OnWords
Middle-graders and teens, this is something just for you! You’re invited to an afternoon of stories, sharing and selfies with two amazing Canadian authors: Basil Sylvester and Jean Mills. This is your chance to hear them read from their latest books and ask them about how they write, how they got published, what inspires them, and their tips for young writers. Where: Murray Family Public Library in Pictou. When: In the morning on Friday June 20, 2025. Watch this space for more details!
Jean Mills
Jean Mills has been writing professionally for over 30 years, and her essays, reviews, features, and children’s stories have appeared in publications across Canada. Her five Young Adult novels – Skating Over Thin Ice, Larkin on the Shore, The Legend, and Bliss Adair and the First Rule of Knitting (all with Red Deer Press) and Wingman (with Orca Books) – received critical acclaim in Canada and internationally. Skating Over Thin Ice was a 2019 Forest of Reading Red Maple Fiction nominee and was named to the USBBY Outstanding International Book List. Larkin on the Shore won a 2020 Whippoorwill Award and is included in the Nova Scotia Book Bureau curriculum for Grade 11 Language Arts. Her hi-lo novel Wingman is a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard selection, as is her latest Middle Grade novel, After the Wallpaper Music, published by Pajama Press.
Jean is a former college Communications professor, and she also spent ten years on the Media & Communications team at Curling Canada, where she was able to combine her love of writing and sports. Jean lives in Guelph, Ontario, but for many years, she spent her summers at her little blue house on Pugwash Point, overlooking the shores of the Northumberland Strait.
Alexandra Harrington
Alexandra Harrington is the author of the young adult novel, The Last Time I Saw her. She lives in Halifax where she has worked as a restaurant manager, fiction editor, and waitress. She has an honours degree in journalism from the University of King’s College in Halifax and worked in publishing in Toronto before coming back to Nova Scotia. The Last Time I Saw Her is her first novel. Website: @alexandrahwrites on Instagram.
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.