This week we talk to Ted Barris. Ted is an award-winning historian with 22 books to his credit. His journalism has appeared regularly in the national press, as well as magazines as diverse as Air Force, esprit de corps and Zoomer. He has also worked as host/contributor for most CBC Radio network programs, PBS in the U.S. and on TV Ontario. And after 18 years teaching, he recently retired as a full-time professor of journalism at Toronto’s Centennial College. He is the author of 22 bestselling, non-fiction books, including many on wartime Canada. Ted’s 20th book, Battle of the Atlantic: Gauntlet to Victory was published in the fall of 2022 and immediately landed on the Globe and Mail and Toronto Star bestsellers lists. Also in 2022, Ted was awarded the Platinum Jubilee Award celebrating the Queen Elizabeth’s 70 years on the throne. In October of last year, Ted went to Rideau Hall in Ottawa to be appointed Member of the Order of Canada.
Month: March 2025
Karen Walker
This week our guest is Karen Walker. Karen, a long-time resident of Cobourg, began writing flash fiction, prose poetry and erasure poetry in 2019. Her work is in more than one hundred print and digital literary publications and anthologies worldwide including Hill Spirits V.
Marie-Lynn Hammond
This week we offer an encore presentation of a programme we made last year with Marie-Lynn Hammond. Alongside a music career as a singer-songwriter and co-founder of the seminal Canadian folk group Stringband, Marie-Lynn Hammond has, for the past 40 years, written magazine and newspaper articles; essays; stage plays, all professionally produced; one feature film (co-written); a handful of short stories; and poetry. More recently she’s co-written, with writer Michael Kaufman, a young adult novel, Moon Storm Rising, under the pen name Kayden Quinn.
Marie Prins
Marie Prins is the author of a middle-grade, time-travel book THE GIRL FROM THE ATTIC, published in 2020 from Common Deer Press. Her picture book WHO’S WALKING DAWG? was launched from Red Deer Press on October 15, 2024. Her short stories for children, memoir, nature pieces, and poetry can be found in the Hill Spirits Anthologies II – VI. She lives with her artist husband Ed Hagedorn in a historic, octagonal house in Colborne, Ontario.
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.
Mia Burrus
This week we offer an encore performance of a show we made with Mia Burrus in February 2024 Mia is a writer and artist who lives in a restored one-room schoolhouse in the country north of Cobourg. Also known by her given name of Anne-Marie, she still provides occasional accounting support to charities in the GTA. 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, mindful and mindless, crafting poems, and multi-dimensional, multimedia 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 part of the Juried Show at the Art Gallery of Northumberland in 2024.
Word on the Hills Radio Program 