Loyola O’Brien runs a boat tour business, out of Bay Bulls, just south of Newfoundland’s capital of St. John’s. As the cod fisheries out in the North Atlantic began to run thin, he turned his fishing business into tours of a coastline teeming with seabirds. Then he added a bit of whale-watching and finally rounded things out with the drama of ice floes along a coastline which had taken on the sobriquet "Iceberg Alley." Each year, thousands of visitors take one of O’Brien’s Boat Tours.

For author Michael Crummey, however, the ice floes and other elements of the land- and seascapes of his birthplace provided a different kind of dramatic tension for his novel, "River Thieves," which was short-listed for the Giller Prize, Canada’s top literary award. In the novel, set in the early 19th century, colonists butt up against the native Beothuk, within Newfoundland’s often unforgiving environment.

First settled in the early 17th century, as an outpost for fishermen drawn by the area’s proximity to the fecund fisheries of the Grand Banks, Newfoundland became a place where settlers were inextricably enlaced into a geography that was both rewarding and harshly demanding. That an intense sense of place would become part of the area’s history, folklore and then its literature was virtually inevitable.

"Place seems to me to be one of the central concerns in just about all the writing that comes out of Newfoundland," Crummey says. "That’s partly because the physical landscape has played such a large role in the culture. Until very recently, everyone in Newfoundland was directly dependant on the natural world for survival and that created a pretty elemental relationship between the people here and the sea, the woods, the weather. I’ve often said that the physical landscape is one of the main characters in ‘River Thieves.’"

Today, the "Beothuk Trail," through the central part of Newfoundland, will take you along the route followed by these First Nations people who play a prominent role in "River Thieves." Sections of the trail run along the Exploits River, where the Beothuk migrated seasonally, following their food sources, including fish and caribou. At the Interpretation Centre in Boyd’s Cove, you can get a detailed look at the Beothuk. In Great Falls-Windsor, you can explore 5,000 years of the region’s anthropology at the Mary Match Regional Museum.

While there are many interesting elements in the details of specific driving routes, trails and museum displays, the drama of place in Newfoundland is often more of a general nature, the stark beauty in the physical elements all about you. Here, in Canada’s easternmost province, ragged coastlines plunge into the icy North Atlantic, river valleys wind through deep ravines amid weathered mountains, meadows of buff-colored grasses twist in the persistent winds, while the nighttime skies are smeared with the pastels of the Northern Lights. It’s the stuff of settings for fine literature.

In E. Annie Proulx’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "The Shipping News," the protagonist, Quoyle, a frumpy American from a dysfunctional family, returns to Killick-Claw, the fictional Newfoundland seacoast town of his ancestors, and is profoundly transformed by the experience. His ancestral home on Quoyle’s Point sits at the end of a remote, narrow finger of land that seems symbolic of Quoyle’s societal isolation. While Killick-Claw and Quoyle’s Point are fictional, they are emblematic of countless, real outport towns along coastlines throughout Newfoundland, especially along Trinity and Conception Bays near St. John’s, where one can only guess Proulx found her inspiration.

"I regard the geographical place in which the fictional character acts rather as French winegrowers refer to terroir," Proulx says, "meaning not just the earth in which their vines grow, but the weather, climate, the latitude and longitude, the minerals in the stones that heave up, the winds and hours of sunlight, rainfall and dust fall, the neighboring crops, the insects, and, not least, the humans who tend the vines. Characters are part of a geographic place both culturally and psychologically."

There is an almost inexplicable dramatic tension about an exploration of the province, whether that be a drive along the coast, a hike along a mountain trail or a walk through the archaeological dig at Avalon, due south of St. John’s. Here, even a warm day in summer is choreographed by eddies of mist twisting across this near-four-centuries-old European settlement. Despite the clink and clonk of daily routines, performed for the benefit of visitors by staffers in period dress, there is an odd sense of abiding tension that seaborne trouble will visit, yet again: the French or the Dutch, come to harass the English settlers.

"Place, here is also as much about the history of the people as it is the physical landscape," Michael Crummey says. "All over the island, I think, the landscape is like a history book for people, with the stories of communities and individuals associated with this piece of land."

Creative fodder comes not from the hinterlands alone. St. John’s, with its history as the commercial and cultural base for the area’s nautical orientation, has spawned first-rate art galleries, theatrical troupes, nights spots where even members of the audience come up to an "open mic" to present their particular takes on musical genres, both traditional and contemporary.

An endless fascination with the social interactions in the city has had a powerful influence on the writing of Lisa Moore, who, like Crummey, has been short-listed for the Giller Prize, in her case a collection of short stories called, "Open."

"I’ve lived in St. John’s most of my life," Moore says. "I especially loved October afternoons, when it was starting to get cold, and it got dark early − walking around the streets, looking at the cats sitting in the windows of row houses, smelling woodstove smoke, looking at the boats that had come into the harbor. The giant steel prows cutting against the dark sky." Walking the streets on those late October afternoons, Moore also would stop at gathering places like the Duckworth Lunch, a café where everyone talked about the arts, or she would drop in at an alternative theatre, called LSPU Hall.

"The Hall was on Victoria Street, and had belonged to the Long Shoremen’s Protective Union," she says. "Some actors had gotten together to buy the building. I got a summer job there when I was 16 and worked as a ticket seller, floor washer, set painter and actress in training. A lot of original theatre was written and performed at the LSPU Hall."

Those encounters, in this uncommonly inspiring city, set Moore on a course that would place her work among Canada’s most acclaimed. "After that summer at the Hall," she says, "I knew I wanted to be a writer and I have been writing ever since. It had seemed a very romantic life to me then. It still does."

Cities often seem to be caught in a conflict between the traditional and the transitory and, while some of the places that Moore encountered during those early years when her creative instincts were taking hold may now be gone, they have been replaced by other elements that are, unquestionably, inspiring a new generation of writers. Although tourism in other places may be defined by sandy beaches on a hot summer day, here the incipient drama may be taking hold on a cloud-laced October day, down by the harbor, where a Russian freighter has just been roped to the dock.

"I’m starting to feel my age," says Moore’s protagonist in her story, "If You’re There."  "A nostalgia for things that haven’t happened yet. Or they’ve happened at such a velocity that I’m left behind, still waiting for them."

A friend once remarked that he was often driven to travel by the romance of place created in the fiction he had read: Hemingway’s Paris or Spain, Maugham’s South Pacific, Forster’s India. The modern authors setting their dramas in Newfoundland, perhaps inadvertently, create a similar sense of drama. Or perhaps the province speaks, uniquely, to the writer in all of us.