Much Music
by Jane Ledwell

Dave Skinner’s life in the music industry as a music store manager and recording producer and engineer have come as a surprise to family and friends who knew him as a top-notch teenage hockey player, but Dave has a talent for recognizing what will give him a fulfilling life. “I was a sports guy who switched to being a music guy,” Dave says. “When I was 15 years
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The Connector
Profile by Jane Ledwell

With roots in Pleasant Valley that go back to 1780, Arnold Smith can stand on a hill and in one direction see where his father was born; in another, where his mother was born. He can point to the home places of four grandparents, all eight great-grandparents, “and a good part,” he says, of his 16 great-great-grandparents. “When this side married that
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Reel to Reel
by Jane Ledwell

In the lobby of City Cinema, the perforated edges of a film glide through Derek Martin’s fingers. He is spooling film from the large reel used in the projector booth onto smaller reels, to be shipped by bus to its next showing. In 18 years running City Cinema, hundreds of films have passed through Derek’s fingers in this physical, painstaking process that is fast
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The Theatre of Life
Profile by Jane Ledwell

It is twilight on the south shore when I pull up past the for sale sign at Anne Putnam’s house. The house is, indeed, for sale and only half full, leaving room for rehearsal spaces for The Attic, the Pearls, and Three Fine Girls, being created by a collective of five women. Anne is a stage manager of renown, and she is stage manager for The Attic, but,
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Opening Doorsa
Profile by Jane Ledwell

I feel very fortunate that I do enjoy performing so many types of music, and so many genres and instruments,” says Christine Anderson Gallant. By that measure of fortune, she’s a rich woman. In addition to her work as Executive Director at the Indian River Festival, as Music Director at Trinity United Church, and as a parent of five grown or growing
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Power to the People
Profile by Jane Ledwell

Visual artist and educator B.J. McCarville has been home on PEI less than a year since living “away” and studying studio arts and education, and the comment she hears most is, “I didn’t know you were into art.” Now her mission as an arts educator at Confederation Centre Art Gallery is to engage people with art in life-altering ways—whether
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Getting Along Great
Profile by Jane Ledwell

He’s been a Strawberry, had Eyes for Telescopes, been an Orb Weaver, and has hit roads with In-Flight Safety, but summer finds Island musician Pat Deighan at home behind the counter at Back Alley Music flogging other people’s CDs and vinyl in the last remaining music store in Charlottetown.

“I feel like a bartender here, except I’m not selling
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The Soul of a Poet
Profile by Jane Ledwell

I dove into the ocean today,” says a wide-eyed Tanya Davis on an unseasonal, chilly June Wednesday when the Halifax-based poet and musician is visiting her home province to perform. “It was like washing the winter off, or like summer joined winter on my skin.”

Ask anything of Tanya, and art happens—language with the rhythm of music, personal revelation
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Creative Change
Profile by Jane Ledwell

When I meet Pan Wendt at the Confederation Centre of the Arts, kids are playing in the concourse outside Mavor’s Bistro, poking at glass display cases for visual art exhibitions. “As a kid,” Pan remembers, “I was in here all the time, and in some senses it was just the place where my dad [Konrad Wendt] worked. I had no idea of its place in the community.”

Now
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A Publisher’s Life
Profile by Jane Ledwell

What’s the use of wasting all night at home, sitting on the couch?” asks Marcia Enman, publisher of the weekly La Voix acadienne, PEI’s only French-language newspaper. “I don’t think there’s one night I don’t do something, for the paper or for a committee.” Among other things, the active single mother is vice-chairperson of her municipal
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Small is the New Big
Profile by Jane Ledwell

Do you know the Lot 16 Hall?” asks Steve Horne, business director for PEI’s Festival of Small Halls. The June festival, an ECMA nominee for Event of the Year, features almost two weeks of music and storytelling in community halls across the Island. To Steve, the Festival is “everything that’s good about PEI in the early summer.”

Steve says,
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Putting On a Show
Profile by Jane Ledwell

Paula Kenny, the director of the Eptek Art and Culture Centre in Summerside, studied fine arts at university, but it was summer work at the airport that led to her first career, in the commercial airline industry. History and art remained her passion, and now in her second career, she says, “I’m getting to do what was my hobby.”

Working at the airport and
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