Jack Whalen’s two children, Nicholas and Brittany, were teenagers before they learned the reason behind their father’s erratic bouts of drinking, inability to help them with homework, strict curfews and uncontrollable fears that he might lose them. They knew he’d spent time in prison as an adolescent but nothing more, until the evening their mother, Glennis, called them to the den, and said: “Your father has something he wants to tell you.”
He revealed he suffered ongoing trauma as a result of four years spent in Newfoundland’s brutal juvenile detention system in the 1970s. At the age of 13, Whalen was sentenced for a series of misdemeanours to the now-defunct Whitbourne Training School for boys, where he was deprived of education, sadistically punished and subjected to solitary confinement for up to four months at a time.
No sooner had her father finished than Brittany said: “I’m going to become a lawyer Dad.… And I am going to fight your case.”’ Called to the bar a decade later, Brittany launched a series of investigations and legal initiatives on her father’s behalf. But all of them were denied because of a provincial statute of limitations for cases of physical and psychological abuse. In 2023, Whalen, who was treated for cancer that year, raised the profile for the issue even higher, by travelling through the province in his pick-up with a life-sized replica of his tiny incarceration cell in back of the truck. In June, 2024, the province finally did away with the statute of limitations, allowing Whalen and others like him to sue for damages.
All of this is captured in Invisible Prisons, the first work of non-fiction by award-winning Newfoundland novelist Lisa Moore, and written in collaboration with Whalen, now 64. Nominated for the 2024 Hilary Weston Writer’s Trust Prize for Non-Fiction, it is a heroic tale of a remarkable man’s resilience and fight for justice. As well, it’s a frank, moving account of a two-year collaboration that became a deep friendship.
What makes Invisible Prisons unusual is that Moore has rendered chapters of Whalen’s life as fiction. “I wanted more than just the facts,” she said, speaking by phone from St. John’s, where she lives with her husband and teaches creative writing at Memorial University. “As a fiction writer, I know that the imagination brings a powerful, emotional truth that other kinds of writing can’t approach as closely.”
In Cold Blood, Truman Capote’s exhaustively researched book about the grisly, senseless murders of a family in Kansas in 1959, was one of Moore’s inspirations. What made In Cold Blood a groundbreaking classic was that it read not like a journalistic report, but rather like fiction. Capote believed the genre he called the “non-fiction novel” required a rare combination of skills: the capacity for empathy; a 20/20 eye for detail; fact-checking rigour; and, rarest of all, creative artistry.
Moore ticks all these boxes: Her debut, Alligator (2008), won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize; February (2010) was long-listed for the Booker Prize and won CBC’s Canada Reads in 2013, and Caught (2013) was shortlisted for the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Giller Prize. February is rooted in real life, as well, and explored the outsized grief of a young mother whose husband drowned when the Ocean Ranger oil rig sank off the coast of Newfoundland in 1982.
Moore, 60, was raised in St. John‘s, and understands at a visceral level the church-dominated world of Whalen’s youth. “I, too, grew up in a Catholic milieu. I knew kids who were at Mount Cashel and were damaged by the experience,” she reflects, adding, “When Jack spoke, I just knew the truth of everything he was saying in a kind of molecular way.”
In Invisible Prisons, Moore’s writing is nowhere more spellbinding than when she transports the reader to Whalen’s childhood home. We watch, entranced, as 11-year-old Jack comes home from school, kicks off his shoes, slathers margarine on a slice of hot, homemade bread, ignores an older sister shouting at him to undo his laces properly and get to his homework, and races back outdoors only to land up in trouble with his friends. It’s fiction, not in the sense of raw invention, but rather in its rhythms, exquisite detail and pitch-perfect capture of the tones and textures of lived experience.
The full immersion in the Whalen household sets up a wrenching contrast with the stark cruelty of the detention centre, and helps explain why he made no fewer than 24 attempts to run away to his family. Fiction also gets the reader inside the head of Jack’s mother Alice, a devout, kind-hearted widow who raised eight children on social assistance while working part-time in a pub. Although Moore never met Alice, the author checked each detail for plausibility with her surviving children.
Overall, Moore found the constraints of creative non-fiction more demanding than writing novels, yet she considers the project a gift to her as a writer. She describes Whalen as “a tremendous story-teller” and believes that their tight collaboration – “poring over each sentence together, removing a word, finding a better word, discussing the placement of a comma,” as she notes in the book’s preface – generated a fresh narrative voice. “Maybe this book is more plainspoken or more urgent; I’m not sure what the difference is. I just know when I read it I hear Jack’s voice and I hear my own.”
Whalen’s time in the isolation cell at Whitbourne was the hardest for Moore to write about. “I’m a mother myself, and the thought of putting a child in solitary confinement is horrendous to me,” she said. “Jack was fearless. He wanted the truth, regardless.” In an early draft, Moore had emphasized the positive trajectory of his adult life: a strong marriage, devotion to his children, steady work as a forklift operator for Sobeys; loyal friendships. All true, yet the happily-ever-after narrative was not the whole story. As Glennis informed Moore at one of their meetings: “Jack thinks you’re avoiding the horror.”
Admitting her mistake, the author re-worked the text to acknowledge both the light and dark facets of a life shaped by joy, resilience and enduring psychic pain. On the prison-cell replica he constructed, Whalen painted in big chunky orange letters: “EVERY NIGHT I GO TO SLEEP THIS IS WHERE I GO.” Invisible Prisons is an extraordinary testimony to courage and to the power of great writing to convey a complicated truth.
