The Story Behind the Story with author Doug Dolan of Moncton, NB, Canada.

 

Let’s welcome Doug to the Scribbler.

I had the pleasure meeting him at the Turner's Christmas craft fair and he kindly accepted my invitation to be our guest this week.

Read on my friends.

 

         Doug Dolan was born and raised in the small village of Nelson, beside the magnificent Miramichi River in North-East New Brunswick. Doug is a seventy-year-old novice writer. He has self-published “Stories From the River” a memoir profiling his struggle to find his way through a painful gay labyrinth at a time when it was best to keep such a sexual orientation to oneself. A wide variety of readers has positively reviewed it. He recently completed the historical fiction. “The Mill” It follows the Burchill family of Miramichi over their 140-year dynasty in the lumber industry. He is working on an anthology of Christmas-themed stories to be released in 2025. He has recently completed a novella looking at the murders of two Moncton police officers in 1974. It offers a unique look at the effects their deaths had on one of their own. Doug lives with his husband in Moncton, N.B. 

 

Title: The Mill

 

Synopsis: 

                The Mill follows four generations of the Burchill Family from 1840 through the 1970’s. Young George, his siblings and parents, sail from Ireland, up the Miramichi River to start a new life. At six years old, he sees only possibilities. In his lifetime of grit and determination he makes them real.

John Percival, his son, becomes the youngest person elected to the provincial legislature. Later in life, he displays his keen negotiation skills as other mills collapse along the river

George Percival, the heir to a derelict mill, emerges as the risk tolerant, persistent Industrialist who struggles to keep the lumber industry alive during a decades long depression. A successful businessman with an outgoing personality, he never forgets his roots and the community around him.

John inherits his father’s irrepressible optimism. His secure childhood allows the seeds of curiosity, and innovativeness to germinate. He emerges as the man who creates a new era in forestry for Eastern North America.

The workers at the Burchill mills integrated their home - grown skills to keep the plants working.

The employers and employees kept a struggling enterprise alive for over 130 years. This story captures the characters, many of them colorful, who made it happen.

The Story Behind the Story:  

As a young person growing up in a small community, I knew of the Burchills as a main employer. As I grew up, I learned something of their history spread over a century and a half. Through the generosity of a family member, I was given access to personal records and manuscripts that detailed the sacrifices and personal struggles to keep a fading industry alive. I became fascinated with a succession of entrepreneurs and their unique personalities.

Website: Please go HERE.

A question before you go, Doug:

Scribbler: Where is your favourite spot to write? Are you messy or neat?

Doug: I admit to being a bit different. I write my stories on a recliner in our Living Room. Initially I cut an odd figure curled up in a fetal position pecking with one finger (three on a good day) on my laptop. I recently upgraded to a fancy lap desk when my aging back acted up. I have to be neat with the little space and a stiff back.



An Excerpt from “The Mill”

“…In a video interview with his son, Derek, John shared the small victories and many setbacks in setting up and operating a softwood plywood mill in eastern North America. He suddenly pivots and says, almost casually, "We just got things into position, showed a little profit and damned if it (the mill) didn't burn down. " The state-of-the-art plant was opened one year to the day after the fire. Retelling the story in the video interview, John quips, "My advice is not to build a plywood mill," followed by a hearty laugh. John saw, that Burchill lumber and other sawmills were soon to become a relic of the past. It did continue for a short time after the plywood mill found its legs. It was not easy for him or his father, to let go of this integral part of their lives. Some aspects of its operation had been knit into the fabric of the community.”

I look forward to reading your story, Doug. Thank you for being our guest this week. We wish you continued success with your writing.

And a Special Thank You to al our visitors and readers.

Feel free to leave a comment below. 

Here's What's Happening.

 

Here’s what’s Happening.

 

Over 1,000, 000 Page Views.

(1,017,974 to be exact)

Wow!

Thank you to all our visitors and readers.

 

The most popular guest posts of 2025

Luke Beirne – go HERE.

Completely Shattered – Go HERE.

Casey Shelley – Go HERE.

Yvonne Belliveau – Go HERE.

 

April 26^th 10 a.m. – 3 p.m.

One of the Year’s Biggest Book Events.

Greater Moncton Riverview & Dieppe Book Fair.

Riverview Lions Community Center.

701 Coverdale Road, Riverview.

50 Authors – 100’s of stories.

Every Genre.

This is a book event not to be missed.

Please go HERE.

 

The launch of my newest novel will take place in June.

Code Name: Iron Feather 1942

Cover Reveal

A murder mystery at

Canadian Forces Station, Debert, NS.

Camp Debert is an army base being built next door to Royal Canadian Air Force Base in Debert, Nova Scotia on the east coast of Canada in 1942. Thousands of thousands of men and women will pass through on their way to Europe. Units will be mustered, weapons handed out and training for war. The contractors are erecting buildings as fast as they can.

