By Lana Button, Community Contributor
Roundtable by the Sea Literary Festival and Conference takes place in and around Saint Andrews, starting Nov. 12. This is an exciting four-day literary festival, and if you love books, you won’t want to miss this opportunity to be inspired by an array of authors, including Canadian journalist and chief BBC correspondent Lyse Doucet and New York Times bestselling author Donna Jones Alward. Literary talks and conference workshops will focus on the inaugural festival’s theme: Wonder, Possibility and Community: Literature in the Age of Polycrisis.
As the author of 20 books for children who love travelling and speaking at conferences and festivals across Canada. I’m thrilled to be travelling from southern Ontario to Saint Andrews for Roundtable by the Sea. The conference aims to encourage conversation and reflection on how literature builds community. As I prepare for my Thursday keynote and pack books for my Saturday storytime, I am also reflecting on how community builds literature. I’m from here. From a young age I loved performing and, growing up in St. Stephen, I received a lot of community support as I sang on Santa’s Helpers in the 1970s and performed with the drama club in the 1980s. After studying theatre at Concordia University and acting in TV and film, I came home in the early 1990s to study early childhood education at NBCC in Saint Andrews. It was there that I fell in love with picture books and my writing dream began.
Often when I’m writing, I am inspired by not only the setting of our community but also its spirit and strength which is sprinkled through several of my stories.
I’m proud to have the opportunity to come home and speak at this conference and to share how this community contributed to my confidence and inspired my writing.
Details of the Roundtable by the Sea Festival, including the schedule, registration, book fair and author signings, can be found at roundtablebythesea.org.
I hope you will bring the kids to Saturday story time on Nov. 14. It is a free event taking place at Ross Memorial Library at 10:30 a.m. And if you can’t make my keynote on Thursday, just know that I’ll be thanking this community for being the village that helped raise this children’s author.
