Everything about the life of Silver Donald Cameron seemed born out of story or storytelling, including his own rather idiosyncratic name.

Born in Toronto and raised in Vancouver, in 1971 Cameron relocated to the small area of D’Escousse, on Isle Madame, off Cape Breton’s southeast corner. The tightly knit community was a mixture of Acadian, Indigenous, and Scottish heritage; it was this last that caused some problems for the budding writer in his new habitat.

“If you turn any corner here, you’re going to run into a Donald Cameron or a John MacDonald,” says Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Linden McIntyre, whose family hails from Cape Breton and who had known Cameron – “or known of him” – for 50 years.

The confusion about Cameron’s particulars got so great that his own mother mistook him for someone else, according to Cameron’s wife of many years, the writer Marjorie Simmins. “When Billie Joe MacLean, the mayor of Port Hawkesbury, phoned him up one time and said, ‘How are you, you old fart?’ thinking he was talking to his friend who owned the A&W, that was it,” Simmins says. “Donald Cameron was going to change his name.”

Cameron’s hair had gone white early, and that provided the impetus for his friend, the musician Tom Gallant, to dub him “Silver Donald.”

“I heard two things that made me roll my eyes,” says McIntyre. “One was that he was going by ‘Silver Donald.’” The second was that Cameron had decided to live in “an enclave within an enclave” on Isle Madame. “I’d say, ‘Give him one winter down here, that’s all it’s going to take,’” McIntyre says. “Fifty winters went by and I gradually became accustomed [to the fact that] Silver Donald was [still] there.”

Indeed, Cameron – who died on June 1 of complications from lung cancer – never left his adopted home on Cape Breton. Not only did he become a fixture in D’Escousse and its environs, he became something resembling an unofficial laureate. “I kept hearing that the guy is part of the fibre of this community,” says McIntyre.

“Don simply adored the people here, and had a bone-deep knowledge of the geography, history, and different groups who grace this landscape: the Black Canadians; the Acadians; the Mi’kmaq (and Maliseet, in N.B.); and the Celts,” Simmins says. “One might even include a fifth group, the musicians, who of course, belong in all of the other groups.”

From his home in D’Escousse, Cameron embarked on a career in literature and journalism which would see him publish 20 books and co-found The Writers’ Union of Canada. He wrote columns for the Globe and Mail and the Halifax Sunday Herald, taught at Dalhousie University and the University of New Brunswick, and served as the inaugural dean of communication studies at Cape Breton University. In addition to being a documentary filmmaker and musician, Cameron was also a dedicated environmentalist who served as the first Farley Mowat Chair in Environment at CBU.

“In the course of his important career he seemed to be involved in everything, from the Writers’ Union to the worlds of fiction and non-fiction, in addition to his teaching thousands of lucky students over the years,” says Douglas Gibson, former publisher of McClelland & Stewart, who was responsible for publishing Cameron’s non-fiction title Sailing Away from Winter. The book, about a boat that Cameron acquired with an eye to refurbishing it and sailing to the Bahamas as a way to avoid one of the East Coast’s typically punishing winters, grew from what was less than an idea in Cameron’s head, spurred on by Gibson’s enthusiastic encouragement.

If Gibson was instrumental to the creative process where Sailing Away from Winter was concerned, Cameron continued to pay that forward, mentoring and inspiring generations of writers, students, and acolytes. “Back in the late 1960s and early ’70s, his example encouraged me to believe a writing life in the Maritimes was possible,” says fellow East Coast writer Stephen Kimber. “After all, he’d left academia to pursue a life as a writer in Cape Breton!”

And as a mentor to younger writers, Cameron was always one to lead by example. “There are so few stylists in this world, and Don was a superb stylist,” says Simmins. “The brightness and muscularity of his writing, and its elegance, is a rare quality on the Canadian – or international – writing scene. His verbs were always perfect; they would make you laugh out loud at their precision.”

Cameron’s final book, a work of non-fiction called Blood in the Water, due out in August, looks at the murder of Philip Boudreau, who died following a 2013 dispute with three fishermen following accusations of poaching their lobster. The fishermen were convicted of manslaughter though Boudreau’s body was never found; all three were upstanding members of the community who had never before been in trouble with the law.

“It’s a really morally complex tale, it’s a great history of that region,” says Diane Turbide, publishing director at Penguin Canada, who acquired and edited the book. “And what comes through it all is this amazing love for Cape Breton and its people.”

“It’s almost like it was planned to be his final summing up of the place and his place in it,” says McIntyre. “For him to be able to write a book about a subject as raw and violent as that one and still have it come off as a tribute to the place and a highly sensitive, sympathetic look at all the factors that go to making a community a community – he pulled that off.”

“To me, it felt like the book he was destined to write,” Turbide says. “It was almost Shakespearean in scope because of the kinds of moral dilemmas that it addresses.”

For Kimber, the forthcoming publication of Blood in the Water, though highly anticipated, will be tinged with sadness. “Reading it will be bittersweet, knowing you’re in the presence of a master storyteller, but knowing too there will not be a next book by Silver Don.”

Notwithstanding the fact that there will be no more published material from the prolific writer, his legacy prevails in the hearts of the people who knew him and loved him. “Don is the love of my life and the light of all my days,” says Simmins. “I use the present tense deliberately, as he always will be those things to me.” As he will, one presumes, for the Cape Breton populace he chronicled so conscientiously and with such piercing perception.

For information on events to mark Silver Donald Cameron’s passing, go to www.silverdonaldcameroncelebration.com.

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*Correction: This post has been updated to reflect the correct year Silver Donald Cameron moved to Isle Madame and the identity of the Acadian population there.