Sean Paul Bedell
Categories: Male Authors - Anglophone Authors - Poets - Novelists - Miramichi River - Southeast
Source: Author / auteur
Biography
While he has worked as a paramedic and as a captain with the fire service, Sean Paul Bedell has been writing and publishing for more than 30 years. He lives in Dartmouth with his wife Lisa, and Somewhere There's Music is his first novel.
Sean has lived in Miramichi and Moncton. He spent many happy days in Perth-Andover, Aroostook Junction, and Bedell Settlement visiting relatives on his father's side of the family and enjoying the natural beauty of Carleton and Victoria counties. His grandfather on his mother's side is a proud Acadian from Petit-Rocher. He remembers trips in the summer with him where they would travel to the Acadian Peninsula and visit his relatives. He would speak French only and each house would be warm with laughter, love, and fricot.
Sean attended school at St. Michael’s Academy in Miramichi.
How has New Brunswick influenced your work?
Though I no longer live there, whenever I come into New Brunswick now, I feel like I am coming home. New Brunswick locales, and experiences, center prominently in my work. My current novel is set in Amherst, Nova Scotia, and makes many references to New Brunswick. I also try to reference my Acadian heritage as much as I can in my work. My earlier poetry and short stories feature scenes and snapshots of New Brunswick, especially parts of the Miramichi River as well as the city. A new novel I am in the process of editing is set in Miramichi and the opening scene takes place in the parking lot of St. Michael's Basilica in Chatham, overlooking the Miramichi River.
What is your favourite New Brunswick book, and why?
I can't choose just one, so I have to say for a novel it's Nights Below Station Street by David Adams Richards. It is my old hometown, so haunting and filled with rich, vivid characters that I feel I know. For short stories, I have to choose Raymond Fraser's The Black Horse Tavern. The raw emotion and the gritty, timeless honesty of those stories define New Brunswick for me. For poetry, Bliss Carmen and Charles G.D. Roberts rank up there, but I have settled on Brian Bartlett as my favourite. Bartlett's striking words create such vivid images of nature and they resound with optimism, hope and reflect the real essence of life: "And the storyteller stopped and said: giving a minute to a man or a woman/who has lived eighty years (or twenty) is like trying/to pour a lake into a bottle..."
What do you consider to be the highlight of your career so far?
So far, publishing the novel has been the highlight. Even more so, has been the response and comments from people who have read it. As a writer, I am touched when my story touches others in some way.
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Featured Publication |
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Somewhere There's Music (2022) |
Excerpt: While shining a light on the trauma first responders endure, Somewhere There's Music immerses readers in a young man's struggle and desperate search to find what is left of his family. |
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Source(s): Author.
