Renée Belliveau’s first novel, The Sound of Fire, was published by Vagrant Press in 2021. It was shortlisted for the 2022 ReLit Award in the novel category, and was named one of Quill and Quire’s 2021 books of the year as well as one of the Miramichi Reader’s best fiction titles of 2021.

First, what compelled you to write a novel about this particular historical event?

I started working at the Mount Allison University Archives only a few years after completing my BA, and the stories that appealed to me the most usually related to the student experience. Stories related to the 1941 residence fire abounded in the archival holdings, and I often stumbled across references and collections that served as pieces of a puzzle. In a way, I felt haunted by those voices and writing about it was a way for me to make sense of it.

This story is told from the points of view of a large cast of characters, most of whom only get one chapter to tell their story. What made you decide to tell the story this way, rather than focussing on one or a few narrators? And can you describe the process of piecing together the narrative in this way?

The structure of the novel was inspired by the archival records themselves. I learned about the fire through correspondence, diary accounts, newspaper clippings, photographs, oral history interviews, and so forth. The full picture came to me from fragments, and by the time I decided to write about it, I couldn’t divorce the event from the countless perspectives I had encountered in the archives.

I was also interested in showing how many people had been affected by this fire, but most importantly, the narrative structure allowed me to focus the story on the event itself rather than on the experiences of a few characters.

I know that Mount Allison University is essentially the focal point of the small town of Sackville, NB. What impact did this fire in 1941 have on the school and on the town then? And, in the book, you mention also that there were fires at the school in 1933 that had “taken on an almost mythical aura” by 1941. I know you attended Mount Allison for your undergraduate degree—were people still talking about the fires when you were there as a student?

I only learned about the 1941 fire during my final year at university, when the alumni magazine published an article to commemorate the 75th anniversary. There is a plaque on campus in remembrance of the students who lost their lives to the fire, but it is not something that was frequently discussed. I also only learned about the fires that occurred in 1933 when I started working at the archives.

It has been interesting to see who had previous knowledge of the fire. Students from the 1950s tell me they had no idea what had happened only a decade or so before they attended, while some students from the 1980s were aware of it. It seems to be the kind of story that comes and goes.

This is a novel about a devastating fire, but, since it takes place in 1941, it is also a novel about World War II. There’s mention in the novel that men who attended university rather than leaving to fight in the war were considered to be “shirkers”—can you elaborate on the atmosphere at the time? How were these men at Mount Allison, and the idea of getting a post-secondary education in general, seen in the broader world? Was this seen as an indulgence?

Anxiety permeates the pages of the student newspaper during the war years. It’s evident based on how often they wrote about it that male students felt the need to constantly argue their position as students. Whether that anxiety came from within or from external influence is unclear.

However, the widespread adoption of the Canadian Officers' Training Corps (COTC) on Canadian campuses points to a larger national anxiety about the role of education in wartime. This was a program that had been introduced during the First World War, revived in 1939, and made mandatory for all male students in 1940. Clearly, universities felt obliged to show their students were doing something useful while other men that age were going off to fight. Training did not extend to women, though most universities probably did see the rise of women-led volunteer organizations.

Students (especially in the sciences) were also being recruited for their expertise, so while education may have been seen as an indulgence, that knowledge was also a valued part of the war effort.

The fire itself is one of the characters in this novel. You ended up sort of anthropomorphising the fire into a somewhat tragic, lonely being who seemed to be looking for a friend, a being perhaps lonely in its power. I’m interested to know how you decided on or developed this particular personality for the fire, rather than something more sinister.

The voice of the fire came to me unexpectedly. I was nearing the end of the first draft when I heard it, and it completely shifted the tone of the novel. Though it wasn’t a conscious decision on my part, inspiration doesn’t happen in vacuum. I was inspired in part by Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, where Death features as a narrator. I remember Zusak saying in an interview that he had difficulty striking the right tone with the voice of Death, because he didn’t want it to come across as malevolent. I had the same intention while writing from the perspective of Fire.

Societies have often tied natural disasters to the wrath or whims of higher beings, and I think we tend to speak of them in language that imparts a sense of consciousness on these natural elements. I was interested in highlighting this contradiction. While the characters describe the fire’s fury and pleasure, fire itself has no intention or target. It simply burns.

Ultimately, I wanted to explore it as a narrative device that brought all of these different perspectives together.

I hope I’m not spoiling anything with this question, but in the end, they never found the cause of the fire. I imagine this is what happened in real life, but since this is a work of fiction, I wonder what led you to decide not to make up a cause, even if it was accidental, of the fire.  

Though I have fictionalized the characters to avoid speaking on behalf of anyone, the story is entirely based in fact. It never even occurred to me to make up a cause!

I have also heard or read several different versions of this story, many of which claim a cause that is not reflected in the archival records. The book includes some musings on the concept of “truth” precisely because of the contradictions I encountered in my research. Faced with all these different possibilities, I realized that the mystery itself was an integral part of the story.

One thing I ask authors to do is to provide me with a song list – either songs that are inspired by your book, or maybe songs that you listened to while writing the book.

I don’t listen to music while I write, but I do have a list of books that inspired The Sound of Fire, if that is of interest!

The Sound of Fire Reading List

Mean Boy by Lynn Coady

This novel is set at a fictional university in New Brunswick, a thinly veiled version of Mount Allison. I read it during my first year of university and now credit Coady for giving me license to eventually write my own campus novel.

Watermark by Christy Ann Conlin

I started writing The Sound of Fire after I moved from Sackville to Toronto, and Conlin’s book of short stories was the first one I purchased at the local independent bookstore near my new apartment. Conlin, a Nova Scotia author who writes so beautifully about the Maritimes, carried me home, and my book was a way for me to write myself home as well.

The Book Thief by Mark Zusak

I already mentioned why this one is significant. I love stories set at the periphery of war, and Zusak inspired me to take chances with my own writing, to try something unusual.

Renée Belliveau is a writer and archivist who gladly spends her days surrounded by records from the past. She is the author of The Sound of Fire, a novel based on the true story of the devastating 1941 fire at Mount Allison University, and a memoir about her father’s battle with cancer entitled Les étoiles à l’aube. She holds degrees from Mount Allison University, the University of Waterloo, and the University of Toronto. She lives in the Siknikt district of Mi’kma’ki (Sackville, New Brunswick), but calls any shore in the Maritimes home.