📚 WritersFest Is Back 🐉 Kingston's Flag to France 🛶 A $1 Million Paddle 🔭 Astronomy Day 🗓️ Events & More 🔦 August 17, 2026

Local Spotlight

📚 Kingston WritersFest Is Back, and It Is Starting With Yann Martel and Iain Reid

Kingston & Area Local News

🚌 Route 12 Every 10 Minutes, and Route 10 Finally Gets You to the New Amherstview Pool

🍲 The City and Feed the People Worked It Out, and Up to $70,000 Is on the Table

🚗 Communauto Now Parks in 12 Kingston Spots, Five of Them City Sites

Community Champions

🐉 Kingston’s Flag Is Going to France, and Chestmates Is Carrying It

🛶 A Family Paddle Down the Rideau Has Now Raised $1 Million

🏕️ 1st Bayridge Scouts Needs Grown-Ups, About 12 Hours a Month

New Events In and Around Kingston

📚 FEATURED EVENT: Kingston WritersFest Presents Yann Martel and Iain Reid | The Spire | August 19

🎻 FEATURED EVENT: One Concert Left, and It Closes the Festival | The Spire | August 18

💎 The Last Charm Workshop of the Summer | Studio 88 | August 19

💃 Four Zumba Sessions Left on the Waterfront | Breakwater Park | Tuesdays and Thursdays to August 27

🎶 Nine Acts, Six Mothers, and a Welcome in Nine Languages | Compton Park | August 23

🔭 Astronomy Day Closes the Free Fridays in Napanee | Museum of Lennox & Addington | August 21

🤝 A Talk About Caring for People at Every Age | Portsmouth Olympic Harbour | September 15

Events Calendar

It’s gotten too long to include here in the summary! Click Events Calendar to see our list for the next few days.

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Some people leave a one-star review. Most just tell the people they know and quietly stop coming back, and closing that gap is what our sponsor SignAble Vi5ion does. It is Deaf-led, run out of Kingston by Leah Riddell, and the training is built around a moment nobody prepared your staff for: a customer with a disability comes to the counter, something shifts, and everyone freezes. It is a training gap, not a character problem.

Her sessions cover Deaf awareness, practical ASL for the situations your team actually runs into, and how to work alongside an interpreter. Everything is built around your environment, because a retirement home and a coffee shop need very different things.

Ten residents aged 70 to 90 at Kingsbridge Retirement learned enough to talk with a server who signs. Haymaker's Coffee Co. on Wolfe Island, Score Pizza, the Isabel Turner branch of KFPL, and Kingston Economic Development Corporation have all had Leah in.

Every session is built for the room it is going into. Tell Leah about yours.

We went deep this summer on Leah's story, from four schools and a cochlear implant to the day Kingston became the first city in Ontario to proclaim International Day of Sign Languages. Read the full spotlight.

We save this space for local businesses worth knowing. Drop us a line.

That is Margaret Atwood on stage at the Isabel Bader Centre last August, at an evening that almost did not happen. In January 2025 Kingston WritersFest had run out of money and announced it was closing. The turnaround is quite a story. This Wednesday the festival puts Yann Martel, who won the Booker Prize for Life of Pi, on stage at The Spire with Iain Reid, the Kingston novelist whose books Hollywood keeps adapting. Event details are in New Events below. Read the full story.

Know a neighbour worth a spotlight? Tell us about them. (Yourself counts, by the way.)

Kingston Transit’s fall schedules start on Monday, September 7, and two changes stand out. Route 12 moves to every 10 minutes on weekdays between St. Lawrence College, Queen’s University, Kingston Health Sciences Centre and downtown. Route 10 runs more often, which finally makes the rebuilt Barr Homes Aquatic Centre in Amherstview an easy trip, eight lanes and 25 metres with a separate warm water pool. Weekday timings also shift on routes 2, 10, 31 and 32 and on the 701, 702, 801 and 802 expresses. Transit App users should set the date to Sept. 7 or later to see it all.

Read the full story at: City of Kingston

Feed the People puts out about 100 meals a day at Belle Park, and it was one of eight groups applying for a share of a $350,000 City of Kingston pilot supporting harm reduction, homelessness and community health. Its first application did not include a way to meet the City’s permit, licensing and insurance requirements, so it was invited to try again. Council then approved a set of amendments on Tuesday, August 11 to help it get there, and eased the rules on what the money can cover, including naloxone, honoraria and police background checks. The Kingston Whig-Standard reports that up to $70,000 is now available to the group.

