Halifax-based author presents a fresh take on notorious local legend

Halifax-based author Becca Babcock is feeling quite relieved that her debut novel is finally coming to bookshops across the city.

After all, like many of us, not only has she spent the past year cooped up and working from home but the tale within her new book — One Who Has Been Here Before — has been stuck in her head for over five years.

“I don’t really remember when I started writing it,” says Babcock from her home in Williamswood near Crystal Crescent Beach. “If I dug back in my files I would probably find some early drafts from probably around 2015 or 2016 but it’s an idea that was planted not long after I moved here.”

That takes the central idea of her book back even further.

Shortly after relocating to Halifax from Alberta to get her PhD from Dalhousie University in 2005, Babcock began to hear stories involving the notorious Goler clan, a group of poor, rural families that lived on South Mountain outside of Wolfville.

In the 1980s, fifteen men and one woman from the Goler clan were charged with hundreds of allegations of incest and sexual abuse of children as young as five-years-old.

A student of Canadian literature and studies, Babcock became fascinated with the local legend and soon started to adapt what she learned into a fictional horror story. However, the more she researched the history of the Goler clan, the more she realized the story had much more depth to it.

“I became ashamed at my inability to recognize the humanity of people who faced incredibly challenging circumstances,” adds Babcock.

Coming to bookstores later in April, One Who Has Been Here Before is a rich, gothic fictional narrative that follows Emma, an Albertan student that comes to the province to get her Master’s degree studying a family living off the grid in rural Nova Scotia.

Exploring the debilitating poverty and systemic problems within the fictional Gaugin family, Emma learns she must come to terms with the humanity of those she is investigating.

“It sounds horrible to say but I think the book is for me, or someone like me, who sometimes needs a reminder of the humanity of other people,” says Babcock, adding that last year’s rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and the shifting spotlight on issues facing visible minorities has proven that social rules are shifting rapidly.

“I think the ripple effect of that is that it’s a reminder that we don’t always respect the humanity of people who become marginalized for whatever reason.”

After winning awards and previously releasing a collection of short stories, Babcock is excited to finally release her debut full-length novel and help share the notorious local Nova Scotia story. Furthermore, she hopes the fact that she is originally from Alberta gives the local legend a unique point of view.

“Living somewhere that you haven’t grown up lets you see things in a fresh way,” says Babcock, who is also a part-time instructor at several Atlantic Canada universities, including Dalhousie.

“When I teach creative writing, I use the phrase ‘make it strange’ to my students all the time. I tell them to take a familiar situation or a familiar phrase and to make it fresh and new,” says Babcock. 

“.I think being someone who has lived in Nova Scotia quite a long time now but who isn’t from here — it’s a short cut. It’s easier for me to make it strange and not in a weird, alienating way, but to see this place with fresh eyes because it’s not that long ago that I was seeing it with fresh eyes.”

For more information on One Who Has Been Here Before visit the book’s website.