The new mess on the army base is partially completed until work stops when the foreman finds a dead body hanging from the rafters. Not a soldier, but an airman.

Everything is hush-hush. The commanding officer has asked for the investigation to be handled by Warrant Officer Stefan Kravchenko of the Air Force Service Police. He’s ordered to Camp Debert, immediately. Upon arrival he discovers the scene is all wrong. The medical examiner suggests it may look like a suicide, but …

June 21^st – The Write Cup

Market Square, Saint John.

June 22^nd – Chapters

 Dieppe, NB

 

 This is a sequel to Code Name: Iron Spear 1941

Please go HERE.

 

Watch for the following guests to be on the Scribbler

Author Doug Dolan.

Poet Richard Doiron

Author Robert Stutt

M. A. Ferguson.

Pierre Arseneault

Peter Foote

Tanah Haney

Cathy J. Hopkins

 

The Story Behind the Story with author Matthew Anderson of Antigonish, NS, Canada.

 

Let’s welcome another new author to the Scribbler.

Matthew will be a participant at the GMRD Book Fair and he kindly accepted my invitation to be our guest this week. I know you will enjoy meeting him. 

Read on my friends.

 

 

Matthew R. Anderson grew up in Saskatchewan in what he later came to realize was Treaty Four territory. He now lives near Antigonish, Mi’kma’ki (Nova Scotia), with his wife, Dr Sara Parks, a Maritimer from New Brunswick. Matthew is Gatto Chair of Christian Studies at Saint Francis Xavier University. This part-time contract means that he gets to teach a class a term at StFX while he researches and writes a murder mystery set in ancient Rome and the Holy Land. His 2024 bestseller, The Good Walk, tells of the long treks he initiated with others across the prairies to help recover traditional First Nation, Métis, and settler trails. Matthew is proud to announce that this month Pottersfield Press publishes his sixth book, which is his first to feature his new home:  Someone Else’s Saint: How a Scottish Pilgrimage Led to Nova Scotia.

 

Title: Someone Else’s Saint: How a Scottish Pilgrimage Led to Nova Scotia

Synopsis: In 2019, Matthew was in the first group of Canadians to walk the recently revived Whithorn Way, a recreation of a medieval pilgrim route from Glasgow to the south-west tip of Scotland. Slogging along beach, heather, sheer cliff, and soggy moor, they traced ancient paths to the lonely spot where the mysterious Saint Ninian reportedly gazed out over the Irish sea from his cave.

Three years later, when Matthew and his wife Sara Parks moved to Nova Scotia, they were surprised to discover Saint Ninian again: Antigonish’s Catholic Cathedral bears the name of this unusual figure.

Someone Else’s Saint: How a Scottish Pilgrimage Led to Nova Scotia is one of two winners of the 2024 Pottersfield Press Prize for Non-Fiction. You’re invited to set off with Anderson on his two long walks in pursuit of Ninian, one through the Scottish Lowlands and the other along Nova Scotia’s Northumberland Shore. In alternating chapters you’ll encounter plinths, pubs, crumbling 1960s amusement parks, gypsum caves, and stone-age tombs, as well as the complex intertwined histories of Gaels, Scots, Romans, English, Acadians, and Mi’kmaq. Someone Else’s Saint is a thoughtful, funny, and perceptive travelogue for lovers of walking—or reading. The “slow travel” of pilgrimage on foot reveals two lands linked not only by Ninian, but also by common struggles and successes. Anderson’s account weaves together local and international history, geography, literature, and food culture. It brings together co-ops and currachs to show how a pilgrimage is never just a matter of the feet, but also of the heart.

The Story Behind the Story:

As a fan and a scholar of ancient history, especially Roman history, I’ve wondered about the mysterious Saint Ninian ever since first hearing the name. For years I’ve also been a committed long-distance walker, logging a couple thousand kilometers from Norway to Santiago to Holy Island to North Battleford Saskatchewan, striding along every possible kind of trail (you can hear audio from these trails on my podcast series “Pilgrimage Stories From Up and Down the Staircase.”) The combination of my interest in Ninian and in pilgrimage is why I got the first group of Canadians together to walk the Whithorn Way in Scotland in 2019. As I describe in the book, we had quite the wet adventure.

So it was pure surprise and delight when Sara and I moved to Antigonish three years later, and discovered we were coming to Ninian’s own Nova Scotian back yard! It seemed too much of a coincidence for me not to dig out my books and do more research on the saint. Soon I was digging up info on why the Cathedral in my new home had been named for him. Before I knew it, I was also deep into the history of the Acadian community Sara and I had moved to, the waves of Gaelic immigration that so influenced the North Shore, and the histories of the Mi’kmaq communities first and still here.

