A forthcoming audiobook from St. John’s-based Flanker Press will bring the singular voice of acclaimed actor and Newfoundlander Gordon Pinsent, in a new work, to listeners’ ears once again. 

The Dicky Bird Dish, an audiobook of a short story by Newfoundland-born author Ron Pollett, is narrated by the late actor, and will be released on Sept. 6. The audiobook will be available through retail links on the press’s website.

Flanker Press publisher Jerry Cranford decided to release the audiobook to mark the press’s 30th anniversary in 2024, but the project can be traced back to 2010, when his father and former Flanker publisher, Garry Cranford, emailed Pinsent to ask him if he would be interested in narrating what Cranford envisioned at the time as a CD packaged with a full-colour children’s book.

“He sent Gordon the text for the story and Gordon fell in love with it,” Jerry Cranford says. “He absolutely fell in love with it and he said ‘I would be delighted to do that.’”

On a rainy day later that year, Pinsent happened to be in St. John’s filming an episode of the CBC series Republic of Doyle. Cranford and his mother, Margo, picked up the actor at his hotel to take him to the recording studio on Bond Street for the afternoon. Pinsent was easygoing and down to earth from the get-go, chuckling when Margo apologized for uttering a minor curse word at another driver on the way to the studio. Pinsent took several takes to account for spots where he was unhappy with how he sounded, Cranford remembers, and the group shared coffee and donuts from a nearby Tim Hortons as they worked. 

The Dicky Bird Dish tells the tale of Ernie Tarn, a boy who lives alone with his widowed mother, and has been working all fall to save up $1 for a pair of skates, but finds himself thwarted when the last barrel of shipped goods is opened at the shop on Christmas Eve and the skates are priced at $5; he opts instead for a porcelain butter cooler for his mother.

Flanker Press first published “The Dicky Bird Dish” in 1999’s The Ocean at My Door, a collection of Pollett’s work that followed on The Outport Millionaire, a story of Pollett’s published in book form in 1998. Pollett, who was born in 1900 in New Harbour, Trinity Bay – the same rural area where Garry Cranford grew up – immigrated in the 1920s to the U.S., where he worked as a printer until his death in 1955, but wrote many short stories about his hometown and life in Newfoundland. He published stories frequently in the St. John’s–based magazine Atlantic Guardian in the 1940s and 50s, and Cranford says he won a poll the magazine ran asking readers to vote for Newfoundland’s favourite storyteller. 

Flanker Press paid Pinsent’s ACTRA fee for the afternoon’s work of recording the narration, and then found themselves sitting on the unedited file for years, as the market for books on CD declined and the cost of producing a full-colour hardcover children’s book with accompanying audio CD grew more prohibitive. 

Once Cranford, who took over as publisher in 2020, decided on the audiobook as Flanker Press’s anniversary project, Rick Hollett, the engineer who had recorded the narration in 2010, agreed to take on the work of editing the recording and adding some music.

The result is a 48-minute audiobook featuring Pinsent’s unmistakable voice narrating the Christmas story of Ernie Tarn, and voicing each of the minor characters Tarn encounters.

“There’s going to be lots of people with a nostalgic tear in their eye hearing good old Gordon Pinsent’s voice again,” Cranford says. “The only regret I have is that he didn’t get to see the final product while he was still alive.”