How I Wrote William Pender

Finding the Story

I did not know one thing about William Pender or his world. I went to the library at MUN. Anybody can go there. There is a wonderful room in there where you can hunt for stories that have happened here. It is called the Centre for Newfoundland Studies.

There are people who help you. You tell them what kind of story you are hunting. They go in a big back room where they keep all the stories. There are whole stories and bits of stories. You can use the bits to piece together old stories that no one ever found out before. Or you can make new stories.

I wanted to find a story about a working man around 1900 in St. John's. I found some essays about that. One said there was a man who made barrels. Barrel makers were called coopers. They had a strike in 1904. This one man never found work again. He wandered over the South Side Hill and perished.

That was all it said. It did not say his name. The rest of the essay talked about something else.

If I write something I like it to teach me. I want it to thrill me. I want to feel as if I am hunting treasure. If feels like when we did scavenger hunts as kids.

I decided I wanted to find out who the barrel maker was. I wanted to see his world, and smell it and taste it.

First I needed his name. If he died in a strange way, he would probably be in the newspaper. The same library has newspapers in the basement. They go back in time. I found St. John's papers from 1904.

St. John's had a lot of newspapers in those days. They told different kinds of news. They still had The Evening Telegram. They also had the Daily News. Then there was a paper that told a lot of working man's news, and another one that told rich people's news.

I looked in them all to find the name of the barrel maker who died. I did not know the date of the strike, so I looked through every day's paper in all of the papers starting in January of 1904. Finally in October, after reading hundreds of papers, I found the strike.

The strike was over in November. That meant the barrel maker could have died a few months later, in the winter of 1905. So I looked through 1905 papers too.