Trudy J. Morgan-Cole

Most Anything You Please grew out of, of all things, a Facebook conversation (who says social media's not good for creativity?) Some friends who grew up in the same neighbourhood I did -- Rabbittown, in the heart of St. John's -- we trying to remember names of the corner stores we  used to shop at, back when there was a small convenience store on virtually every corner.

​

I had the same conversation with my hair stylist, who for more than 3o years has operated her salon out of the building that used to be our closest corner store when I was a kid. In having these conversations, I was intrigued by how many of these "mom and pop" stores had closed or morphed into something else (or been swallowed up by chain stores From Away) over the years. It seemed to me like you could trace the changes in our neighbourhood, in St. John's and in Newfoundland, maybe even in the wider culture, through the story of a family and their corner store

​

That's how Holloway's Grocery and Convenience was born -- a fictional tribute to the hundreds of real shops that once dotted the corners of St. John's (and some that still do). It's a love song to my neighbourhood, my city, and a vanishing piece of our culture.

​

As for the Holloways themselves, they showed up the way characters always do for me -- complete in their fictional glory, owing nothing to any real people. Ellen and Wes, a young couple from Bonavista Bay who move to St. John's in the 1920s and open a corner store, are the hardworking Methodist parents of the Holloway brood. That family includes Audrey, the sharp-tongued redhead who dreams of bigger things than a life behind the counter of a corner store. Audrey falls in love with an American soldier stationed in St. John's during World War Two, and her life takes some unexpected twists and turns, but Audrey somehow ends up spending nearly five decades behind the counter of the store. She's a fixture in the neighbourhood: the shopkeeper who knows all the neighbours's ecrets, but guards her own fiercely.

​

Music is another thread that runs through this novel. Wes plays hymns on the accordion on Sunday afternoons. Audrey's life is transformed when she hears Hank Williams, Senior, singing live. Audrey's son Henry and daughter Rachel both dream of "making it" as musicians -- and they, too, want to leave the corner store in the old neighbourhood far behind. But somehow, it's always there, in the background of their lives and their music.

​

From the 1930s to the 1990s, from salt beef in buckets to sticks of baloney in the cooler, from dandy-cakes and squares to chips and scratch tickets -- the Holloways have seen it and sold it all. The neighbourhood has changed; the city has changed; Newfoundland has changed. Then, in the dark moratorium years of the 1990s, a family member comes up with a plan to save the family shop that might just be too high a price to pay.