I knew that to really connect the landscapes of these North Shore groups I had to walk a trail as I had in Scotland. So in September 2024 a group of 15 of us walked the 25 km from beautiful Pomquet Beach, in St George’s Bay, to Saint Ninian Cathedral. We arrived just in time to receive a pilgrim welcome and to be present for the 150^th anniversary of the Cathedral.

The story behind the story – and one not told in Someone Else’s Saint, although maybe it will be in my next book! – is that the day after finishing the inaugural Nova Scotia Ninian Way, while Sara and I were toasting the walk’s success, I found myself hit by a minor and then a major stroke. (The stroke was unrelated to the walk.) My left side was paralyzed. I was in hospital for three months, facing my hardest and most unexpected pilgrimage of all: the fifteen feet I had to learn to walk while holding on to parallel bars.

I’d like to say that the stroke is behind me and I’m back to my 150-km trails. I’m not. At least, not quite yet! But the good news is that there’s been slow but steady improvement daily since last fall. I’m now back to walking (with a limp), writing, and teaching, and I’m working my way up to greater and greater distances. Come see me in Moncton...to talk about Nova Scotia, Scottish and Roman history, the Gaels, or about being a pilgrim who learns to walk again after a stroke!

Website: Please go HERE

A question before you go, Matthew:

Scribbler: Where is your favourite spot to write? Are you messy or neat? Your beverage of choice?

Matthew: My beverage of choice is a nice, strong tea with milk, although readers of my book Pairings: The Bible and Booze (2021), in which I “pair” drinks with passages from the Bible, will know that on a warm summer evening I’ll also happily partake in a Campari and soda or a Moosehead. But New Brunswick’s King Cole tea is my go-to for any and all occasions.

I probably tend more toward messy, even though my source books and papers get cleaned up and stored in a wicker basket overnight. My favourite spot for writing is the kitchen table. From there I can look out our patio doors at the small tidal finger of marshy water at the foot of our property, where there’s always something going on, whether it’s ducks, eagles, or great blue herons. My wife Sara writes her books and academic papers in the same space. So there’s always some “nerd discussion” going on as we compare notes or look at each other’s work.

Photo by Richard Kotowich

An Excerpt from Someone Else’s Saint: How a Scottish Pilgrimage Led to Nova Scotia:

To simply “go for a walk” becomes an act of defiance when it seems there’s always so much to do. Our dopamine-addicted brains have learned to clamour for the distracting shock and applause of social media. As a pastime, walking seems too ordinary and simple. It’s just step after step, repeated, again and again. What you’re choosing when walking any distance is not pleasure in any normal sense. It’s choosing — at first — to be bored.

Paradoxically, the unhurried pace turns out to be fulfilling. As one walks, the mind quiets. Eventually, if we’re paying attention, we notice things. In the monotony, our breath. In the aching ankle or the blistered toe, the presence of our bodies, so often neglected in front of screens. Step by step, before us, we begin to see more sharply: not only hill, tree, rock, flower, sidewalk, fence, wall, overpass, or garbage, but also, and whether or not we always want to — memories, people, dreams, regrets, and hopes. Unbidden, our inner lives and our imaginations join us, stepping between and around the landscape. If we’re fortunate, we also begin to see nature anew, whether in the quiver of a stem of dewy morning grass, the way the light reflects off the windows of an old building, the smile of a passer-by, the erratic blue flit of a damselfly, or the scurrying of some creature into the underbrush. Revelations sometimes fall into rhythm beside us. Resolutions about some problem sidle up alongside, although they often stay no longer than the next step or the next breath, before diverging from our path again, gone too soon to be recognized.

Keep going. Long-distance walking is not primarily an instrument for exercise or pleasure, although both might arrive with us at the end of our trail. First and foremost, walking is a meditation. It’s a spell our feet cast over us, quieting our brains while step by step by step the rhythm bonds us for good to our bodies and to the body of the world.

If you’ve never been to south-west Scotland or north-east Nova Scotia, you may not know the places described in this book. That’s okay: even locals who have never been on these trails may not have seen, or noticed, all of what’s in these pages. Noticing is part of the beauty of walking.

Thank you for being our guest this week, Matthew. We wish you continued success with your writing.

A HUGE thank you to all our visitors and readers. Feel free to tell us what’s on your mind in the comment box below.

The Story Behind the Story with Joanne Daggett of Quispamsis, NB, Canada.

 

Let’s welcome Joanne to the Scribbler.

It’s her first visit and I know you will enjoy reading about her and her book.

She will be participating in the GMRD Book Fair and looks forward to meeting you.

She will be there signing her books.

Read on my friends.

