wanted to write this book for some time. When you sit down at the right time to write, it’s just a joy—the words do flow when the time is right,” she says. “I wrote 20,000 words in a month. I had been poised at the runner’s line for 10 years. I just totally read wanted to; if it had come any earlier it wouldn’t be the book it is.
Simmins teaches memoir-writing workshops, and is an avid reader of memoirs. (She cites Linda Greenlaw’s The Hungry Ocean, Harvest of Salmon, by Zoë Landale [her older sister] and Bay of Spirits, by Farley Mowat, as some of her favourites.) She believes every person has a story to tell. There’s nowhere to hide in memoir—you have to lay it all on the line: the good, bad, and the ugly.
“If you’re going to pen a memoir that has enduring interest and artistic merit, you can’t write about the surface of a life,” she says. “Offer an honest voice and an honest recounting of a life. No excuses. No pretty language covering over the hard bits. Your reader has to trust you, and that means more than talk about the weather.”