MARYSTOWN, N.L. — Annie Daylon left Placentia and Newfoundland many tides ago.
For many who leave, arguably most, this island just doesn’t let go.
Daylon likes it that way just fine.
“Newfoundland owns me,” she said via telephone from the other side of the country.
“I may be living in British Columbia, but my heart is in Newfoundland. I think that’s a common affliction of many of us who move away.”
Daylon has been back to Newfoundland about a dozen times in the last two decades. Regardless of whether she’s living here or not, the connection will always run deep.
“It’s the Atlantic, and it’s the ocean,” she says of the pull eastward.
Newfoundland is also the backdrop for Daylon’s writing raison d'être, her book series, The Kerrigan Chronicles.
“This literary family saga is what I was meant to write, I think,” Daylon says.
Tsunami setting
Of Sea and Seed launched The Kerrigan Chronicles in 2015, introducing the story of three generations of the Kerrigan clan to readers.
The 1929 Tsunami, which devastated several Placentia Bay communities, served as the driving force behind the book, Daylon says, with the Burin Peninsula as a major setting. Argentia is also part of the backdrop.
The idea came about during conservations she had with her father, Andrew Lannon, who died recently at the age of 97.
“Of Seed and Sea launches The Kerrigan Chronicles, the story of three generations battered by love, betrayal, war, and the effects of a tsunami that ravages the Burin Peninsula of Newfoundland in 1929. Family matriarch, story teller, and ghost—Kathleen Kerrigan—confesses that heaven does not open its gates to women of her ilk.
“In her afterlife she is adrift, doomed like some ancient mariner to atone for mortal sin by telling repeatedly the story of her downfall. With the lyrical voice of Kathleen at the helm and through the voices of her children—the duty-bound Kevin and the strong-willed Clara—mysteries fall away until the core of Kathleen’s crime is revealed.”
- Of Seed and Sea synopsis from www.anniedaylon.com
“After my mom died, I used to call him almost every day, and you kind of run out of conversation. So, I started asking him about his childhood, about stories, and things,” Daylon said.
“One day, he said, ‘I remember the earthquake’ … and he said, ‘I remember the tsunami, too.’”
Lannon told her how he and his brother were putting ducks in a barn when everything started to shake in Placentia.
Daylon was hooked.
“I started with the idea of a little girl and I kept playing what if, what if, what if, until I came to the idea of her grandmother, who’s a storyteller. She’s a ghost in the story. She’s set adrift to wander, telling the same story over and over,” Daylon explains.
“The characters, of course, are all fictional, but everything is set to pretty accurate history, to the best of my ability, because I have done a ton of research.”
Regaining focus
Daylon says she always had a hunch she would be a writer someday.
“I spent over 30 years as an elementary school teacher, but it wasn’t until my husband was diagnosed with cancer that I clicked into the idea that the only time we have is today,” she says.
Daylon’s husband beat the disease and a few years after that she retired and began writing.
These days Daylon is hard at work finishing off the second installment in The Kerrigan Chronicles and hopes to have the book released sometime this year.
After having some success with Of Sea and Seed, Daylon turned her efforts onto another book, which she subsequently released.
Finding herself burnt out from a variety of writing gigs, it was another medical scare in late 2018 – this time, her own – that shifted her attention once more to The Kerrigan Chronicles and making sure the series is completed.
“It pushed me back into focusing, definitely, on getting back and getting it done,” she says.
Daylon says the Second World War drives book number two in the series with the conflict landing on the Kerrigan family’s doorstep in Argentia. The war years and its aftermath, up to Newfoundland joining Confederation in 1949, will set the stage for the third book.
“I’m getting there,” she said of Of Sea and Seed’s follow-up.
“The story is done. The story is down, but sometimes you have to find the right word, in the right paragraph, and that can take some time.”
Of Sea and Seed success
Of Sea and Seed was a fiction finalist in the 2017 Whistler Independent Book Awards, a semi-finalist in the 2017 Kindle Book Review Awards, the recipient of a B.R.A.G Medallion, and the winner of the 2017 B.R.A.G Award for Cover Design.
