Word on the Hills welcomes Antony di Nardo to talk about the poetry event, WOW, scheduled for September 15th as part of the Northumberland Festival of the Arts and his own work. Antony has written seven books of poetry. His work appears widely in journals and anthologies across Canada and internationally, and has been translated into several languages. His long poem suite May June July was winner of the Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Prize for 2017 and was short-listed for a National Magazine Award. He spent the last years of a teaching career in Beirut where he launched his first book of poetry Alien, Correspondent in 2010. He is an active member of the League of Canadian Poets and the Cobourg Poetry Workshop. The winner of the inaugural Don Gutteridge Poetry Award, Through Yonder Window Breaks has been published by Wet Ink Books. His latest collection Forget – Sadness – Grass was released by Ronsdale Press.
Author: felicity936
Rodney Robert Brown
This week we are interviewing Rodney Robert Brown. He is a writer and fine artist of traditional realism, having exhibited paintings in New York, Philadelphia, New Jersey, Ottawa, Vancouver and Toronto. For nearly two decades, he has worked as an actor, teacher and coach, mostly in New York, and belongs to the Screen Actors Guild and other performer unions in the United States and Canada. Although he has written various works, including essays, poetry and a screenplay, his novel, Powerless to be Born, is his first published book. It is a work of literary fiction and is in the collection of the U.S. Library of Congress. Rodney believes that all of the arts are connected, and he utilizes his knowledge and experience in each to enhance his work in the others. His reading and study interests are art, history, literature, and philosophy.
Drama at NFOTA24: episode 1
This week, Word on the Hills is delighted to have four playwrights with us to tell us about the plays they have written and will be presenting this September at Northumberland Festival of the Arts NFOTA 24. Anne Page has been a performer, writer and producer in and around the Canadian theatre scene for many years. Anne has a deep connection with Cobourg. Her parents grew up, met and married here and though they moved away frequently returned to spend time with their extended families. Peter Paylor’s plays will be produced this year in Brockville, Belleville, Elliot Lake, Port Hope, Sault Ste. Marie, and Wilberforce and Cobourg . Peter is Artistic Director for River & Main Theatre Company at Theatre in The Wings in Belleville. For over thirty years, Marcia Johnson has been a Toronto-based theatre artist, who also works in audiobooks as a director and narrator. She has written numerous plays which have been performed by companies across Canada including Stratford. At the end of last year, she was in the first cohort of playwrights to take part in the Slaight Playwrights Residency at the Banff Centre. Sean Carthew is a long-term Port Hope resident. He is the Founder and artistic Director of Port Hope’s Ontario Street Theatre, which has produced, created and performed well over 250 productions in and around Northumberland County. Sean will have two plays performed at the Port Hope Arts Festival in August and one, Go Fish, at NFOTA.
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Patrick Muldoon
This is a re-run of a programme Patrick made with Word on the Hills last year. Patrick Muldoon is the Branch Supervisor of the Warkworth Public Library, which is a part of the Trent Hills Library system. He has always loved libraries and reading. Patrick has degrees in English Literature and Education and before coming to the library, he had a 27 year career as an elementary school teacher. The highlights of his teaching career included introducing children to Shakespeare and touring the county with student performances of many Shakespeare plays. Since retiring from education, he has been working at developing the collection and programs at the Warkworth Library. His plans for making the Warkworth Library a dynamic community hub are well under way and he is here today to share what has been happening at the library, and his upcoming plans.
Dave Carley
On Sunday at 1.00 pm join us to hear Dave Carley discussing his plays and telling us about his career as a playwright, director and curator. Dave’s stage and radio plays have had over 450 productions across Canada, the United States, and around the world. They include Writing with our Feet, Conservatives in Love and Midnight Madness. He has also written dramatizations of novels, including Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman; Al Purdy’s A Splinter in the Heart; and, in progress, Farley Mowat’s And No Birds Sang.
Dave’s plays often deal with human rights concerns and include Taking Liberties; The Last Liberal; and Twelve Hours. His play Canadian Rajah – first read at Wesleyville Village church – has its Asian premiere this fall in Malaysia. He has just completed a new drama, Hope is a Bird, about the elusive Ivory-Billed
Woodpecker. Dave’s radio plays have been broadcast by the BBC (UK), CBC (Canada), ABC
(Australia) and NPR (USA). He is also curating ten-minute play events for the Port Hope Festival in August and the Northumberland Festival of the Arts in September, festivalofthearts.ca
Linda Hutsell Manning
This week we welcome Linda Hutsell Manning. Linda’s publications include four picture books, three juvenile plays, two mid-grade novels and Polka Dot Door scripts as well as a literary novel, That Summer in Franklin, a two-act comedy, A Certain Singing Teacher, VOS Theatre, a memoir, Fearless and Determined, Blue Denim Press, about her 1960’s teaching experiences a one room elementary school west of Cobourg and Finding Moufette, Pandamonium Publishers, a picture book about a cat lost in a Christmas Eve snowstorm, released in 2023. A novella, Heads I Win, Tails You Lose, AOS Publishers has just been released and is available in bookstores and on Amazon. Linda has also written many pieces of short fiction and poetry published in literary magazines. Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, she now lives near Cobourg Ontario where she writes in a century old farmhouse. www.lindahutsellmanning.ca.
Michael Pepa
WORD ON THE HILLS welcomes Michael Pepa as our guest this week. Michael has composed/written some 80 works for solo instruments, chamber groups, and orchestras. These have been commissioned and broadcast in Canada, the U.S., many European countries and Japan. He studied composition at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto graduating with an ARCT diploma. Having passed the necessary examinations in the Theory and Practice of Composition, he was admitted as a FELLOW (FTCL) of Trinity College of Music, London, England. He holds a Teacher’s diploma in the Art of Violin Playing (LTCL) from the same college. Michael also earned a Master of Arts in Music Education. As well as being the founder and artistic director of Les AMIS Concerts, he is the composer-in-residence of the Canadian Sinfonietta, a member of the Canadian League of Composers, SOCAN, and an Associate Composer of the Canadian Music Centre. http://www.musiccentre.ca/composers. Michael Pepa was born in Timisoara, Romania. He came to Canada in 1953, settling in Toronto with his family. He has lived in Cobourg, since 2014.
Matthew King
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.
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.
Word on the Hills Radio Program 