This week we celebrate the last week of poetry month with Matthew King. Matthew taught philosophy at York University for a number of years before he moved to the Marmora area in 2015—or, as he likes to say, “what Al Purdy called ‘the country north of Belleville’”—where he tries to grow things, counts birds, and takes pictures mostly of flowers with bugs on them. Over the last several years, catalyzed in part by winning the Spirit of the Hills Festival Poetry Prize in 2019, he has increasingly been concentrating his energies on poetry. In 2020 he won the FreeFall magazine poetry contest; in 2023 he was a runner-up for Plough Quarterly’s Rhina Espaillat Poetry Award, won Arc magazine’s “Award of Awesomeness” for June, and had a poem selected for Best Canadian Poetry 2024. Others of his poems have appeared in various magazines in print and online.
Month: April 2024
Kathryn MacDonald
Our third celebration of Poetry Month features poet Kathryn MacDonald. Kathryn has published in Room, FreeFall and other Canadian literary journals and anthologies, as well as internationally in the U.K., U.S. and even Indonesia. Her poem, “Duty / Deon” won the Arc Award of Awesomeness (January 2021). “Seduction” was entered in the Freefall Annual Poetry Contest and published in Freefall (Fall 2020). Kathryn is the author of Far Side of the Shadow Moon: Enchantments (poetry chapbook), A Breeze You Whisper: Poems and Calla & Édouard (fiction), as well as a book of essays and recipes, The Farm & City Cookbook with its philosophy of “eat natural, eat local.” Kathryn lives in Belleville on the north shore of Lake Ontario where the Moira River flows into the Bay of Quinte. Kathryn taught literature as well as creative and nonfiction writing in Ontario’s college system in addition to facilitating writing workshops and coaching sessions. For pleasure she pursues photography and sketching.
Allan Briesmaster
This week we celebrate Poetry Month with Allan Briesmaster. Allan is a poet, freelance editor and publisher, active on the Toronto-area literary scene for many years. He has been a workshop leader and reading series organizer and was a partner in Quattro Books in 2006-2017. He currently operates his own small, independent press, Aeolus House, specializing in custom-designed, limited-edition books of poetry. The most recent of Allan’s nine poetry collections are The Long Bond: Selected and New Poems, from Guernica Editions in 2019, and Windfor, from Ekstasis Editions in 2021. He has read his poetry, given talks, been on panels, and hosted events at venues from Victoria to St. John’s. He is a Life Member of The League of Canadian Poets and of The Ontario Poetry Society. Due to an unexpected problem with the sound on the programme when it was recorded recently, this episode is is an encore presentation from 2021. The episode originally proposed for this week will be re-recorded for broadcast this summer.
Kate Rogers
On our first show for Poetry Month this year, we interview poet, Kate Rogers. Kate’s poetry collection, The Meaning of Leaving, launches in Toronto on April 20th. Homeless City, a chapbook co-authored with Donna Langevin, debuted in the first week of January 2024. Kate recently won first place in the subTerrain magazine 2023 Lush Triumphant Contest for her suite of poems, “My Mother’s House.” Her poetry also recently appeared in Where Else? An International Hong Kong Poetry Anthology. She has been published in such notable journals as World Literature Today; Cha: An Asian Literary Journal and The Windsor Review. She is a Co-Director of Art Bar, Toronto’s oldest poetry reading series. More at: katerogers.ca
Tom Cruikshank
This is an encore presentation of our interview with Tom Cruickshank in 2023. Tom’s current big project started out as a straightforward architectural inventory of Hamilton Township’s older buildings. The township had never catalogued its heritage before and in , 2016, Tom proposed he was the guy to do it. Retired from a career in journalism, he has an abiding interest in local history and heritage architecture, a subject he has pursued in no less than five books. His work includes Old Ontario Houses, Old Toronto Houses and The Settler’s Dream. For the better part of 25 years, he worked in the Canadian magazine industry, first as editor of the locally produced Century Home and later, Harrowsmith Country Life. Nowadays, he freelances for Watershed magazine.
Word on the Hills Radio Program 