Shunpiking Online Vol 2 No 10 Voices of Nova Scotia communities By SILVER DONALD CAMERON

Excerpted from
Voices of Nova Scotia Communities; A Written Democracy
By Scott Milsom
Fernwood Publishing 2003
192 pages, B&W photos
IBSN 1 55266 113 x
$17.95

NEARLY thirty-five years ago, when I was a downy-cheeked young professor at the University of New Brunswick, I joined a few friends in establishing a cheeky investigative monthly called The Mysterious East. It ran for three or four years, and it was one of the most draining and exhilarating things I've ever done.

The experience left me with profound admiration for any writer who - like Scott Milsom - can make a life (if not necessarily a living) in alternative journalism. Alternative journalism provides reports and viewpoints - political, social, artistic, psychedelic - which differ sharply from those of the mainstream media and are often irreverently critical of them. The best such journalism is incisive, provocative, impassioned, and funny. The late 1960s and early '70s saw a remarkable flowering of alternative publications in the Maritimes, but most folded fairly quickly. Then came New Maritimes, founded in 1982, which published for fourteen years. Scott Milsom was among its founders and was managing editor from 1988 to 1996. When New Maritimes ceased, Milsom joined Nova Scotia's Coastal Communities Network - "A Large Voice for Small Communities" - and became editor of its bi-monthly magazine, Coastal Communities News. That makes him perhaps the only journalist in the world with a mandate to report on recent developments in East Kemptville, Freeport, Lincolnville, and Orangedale. It's a pleasure to see these pieces collected in this volume. Reading these pieces together is quite different from reading them separately. Themes emerge. Milsom's character emerges too. Rather charmingly, he is diffident about the fact that he's a city guy, a born Haligonian, trying to absorb and express a very different rural frame of mind. But he pulls it off triumphantly. He obviously likes these people, and they like him, too.

There are, of course, many different rural frames of mind. A farmer in Stewiacke sees the world differently from a Caledonia logger or a Chéticamp fish harvester. But they do have something in common, and part of the pleasure of Milsom's explorations is the understanding, built up chapter by chapter like layers of paint, of the outlook that rural people share. They share a certain connectedness with their natural environment, which is where most of them make a living. They share the understanding that, although you may not like or trust your next-door neighbour, he's not going away, and you're going to need one another, so you'd better figure out how to get along with him. They share a way of knowing. As Alex Colville once remarked, the rural world is much less kaleidoscopic than the city. There are many things you never see or know - but what you do know, you know extremely well.

Rural populations are shrinking everywhere, and many rural residents have thought carefully about why they stay. It has to do with the unity of their lives, with the way that work and play and family and social obligation all flow seamlessly into each other.

They also understand - and this is the core of Milsom's concern - that if they do not take charge of their own communities and give them life and direction, nobody else will

. They often develop a very active style of citizenship. Milsom is fascinated by these struggles to keep small communities vibrant in a world that increasingly sees them as redundant, backward, and irrelevant. He interviews theatre entrepreneurs, environmentalists, historical societies, women's groups, harbour authorities, fishermen's associations, health clinics, teen groups, mayors, and innkeepers. What's shaking in Tusket, Bay St. Lawrence, River Hebert?

His procedure is unusual, profoundly democratic - and risky. He tells his subjects that he's going to write about them, and he gives them the opportunity to review and revise what he's written before publication. This process, he argues, makes people more forthcoming, and saves him from many inaccuracies. It also corrects a power imbalance between writer and subject. He is not a lofty author, feeding off the people he visits. He becomes, in effect, their voice.

But the price may be the sacrifice of his own voice, his own perception, his own judgments and sometimes, I suspect, the evaporation of jagged or slippery realities. What a person blurts out is often more revealing than what he or she composes for the record. The raciness of Nova Scotian language disappears. The woman who said, "I was that savage, I could have torn off his arm and beat 'im with the wet end" decides that "I was angry" would look better in print.

Milsom might argue that such reporting can be left to less civilized authors, such as myself. True enough. Voices of Nova Scotia Community: A Written Democracy is a unique project: an attempt to give voice to ordinary people engaged in an extraordinary effort to find their footing in a world whose attention is always elsewhere. In its hopefulness and good humour, it is a memorable testament to the determination and courage of people who don't think they're marginal at all.