📖 Everyone Deserves to See Themselves in a Book. So Danni Maxwell Keeps Writing Them
🌽 So how does Kingston cook it?
🌽 Your favourite needs you this week
🗳️ Every Kingston District Gets an All-Candidates Meeting Before October 26
🌊 Cataraqui Region Lakes Begin Their Fall Drawdown
📚 Kingston Readers Doubled Their Summer, Hitting 3.2 Million Minutes
💙 Linda Galarneau Is Retiring After 52 Years of Nursing
🎬 Stephen Lee Naish Has Three Books Out This Year, and No University Behind Him
⛳ FEATURED EVENT: Norm’s Annual Charity Golf Tournament | Amherstview Golf Course | September 18
🛝 Jumpstart Inclusive Playground Grand Opening Block Party | Shannon Park | September 12
🎪 RoadTrip Scenic Route: A Free Street Party Down Princess | Downtown Kingston | September 12
🎸 RoadTrip Music Festival | Springer Market Square | September 12
🎙️ Mayoral All-Candidates Meeting | The Spire | September 14
It’s gotten too long to include here in the summary! Click Events Calendar to see our list for the next few days.
Too long? Too short? About right? Tell us what you would like to see more of, and less of.
🔦 Local Spotlight
📖 Everyone Deserves to See Themselves in a Book. So Danni Maxwell Keeps Writing Them
Kingston author Danni Maxwell with Life in Colour, beside the cover of Lift Me Up. Photo by Hannah Jones. Cover art for Lift Me Up by Danielle of Designs by Danielle.
That is Kingston author Danni Maxwell in the blossoms, next to the cover of Lift Me Up, out September 17. Her heroine crochets, lives with a chronic illness, and spends the worst day of a bad run stuck in an elevator with only a voice on the emergency phone for company. She is also, in many of the ways that matter, Danni. There is more in the piece: the years the book did not move, the cover artist who nearly walked off with the money, and the reason Danni has been writing characters like Georgie since she was a teenager. Read the full story.
🌽 So how does Kingston cook it?
The microwave won, which we did not expect. Boiled came second. Not one of you cooks corn in the oven.
You also told us how you do it, on the poll and on our Facebook post. Here are a few, in your own words.
J***s O****r | "Microwave with the husks on! Soak in water first. 6 minutes on high"
D***a H******n | "Microwave husk on, silk removed, 3 minutes"
J****e R*****d S***h | "Boil, 5 minutes for fresh new corn."
t**********e@********m | "Steam my corn for 8 minutes…the water is in a small pot…the corn in a larger pot that sits on top..never in the water"
C***l A****t | "We place ours in oven at 400 for 20-25 minutes...husk and all...it dries out the husk and then it removes easy...kernels then have a nice little snap to them..best way"
Nobody voted for the oven. One of you would like a word.
🌽 Your favourite needs you this week
Voting closes Thursday. Here are the three growers readers have named most often so far.
Seventeen local growers, one vote each, and until Thursday to make your favourite's case. If you have already voted, send this to someone who hasn't.
📰 Kingston & Area Local News
🗳️ Every Kingston District Gets an All-Candidates Meeting Before October 26
Kingston City Hall at dawn. On October 26 voters choose a mayor, a district councillor and school board trustees. Photo from cityofkingston.ca.
Every Kingston district is getting an all-candidates meeting ahead of the October 26 municipal election, and so is the mayoral race. The Coalition of Kingston Communities, an umbrella group for local community associations chaired by Christine Sypnowich, has organized eleven in all, as it did in 2018 and again in 2022. They run from September 14 through to October 13. Where a neighbourhood association is hosting, the meeting is in person; where the coalition is running it, it is on Zoom with advance registration. Portsmouth and Williamsville get none, since Don Amos and Vincent Cinanni are re-elected. Every date is on our events calendar, and the City of Kingston lists the certified candidates by district.
Read the full story at: What’s Up Kingston
🌊 Cataraqui Region Lakes Begin Their Fall Drawdown
The Sydenham Lake Dam, one of six structures where Cataraqui Conservation is adjusting levels this fall. Photo from cataraquiconservation.ca.
