'What I found in Lucy Maud Montgomery's pages was thrilling': Antonio of Green Gables

“What does that loudmouth little red-headed girl have to do with me?” I wondered. 

I had just found out that my little trip to Prince Edward Island, to the inaugural Cavendish Literary Festival, had become a pilgrimage to the home of Lucy Maud Montgomery's classic work Anne of Green Gables — a book I previously had no interest in reading.

You see, until then Montgomery and her beloved protagonist Anne Shirley were like sunburns to my dark, Trinidadian skin: I had heard about them but had only a vague idea what they were about.

The Canadian tale of the pony-tailed orphan with the spunky spirit seemed quaint and irrelevant to me. 

Though I deferred to my CBC Books team of producers and agreed to read the book and receive a tour of Green Gables, the "temple of Montgomery", I wondered what lessons these beloved books, their island home and their iconic heroine would have to teach me? 

What I found in the pages was thrilling: a writer in ecstasy with her subject, Dickensian vividness without Dickensian verbosity — characters so finely drawn it felt as though Montgomery had just dashed in from tea with them, witty, revealing dialogue that stuck and, of course, Anne.

I wasn’t prepared to encounter this endlessly chatty, imaginative child, re-naming every feeling, every tree, even friendship itself — “Bosom Friend,” “Kindred Spirits” — imbuing it with a kind of magic. She exuded a boundless positivity despite her comically tragic upbringing. 

As my grandma, Miss Excelly, would say, "some things if you don’t laugh, you will cry.” Anne didn’t laugh but she never let trouble weigh her down.

But my favorite Anne alchemy is in how Montgomery describes landscapes and geography. A mere pond became “The Lake of Shining Waters,” a stand of trees turned to, “The Haunted Wood,” and a scenic walking trail was instantly, “Lover’s Lane.” 

And even before the plane descended from the clouds over Charlottetown, I was already in awe of the ground from which this story grew.

My initiation into the cult of Anne had begun. 

Linden McIntyre must’ve thought that I was stalking him.

Days after interviewing the former host of CBC’s The Fifth Estate about his new book, I said a sheepish hello on the airplane only for him and I to be piled into the same minivan upon landing. 

Both of us, we discovered, were on our way to the Cavendish Literary Festival, but Linden, an easterner, Cape Breton born and bred, was much less wide-eyed about the whole thing. We passed along the bright seaside road through the town of North Rustico and entered Prince Edward Island National Park.