When did you first realize the stream of letters from Leonard Budgell were of historic importance?

CLAUDIA COUTU RADMORE: Years went by before I looked at the letters in this way. Len and I were simply enjoying the back and forth of stories and news. I often found myself reading parts of them to anyone around, and would bring the most recent out to share with friends.

Only after I came back from the South Pacific in 1990 did we start to think others might be interested. Len proposed publishing the complete correspondence but I was reluctant. My letters were of daily happenings, family news, descriptions of travel and travel experiences, and while Len found them interesting, I doubted my side of the correspondence would interest a wider audience.

People are intrigued by his friendship with you, the unique bond you shared. How do you explain it?

COUTU RADMORE: We listened to each other, and were patient with each other. Len was the kind of father figure one reads about in fiction and I admired him, admired his respect for people. I was captured by his stories, but captured even more by his understanding of humanity.

Anyone who knew Leonard Budgell well knows that when he was with you, he was completely yours, and he spoiled you in the old-fashioned way. You came away rested, content, feeling that you had spent an interesting afternoon with a person who was consistent in his values, considerate, helpful and interesting. There wasn’t much we could do about it so we allowed the friendship to blossom. I felt privileged to know Len well enough for him to share his thoughts and his family with me.

You’ve written about him in this book, and edited his letters for a much wider audience. Yet wasn’t Leonard Budgell a shy man, a very private man?

COUTU RADMORE: Yes, on one level Len was a shy man until he decided that you were worth knowing. Once that happened, he was committed to a friendship. If you wrote to him, a correspondence was started until you ended it. He never would. Once a friendship was established, even with the woman down the block who needed help carrying groceries, he treasured it.

He was not shy with your friends either, for they were part of you, and he was never too shy to stand up for a cause, or for his family.

Len would not have enjoyed talking about his own book, calling attention to himself. I am so glad to be able to present his writings for him. Otherwise they would have been lost.

What are some of the other books you’ve written?

COUTU RADMORE: This is fun to tell about. The first book I wrote, Kindabuk, was in the language of Bislama and has been the official manual for pre-school teachers in Vanuatu since 1989.

When I came back to Canada, I began to practise writing because I wanted eventually to write a novel. I self-published The Pond and Boxes, my earliest poems, Moonbeam, a collection of poems and prose pieces, in the nineties, then a book of haiku-like poems called White on White. Terry Ann Carter and I published Callalilypepperwords, poems about Mexico, and with Joy Hewitt Mann, we put together “3”, a book of poetry.

I have just completed a minute or two/without remembering, lyric poems in the voices of my earliest ancestors in New France, and I have finally begun that novel I wanted to write, which is based on my mother’s life.

You’ve lived and worked overseas, seeing other cultures. How might that have made you more appreciative of these unique stories of the northern culture in Canada?

COUTU RADMORE: With the organization known as Canadian University Students Overseas or CUSO in Vanuatu, I worked with people who were not yet too damaged by our so-called more progressive civilizations. I saw the effects of our various intrusions into their culture, many well-intended, by missionaries and aid workers. Benefits were evident, but couldn’t we all have been more intelligent about it, more empathetic towards their cultures and values? When I returned six years later, the damage was out of control.

In China as recently as 2005 I felt the fears that citizens lived with every day. I saw a people who had no say in restrictions and laws by which they had to live, yet who were by nature generous, kind, and outgoing.

Travelling the Labrador coast brought home how much the indigenous peoples have lost, how much is now inaccessible to them and to the descendents of the early settlers. In some way, Len’s writings will give some of that back to them.

How would you describe your work as an artist?

COUTU RADMORE: In my art as well as in my writing, I am interested in process as much as in the finished work. Often I could not afford art materials so fell back on things that I had learned from my mother who always made do. I like to recycle materials and ideas and am using natural materials and green products where possible. Figure drawing always interests me for its necessary accuracy yet its range of possibilities. Much of my work is based on landscape and is often abstract.

As a published poet yourself, did you find something “poetic” in Leonard Budgell’s letters?

COUTU RADMORE: Perhaps the underlying poetry of Len’s writing subconsciously captured me. There had to be a reason I kept every one of the 4000 pages he wrote me in the ten-year span covered by this book. It was so I could pick them up and reread them whenever I wanted or needed to. That is one of the reasons we buy books of poetry, and I think I got out of Len’s words much of what I get today from good poems.

I write haiku and other Japanese poetic forms. There is an insistence on immediacy, on the moment, but with a great deal of silence, description, capturing that moment. Len spent so much time alone and it is evident in the power of his writing. He took it all in: the landscape, the experiences, the people. It seems as if everything he saw and heard was treasured and subconsciously honed, so that when he told someone it came out seamlessly. That someone happened to be me. What poured out was perfect in its natural rhythm, perfect in its chosen words.

I am sure that if you took many of his passages, broke them up into shorter lines, spaced them as he would have breathed them, you would have beautiful poems. Long, yes, but beautiful. Something along the lines of the early sagas.

Are there more stories about Leonard Budgell?

COUTU RADMORE: It would have been a worthwhile project to record stories about Len. It wasn’t done while he was alive, and there are not so many now who knew him well enough to explain the effect of having Len in their lives. His writing can be found in several issues of Them Days, a magazine of oral and written history of Labrador. There are others who have kept his letters to them, many of which could be published. He also wrote to me for another eight or nine years after we put this manuscript together, though these later letters are quite different from the earlier ones. There is a wealth of material on the tapes in the Manitoba Archives that he recorded with Jocelyn McKillop under the auspices of The Hudson’s Bay Company Archives.

Fortunately, more amazing stories written by Len exist, some taken from the letters, but others created separately. Seven or so of these stories, true-life episodes and adventures in Labrador and the Canadian north, will be published in another book I am now preparing for Blue Butterfly.