Read the full story at: Kingston Whig-Standard

You do not have to own a car to drive one. Communauto car sharing has grown to 12 Kingston locations, five of them at City of Kingston facilities: the Rideau Heights Community Centre, the Anglin Lot, the Kingston Memorial Centre, the Springer Memorial Lot, and the Kingston Frontenac Public Library’s Pittsburgh branch on Gore Road. Kingston is station based, so you pick a car up and bring it back to the same spot, and cars can be booked up to a month ahead and used around the clock. The City backs the pilot as a way to put fewer cars on the road, but it does not run the service itself.

Read the full story at: City of Kingston

Chestmates is Kingston’s breast cancer survivor dragon boat team, and every paddler in it has had breast cancer. Members have ranged from 20 to over 80, the crew trains out of Collins Bay Marina twice a week from May to September, and it is the only team of its kind in the region served by the South East Regional Cancer Program. This month they fly to Aix-les-Bains carrying the City of Kingston’s official flag, joining about 4,500 paddlers from teams around the world at the IBCPC festival on Lake Bourget, which is a participatory event rather than a competition.

Read the full story at: Kingston Whig-Standard

This is the 26th year of Kayaking for Cancer, and on Tuesday, August 11 the campaign passed $1 million raised for the Canadian Cancer Society. It started with Kevin Dionne of Brockville, whose mother was treated at Kingston Health Sciences Centre and whose father in law was treated at the Ottawa Hospital. The paddle covers 202 km of the Rideau over eight days, and this year’s group set out from the Kingston Rowing Club on August 8 bound for the Chateau Laurier, carrying a bucket for donations from the people who come down to the water to greet them. Family spokesperson David Martyn told the Kingston Daily that last year alone brought in $89,000.

Read the full story at: Kingston Daily

Everything the 1st Bayridge Scout Group runs is run by volunteers, and right now it is short of them. The group needs leaders for Beavers, Cubs and Scouts, plus people who can help with admin, fundraising, communications and keeping the gear in one piece. Group Commissioner Ben Clock told the Kingston Daily that training comes with the role, covering youth development, programme planning, leadership and risk management. Expect about 12 to 14 hours a month, and expect to sit an interview, provide references and pass a police record check with vulnerable sector screening. 1st Bayridge is a Scouts Canada group, and enquiries go through its Facebook page.

Read the full story at: Kingston Daily

Kingston Spotlight has a Google listing now, and it is a bit bare. If the newsletter has pointed you at something good, a neighbour worth knowing about, or an event you would have missed, that is worth saying out loud where other people can find it.

It really helps us! A local business deciding whether to work with us usually looks us up first, and what they find there is you.

Takes a minute, and honest is the only kind we want.

Two writers whose books you have probably read, or met on a screen without realising whose they were, are sharing a stage at The Spire on Wednesday. Yann Martel wrote Life of Pi, which won the Booker Prize and became a film that took four Academy Awards. Iain Reid lives here in Kingston, and two of his novels have been adapted: I’m Thinking of Ending Things, which Charlie Kaufman wrote and directed for Netflix, and Foe, starring Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal. Both have new books, Martel’s Son of Nobody returning to the Trojan War and Reid’s A New Kind of Clean, written with filmmaker Ellie Foumbi, arriving this fall. Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer moderates. Ancient Myths, Modern Nightmares is the first event in KWF Presents, a new year round series from Kingston WritersFest, so the festival is no longer only a September thing. The story of how the festival got back here at all is our Local Spotlight at the top of this issue. Tickets are through Showpass.

This is it. The Cataraqui Chamber Music Festival closes on Tuesday, the day after this issue lands, with violinist SongHa Choi and pianist Ying Zhang. Choi is a laureate of the 2024 Queen Elisabeth Competition, and the programme runs Kreisler, Bach’s Chaconne, an Ysaye sonata and Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s Louisiana Blues Strut, then Brahms after the interval. If a ticket is not in the cards, the free Indigenous Cultural Corridor that Robert Spade designed is up at The Spire until Tuesday as well, and it costs nothing at all. Presented by Harmonaire Musique. Closing night has its own page, and our spotlight has the story of how a festival this size ended up in Kingston.

Mochi Charms is closing out its summer at Studio 88 on Wednesday before the fall lineup starts. Thirty five dollars gets you a stainless steel bracelet or necklace base, a $20 charm allowance, the run of more than 400 curated charms, and somebody on hand to help you style and assemble the thing so it looks like you meant it. Extra charms and upgrades are available on site. Spots are limited and there were 11 left at last count. Mochi Charms is a women owned Kingston business, and a percentage of every pet charm goes to local animal shelters. Tickets and the full list of what is included are on the workshop page.

