Les Bowser
Categories: Male Authors - Dramatists - Authors of Non-Fiction - Southeast
Source: Author / auteur
Biography
Les Bowser was born in Sackville in 1948. After graduating from Riverview High School in
Canada's 100th-anniversary year, 1967, he attended the University of New Brunswick for three years and led a bohemian lifestyle in Fredericton during the 1970s. After moving to Toronto in 1978, he entered the natural food business and joined with eight like-minded partners to found the Big Carrot, which was then Canada's largest natural food market. He soon exercised his entrepreneurial talents by establishing Doormouse Distribution, the largest importer and distributor of alternative magazines in Canada. Drawn to the history of his home province, in 1997 he launched a career in writing and research to explore the roots of the 18th-century settlement on the Petitcodiac River that is today the city of Moncton. In 2000 he sold his magazine business and bought a farm near Peterborough in Ontario, intending to follow in the footsteps of his Pennsylvania-German ancestors. His first book, The Search for Heinrich Stief, was published by Nimbus in 2001. That book was followed by a series of articles published in Generations, the journal of the New Brunswick Genealogical Society, all of which were republished in 2016 as The Settlers of Monckton Township. Lately, he has written a script for a feature-length film which he is hoping to get produced in Canada, and he is currently compiling a hydronymic history of the Petitcodiac River.
How has New Brunswick influenced your work?
The great historian William Francis Ganong once said that New Brunswick is a province of rivers. I've tried to appreciate that sentiment by canoeing on the Saint John, the Nashwaak [River], the Nashwaaksis [Stream], the Washademoak, the Miramichi, the Oromocto, and the St. Croix rivers – exciting rivers, every one.
What is your favourite New Brunswick book, and why?
I love history, especially Maritime history, and one of my favorite books is John Clarence Webster's The Forts of Chignecto (1930).
What do you consider to be the highlight of your career so far?
The basis and starting point of my career was the discovery of the roots of New Brunswick's Steeves family in Germany in 1997.
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Featured Publication |
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The Settlers of Monckton Township (2016) |
Excerpt: In this little volume, the author will take you on a journey of discovery – into the inns and byways of colonial Philadelphia, onto some of the immigrant ships that came to America, into little towns and villages in the south-German Duchy of Wurttemberg, and into the lives of the Pennsylvania-German settlers who founded the township of Monckton in 1766. |
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Find this author in the New Brunswick public libraries catalogue.
Source(s): Author.