 

Joanne is a Christian author who lives in Quispamsis, NB with her husband of thirty-seven years, Alex. She calls herself a hesitant writer and an accidental author. Sing, Dance, Pray, which was published in 2022, is her first book. She enjoys reading, writing poetry and prose, walking in nature, creating art out of string, beachcombing, and spending time with her loving family.

  

Title: Sing, Dance, Pray

Synopsis: Sing, Dance, Pray is a collection of prose and poetry written in simple faith, even in the midst of the complexities of life. Joanne’s faith in God is reflected in her poems and prose, despite a personal story of tragedy and loss many years ago. She pens poems of hope and defiant joy in present seasons of grief, trauma, and crisis. Her writings reflect a personal relationship with her Kind Shepherd, Jesus, with elements of coastal beauty sprinkled with a love of nature.

The Story Behind the Story:

Many years ago, when I faced an unimaginable tragedy that changed the course of my life, people often told me that I should write my story. But I never considered it, as I was too busy raising a family and enjoying coastal life on Grand Manan Island. Living in a small village on a tiny island, everyone knew my story, so I didn’t feel the need or desire to write it down. My faith in God, which was planted as a tiny seed when I was very young, grew and strengthened over the next years of my life. A tragedy that could have made me bitter instead solidified my faith and hope in Jesus Christ.

 In more recent years, as I (and our family) walked through a season of grief, fear and trauma, I felt the gentle nudging to write. My counselor, family, and God urged me to get things out that were “bubbling up” inside me.

Walking with our son through the heartbreak and chaos of addiction, homelessness, and even incarceration left us limping and struggling. As I began to surrender to God and let go of circumstances I couldn’t control or even comprehend, I started to vulnerably share my heart through poetry. No one was more surprised than me! Over the course of a year I bravely wrote, shared my writings, and in that process saw hope and joy renewed in my life. What’s amazing is that every writing always finds a pathway back to a place of hope and peace. Only God can do that for me. It was a healing journey for me, my family, and others who resonated with my vulnerability, defiant joy and stubborn faith. I felt the calling from both God and others around me to publish my poetry and prose. It was never something I imagined, but God had other plans.

Sing, Dance, Pray is my story, which is really God’s story told through mine. It is a love story of grace, peace, hope, joy and light.

Website: Please go HERE.

A question before you go, Joanne:

Scribbler: Where is your favourite spot to write? Are you messy or neat? Your beverage of choice?

Joanne: I enjoy writing either sitting outside on my deck in the sunshine or in my living room, where there is plenty of natural light.

I am neat, both in writing and in general.

I do not have a favorite beverage so I would choose a couple of pieces of chocolate to savor as I write.

An Excerpt from Sing, Dance, Pray:

BE BRAVE

“So do not fear for I am with you, do not be afraid for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.” Isaiah 41:10 

A pretty journal adorns my nightstand.

I love the way it looks sitting there, all peaceful, with swirly gold lettering. And I love the message on the cover—be brave.

Yes. Brave!

I want to be brave—I truly do.

 

I see bravery in the people in my life: my daughters, husband, family, and friends.

In my Bible, friends like Queen Esther, Father Abraham, and bold Elijah meet me, too. But it seems almost impossible to walk in their shoes. 

It’s so easy to see bravery in them, in others, am I right? 

Putting on a brave face has been mine to do a few times in my life, like when I became a widow and a new mom, (on the same day), at nineteen-years-old. 

When I said yes to my new husband and turned the corner into a new life, I was also practicing bravery. When I moved away from my island community to the mainland with my little family—brave. Oh, and when I put on my “big girl clothes” and flew out west, alone, to visit my daughter and her family—very brave. 

Sometimes you just do the brave thing without even thinking about it too much, perhaps it’s easier if your bravery will benefit another? 

Other times being brave feels just too hard. Too much.

Overwhelming.

Bravery can look like speaking hope and beauty from the trenches of grief and trauma. Like writing letters of hope to aloved one in prison. Praying for healing, restoration and “new life.” 

Recently I’ve felt God nudging me to write. To write my story—share the beauty in the broken, the message in the mess.

His story told through mine. 

Singing has always been easier for me, but writing, it feels awkward at times and a bit stilted.

But God, He pushes my pen. 

Because He wouldn’t give up on the message…or the girl. The Messenger has a beautiful story of grace, peace, hope and faithfulness—even in the trenches. Especially in the trenches.

So, I write my story which is really His story. 

His story of mercy and grace, peace, healing, and hope.

The Beautiful Healer, He walks with me and holds my hand, the tiny, calloused hand of the common island girl. 

Leaning on Him, I rest and walk on in the light of His beauty.

I can be brave, leaning on His strong arms of HOPE.

Thank you for being our guest this week, Joanne.

 We wish you continued success with your writing.

 See you at the Book Fair.

And another BIG thank you to all our visitors and

 readers. Please leave a comment below and tell us

 what's on your mind.