This week we interview Stephen Skyvington. about his new book. His columns regularly appear in newspapers all across Canada, under the banner Opinions and Observations. Formerly the manager of government relations for the Ontario Medical Association, where he spent six and a half years lobbying elected officials and civil servants at all three levels of government, Stephen is currently the president of PoliTrain Inc., a public relations firm he founded in 2001. In addition to being a full-time registered lobbyist, Stephen also has a great deal of experience in community and stakeholder relations, as well as media and government relations. He lives in Cobourg, Ontario.

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We are devoting this week’s episode to the exciting festival, now in its third year, organized by authors, Vicki Delany and Janet Kellough. WOMEN KILLING IT is a hugely successful festival celebrating Canadian women crime writers and all the genres of crime and mystery writing. It takes place in Picton, Prince Edward County, on the Labour Day weekend. Join us to hear all about it!

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This week we are rebroadcasting a show we made with Linda Hutsell Manning when she was researching material for her memoir about teaching in a one room school house in Cobourg in the 60s. Linda has had a long and successful career as a children’s author, poet, novelist and playwright. Recently, her 2 act comedy A Certain Singing Teacher was produced by VOS and  she published a new story for children with Common Deer Press, Finding Moufette.  Now her memoir is complete and will be published by Blue Denim Press this fall. This show will tell you what you can expect from Linda’s new book —something to look forward to this September.

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This week, we are repeating a programme we made with Marie-Lynn Hammond some time ago now. Marie Lynn Hammond has worked in a great many formats over the years, writing poetry, plays, short fiction, radio essays and non-fiction magazine pieces, as well as two screen plays and she has just finished co-writing a YA novel. She is also an experienced editor. But her primary focus has always been song-writing. She with Bob Bossin, founded the folk group Stringband and she has been writing and performing her songs, to great acclaim, ever since. She released her latest CDs in 2013, entitled Hoofbeats and Creatures. Since coming to Cobourg she has produced and directed her own play Beautiful Deeds/ De Beaux Gestes, for the Spirit of the Hills’ Festival of the Arts, 2017 as well as organizing the concert for that event. And this year she is deeply involved in the second SOTH Festival of the Arts planned for October 24-26, 2019.

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Meet Janice Gannon, an accomplished horsewoman and riding instructor who has more than forty years’ experience in the industry. She began her lifelong love affair with horses as a child and later graduated from Humber College’s School of Horsemanship. An early job in the horse industry took her to the racetrack where she dived into the little known world of the backstretch, grooming and exercising horses, working on various racetracks through Canada and the United States. Ten years later, after working with a wide variety of human and equine characters, she moved on to successfully showing her own horses, and schooling others in an empathetic approach to riding and training. After earning coaching certificates in both English and Western riding, she developed a unique style of teaching that focuses on the partnership between rider and horse. TAILS FROM THE TRACK is her first book.

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Join us for our discussion with award winning writer and illustrator Jan Thornhill. Born in Sudbury she grew up living on the outskirts of small communities where the fields and woods became her world. She and her friends travelled in packs, building forts, looking for meteorites, exploring dangerous abandoned houses and keeping their activities to themselves so as not to worry their parents!  She chose to go to OCAD and after she graduated decided to try free- lancing as an illustrator for magazines and newspapers and to her surprise found employment this way for over 10 years. After she met her husband Fred in 1981 and they had moved to a house they built in central Ontario, Jan started writing, something she had long wanted to do. Jan has won many awards including the 2015 Vicky Metcalf Award for Literature for Young People, a lifetime achievement award presented by the Writers’ Trust of Canada,^[2]  the Norma Fleck Award in 2007 for her book I Found a Dead Bird: The Kids’ Guide to the Cycle of Life & Death.^[3]  and the 2017 Governor General’s Awards for The Tragic Tale of the Great Auk.

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On the last Sunday of Poetry Month, we bring you our interview with Gil McElroy. Gil is a poet, visual artist, curator, and visual arts critic. He has published four books of poetry with Talonbooks, a collection of art writing with Gaspereau Press, and a memoir about his father and what it was like growing up a military brat during the height of the Cold War. He’s also published numerous chapbooks, and was co-winner of the bpNichol Chapbook Award for The Merton Lake Propers (2013). He currently lives in Colborne and works for Canada Post delivering mail on rural routes.

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Continuing our celebration of Poetry Month and in honour of the poet’s mother, who recently passed away, we are re-broadcasting the programme we made with Katie Hoogendam last winter. Meredith Katie Hoogendam is a writer, artist, mother, and sometime radio host.Though focused on parenting and homeschooling, she remains professionally and personally concerned with environmental issues and educational theory and practice. Her chapbook,  Mothertongue is a collection of poetry on motherhood, mourning, and identity released last November at a poetry party in Camborne.

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In celebration of Poetry month we rebroadcast our interview with Antony Di Nardo. Antony was born in Montreal and is the author of four collections of poetry, his most recent, SKYLIGHT, was published this fall by Ronsdale Press. Work from previous collections has been translated into both French and Italian, and appears in several anthologies. His first book, Alien, Correspondent, was nominated for the Acorn-Plantos People’s Poetry Prize and the Re-Lit Award. He has been shortlisted for The Malahat Review’s Long Poem contest and in 2017 he won Exile’s Gwendolyn MacEwen Prize for Best Suite of Poems. He divides his time between Sutton, Quebec and Cobourg, Ontario.

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This week we begin our celebration of Poetry Month with a short discussion of how important poetry is to society and has become in our area, thanks to the tireless efforts of a number of local writers. You will also hear readings by local poets, including Ted Amsden, Bridget Campion, Tai Grove, Katie Hoogendam, Wally Keeler, Jessica Outram, Janet Richards, Gil McElroy and your hosts on Word on the Hills, Gwynn Scheltema and Felicity Sidnell Reid. We hope you enjoy the show!

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