Review of The Cabot Trail Writer’s Festival–Excellent!

With the kind of anticipatory excitement that builds gradually and cannot easily be quelled, this past Saturday morning I made the short drive from Indian Brook to North River for the 3rd Annual Cabot Trail Writer’s Festival, held at the community hall next to Shape Shift Pottery.  I have only been to a handful of similar events and did not really know what to expect, so I entered the hall eager for the first workshop to begin.

Since I am not a local the names of the writers were unfamiliar, though everyone else seemed to know them well. The first workshop I attended was with Alexander MacLeod, the author of the Giller Prize-nominated collection of short stories entitled Light Lifting and teacher at St. Mary’s University in Halifax.  During that hour and a half we answered the questions who, what, when, where, why, and how for stories each of us had been working on and for a story we as a group crafted as we went.  Our conversation progressed in a logical manner:

Who?

• Who is the story about?
• Who gets to tell the story? 

What?

• What is the story about?
• What are the scenes?

 When?

• When does the story take place?
• How important is time?
• When do I disclose important information to the reader?

Where?

• Where does the story take place?
• How important is setting?

After lunch I attended a workshop led by another local writer, Johanna Skibsrud, whose novel The Sentimentalists  recently won the Giller Prize. In the workshop we participated in poetry exercises in which we would read a written poem and then write our own translation of it, in our own words but with an awareness for what we each thought the author of the original was trying to convey with images and symbolism. For example, we each received a haiku about a frog jumping into water, but with slightly different wording arrangements. Our task was to then create our own haikus in our own style and voice, while retaining the components of the original.  This exercise helped us envision what we have in mind We also did some original prose as well, which we peer reviewed.  In this delightfully personal workshop we were able to practice our poetry skills and get useful advice from others in the form of constructive criticism. I enjoyed it a lot, and came away from the workshop with a new found enjoyment for writing poems.

The third author was Shauntay Grant, a poet and spoken word performer from Halifax, whose workshops I unfortunately was unable to attend.