Cataraqui Conservation has started lowering water levels on the lakes it manages, which makes room for fall rain and next spring’s snowmelt and gives the water a steadier surface to freeze on come winter. The work runs through to December and covers the Wilton Road Dam at Odessa Lake, the Sydenham Lake and Temperance Lake dams, the Fred Grant Dam at Lees Pond, the Broome-Runciman Dam at the Buells Creek Reservoir in Mac Johnson Wildlife Area, and the Buells Creek Detention Basin in Brockville. Levels will keep moving with the rain in the meantime. If you are out near a dam this fall, stay well back from it: the inflow and outflow channels run fast, the banks get slippery, and the warning signs are there for a reason.
Read the full story at: Cataraqui Conservation
📚 Kingston Readers Doubled Their Summer, Hitting 3.2 Million Minutes
Bubbles and a craft table at the wrap-up party that closed KFPL’s summer reading challenge. Photo courtesy of Kingston Frontenac Public Library.
Readers across Kingston and Frontenac County logged 3.2 million minutes over the summer for the Kingston Frontenac Public Library’s Summer Reading Challenge, up from 1.6 million in 2025. Doubled, exactly. The challenge is open to every age and runs on programs, events and prize draws, and the winners have now been drawn and posted. Liz Coates, KFPL’s manager of programming and outreach, told Kingston Daily the library is thrilled with the response, and that reading builds literacy skills and keeps supporting learning long after the school year starts again.
Read the full story at: Kingston Daily
🏆 Community Champions
💙 Linda Galarneau Is Retiring After 52 Years of Nursing
Linda Galarneau on her last day at Providence Care’s Geriatric Medicine Clinic, after 52 years of nursing. Photo from providencecare.ca.
Linda Galarneau started at 16, working as a kitchen aide in a long-term care home. Fifty-two years later she is retiring as a Registered Nurse from Providence Care’s Geriatric Medicine Clinic, 46 of those years spent with Providence Care and most of them in geriatric medicine. That is a whole working life given to older patients at the point where they most need somebody unhurried, and it is the kind of run almost nobody has any more. Providence Care’s own headline says it best: 52 years, and it felt like a finger snap.
Read the full story at: Providence Care
🎬 Stephen Lee Naish Has Three Books Out This Year, and No University Behind Him
Kingston film critic and researcher Stephen Lee Naish, who has three books out this year. Photo by Isla Naish.
Stephen Lee Naish has lived in Kingston for 15 years and has nine books to his name, three of them out in 2026: a Lever Press reissue of his essay collection Screen Captures in March, Post-Catastrophe Film from Intellect Books in May, and Point Break: Movies Minute by Minute on September 3, four days ago. He does all of it without a university appointment, working from a community membership at Stauffer Library, and he programs screenings for the Cinema Society of Kingston at The Screening Room. Naish wrote in an email to Kingstonist that the bike lanes, the bus service and how close the nature is are among the reasons he stays.
Read the full story at: Kingstonist
🆕 New Events In and Around Kingston
⛳ FEATURED EVENT: Norm’s Annual Charity Golf Tournament | Amherstview Golf Course | September 18
Poster supplied by Norm’s Golf & Social.
Eleven days to go. Norm’s Golf & Social is running its first outdoor charity tournament at Amherstview Golf Course on Friday, September 18, and branding it annual from the off, which is either confidence or a plan. $150 a person covers 18 holes with a cart, a ride out from Norm’s on Gardiners Road and back again, Tony’s all-you-can-eat buffet, the SIM after-party, and a $25 contribution receipt. Registration and the full rundown are on the event page.
🛝 Jumpstart Inclusive Playground Grand Opening Block Party | Shannon Park | September 12
Children on the wheelchair-accessible Sway Fun glider at the Jumpstart Inclusive Playground, which has been open since July. Photo from The Inclusive Play Project.
The playground has been open since July, so September 12 is the party. The grand opening block party for the Jumpstart inclusive playground runs at Shannon Park on Wilson Street in Rideau Heights, and it is free. Behind it sit two and a half years and $1.5 million: more than $1.2 million raised in the community since 2023, $300,000 plus the land and staff support from the City of Kingston, and a long list of local funders, the record-breaking $232,286 Tim Hortons Smile Cookie campaign among them. Rachel Doornekamp, a pediatric occupational therapist, founded the Inclusive Play Project that drove it, and the whole point of the design is that children of all abilities play in the same place rather than beside it. It is a busy Saturday, mind: the two events below are the same day. Full details are on the City’s project page.
