Canadian poet, PJ Thomas writes and publishes poetry in the Kawartha Lakes region of Ontario. She has launched three full collections in the Water Trilogy; Undertow (2020), Waves (2022), and Drifting (2024). Thomas wrote the lyrics to three songs on the Rick Fines Juno Award-nominated album, Solar Powered Too. Her work has been published in magazines, newspapers, and anthologies. Thomas’s books have met with critical acclaim. She recently received a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts to write her next manuscript, Afterwaves. Thomas is a member of both the League of Canadian Poets, and The Writers’ Union of Canada. As an experimental poet, she creates verse about the local geography, the cosmos, natural bodies of water, community, and how they shape emotion. Ms. Thomas makes her home with her cat by the Otonabee River.
Author: felicity936
J. D. Carpenter
This week we talk with J David Carpenter, a poet and novelist who lives in Prince Edward County. He grew up in Toronto and attended York University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts and Queen’s University, for his B. Ed. He first worked as a journalist for Daily Racing Form and as a freelance writer, then taught high school English for 25 years. David began his writing career as a poet, publishing four books of poetry between 1976 and 1994. He then turned to crime fiction during the 1990s and has published six novels: The Devil in Me (McClelland &Stewart, 2001) This first novel appeared on the Globe and Mail’s bestseller list and was nominated for an Arthur Ellis Award; his subsequent novels have also received critical acclaim, His most recent books of poetry are All Us Cats on Stage (Cressy Lakeside Books, 2021) and A Road through the Corn: Prince Edward County Poems, 1982-2022 (Cressy Lakeside Books, 2022). He has just completed an MS of list poems and is currently working on a new project which may become a novel. He is also locally known for writing and performing jazz poetry with musical accompaniment.
Ted Barris
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.
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.
Kim Fahner
This Sunday our guest is Kim Fahner. Kim lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her latest book, a novel, is The Donoghue Girl (Latitude 46 Publishing) and her next book of poetry, The Pollination Field, will be published by Turnstone Press in 2025. Kim was a finalist for the 2023 Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, and she recently won first place in The Ampersand Review’s 2024 Essay Contest for her essay, “What You Carry.” Kim is the First Vice-Chair of The Writers’ Union of Canada, a member of the League of Canadian Poets, and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. She read for The Third Thursday Reading series in Cobourg recently and gave a workshop.
Terry Fallis
This week we talk with Terry Fallis about his new work.
And here’s Terry’s “Really Short Bio”
Terry Fallis is a two-time winner of the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, he is the award-winning author of nine national bestsellers, six of them #1 bestsellers, including his latest, A New Season. His debut novel, The Best Laid Plans, won the 2008 Leacock Medal, the 2011 edition of CBC Canada Reads, and was adapted as a six-part television miniseries, as well as a stage musical. He won the Leacock Medal a second time in 2015 for No Relation. He lives in Toronto and teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies.
Word on the Hills Radio Program 