SYDNEY, N.S. — Music will be taking a big part in this year’s Cabot Trail Writers Festival with a lineup of some of this island’s best known performers.
Singers Andrea Currie and Abby Mullendore, and the Mi’kmaw women’s drum group We’koqma’qewiskwa will be featured on Saturday from 7-8 p.m., along with a spoken word poem by George Elliott Clarke. On Sunday, from 2-3 p.m., fiddlers Shawnee Paul and Toney Morgan, multi-instrumentalist Bradley Murphy and pianist-guitarist Mario Colosimo will perform in the Great Hall of the Clans.
This year’s festival opens Friday night at 7 p.m. at the Gaelic College with readings by Tom Ryan, Lesley Crewe, Jessica Westhead, Sara Peters, Joshua Mensch, Alicia Elliott, Lynn Coady, Eleanor Wachtel and George Elliott Clarke.
Saturday will be devoted to several workshops from Joshua Mensch, Lesley Crewe and Tom Ryan, along with festival book club with Jessica Westhead, conversations with writers like Lesley Crewe, Jessica Westhead, Tom Ryan and Lynn Coady and a walk through the forest with a harpist and literary readings. The day ends with the Lives of Writers presented by Eleanor Wachtel.
Sunday features a performance, ready and conversation in Gaelic and English with Mary Jane Lamond, Mairi Britton, Goiridh Domhnullach and Lewis MacKinnon, a conversation on how books can change people and the world around them, a conversation with George Elliott Clarke and songs and stories with Shawnee Paul, Toney Morgan, Bradley Murphy and Mario Colosimo in the Great Hall of the Clans.
For more information on this weekend’s events at the Gaelic college and tickets, go to https://www.cabottrailwritersfestival.com/.