This book is a heartfelt account of a lifetime of encounters and experiences revolving around coming to the realization that God and passed loved ones are always with us. My purpose in writing this diary is to help and educate people about the signs they get throughout their lifetime that they are not recognizing and about weird things that happen that they try to rationalize. It is normal to try to rationalize lights turning on or off, or items being moved in your home. It is my hope that you can take these experiences one step further and understand that you are not alone and that these signs are real. In other words, believe your sixth sense. May the white light of divine love and protection be with each and every one of you.

Having moved from Maine with her physician husband in the 1840s, Dolly lost her husband and her only living child to illness by the time she began the diary at age thirty. A devout and self-sufficient schoolteacher, she soon married her second husband, Thomas Burge, a planter and widowed father of four. Upon his death in 1858, Dolly ran the plantation independently through the Civil War, remaining on the land during Sherman's infamous march through the area. After making the transition from slave labor to tenant farming, Dolly was married a third and final time to the Rev. William Parks, a prominent Methodist minister.

Long before she became the renowned author of the best-selling Schmecks cookbooks, an award-winning journalist for magazines such as Macleans, and a creative non-fiction mentor, Edna Staebler was a writer of a different sort. Staebler began serious diary writing at the age of sixteen and continued to write for over eighty years. Must Write: Edna Staebler’s Diaries draws from these diaries selections that map Staebler’s construction of herself as a writer and documents her frustrations and struggles, along with her desire to express herself, in writing. She felt she must write—that not to write was a “denial of life”—while at the same time she doubted the value of her scribblings. Spanning much of the twentieth century—each decade is introduced by an overview of key events in the author’s life during that period—the diaries vividly illuminate both her intensely personal experiences and her broader social world. The volume also presents four key examples of Staebler’s public writing: her first published magazine article; her first award-winning publication; the opening chapter of her book Cape Breton Harbour; and her lively account of the Great Cookie War. Must Write: Edna Staebler’s Diaries portrays an ordinary woman’s struggle to write in the context of her lived experience. “All my life I have talked about writing and kept scribbling in my notebook, as if that makes me a writer,” wrote Staebler in 1986. This volume argues that the very act of writing the diaries, with all their contradictory accounts of writerly ambition, success, and conflict, made Staebler the writer she yearned to be.

Includes book reviews.