The Promoter

Now in her mid-eighties and nationally celebrated as a biographer and CanLit specialist, Sandra Djwa is “less conscious of living on the margins of place and more conscious of living on the margins of time,” even though her latest title, Ground to Stand On, suggests that place has primacy in the arc of her life. In retirement, she can again “see the connections” that link her to her eighteenth-century ancestors, who voyaged from England in search of a better life. “With the return to my family past,” she explains in her preface, “I felt the tug of my birthplace and the autobiographical impulse.”

Djwa’s story begins in April 1939, in “the small, rugged coves of Newfoundland.” Both sides of her family (the Hancocks on her maternal side and the Drodges on her paternal) descended from seafaring people. Her father, Walter, had “run away to sea as a teenager,” educating himself through reading and then studying navigation in New York. Her mother, Dora, worked as...