With only a grade 8 education, Gord Barney has surprised more than a few people with his knack for telling a story.

A logger for the better part of his almost 52 years. Barney now works running a yarder for Mount Sicker Logging. He seems at first glance, to fit the stereotypical image of a logger. His flannel shirt and work boots clothe an opinionated, outspoken working man. But he also breaks the stereotype when he writes or tells a story.

Barney has self published five pamphlets of stories, poems and cartoons. His work has appeared in the Green Gold Newspaper, the union paper for the IWA local 1-71, the Duncan Citizen, the Nanaimo Times and the Business Logger. Barney was also the editorial cartoonist for the Ladysmith Chronicle in 1990-91.

He began refining his skills as a cartoonist even before he began honing his way with words. He drew caricatures to entertain his friends in camp, poking fun at both his buddies and his bosses. He began writing because there were some stories that couldn’t be captured in a cartoon.

Like many writers, Barney is a voracious reader. He says he read everything he could get his hands on. “I would read anything in the house,” he says. “My parents were great readers too, so there was always lots of reading material at home.

Barney began writing out of sheer boredom in the camps after work. Stuck in a room with nothing else to do but drink or do drugs. Barney turned to words although he admits he did his fair share of partying.

The stories he tells are of the woods and the people who work in them. The tales contained in his latest book, Timber beasts of the Great Bear Rainforest, were first written long hand on scraps of paper which Barney kept for years before finally putting them into his computer.

After years of listening and compiling the stories of the woods, Barney finally put them together, with encouragement from Mike Ballantyne, President of the B. C. Folklore Society.

Ballantyne stumbled upon Barney’s work while visiting a friend who happened to have one of the logger’s pamphlets of poems, and immediately saw its worth.

“ As soon as I saw it, I realized it was a very good example of our Folklore and should be preserved,” says Ballantyne, “The stories and poems are certainly part of our heritage, but this sort of book doesn’t get published unless it’s author gets some encouragement.”

And it didn’t take much encouraging to convince Barney to put the myriad stories he has collected over the years into a book.

“I thought one day I would put them in a book, and there it is,” he says, pushing the manuscript text across his kitchen table.” It took me 25 years to do it though.”

The manuscript that slides across the table is a thick bond cardboard paper cover which bears one of Barney’s cartoons on the front, as well as a sticker warning: Adult material.

Barney likens many of the stories in Timber beasts to mythology or legend. They are stories every logger has heard at one time or another, stories that change subtly as they are told and retold around the camps or in the crummies, but which have never been written down, until now. Some are true, some are fiction and some are somewhere in between.

While there are nearly 90 stories in Timber beasts, Barney believes he has enough scraps of paper to fill at least one more volume of loggers stories, and recently began work on compiling a definitive Glossary of logging Terms used today and years ago to put into another book. His latest book manuscript is a novel called A Room at Murphy’s. It’s a story about loggers who live in a rooming house on Carrol Street in Vancouver during the 1950’s and their travels into the woods of British Columbia.