life rattle show no. 1194

Presented on Sunday, March 4, 2012

Hosted by Laurie Kallis

featuring

Aline Burke reading her stories
"Jackpot"
"Blood"
and
"Terre de Cain Vignettes"

tonight's Show

Tonight, on Life Rattle No. 1194, we bring you three Life Rattle Classics written and read by Aline Burke.

Aline Burke, was born in Blanc Sablon in 1960, the eighth of eleven children. Her father, the teacher in the village, also worked as a carpenter for the local Catholic mission. He built schools and churches in towns along the coast. Her mother—when she finished raising eleven children—became mayor for two terms.

In 1974, when she was fourteen, Burke left Blanc Sablon to go to high school in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, 1500 hundred miles from home, the only option for someone in her village who wanted to go to high school. She boarded with a number of families in the townships for the three years she attended high school, and returned to the village upon graduation and worked as a clerk at the Hudson Bay Store for a year. When she was eighteen, Burke went to Montreal and worked as a housekeeper for a wealthy family in the affluent area of Town of Mount Royal. When she couldn't stand it anymore, she came to Toronto.

In Toronto she worked in restaurants, as a nanny, at the Women's Movement Archives, as a labourer doing demolition and construction. She also went to university for three years. Aline Burke finally became a painter and started her own business in 1987 called Just Paint. Aline Burke has been writing since 1986. In 1992 she received a Canada Council Explorations grant to work on the Terre de Cain stories.

Tonight’s featured stories come from Aline Burke’s Terre de Cain collection, stories of life in Blanc Sablon, the village Burke grew up in. Blanc Sablon sits on the southern coast of Labrador, on the border of Quebec across from the northern Peninsula of Newfoundland. The closest city is Quebec City, five hundred miles away.

Although Blanc Sablon is a Quebec village, the culture is more like Newfoundland. Blanc Sablon’s population of about 350-400 people descended from settlers who came from Ireland during the famine in the 1840s, as well as settlers from France. The closest village is in Labrador, about four miles away. There is a road going through, but the road deadends about 40 miles in either direction.

Blanc Sablon was named White Sand by Jaques Cartier in the 1530s. Cartier called the area "Land God Gave to Cain" because it is so barren and rocky. Hence the name of the collection: Terre de Cain, or Land of Cain, Vignettes.

Recently digitized from an analog collection of Life Rattle treasures, the three stories we present to you tonight, have not been heard since they were last aired in 1995.