Lawrence stands the writer’s shack w here Alistair Macleod wrote many of his stories. In the near distance on a bluff overlooking the Gulf of St. We step over the downed trees, for d a stream by walking on a log, and emerge on a beach strewn with rocks and boulders. Across the trail dead trees guard MacLeod’s right to privacy. Gil MacLeod’s path to the writing shack leads through a forest of white birches. He grew up in the Dunvegan farmhouse his great-grandfather built in the 1860s.

His parents moved to Alberta where his father worked in the coal mines, then returned to the MacLeod homestead on Cape Breton Island when Alistair was ten. He once said of his works, “These are not true stories, but they’re real stories.” Alistair MacLeod’s family home in Dunvegan, Inverness County (photo by Kathleen Wickham)Īlistai r MacLeod (1936-2014) was born in Saskatchewan. Yet alt hough fictional characters and places are imaginary, MacLeod’s stories of third and fourth generation Scottish immigrants’ hardships in a starkly beautiful but unforgiving landscape are based on rock- solid reality.

“ People asked him all the time is that whe re such and such happened, is that bluff ‘ Cal um Ruadh Point,’ is that where the boy ’ s parents fe ll through the ice and drowned? And he said again and again, ‘It’ s fiction. T all, blonde, and plain-spoken, Gil MacLeod warns against a literal interpretation of his cousin’s works. Driving north on Highway 19 from the Canso C ause way and winding along the coast I’ve been keeping an eye out for “ Calum Ruadh’s Point,” the fictional burial place of redheaded Calum MacDonald which is worn away by storms “as if his grave is moving out to sea.” Gil MacLeod leading the way to the writing shack. His novel No Great Mischief, publ ished when he was 63, tells the story of the clan Donald’s emigration to Canada led by patriarch “ Calum MacDonald” during the Highlands Clearances. In MacLeod’s stories, fiction and history are inextricably intertwined, and the literary pilgrim comes to Cape Breton Island expecting to find landmarks immortalized in his stories.

Island by alistair macleod