Alan Doyle

Harvard Book Store welcomes Canadian musician and actor ALAN DOYLE for a discussion of his latest book, A Newfoundlander in Canada: Always Going Somewhere, Always Coming Home.

About A Newfoundlander in Canada

Following the fantastic success of his bestselling memoir, Where I Belong, Great Big Sea front man Alan Doyle returns with a hilarious, heartwarming account of leaving Newfoundland and discovering Canada for the first time.

Armed with the same personable, candid style found in his first book, Alan Doyle turns his perspective outward from Petty Harbour toward mainland Canada, reflecting on what it was like to venture away from the comforts of home and the familiarity of the island.

Often in a van, sometimes in a bus, occasionally in a car with broken wipers "using Bob's belt and a rope found by Paddy's Pond" to pull them back and forth, Alan and his bandmates charted new territory, and he constantly measured what he saw of the vast country against what his forefathers once called the Daemon Canada. In a period punctuated by triumphant leaps forward for the band, deflating steps backward and everything in between—opening for Barney the Dinosaur at an outdoor music festival, being propositioned at a gas station mail-order bride service in Alberta, drinking moonshine with an elderly church-goer on a Sunday morning in PEI—Alan's few established notions about Canada were often debunked and his own identity as a Newfoundlander was constantly challenged. Touring the country, he also discovered how others view Newfoundlanders and how skewed these images can sometimes be. Asked to play in front of the Queen at a massive Canada Day festival on Parliament Hill, the concert organizers assured Alan and his bandmates that the best way to showcase Newfoundland culture was for them to be towed onto stage in a dory and introduced not as Newfoundlanders but as "Newfies." The boys were not amused.

Heartfelt, funny and always insightful, these stories tap into the complexities of community and Canadianness, forming the portrait of a young man from a tiny fishing village trying to define and hold on to his sense of home while navigating a vast and diverse and wonder-filled country.

Praise

"Excellent adventure. I feel like I've lived another's life." —Russell Crowe

"As Great Big Sea's frontman, Alan Doyle is exuberant, irreverent, hilariously funny and a heart-on-the-sleeve Newfoundlander. As a writer, he's all that and a bag of chips. Doyle's description of growing up on the hills and wharves of old world Petty Harbour is intimate, saucy and note-perfect. In his own words: Deadly." —Michael Crummey, award-winning author of Galore 

"Alternately laugh-out-loud funny, tearfully nostalgic and stunningly beautiful, the stories in Where I Belong have nothing to do with the famous and everything to do with the legendary. . . The beating heart of life itself runs through this book." —Huffington Post

"A laugh-riot kitchen party on wheels that will make you fall in love with Canada all over again. Alan Doyle's heart is as big as his talent." —Denise Donlon, media executive and author of Fearless as Possible (Under the Circumstances)