Category: Events

  • Pride Coffee House 2024

    Tuesday, July 2 was opening night for the Pride Week celebrations organized by Safe Alliance here in Happy Valley-Goose Bay. The Coffee House this year was combined with a rock-painting and crafting event, which rounded out the event beautifully, and bumped up our participation numbers. Some of the crafters didn’t know there would be poetry,…

  • Pride Week Is Coming Up

    I love how Pride isn’t a fixed date. It’s a special time—a day or a week or a month, depending on where you are—but not a holiday, which I think makes it feel more like part of life’s regular programming, rather than an intermission, if that makes any sense. Somehow this way it doesn’t feel…

  • Words of Warmth Wrap-Up

    Tonight was a wonderful evening with wonderful folks and a fitting way to wrap a week of celebrating literature in Happy Valley-Goose Bay. All throughout the festival, participants praised our diverse lineup of events, and we really tried to represent many forms of writing, including fiction, non-fiction, comics, poetry, songwriting, screen-writing, and activism, as well…

  • Words of Warmth, Day 6

    Our final day of workshops came to a close today. It’s a bittersweet feeling—but to be honest, by now I’m also pretty tired! It has been a whirlwind of a festival, with 12 events over six days and our end-of-festival social gathering and celebration still to come tomorrow evening. What a tremendous experience it has…

  • Words of Warmth, Day 5

    We’ve had three more workshops in the past 24 hours! Today, Anne Budgell talked about different aspects of researching and organizing materials for historical non-fiction, in the vein of her biographical book, Dear Everybody (which Robin McGrath reviewed in Labrador, a Reader’s Guide) and her history of the 1918-19 influenza epidemic in Northern Labrador, We…

  • Words of Warmth, Day 4

    Today is the busiest day of the festival and also the halfway mark! It’s hard to believe things are going by so quickly. This morning’s events were held at the College of the North Atlantic. Michael Johansen’s workshop “Creative Writing 101” drew a group of talented local writers, and Rosena Fung opened up the festival…

  • Words of Warmth, Day 3

    The festival’s third day is in the books, with a roundtable discussion this afternoon on the future of local literary industry and a screening of Sweetland this evening. We have our big weekend slate coming up tomorrow and Sunday. As so often happens with these extended events (conferences and chess tournaments come to mind for…

  • Words of Warmth, Day 2

    Today it was a great pleasure to introduce and sit next to Robin McGrath at a “Reading Labrador” workshop and celebration of her book, Labrador, a Reader’s Guide, which Mark and I published through Brack and Brine. This was the second event of the Words of Warmth Literary Festival, with a slew more to come…

  • Words of Warmth

    I’m excited to kick off the Words of Warmth Literary Festival here in Happy Valley-Goose Bay tomorrow! The festival’s first event will be the much-anticipated Audiobooks Launch Party at Them Days, courtesy of Aimee Chaulk, Alexa Nicolle, and many others. As a member of the organizing committee, I’ve been busy promoting the festival, both on…

  • Canadian Women’s Chess Championship

    I competed in the Canadian Women’s Zonal Championship, our national chess championship and the first stage of the World Championship cycle, in April 2024. I think it may have attracted the largest and strongest field ever for a Canadian women’s tournament. I was very proud of the Hart House Chess Club for pulling off such…

  • St. John’s International Women’s Film Festival

    I joined filmmakers Christine Poker, Holly Andersen, and Amanda Gear at the 2023 St. John’s International Women’s Film Festival for a “Northern View” panel discussion facilitated by Latonia Hartery. I guess the Labrador Heritage Minutes make me a filmmaker, too! It was an honour and learning experience to be in that company, and to take…