AmeriCeilidh gig for Bookends
Bookends has bagged itself a foot stompin’ gig to get festival-goers up dancing, writes Kathie Griffiths.
A lively night with The Hollow Mountain String Band is set for Friday September 28 from 8pm at Benderloch’s Victory Hall. The band will perform its blend of sound bridging the gap between Scottish and Americana music. Revellers can expect a mix of country, old time, honky tonk, Celtic traditional and western swing.
The gig comes at almost the half-way point of the twoweek festival which starts on September 22, bringing a host of authors and crowds of visitors to Benderloch. Tickets are being snapped up for all the events, so booking is advised.
Living with Lyme disease, a bacterial infection that can be spread to humans by infected ticks, spurred author Morvern-May MacCallum to write. Using her own difficult situation she wrote Finding Joy, a moving tale about 16-year-old Joyce who is torn from the life she loves. Two years of ill-health pass as she and her family struggle with a dizzying array of symptoms and a fight for diagnosis in the hope of recovery.
Morven-May will be a guest at Bookends’ Victory Hall home on Sunday September 23 at 2pm. She will also be visiting Oban High School’s English Department the next day as part of the festival’s outreach programme talking to young people about writing from personal experience and will be raising awareness of Lyme Disease.
Taynuilt-born poet, novelist and TV scriptwriter Lorn MacIntyre is another author who will be appearing at the festival. On Saturday September 29 he will be talking about his book The Leaper. This event at the Victory Hall, starts at 2pm. MacIntyre’s work records and laments the disappearance of a traditional way of life, with accompanying decline in the Gaelic language and the exploitation of the environment. In The Leaper, Seumas Macdonald is an outsider, not only because he lives on an isolated primitive croft but also because he is the only child in the school to speak Gaelic, apart from his disturbed sister. He is also the favourite of MacCallum the headmaster, which leads to the boy being bullied in the playground.
MacCallum comes in his boat for ceilidhs with the Macdonald family, to preserve the evocative Gaelic names of birds and flowers, and to teach Seumas to read and write what the headmaster calls ‘the language of Eden’ which, like the natural world, is under threat.
Anyone submitting a chapter, poem, article or a short story of 2,000 words max to Bookends’ writer in residence Kenneth Steven should email it to info@kennethsteven.co.uk by Monday September 17 to get a feedback session with him on Monday September 24.