The photo I am posting this morning is of Katharine McLennan, who as a young woman served as a nursing assistant in hospitals in France during the First World War. Like her father, industrialist-turned-historian-turned-Canadian-Senator J.S. McLennan, Katharine would later go on to play an important role at historic Louisbourg.

After writing three Thomas Pichon novels in four years, I’ve decided to take a break (so to speak) before I turn to the writing of the fourth and final novel in that series. I am currently going back to and greatly improving a manuscript I wrote before I wrote Thomas, A Secret Life. It’s a novel that has a fictionalized Katharine McLennan as its focus. I think I now know a lot more about writing immersive fiction, thanks to the Thomas Pichon experience, and I want to see if I can breathe life into Katharine in her novel. Needless to say, the themes, tone and voice for her story bear little or no relationship to that of Thomas in his three books.

Once I have finished my re-writing of this novel set in the late 19th and early 20th centuries I’ll be getting back to the 18th century and the final chapter in my Thomas Pichon quartet.

Here’s a link to the CBC Mainstreet Cape Breton show where Wendy Bergfeldt and I talk about the Thomas Pichon Novels.

http://www.cbc.ca/mainstreetcb/blog/2015/09/11/crossings-a-thomas-pichon-novel/

What a difference a single person can make.

We know this from countless examples in all of our lives, and yesterday in a ceremony at the Fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island we were reminded of that truth yet again. I was not there, but wish I could have been, for it was an event to honour publisher and story-collector Ron Caplan. This time the honour was the Katharine McLennan Award. Previously, he had been made an member of the Order of Canada, and there have been other honours bestowed on him as well.

Ron Caplan came to Canada from the USA during a tumultuous time, when thousands of Americans were heading north to continue their young lives in what they hoped would be a better (and more peaceful) place. Canada was enriched by the mass migration of so many creative, thoughtful and hard-working souls. In Ron’s case, he chose Cape Breton Island. Over the decades that followed, first through Cape Breton’s Magazine and then with Breton Books, he has published a wealth of material about the Island and its people. All of us with a connection to Cape Breton are in his debt. Yes, he had help, he did not do everything by himself. But the vision was his. So, thanks Ron Caplan for an untold number of stories, recollections, tall tales, images, novels and histories. Thanks to you, they were not lost but presented to a wider world. A single person, a single life, and so much accomplished.

In addition to my Facebook site — A J B Johnston, Writer — I am now also using Instagram as a place to post images I find interesting or relevant to this or that. They both serve as a sort of Visual Archives. Sometimes I’ll be putting images on both sites, but more often they will be different postings, reflecting what I perceive to be the differences between the two. I have now posted perhaps a dozen or more images to Instagram, with more to come.

Under a new initiative to get Atlantic Canadians reading Atlantic Canadian books, the region’s publishers have made a large number of their titles available as digital versions (e-books) to libraries.

I am informed that two of my novels, Thomas, A Secret Life (2012) and The Maze, A Thomas Pichon Novel (2014), were made available in this way. So, if you’ve not read either book yet, and prefer the e-book format, those two stories are waiting to be read via a digital download from a library.

For the story of this initiative, go to https://library.novascotia.ca/readlocal.

Fellow historian B. A. (Sandy) Balcom and I are both delighted and honored to be asked to play a role in pulling together the historical background of the Mi’kmaw relationship with the French as it relates to the altar recently returned to the Chapel Island First Nation. Sandy and I have each done work in this area, especially when we used to work for Parks Canada at the Fortress of Louisbourg.

Here is a link to one of the recent stories about the altar’s return.

http://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/historic-altar-returned-to-mi-kmaq-church-after-more-than-250-years-1.2478703