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.

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.