Twenty years ago, on the steps of the yellow cottage at Brophy’s Point, where the St. Lawrence River and Lake Ontario converge, Dave Bidini celebrated the launch of “Baseballissimo” with his friends Mark Mattson, Stephen Heighton and a handful of others (the cottage was Mattson’s family’s).
The next year they invited a few more friends to read from their works – including novelist Tanis Rideout, who’d only self-published poetry to that point – and the Joe Burke Wolfe Island Literary Festival was born, started partly to honor their late friend (Joe) and partly to provide a bucolic setting with low entry fees – check that, zero entry fees – where the audience gets fed after the last readers reads.
Mark and Dave – the two festival organizers – have kept the event at Brophy’s Point, where only small signs stuck to poles direct the audience into the marshland to where a small patio surrounding an old hunt club has hosted everyone from Ireland’s Kevin Barry to Iceland’s Angela Rawlings to the late Paul Quarrington to Rideout, Heighton, Christian Bok, Sonnet L’Abbe and more.
This year’s lineup celebrates 20 years by featuring novelists Andrew F. Sullivan and Dave Hurlow, essayist Morgan Campbell, and poet Dani Couture along with a handful of other writers sharing their memories of Canada’s most unique literary festival.
July 27, readings start at 3 PM
Wolfe Island is accessed by ferry from Kingston and signs along the road will direct you to the event.
Free to attend.
Author Bios:
Andrew F. Sullivan is the author of The Marigold, a finalist for the Aurora Awards and the Locus Awards and named a Best Book of the Year by Esquire, The Verge, Book Riot and the Winnipeg Free Press. He cowrote The Handyman Method with Nick Cutter, a novel about home improvement gone wrong. Sullivan is also the author of the novel WASTE], and the short story collection All We Want is Everything. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario.
Morgan Campbell's work as journalist explores the spaces where sports intersects with picture issues like race, politics and business. He has won a National Newspaper Award as a feature writer at the Toronto Star, and an AIPS Sport Media award as a columnist at CBC Sports. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, Slate and ESPN+. As a memoirist, he examines the ways race, heritage, nationality and identity collide and coexist. My Fighting Family is his first of what we hope are many books.
Dave Hurlow is a Toronto-based musician, writer and educator. He was a founding member of the Juno nominated rock band The Darcys, and currently releases music as Decafwolf. A graduate of King’s College University in Halifax, his previous publications include the short story collection, Hate Letters from Buddhists (Steel Bananas Press, 2014), as well as articles on literature and music for NOW and The Ex-Puritan magazine. He also develops and facilitates creative writing and music programs for Story Planet, and is currently training to become a teacher. Deep Sea Feline is his first novel.
Dani Couture is the author of four collections of poetry and a novel. Her work has been nominated for the Trillium Award for Poetry and Pat Lowther Memorial Award, received an honour of distinction from the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s Dayne Ogilvie Prize for Emerging LGBTQ Writers and won the ReLit Award for Poetry. Her work has appeared in Ambit, Arc, The Awl, Boston Review, Dark Horse, The Fiddlehead, Plenitude, Poetry, Taddle Creek and others. Her most recent collection is Listen Before Transmit (Wolsak & Wynn, 2018).