GODMOTHER OF CAPE BRETON FICTION, and an essential figure in contemporary storytelling, Tessie Gillis has inspired Nova Scotia writers including Lynn Coady, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Alistair MacLeod, and Sheldon Currie. Her gripping stories dare to open the door to a realistic, sympathetic, and often dark portrait of rural Cape Breton life.

The Innocent and Other Stories is generous selection inspired by Sheldon Currie’s powerful and insightful opening essay— stories with exquisite focus on her vivid characters' hopes, fears, and failings. Gillis explores the pain and joy of the ties that bind, be they marital or community. No one before her wrote such stark or compassionate Cape Breton stories.

“Tessie Gillis’ stories are full of warmth, comedy and insight . . . . Her subtle humour is a constant pleasure that lightens the bleakness of the most tragic, cruel and hopeless moments.”—Sheldon Currie, author of The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum—the Novel

“Here we have a living, breathing, thinking woman who looked about her and recorded what she saw with caring and affection, and without flinching.”—Mary Anne Ducharme, author of Archie Neil: From the Life and Stories of Archie Neil Chisholm of Margaree Forks, Cape Breton

Born in Montana in 1910, Tessie Gillis in the 1950s came with her husband Joe to Rear Glencoe in Inverness County to live the hard, satisfying life of rural Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Illness finally gave her the opportunity to write, and her friend and editor Evelyn Garbary helped her bloom into one of Cape Breton's finest writers. Daring to write about the darker elements of rural life, Tessie Gillis has emerged as the Godmother of Cape Breton Fiction. She died in 1972.

Tessie Gillis' profile page

Born in Reserve Mines, Cape Breton, Sheldon Currie is professor emeritus at St. Francis Xavier University and author of short stories, novels, and plays. Probably his most widely known work is The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum, which was also adapted for radio and stage plays, and made into the critically acclaimed film Margaret’s Museum, starring Helena Bonham Carter. In his varied career, Sheldon has also served in the RAF and as fiction editor of The Antigonish Review. His play Lauchie, Liza and Rory won the 2004 Merritt Award for best play by a Nova Scotia writer. Down the Coaltown Road, first published in 2002, was nominated for the Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction.

Sheldon Currie's profile page