Dinner & Entertainment Series 2012

Our third season will open on March 31, 2012. Featured musicians for the 2012 series include Triola and Jack Kayak. Featured writers include Helen Humphreys, Patrick Lane, Lawrence Hill, and Steve Heighton.

Each evening begins with a delicious and plentiful dinner, and vegetarian options are always available. Following dinner, you will enjoy a concert or a reading. Dinner is served at 6:00 pm; entertainment begins at around 7:30 pm. Tickets are $40 per person and include dinner, entertainment, and HST. Tickets can be picked up at the door, but they must be reserved in advance by email or by phone (613 • 273 • 8745) as space is limited. There is also an overnight accommodation option: $120 includes dinner, concert, accommodation, and breakfast the next morning.

Triola, String Trio, Saturday, March 31, 2012

Come enjoy the first days of spring at Wintergreen as we open our season with the inspired Kingston ensemble, Triola. After a tasty spring meal, you will enjoy an unusual evening of live music, as Triola becomes a “live” iPod shuffle, playing from a song list provided at each table and with an incredible range of genres including Baroque, blues, jazz, show tunes, opera, classical, waltzes, and Irish airs — you name it, they’ll play it!

The Triola players — Gisèle Szczesniak(violin), Eileen Beaudette (viola), and Melinda Raymond (violin) — are professional musicians, and principal players of the Kingston Symphony.  Collectively, they have trained at the Universities of Yale, Queen’s, Toronto, and at le Conservatoire de Montréal. Their individual performing credits include CBC broadcasts, work in the National Arts Centre, Winnipeg, Ottawa, Peterborough, Mississauga, Quinte Orchestras, commercial recordings, solo, and chamber work in Canada, the United States, and Europe.

Jack Kayak, Saturday, May 12, 2012

Jack Kayak is an amorphous, seasonal, and passionate musical collective with a strong focus on improvisational and experimental compositions. Consisting primarily of Aaron Baxter (guitars, vocals), Dan Shadick (drums), and Dan Hambleton (cello, guitar, vocals), the group is sometimes joined by Jon Ebbrell, Emily Bennett, and others. As a group whose output consists mainly of recorded material, Jack Kayak tries to explore a wide range of musical directions. Everything from expansive soundscapes to cello rock, acoustic melody to electronic funk shows up on their three albums.

What is clear, despite varying musical directions and band members, is that this group loves to play music. And we’re delighted that they’ve agreed to play music at Wintergreen in May!

An Evening with Steven Heighton, Saturday, June 23, 2012

Acclaimed Kingston-based author, Steven Heighton, will inspire and provoke audience members with a public reading on Saturday, June 23, at Wintergreen Studios. Guests will enjoy a gourmet feast, followed by Steven’s reading. Steven will read from two recently published books, Workbook and The Dead are More Visible. The first of these works explores the writer’s life, and The Dead are More Visible is a collection of short stories, to be released in the spring of 2012.

Steven Heighton is the author of the novel Afterlands, which has appeared in six countries; was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a best book of the year selection in ten publications in Canada, the US, and the UK; and has been optioned for film. His first novel, The Shadow Boxer, was a Canadian bestseller and a Publishers’ Weekly book of the year for 2002. Heighton’s fiction and poetry are translated into ten languages; have appeared in London Review of Books, Malahat Review, Brick, TLR, Agni, and Revue Europe, among others; and have been nominated for the Governor General’s Award, the Trillium Award, and Britain’s W.H. Smith Award. He has received the Gerald Lampert Award, The Petra Kenney Prize, the Air Canada Award, the P.K. Page Award, and four gold and one silver medals in the National Magazine Awards.

Helen Humphreys Reads at Wintergreen, Wednesday, July 11, 2012

For the third July running (this is fast becoming an annual event!), Helen Humphreys will read from current and forthcoming works. She is the author of four books of poetry, six novels, and one work of creative non-fiction. Helen was born in Kingston-on-Thames, England, and now lives in Kingston, Ontario. Her first novel, Leaving Earth (1997), won the 1998 City of Toronto Book Award and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her second novel, Afterimage (2000), won the 2000 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, was nominated for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her third novel, The Lost Garden (2002), was a 2003 Canada Reads selection, a national bestseller, and was also a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Wild Dogs (2004) won the 2005 Lambda Prize for fiction, has been optioned for film, and was produced as a stage play at CanStage in Toronto in the fall of 2008. Coventry (2008) was a #1 national bestseller, was chosen as one of the top 100 books of the year by the Globe & Mail, and was chosen one of the top ten books of the year by both the Ottawa Citizen and NOW Magazine. Her most recent novel is The Reinvention of Love (2011). Humphreys’ work of creative non-fiction, The Frozen Thames (2007), was a #1 national bestseller. Her collections of poetry include Gods and Other Mortals (1986); Nuns Looking Anxious, Listening to Radios (1990); and The Perils of Geography (1995). Her latest collection, Anthem (1999), won the 2000 Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry.

Poetry and Prose with Patrick Lane, Friday, August 24, 2012

Join us at Wintergreen for a rare treat, as Patrick Lane shares his work with an intimate audience in the Wintergreen lodge. We are hosting Patrick at Wintergreen for the first time this summer, and hope that this event will be the first of many. After a scrumptious meal, you will be inspired and moved by Patrick’s words, as he reads from a collection of poetry representing his last half-century as a poet.

Patrick Lane is one of Canada’s pre-eminent poets, winner of numerous awards, including the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, the Canadian Authors Association Award, the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence and three National Magazine Awards. He has published twenty-five collections of poetry since 1966, his most recent, The Collected Poems of Patrick Lane, from Harbour Publishing (2011), and with McClelland & Stewart a novel Red Dog, Red Dog (2008), and his celebrated memoir, There is a Season (2004).

Lawrence Hill Reads at Wintergreen, Saturday, September 15, 2012

Lawrence Hill, author of The Book of Negroes, will be our writer-in-residence in mid-September. He will give a public reading on the Saturday evening during his stay at Wintergreen, just as the leaves are beginning to turn on the maples surrounding the meadow. Guests will enjoy a gourmet dinner, followed by the reading. Reserve tickets early (karen.smereka@gmail.com) as space is limited.

Lawrence Hill is the son of American immigrants — a black father and a white mother — who came to Canada the day after they married in 1953 in Washington, D.C. On his father’s side, Hill’s grandfather and great grandfather were university-educated, ordained ministers of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. His mother came from a Republican family in Oak Park, Illinois, graduated from Oberlin College and went on to become a civil rights activist in D.C. The story of how they met, married, left the United States and raised a family in Toronto is described in Hill’s bestselling memoir Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada (HarperCollins Canada, 2001). Growing up in the predominantly white suburb of Don Mills, Ontario in the sixties, Hill was greatly influenced by his parents’ work in the human rights movement. Much of Hill’s writing touches on issues of identity and belonging.