How revisiting the Ocean Ranger tragedy inspired Lisa Moore to think about the climate crisis
Moore’s 2009 novel February was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2010 and won Canada Reads in 2013
When Lisa Moore got the offer to have her award-winning novel February turned into an opera, she was hesitant.
"If you looked for someone who knew less about music in Newfoundland or Canada, or the whole world, you would have a hard time finding anyone who knew less than me," she tells Q's Tom Power.
Now, Moore is not just one of Canada's most acclaimed writers, but a co-librettist for the opera adaptation of one of her most cherished works.
February received huge amounts of praise when it was published in 2009. Nominations for a Giller Prize and the Booker Prize followed, and it would go on to win Canada Reads in 2013.
Real-life tragedy
The novel is set around the Ocean Ranger oil rig disaster, one of the worst maritime tragedies in Newfoundland's history. Eighty-four people died when the rig sank in a storm, and the incident still resonates with Newfoundlanders today.
The novel is partially about the experience of grief, as the protagonist of February, Helen O'Mara, lives in the wake of her husband's death.
"My own father died suddenly when I was 16 of natural causes, and so I watched my mother grieve for a very long time," says Moore. "I'm interested in the idea that grieving is a very important part of the human experience.… We go on working and raising children or falling in love with other people. But that thread is present in a kind of beautiful way."
Contemporary disaster
While February is rooted in a well-known tragedy that happened decades ago, Moore says that adapting the novel to music has changed its meaning.
"I do listen to music, but this was about Laura [Kaminsky] showing me how even changing a note shifts the mood in a scene, like a single note," Moore tells Power. "I am listening to these singers who have voices that, you know, where they can sustain a note for a very, very long time and their voices fill the room.
"I'm thinking, that's oxygen, that's breathing, that is how we lost those men."
With the help of the more musically inclined co-librettist Laura Kaminsky, Moore was able to root February's message in the ever-evolving state of the climate emergency.
"These accidents are the fault of the oil companies and all of us are implicated in the production of oil when we drive our cars," she says. "It just seems so much more urgent to talk about this, to talk about what it means to go deeper and deeper in deeper water, in colder water, to get oil.
"It still is about the loss of human life and a desire to honour those men and to honour the kind of work that they gave for the province, for their families."
The full interview with Lisa Moore is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Interview with Lisa Moore produced by Ben Edwards.
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