Mia Burrus is a writer and artist who lives in a restored one-room schoolhouse in the country north of Cobourg. (She also answers to her given name of Anne-Marie, in which guise she still makes occasional forays to the GTA to provide accounting support to charities there.) But her passion is using words, images and found objects to explore the boundaries and spaces between what is spoken and silent,solid and ephemeral, known and unknowable, and mindful and mindless, crafting poems, and multi-dimensional, multi-media artworks. Her poetry collection, What I Don’t Know, published in 2021, is a selection from years of careful observation and carefree wonder and is available through her website.www.miaburrus.com Two of her altered book artworks were included in the 2022 Juried Show at the Colborne Art Gallery, and a new work was in the Juried Show at the Art Gallery of Northumberland this year.
Month: February 2024
Janice Barrett
This week we present an encore presentation of our interview with Janice Barrett.
Janice is a mother of three. She says her children are her proudest accomplishments. She is a journalist, playwright, ghostwriter and a novelist. She has also written a memoir and given workshops about memoir writing. She is a member of the Canadian Authors Association. Her novel, a thriller, set in the last years of the Vietnam War, is titled AUTHORIZED CRUELTY and was released by Blue Denim Press in 2023.
Gordon Pitts
Meet Gordon Pitts an award winning journalist and author, who was a reporter and editor on Canadian daily newspapers for four decades. In addition, he has written eight books of Canadian business biography and a series of local histories based on his home town of Madoc, Ontario, and of Hastings County. His biographical works include his 2020 release of Unicorn in the Woods, How East Coast Geeks and Dreamers Are Changing the Game, long-listed for Canada’s National Business Book Award and named one of the Globe and Mail’s Top 100 Books for 2020. He won the National Business Book Award for Stampede: The Rise of the West and Canada’s New Power Elite, his book on the business leaders of the Canadian West. A former high school teacher in Brighton, Ontario, before he became a journalist, Pitts retired from daily journalism in 2013. In retirement, he has turned to telling stories of the “country north of Belleville” – as poet Al Purdy called the rugged area from the Madoc area to Bancroft – including a narrative on the murder of a police constable in 1926 and his most recent release, an account of a financial scandal that shook Hastings County in 1914. These days, he divides his time between Madoc’s Moira Lake, where his family has lived for 150 years, and Toronto
Karen Walker
This week we talk with Karen Walker. Karen is a long-time resident of Cobourg, who began writing flash fiction, prose poetry and erasure poetry in 2019. Her work has been published more than one hundred print and digital literary publications and anthologies worldwide. Karen also contributed to Hill Spirits V published by Blue Denim Press in association with Northumberland Festival of the arts in 2022.
Word on the Hills Radio Program 