On Valentine's Day, 1982, the oil rig Ocean Ranger sank off the coast of Newfoundland during a violent storm. All eighty-four men aboard died, raising a number of questions around the safety protocols of a rig nicknamed Ocean Danger.

February (House of Anansi Press), Lisa Moore's follow up to her Giller-nominated novel Alligator, is not about the oil rig, or life aboard it. Moore's protagonist, widow Helen O'Mara, tries briefly to imagine the moments before her husband's death, but the story doesn't reside here. The disaster serves as the impetus for a remarkable story of loss and one woman's attempt to find evidence of herself in a present that has yet to reconcile the past.

Moore sets the reader up on the shore, squaring our shoulders against the horizon, while her narrative ebbs and flows, cycling back over territory and time. I collected the expected pieces — the routine act of matching socks, or a long distance phone call from Helen's son to announce his pending fatherhood — as if pocketing skipping pebbles, tossing some back upon finding others that might promise greater distance — Helen's first foray into dating, or her readiness to picture her husband's last moments.

With each chapter, I checked my footing, looking down, surprised to discover my ankles rooted deeper in the sand, a fascination carried over from childhood. For Moore to tell Helen's story, I would give in to this rhythm, allowing the story to be told in its own time. That the reader can trust Moore to keep our heads above water is a subtle gift. That her most attentive reader is, no doubt, her most immediate community, those who lost husbands, brothers, sons, and lovers — impressed me most. It's been twenty-seven years since the Ocean Ranger sank, and February feels like a quiet call to action, that like Helen who lost the most certain thing in her life, those left behind don't have the option to give up, to stop breathing.

Moore agreed to answer a few questions via email, and I began by asking if this sense of rhythm was a conscious construction.

“I think the rhythm in February is intimately linked to the way memory works . . . bits of talk, small scenes, how they flood through, wash over us, wash away.” She continues, “[Helen] is haunted by a need to know what happened out there [on the rig], what happened when her husband died. Was he afraid? Was he alone? She wants to be with him . . . so she can know.”

We cannot live others' stories, but often we're left to tell them. With no survivors aboard the Ocean Ranger, an eye witness account is not the reality that's left behind but rather the individual stories of the people on shore. “[I'm] interested,” Moore expands, “in the ramifications of that kind of tragedy on a community . . . [and] in time as a social construct that stretches and shrinks, that bunches, and draws itself out, and how time behaves over the course of a whole life.”

Moore also captures, achingly, the loss one woman feels for the partner she truly loved, alongside the frustration of a woman who recognizes her capacity to love, and the loss that comes with not expressing that again for another, something she begins to negotiate slowly with varying results.

“I wanted to imagine what love is and how impossible it is to let go of love, even when a lover dies. And what that means exactly — moving on, but not letting go. It means for [Helen] a flood of memory that moves in and out like the ocean — memory that's as present as the present.”

Closing in on the final pages of February, I experienced a desire to hear more stories from that time, and a hope that perhaps Helen's account would encourage more to follow.

“I think we find the rhythms of the stories we tell in our own bodies,” Moore concludes, “the way a heart beats, the way we draw breath, and in the landscape, the way the ocean pounds, how long it takes a kettle to boil, a fog horn, rain hitting a tin roof, a traffic light changing. The durations marked by these things act in concert to make us understand the rhythm of a story.”

Many thanks to Lisa Moore for the chat!

Listen to Lisa in conversation with Shelagh Rogers on CBC's “The Next Chapter.”

Publishers, if you'd like to set up an Author Talk, fire me an email at bookmadam[at]gmail[dot]com.