There are four free Zumba sessions left down at Breakwater Park before the City of Kingston’s free outdoor fitness series wraps for the summer. It runs mornings, Tuesdays and Thursdays, until Thursday, August 27, which leaves August 18, 20, 25 and 27. It is low impact, it costs nothing, and it happens on the waterfront, which is a nicer place to be talked into dancing than most. You can pre register through the City’s recreation portal to hold a spot, though in practice people just turn up. Details are on the City’s post.

The Music Festival in Compton Park is back on Sunday, run entirely by volunteers: six neighbourhood mothers who picked it up after Larissa Koniuk pitched the idea to a neighbourhood Facebook group in 2023. Nine acts play this year, from the Ollin & St. Pierre Fancy Shawl Dancers to Brass Over Tea Kettle and the Mauricio Montecinos Latin Beat Band, with a free morning yoga class and sound bath before the music starts. There is food, face painting, flower crowns and shade at Compton Park, at Carruthers Avenue and College Street. Awesome Kingston put its $1,000 microgrant into the festival in June, mostly toward paying the artists properly, and we have a story about Awesome Kingston coming. Their poster welcomes people in nine languages, which tells you most of what you need to know.

The Museum of Lennox & Addington wraps its Free Fridays on Friday, August 21 with Astronomy Day, and it is a talk about the sun rather than a night under the stars. The Royal Astronomical Society of Canada’s Kingston Centre brings an all ages presentation about the star that lights our daytime sky, then sets up a range of telescopes so you can look through them and ask the club anything. Photographs from the museum’s Our Dark Skies exhibit go back up alongside. It runs in three sessions, all of them free, and nothing needs booking. It is the last one of the summer, so this is your Friday.

Kerry Smith spent a career teaching applied ethics of care at Saint Paul University, and he wrote a book called The Well-being First Economy. On Tuesday, September 15 he brings the argument to the Front Lounge at Portsmouth Olympic Harbour: that writing lifespan care values into law and into social norms is a practical answer to poverty, a thin safety net and a widening gap between rich and poor. It runs 45 minutes, it is open to anyone, there is no RSVP, and the room holds 70 so seating should not be a worry. The session is being recorded, and you can ask for the video at [email protected]. More about the talk is on his campaign page.

📚 FEATURED: KWF Presents: Yann Martel and Iain Reid  |  The Spire  |  August 19

🎻 FEATURED: Cataraqui Chamber Music Festival 2026  |  The Spire  |  August 5 to 18

🗳️ Vote: 2026 Election Sticker Design Contest  |  Get Involved Kingston  |  to August 17

🎻 Cataraqui Chamber Music Festival 2026  |  The Spire  |  August 5 to 18

📚 KWF Presents: Yann Martel and Iain Reid  |  The Spire  |  August 19

💎 Last Charm Workshop of the Summer  |  Studio 88, 70 Princess St  |  August 19

🎸 Forever Hip: Tragically Hip 10th Anniversary  |  Springer Market Square  |  August 20 to 22

⛳ 3rd Annual YGK Healthcare Champions Golf Tournament  |  Loyalist Golf & Country Club, 1 Loyalist Blvd, Bath  |  August 20

🎤 Forever Hip Day 1: Choir! Choir! Choir! Sings The Hip  |  Springer Market Square  |  August 20

🔭 Free Fridays at the Museum of Lennox & Addington  |  Museum of L&A, 97 Thomas St E, Napanee  |  Fridays to August 21

🎬 Forever Hip Day 2: Long Time Running Screening and Music Walking Tours  |  Springer Market Square  |  August 21

📺 Forever Hip Day 3: CBC Final Concert Re-Broadcast Viewing Party  |  Springer Market Square  |  August 22

⛳ Little Heroes Charity Golf Tournament  |  August 22

🎶 Music Festival in Compton Park  |  Compton Park  |  August 23

⛳ Power of Hope Golf Tournament  |  August 24

💃 Free Zumba in the Park  |  Breakwater Park  |  Tuesdays and Thursdays to August 27

🐱 Groovy Cats Art Colouring Book Fundraiser for Napanee Kitten Rescue  |  Napanee  |  to September 8

📷 Cataraqui Trail Photo Contest  |  Cataraqui Trail  |  July 8 to October 30

Festivals, free weekly programs, museum seasons and every farmers’ market we know about, all in one place and updated with every issue. See the full Kingston Events Calendar, and bookmark it while you are there.

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