Dorothy Cummings McLean
Dorothy Cummings McLean is a Canadian writer living in Scotland. Her first novel with Ignatius Press is Ceremony of Innocence. She has been a regular contributor to The Catholic Register (Toronto). Her first book, Seraphic Singles: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Single Life, is a popular work of nonfiction.
Ignatius
Novels by
author
Posts from this author at the Novel Thoughts blog.
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The Double Life of Veronica
December 10, 2014 12:29 pm 5 Comments
Last night I went to see Kieślowski’s La Double Vie de Véronique (1991) at the cinema, thinking I had seen it many years before. However, I swiftly realized that I had seen only half of the first half, which is about a young Polish singer named Weronika. And I was sorry I… Read more »
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A Wifing Housewrite
July 30, 2014 12:38 pm Leave a Comment
Lately I’ve been reading nothing except Polish in Four Weeks by Marzena Kowalska, A Pocket Full of Rye by Dame Agatha Christie and, above all, Home Comforts: the Art & Science of Keeping House by Cheryl Mendelson. And I’ve been doing little except housework because when I consulted the Great Cheryl… Read more »
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How to Sell Your Catholic Novel
June 10, 2014 11:02 am 1 Comment
My doting husband and I took the train to London this weekend to promote Ceremony of Innocence and support another Ignatius Press novelist and a Catholic book shop in the process. Our expenses, which came out of our savings, were approximately £678, which is to say, the British equivalent of $1,137.27.
To put this into perspective, London is an expensive city, and we neither ate at McDonald’s nor confined our sightseeing to churches. So you may subtract £200, or $335.45, to get a reasonable picture of what it costs to go by train to London from Edinburgh and stay in a budget hotel for a weekend.
London, of course, is a city of endless cultural delights and, in our case, dear friends. We visited museums and churches, attended Mass and feasted with pals. But, naturally, we hoped to sell a lot of books, too. This, as I more than once reminded my museum-crazed husband, was our reason for going.
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Continuing the Catholic Literary Tradition in London
June 2, 2014 6:49 am 2 Comments
You are cordially invited to St. Paul’s Book Shop in London, England this June 7 at 4 PM to hear Fiorella de Maria and Dorothy Cummings McLean read from our Ignatius Press novels. Naturally, you will prefer to be in London already. London is rather far for most Ignatius Press… Read more »
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Lost To Translation
May 28, 2014 7:29 am 1 Comment
I have been absent from this site because I have not had a chance to read a Catholic novel in quite a while. I spent early May travelling about in Poland, and now I am in the middle of translating a speech I gave there into Polish. Fortunately a Polish… Read more »
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The Travel Novel
April 26, 2014 7:52 am Leave a Comment
I am leaving for Cracow (Kraków) in a few hours, the better to celebrate the canonizations of Blessed John Paul II and the other guy. No disrespect to Blessed John XXIII, but in Poland he is most definitely second banana to the great Jan Paweł Drugi. Polish street vendors still… Read more »
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Not a Catholic Novel
April 15, 2014 8:05 am 12 Comments
My husband is a convert from Anglo-Catholicism, that tendency in Anglicanism towards Catholic theology and worship, to the Roman Catholic Church, and he retains fond memories of the religious practices of his youth. He was rejected for the Anglican seminary by no less a personage than the wife of a… Read more »
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Airplane Books
April 2, 2014 3:03 pm 4 Comments
I spend the day in the grip of Agatha Christie’s The ABC Murders. Isn’t that terrible? My father once gave me a lecture on wasting good working hours on reading light fiction, but I couldn’t put my tablet down. I was utterly wrapped up in the mystery–in Hastings’ impatience, Poirot’s… Read more »
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How to Get Published
March 26, 2014 4:39 pm 4 Comments
When I was a child, I was greatly inspired by Canadian author Gordon Korman who wrote his bestselling This Can’t Be Happening At Macdonald Hall when he was thirteen years old. I thought that I too would become an overnight child success, but I did not. Although I wrote story… Read more »
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How To Write a Story
March 19, 2014 11:40 am 2 Comments
I am a writer. I write almost every day. Inspired by a strict Presbyterian friend, I have chosen not to write on Sundays. Although I make money through writing, I do not make very much. Apart from blogging, I make the least amount of money by writing fiction. In the… Read more »