Nova Reads
Nova Reads is an occasional series of relaxed evening socials featuring the reading of passages by some of our province’s major literary contributors.
On February 7, 2024, local drag artist Anna Mona-Pia, NDP MLA Lisa Lachance, meteorologist Cindy Day, and CBC’s Portia Clarke shone a light on Nova Scotian authors of romance fiction, readings passages from
- Donna Alward’s The House on Blackberry Hill,
- Katerina Bakolias’s Luscious Love,
- Renee Field’s The Heart of the Family,
- Deanna Foster’s Post Mortem Management,
- Cathryn Fox’s Kilt Trip,
- Deborah Hale’s The Bonny Bride,
- Michelle Helliwell’s A Captivating Caper,
- and Nicole Northwood’s The Devil You Know.
Romance trope bingo and door prizes were provided by Romance Writers of Atlantic Canada. Book sales were provided by Dartmouth Book Exchange.
Held at The Carleton (1685 Argyle St, Halifax), this ticketed event raised funds for WFNS programming.
Partners
The Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia is grateful to Romance Writers of Atlantic Canada, The Carleton, and Dartmouth Book Exchange for their partnership in realizing Nova Swoons.
On January 17, 2023, Annick MacAskill and five fellow Nova Scotian poets (Nanci Lee, Samantha Sternberg, Tiffany Morris, Anna Quon, and Jaime Forsythe) read from Shadow Blight (Gaspereau Press, 2022), MacAskill’s third, Governor General Award-winning collection. This in-person event was free to attend and was co-presented by Halifax Public Libraries.
Shadow Blight considers the pain and isolation of pregnancy loss through the lens of classical myth. Drawing on the stories of Niobe—whose monumental suffering at the loss of her children literally turned her to stone—and others, this collection explores the experience of being swept away by grief and silenced by the world. Skirting the tropes (“o how beautiful / the poets make our catastrophes”), MacAskill interweaves the ancient with the contemporary in a way that opens possibilities and offers a new language for those “shut up in stillness.”
Annick MacAskill is a poet from Halifax, Nova Scotia, who won the Governor General’s Award for English-language poetry at the 2022 Governor General’s Awards for her collection Shadow Blight. Her other books, also published by Gaspereau Press, are Murmurations and No Meeting Without Body.
Charles Saunders (1946 – 2020) was an African-American author and journalist who moved to Ontario in 1969 and then Nova Scotia in 1985. While a copyeditor and writer at Halifax’s The Daily News, where he worked for nearly two decades, Saunders penned numerous columns grappling with difficult racial issues, contributed to The Spirit of Africville (1992), and authored the book-length community profile Black and Bluenose (1999). Saunders also pioneered the “sword and soul” literary genre through his Imaro series of fantasy novels, begun in 1981. His fiction was groundbreaking not merely for its anti-colonial reimagining of figures like Tarzan and Conan the Barbarian but also for its worldbuilding centered on Black characters and cultures.
Elizabeth Bishop (1911 – 1979) was an American-born poet who discovered her capacious gift while growing up in Great Village, Nova Scotia. Although her work eschews the confessionalism of her contemporaries, her time in this province — and her queerness, long ignored by critics — inform much of her poetic mythology and how we understand it today.
Budge Wilson was born and educated in Nova Scotia, but spent many years in Ontario, returning home in 1989. She began writing later in life, after teaching and working as a commercial artist, as a photographer, and for over 20 years as a fitness instructor. Her first book appeared in 1984, and she has now published more than 33 (with 27 foreign editions in 14 languages) and appeared in more than 90 anthologies. Her most recent book, After Swissair (2016), is a poetry collection chronicling the aftermath of the crash of Swissair Flight 111 off the coast of Nova Scotia on September 2, 1998. Her books have been frequently read and dramatized on CBC, American, and Danish Radio. Wilson’s The Leaving received the ALA’s Notable Book Award and was listed among its Best Books for Young Adults; it was also named a Horn Book Fanfare Book, a School Library Journal’s Best Book (1992), one of the Library of Congress’s 100 Noteworthy Children’s Books (1992), a National Council of Teachers of English Notable Children’s Book (1993), one of NYPL’s Books for the Teen Age (1993), and one of ALA’s 75 Best Children’s Books of the Last 25 Years (1994). Wilson’s Before Green Gables has appeared in 11 countries and seven languages, been animated in Japanese, been recognized by Quill & Quire as one of the Best Books of 2008, and earned Budge Wilson the Atlantic Independent Booksellers’ Choice Award (2009).
On February 20, 2018, favourite passages from the work of Hugh MacLennan (1907-1990) were read by Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia members. Alexander MacLeod, writer and professor of English and Atlantic Canadian Studies at Saint Mary’s University, provided an introduction to MacLennan’s work. Held at The Watch That Ends the Night, a Dartmouth restaurant and cocktail bar named after a novel by MacLennan, the event was free to attend.
A novelist, essayist, and professor, the Glace Bay-born MacLennan is perhaps best known as “the first major English-speaking writer to attempt a portrayal of Canada’s national character,” according to the Canadian Encyclopedia. His books include Barometer Rising (1941), Two Solitudes (1945), Each Man’s Son (1951), The Watch That Ends the Night (1959), and Return of the Sphinx (1967), among others. A Rhodes scholar, MacLennan was recognized for his work with five Governor General’s Literary Awards, three for fiction and two for fiction. The Tragically Hip’s song “Courage” references MacLennan’s The Watch That Ends the Night: the song’s final verse paraphrases the novel’s closing lines.
