LITERALLY GROWING
Cabot Trail Writers Festival celebrating 10th anniversary.
The Cabot Trail Writers Festival has become one of this country’s premier literary events in just 10 years, giving new festival director Rebecca Silver Slayter a chance to put her imprint on an already healthy event. The Cape Breton Post recently did an email interview with Silver Slayter about this year’s festival, which runs Sept. 28-30 at the Gaelic College in St. Anns.
Cape Breton Post: It’s the 10th year for the festival. Are you pleased with its progress through the years? What’s ahead for the next 10 years?
Rebecca Silver Slayter: I am hugely pleased with the festival’s progress over the years, which I can claim no part in. I think the festival founders, Gary Walsh and Jeannette MacDonald, as well as the board members who worked with them over the years, had a truly beautiful vision and did a herculean amount of work to fulfil it. It is pretty incredible to think of what has been accomplished in just 10 years.
My understanding is that the festival began as essentially an overcrowded book club meeting. Gary and Jeannette had invited the poet George Elliott Clarke to read to their book club and the news spread just by word of mouth — they ended up with a packed house for that reading and realized what a thirst there was on the island for that kind of literary event.
And in just 10 years, they have built that evening and that insight into a festival that draws a crowd of hundreds and is known and respected by authors and publishers across the country.
I feel truly proud to be part of something like that. I don’t know that anyone would expect a festival of this scope or calibre in a place like rural Cape Breton ... I think people are truly
astonished to discover it here.
It didn’t happen because it was obvious or easy. It happened because people like Gary and Jeannette worked incredibly hard and because the readers and communities of Cape Breton supported it, year after year, with spirit and with generosity.
CBP: Will there be any special events planned to celebrate this milestone?
RSS: So far as celebrating the milestone goes, the special events are really the new initiatives like the Book Club, Heard in the Highlands and In Other Words.
I guess you could say we’re trying to celebrate not so much by marking a particular moment (though of course there will be some celebrating and some 10th anniversary treats when the festival weekend comes) as by looking forward and by continuing to grow.
Each of those three events was developed as a way to further widen our arms to include more Cape Breton people, culture and community, and to grow beyond the festival weekend into a source of connection between readers, writers and Cape Bretoners, year-round.
CBP: Tell me a little bit about
the festival’s new initiatives.
RSS: There are a few. Our goal this year has been to continue and preserve all the wonderful things about the festival that people have come to love, and not alter its overall structure, but also to find ways to bring in some new ways for our audiences to engage with and encounter books.
So we’ve created a Festival Book Club that we’re rolling out slowly, beginning with a single breakaway Festival Book Club session at this year’s festival, which is a moderated Q&A with a featured author (this year, Linda Spalding), about her latest book.
This session is free to registered Festival Book Club members and limited to 25 participants, which we hope will preserve that sense of an intimate chat about writing and reading.
Our intentions are, if the interest is there, to build the Festival Book Club to include multiple book club sessions at future festivals, as well as readings and gatherings for members during the many months between festivals, at different locations around the island, and to offer free, shareable or discounted books to participants, or opportunities to access hard-to-find titles and develop an online forum for conversations about reading.
My intention and hope with this event was (1) to help ensure that even as our festival grows, it retains that sense of intimacy that made it so special in the first place, still ensuring close encounters between authors and readers are a key part of the festival experience, and (2) to help build a reading community across the island that extends beyond the festival weekend.
We also have a new outdoor event called Heard in the Highlands, which will take place right beside the Gaelic College grounds. Participants will take a guided stroll into the woods, encountering Mi’kmaw musicians and storytellers along the way ... this was a way to bring the festival out into the landscape, which is of course one of the best parts of being in Cape Breton that time of year.
We are also trying out something new with an event called In Other Words, which is a multilingual reading and conversation among Gaelic, Mi’kmaw, Acadian French and English writers. This was a bit of a risk, as managing a multilingual conversation will certainly be a challenge, but we thought it was one worth taking, as a way to try introducing some of Cape Breton’s other languages and literatures to our stage. Personally, I’m really looking forward to this.
And on Saturday night, after dinner, there will be a conversation between Madeleine Thien and Linda Spalding which I anticipate will be incredible, followed by a performance by the amazing, truly unique violinist Jacques Mindreau … And we have a few other things up our sleeves. We’ll be sharing more details in the coming weeks, including a Saturday night dinner reading I’m really excited about and a fundraiser we’re calling My Favourite Book. But I can tell you more about those soon.
CBP: It’s an intriguing list of writers this year. How did it emerge that all of these different writers wanted to come to Cape Breton for this festival?
RSS: It was important to us to bring together a diversity of writers, so they could share with our audience a range of literary genres (fiction, nonfiction, poetry), writing styles and cultural/geographic origins. We began with a sort of wish list and were lucky to find most of the writers on our wish list willing, able and eager to take part in the festival.
The festival founders and the board members and volunteers who have worked so hard on this festival over the years have built up its reputation among publishing houses and especially authors, which makes it an easier job to invite the kind of authors who are receiving and having to turn down many such invitations every year.
When I invited Sharon Bala for instance, she said she ‘enthusiastically accepted,’ noting that a former CTWF guest writer (Megan Coles) had spoken so highly of the festival that she ‘just couldn’t say no.’
I think the festival board has always made it a priority to ensure the writers as well as the audiences are having a wonderful time and having the opportunity to really connect with one another and with the readers, and so it’s a huge help to have authors leave the festival saying what an incredible experience it was ... and of course, it’s hard to come from away from a weekend among Cape Bretoners and not have had a fantastic time.