We Invite You to Read by the Sea Virtually!
Main Stage closes out Read by the Sea literary festival on Saturday with five of Canada’s literary greats. The featured authors for 2021 are spoken word poet and author Rebecca Thomas, journalist and author Joan Baxter in the Local Chair, introduced in 2019 in recognition of the festival’s 20th anniversary, memoirist and poet Wayne Curtis, acclaimed first-novelist Amy Spurway, and author Pasha Malla, the only featured author this year from outside the Atlantic region. But he was born in St. John’s, NL, so we have a full slate of Atlantic talent!
Have you read works by any of our featured authors? Recommend their poetry, prose, and creative non-fiction to other Read by the Sea enthusiasts by sending us your reader reviews. We’ll share them here as part of this year’s festival (using only your first name and your province/territory or country of residence). Submit your reviews (250-word maximum) using the Contact Us form.
Do you want to own works by our featured authors? We’re auctioning off some copies. See our Wordstock page for details.
Rebecca Thomas
Rebecca Thomas is an award-winning Mi’kmaw poet. She is Halifax’s former Poet Laureate (2016-2018) and has been published in multiple journals and magazines. She coordinated the Halifax Slam Poetry team from 2014 to 2017, leading them to three national competitions with the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word. In 2020 Rebecca published her second children’s book, Swift Fox All Along, and her first poetry collection, I Place You into the Fire. Her first children’s book, I’m Finding My Talk, came out in 2019.
Joan Baxter
Joan Baxter is a Canadian journalist, development researcher, anthropologist, and award-winning author with more than three decades of international experience, much of it on the African continent.
The Mill, by Joan Baxter is an engaging and very revealing book that provides another example to the extent of corporate control in Nova Scotia and Canada. The author does a superior job of objectively documenting the history of the 50-year struggle among First Nations, along with environmentalists and the several owners of the Pictou Pulp Mill supported by various levels of government over the period.
The Mill is meticulously researched and was developed from original documents that have been hidden from the public view for a half a century. The book is definitely written in an unbiased tone allowing the reader to form their own conclusions from the material presented. The information presented is extremely enlightening and provides the whole story of the mill’s development along with the roles of big business and the various levels of government! – George M. Murray, Mooseland, NS
Joan Baxter’s book, The Mill – Fifty Years of Pulp and Protest, left me heartbroken. She so factually unveiled 5 decades of an industry that appeared to be quite different than what we were brought up to believe. She provided the accessible and insightful truths of one of Nova Scotia’s colossal environmental disasters. We will be indebted to her for having the courage, wisdom, and integrity to capture for us a realm that was known to many of us only as “the smell of money.” – Karla MacFarlane
Joan Baxter’s The Mill resembles all her other work in that it is based on the understanding that narrative is everything. Right from the mill’s inception, and for the next 50 years, people challenged the information presented by the mill companies and fought to have different facts and realities brought to light. She presents the history of the companies’ insidious and mendacious double-dealing with the Pictou Landing band. She demonstrates how workers are portrayed unquestionably as company supporters, as though workers have no right to expect or demand safe, clean environments for themselves and their communities. In her chronicling of the long tradition of protest she challenges the top-down view of “muck is brass”- the notion that if we want jobs then we must accept them passively on the companies’ terms. – Linda Little
Wayne Curtis
Books In Canada described his work as “A pleasure to read, for no detail escapes his discerning eye.” He is twice winner of the Richards Award for short fiction as well as the Woodcock Award, the CBC Drama Award, and A and B Grants from New Brunswick Arts Board, and The Canada Council for the Arts. Wayne’s latest short story collection is called, Winter Road, published in 2020.
Winter Road, by Wayne Curtis could be an easy, simple collection of nostalgic glimpses into New Brunswick’s not-so-distant history – except they stir the reader to recognition that, despite life’s imperfections, all will be well. The book left me with a general sense of having revisited old haunts and hauntings, and surviving them all happily. –
Monica Graham, Sundridge. NS
Amy Spurway
Amy Spurway was born and raised on Cape Breton Island, where, at the age of eleven, she landed her first writing and performing gigs with CBC Radio.
Her work has appeared in Today's Parent, the Toronto Star, Babble, and Elephant Journal, as well as in the realms of advertising, marketing, non-profit and corporate communications, education, health, and politics.
Crow, by Amy Spurway is a tale of how Stacey Fortune goes down the road, leaves Cape Breton for an obligatory life in Toronto, and then comes back up the road…returning to the island, her mother’s trailer, iffy high school friends, enemies and memories that have stuck in her craw. Because that’s what this island does to you. You always need to come home to get your head right. –
Lesley Crewe, Homeville, NS
Crow, by Amy Spurway Stacey Fortune, AKA ‘Crow,’ escaped her small village on Cape Breton Island as soon as possible when she was 18 years old. For twenty years she made a fairly satisfying life for herself in Toronto. Now at 38 years old she is back home living in her mother’s trailer and waiting to die. In the blink of an eye, she has been given a horrendous diagnosis which turned her life on a dime. She finds herself right back in the life she left 20 years ago, with the same dysfunctional family and friends. However she is on a quest to learn more about her history and identity, as more and more things come to her knowledge. It could have been a very sad book, if it weren’t for the fact that typical Cape Breton humour and the ability to make light of one’s circumstances shines throughout. I liked this book very much. –
Reviewed by Brenda White
Pasha Malla
PASHA MALLA is the author of five works of poetry and fiction, including the story collection The Withdrawal Method and the novel People Park. His fiction has won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, the Trillium Book Prize, an Arthur Ellis Award and several National Magazine awards. His work has also been long-listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Pasha’s latest novel, Kill the Mall, was released in February 2021.
Stephen Maher
The Writers Workshop "Fiction Thrillers" will be led by Stephen Maher, a journalist and novelist originally from Truro, Nova Scotia. Steve is an interviewer for the 2021 MainStage. An award-winning investigative journalist and political columnist, he is the author of three novels, Deadline, Salvage and Social Misconduct. He makes his home on the South Shore of Nova Scotia.
Suzanne Stewart
Suzanne Stewart’s writing has appeared in The Dalhousie Review, The Goose, The Globe and Mail, Saltscapes Magazine, The Antigonish Review, English Studies, Essays on Canadian Writing, The Craft Factor, and Newest Review. She has published a creative non-fiction book, The Tides of Time: A Nova Scotia Book of Seasons (Pottersfield 2018). Having completed an MFA in Creative Nonfiction and a PhD in English literature, Suzanne currently teaches at St. Francis Xavier University. Read by the Sea welcomes Suzanne as a MainStage interviewer.
Lana MacEachern
Lana MacEachern is a library technician and former journalist/columnist whose work has appeared in Nova Scotian daily and weekly newspapers and The Seniors' Advocate. A longtime Read by the Sea fan and frequent festival interviewer, she is now a member of the festival's organizing committee. Lana writes poetry and creative non-fiction and is working up the courage to submit her work to literary journals. She lives on Nova Scotia's Northumberland shore.