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.