🎪 RoadTrip Scenic Route: A Free Street Party Down Princess | Downtown Kingston | September 12
The Scenic Route turns downtown Kingston into a free street party on September 12, with three music stages and more than 100 local vendors. Photo from roadtripkingston.ca.
Free, all day, out on the street. The Scenic Route is the open half of RoadTrip weekend on Saturday, September 12: three free music stages, one of them on Montreal Street and one on Brock, with more than 100 local businesses, community groups and vendors filling the road in between. Also on the bill are a hip hop class outside STRONG Pilates on Princess, line dancing at the Montreal Street stage, and Drag Storytime and an all-ages drag show on Brock. After sunset it hands over to the ticketed main stage. It is put on by the 700-plus business and property owners of downtown Kingston, in consultation with Steve Jordan, who founded the Polaris Music Prize. The full program is on the Scenic Route page.
🎸 RoadTrip Music Festival | Springer Market Square | September 12
Peach Pit, one of the acts on the RoadTrip bill at Springer Market Square on September 12. Photo from roadtripkingston.ca.
That is the free half. This is the ticketed one. Once the sun goes down on Saturday, September 12, RoadTrip’s main stage takes over Springer Market Square for Kingston’s first proper go at a music festival, mixing emerging Canadian and local acts with internationally known ones. Peach Pit, Gabriel Jacoby, Kasador and Katie Tupper are all on the bill. General admission is $65, students $55, and a four-pack of tickets is $240, which works out at $60 each. It caps off the Play Me Kingston and Forever Hip summer we have been following all year. Tickets are on the festival’s site.
🎙️ Mayoral All-Candidates Meeting | The Spire | September 14
The Spire, where the mayoral candidates take questions on September 14. Photo from thespirekingston.org.
The first of the eleven is the one for the top job. On Monday, September 14, the people who want to be mayor of Kingston take questions in person at The Spire, and it is the only meeting in the whole series covering the mayoral race. Everything after it goes district by district, so if you want to hear all the mayoral candidates answer the same questions in the same room, this is the room. Vicki Schmolka has the full schedule in What’s Up Kingston.
📅 Events Calendar
What’s happening in and around Kingston over the next few days
⛳ FEATURED: Norm’s Annual Charity Golf Tournament | Amherstview Golf Course | September 18
💀 Domino Theatre Dress Rehearsal: I Hate Hamlet | The Seniors Centre | September 9 | 🔦 Read our story
🥞 United Way KFL&A Campaign Kick-Off Breakfast | DoubleTree by Hilton Kingston | September 10 | 🔦 Read our story
🦋 Later Life Learning: Natural Wonders of the Region | The Seniors Centre | September 11 | 🔦 Read our story
🏌️ Restoring Mental Health, Mascon Restorations 4th Annual Charity Golf Tournament | Course not yet announced | September 11
🏠 Almost Home Annual Charity Golf Tournament | Rivendell Golf Club, Verona | September 11
🎭 Boodle Theatre Company presents Cymbeline | St. Mark’s Lutheran Church | September 10 to 12 | 🔦 Read our story
🛝 Jumpstart Inclusive Playground Grand Opening Block Party | Shannon Park | September 12
🎪 RoadTrip Scenic Route Free Street Festival | Downtown Kingston | September 12
🎸 RoadTrip Music Festival | Springer Market Square | September 12
♻️ Household Hazardous Waste Day | GFL Environmental, Napanee | September 12
🐾 Big Paws in the Basin: Pledge Walk & Vendor Market | Confederation Basin | September 12 | 🔦 Read our story
🎓 University District Safety Initiative | University District | August 28 to September 13
🎉 Party on the Pier | Great Lakes Museum | September 13
📖 Epic & Kimura Book Signing with Robert Cumming | Indigo Kingston | September 13
🗳️ Mayoral All-Candidates Meeting | The Spire | September 14
📚 Kingston Symphony Volunteers’ Book Fair | Symphony Warehouse | September 10 to 20 | 🔦 Read our story
🏊 Artillery Park Aquatic Centre Closed for Annual Maintenance | Artillery Park | September 8 to 20
💀 Domino Theatre: I Hate Hamlet | Domino Theatre, 52 Church St | September 10 to 26
🗓️ That is just the next few days. The full Kingston events calendar lives here.
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