Thanks for joining us on July 10, 2026 for another week of the Village Commons Music Series, a simultaneously live and live-broadcast show, happening on Fridays from 1 – 2:30pm on the new Pavilion stage. Host Manda Aufochs-Gillespie was joined by Ann Vriend (AV) from Edmonton.
Continue reading The Village Commons Music Series: Ann Vriend
And the Old Schoolhouse Art Gallery is currently hosting an exhibition by three local artists: Melanie Boyle, Karen McDarmid, and Jane Newman. They have just opened a joint show called The Shape of Solace. It opened a few days ago, drawing a crowd of over 100 people, and will continue through July twenty-sixth.
Gallery hours are Fridays from six to nine PM and Saturdays and Sundays from two to six PM. The exhibition also involves some related events: an Artists’ Talk on July 17th from seven to eight-thirty PM, a Collage Writing Workshop on July 19th from noon to two PM, and a Solace Show-and-Tell on July 24th from seven to eight-thirty PM.
Continue reading Schoolhouse Gallery presents “The Shape of Solace”I was the only male among eighteen female writers at a week long retreat called Tapping the Stream. One of the things that set this program apart was the relaxed atmosphere in which widely recognized writers mixed with would-be authors. Personally, I might have totally frozen up had I known more about the company I was with. (That came as a series of surprises, which continues as I google their names.) Instead, we got to know each other as people as we all worked to improve our craft. This was only one of three programs during the week I was at Hollyhock.
Continue reading A Week Long Retreat at Hollyhock
Originally published in the Bird’s Eye
There’s a genre of music you’ve probably never heard before, and it’s coming to Quadra on July 16.
Morgan Toney calls it Mi’kmaltic — a word he coined himself, built from Mi’kmaq and Celtic, that describes exactly what he does and who he is. Toney is Mi’kmaq, a proud member of the Wagmatcook First Nation on Cape Breton Island, and he grew up surrounded by two musical traditions that have shared the same East Coast shoreline for centuries: the fiery, relentless fiddle music that defines his island home, and the ancient songs, stories, and language of his own people, the L’nuk. For most of history, those two traditions have run alongside each
other, each intact and separate. What Toney has spent his career doing is something genuinely different — bringing them into direct conversation, not as a novelty act or a fusion experiment, but as a natural expression of a life that has always belonged to both. The genre he’s made is called Mi’kmaltic because that’s what it is: Mi’kmaq and Celtic, woven together at the root. It sounds exactly as rich and alive as that combination suggests.
Meinsje Vlaming’s “The Uncanny and the Sublime” will be on exhibit for one more weekend at the Old Schoolhouse Art Gallery. This very special show is the culmination of several years of dedicated work in both painting and puppetry, with results that are both surprising and thought-provoking.
Continue reading Meinsje Vlaming at the Old Schoolhouse Art Gallery
