Dividing Island John Stefler Summary

The title of this work comes from a line in Dividing Island by John Steffler. I believe this poem is as close a representation to modern day Newfoundland living as can be. It is a well-known fact among Newfoundlanders that if you want to be successful, it is necessary that you will need to leave the island. There is a sad reality that jobs and opportunities in Newfoundland itself are lacking, which causes for tight budgets or a goal to one day work away. People are required to leave home in order to make a living, and in doing so they are divided between home and work. It is difficult enough to spend time with your family when working full-time, but to be obligated to work weeks away from home at a time, it can become a painful reality for several families.
This anthology aims to prove that Newfoundland life can be trying too. When someone is forced to leave home, there is always a reflection on what you are parting with. For the variety of characters in the following works, sometimes this loss is experienced more severely than for others. The amount of longing for what they once had is prominent in each, and continue to draw on this emotional connection

Whatever pain is displayed in the passages that follow, the authors ground their characters through this shared location, which shows in the landscape and nature’s influence that happens to be prevalent in a number of the works chosen for this anthology in particular. It is a common theme, it seems, that Newfoundland is the one solid, concrete location, while it is the humans that are flimsy with their dedications. Being an island, Newfoundland is often portrayed as a concrete entity that will never disappear except by the occasional water erosion, but instead it is always the humans that leave as is mentioned in Cedar’s Cove by John