Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush, first published in 1852, is the account of a British middle-class woman immigrating to the backwoods of Canada with her husband and daughter. The memoir, which details the hardships of land-clearing and starting a new life in an unfamiliar country, went on to influence a number of Canadian literary icons: Margaret Atwood’s book of poetry The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970) and novel Alias Grace (1996), Carol Shields’ novel Small Ceremonies (1976) and critical analysis Susanna Moodie: Voice and Vision (1977), and Margaret Laurence's novel The Diviners (1974), among others, were all inspired in some significant way by Moodie’s pioneer story. Even Timothy Findley’s 1993 novel Headhunter features a ghostly Susanna Moodie as a character.
Now, Moodie’s story will be brought to a whole new audience: Second Story Press has published a graphic novel adaptation, available in Canada this week and in the U.S. on September 6. This print book started out as a screenplay co-written by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Shields (who died in 2003) and Patrick Crowe, founder and president of production company Xenophile Media. That screenplay never made it to the big screen, but instead, Crowe has used the story to create an animated, interactive app – available worldwide later this month for iPads and Android tablets – which takes the story to a new level.
“It’s sort of a cross between an animated film and a moving book,” explains Crowe, who also created an hour-long documentary about Moodie called The Enduring Enigma of Susanna Moodie, in 1997. “So it’s not an ebook, it’s something quite different. It’s a next-generation thing where, although there is text you can read, there’s also audio, there’s a cast recording of the entire story, and there’s a musical score.”
And to add prestige to what is already a multifaceted project, the print book and app include an introductory essay by Atwood. In it, she mentions Moodie’s involvement with the anti-slavery movement, her own history with Moodie’s work, beginning at age eight with discovering the book on her parents’ bookshelf, and the overall rise in prominence of Roughing It in the Bush.
“Moodie’s feelings about Canada were always mixed. On the one hand, striking beauty; on the other, intense physical suffering,” Atwood writes. “Each incarnation of Moodie has been different: the Shields-Crowe graphic Moodie gives us her place of origin, a stately English home, which helps us understand the huge gap between Moodie’s background and the circumstances she struggled with, often ineffectively, in the bush.”
The project, titled Susanna Moodie: Roughing It in the Bush, features illustrations by Selena Goulding, while artist Willow Dawson helped guide the adaptation from the screenplay to its new format. The choice is logical, since Dawson wrote and illustrated the 2011 graphic novel Hyena in Petticoats: The Story of Suffragette Nellie McClung. And for Second Story Press, a feminist publisher that had never published a graphic novel before, the subject matter provided a perfect segue into the genre. The publisher believes the book and app will have wide appeal in the school and library market, offering students an introduction to a story with wide cultural significance.
“The script was never intended for a youth audience originally, but it’s obviously got potential in that market,” Crowe says. “It’s a psychologically complex story.”
