This week’s programme is a special one to celebrate the life and works of Eric Winter, Cobourg’s first Poet Laureate, who died on December 21^st 2019 at the age of 96 and is greatly missed. We have asked poet, James Pickersgill, Eric’s long-time friend and colleague and two of his followers in the post of poet-laureate, Ted Amsden and Jessica Outram, to talk about Eric, the poet and the man, his contributions to poetry in the community and the cultural life of Cobourg and to read us some of his poems. Please join us.

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This week we talk to J.D.Carpenter poet and crime novelist. David grew up in Toronto, earned degrees at York University and Queen’s University, taught high school English for 25 years at Leaside High School in Toronto, and ran the Special Education programme for 14 of those years. David began his writing career as a poet, publishing four books of poetry, but in 2001 he turned to writing fiction, primarily murder mysteries. The books in his first series have  a gritty racing world background but his latest is set in Prince Edward County, where he and his wife Karen now live. Between them they have five children and eight grandchildren.

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This week we look backwards and forwards as we enter our seventh year on the radio. Gwynn, Felicity and Chris discuss changes in the programme since Chris has joined us as our sound man. We speak briefly about our present work and read a short piece. We have invited many authors to return to the series and talk about their newly published work and are excited to follow their successful careers.We have also enjoyed meeting writers we hadn’t met before except through their writing  and were delighted too to interview people who have struck out and are doing something different. And we end the show with three snippets from previous shows which we specially enjoyed in the past year, featuring David Newland, Katie Hoogendam and Tom Kerr. And we take a look into the future.

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Poet and musician, Tom Gannon Hamilton recently visited Cobourg and read at the Cobourg Poetry Workshop’s Third Thursdays. Tom’s  lifelong engagement with poetry dates  from his childhood and he  first published in Blue Buffalo (Dandelion Press, 1981). Since then his poetry has appeared in too many journals to enumerate. In 2018 he won the Big Pond Rumours Chapbook competition for a suite of poems entitled El Marillo, which chronicles the poet’s experiences in war-torn El Salvador during the 1980s. An Ontario Arts Council Poet in the Schools for three consecutive years, Hamilton has recited,  read and given workshops all over Canada. He has been featured on Valentino Assenza’s CIUT radio show Howl. Tom’s books Panoptic (Aeolus House Press) and El Marillo (Big Pond Rumours) were launched on recent Canada-wide reading tours. Tom also tells us about his career as a musician.

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