That Forgetful Shore is set in Missing Point, a fictional town located on the same piece of ground as the very real town of Coley’s Point, Newfoundland. The real Point lies next to the larger town of Bay Roberts, and across the beach from Bareneed. In the 1860s, my great-great-grandfather, Abram Morgan, built this house on the south side of Coley’s Point and took his bride, Rachel Andrews, to live there:
The house has been in our family ever since — it currently belongs to my aunt, novelist Bernice Morgan. It’s in this house that I first saw the postcards that served as the inspiration for the story of Kit and Triffie, and the house where Triffie lives for all of her married life is based on this house.
For a tiny community that boasted about 1300 people in its heyday in the 1880s (it was down to about 600 by the 1960s, just after That Forgetful Shore ends), Coley’s Point has a lot to brag about in literary terms. It’s the hometown of two of Newfoundland’s best-known authors. Playwright David French was born there, and though his family moved away while he was still quite young, the community remains in the background of much of his work. The much-loved play Saltwater Moon is set in Coley’s Point in 1926. Storyteller Ted Russell was born and grew up in Coley’s Point, and it’s generally agreed that the community was one of several which served as the inspiration for Russell’s beloved fictional outport, Pigeon Inlet.
Some people have asked why I changed the name of the town in writing the book. In the first draft, I called the town Coley’s Point, but I became uncomfortable with the fact that I had made a few small changes to the geography and history of the town, and created fictional characters — not all of them nice people! — who didn’t necessarily correspond to real-life people on the Point. Finally I decided that if I gave my fictional town another name, I could feel a little more free to make changes and not have to stick to reality as much, while still honouring the real place that inspired the story.
I hope that by setting That Forgetful Shore in a fictional version of the Point, I’ve done a little to contribute to this tiny town’s rich literary heritage.
