This week we are re-broadcasting a show we made a year ago with S.M Hurley. She grew up in Ottawa and at the family cottage on the Rideau Lake system, which is very much in her bones. It’s on the same lake as the Queen’s Biology station. Each summer she saw adults spending their time pottering about having a blast. She thought this wonderful, so off she went to Queens and did a biology degree, then a Masters and then began a PhD which got hijacked by her going to law school which is another story. She’s been a small-town lawyer in Picton her entire career. She’s always written, both as a lawyer and as a “writer”. BLACKWATER BLUFF is the first novel she’s let out of the gate. Along the way there was always the cottage, to which she and her partner will retire in the very near future. Then she hopes to get back to where she started, chasing birds and insects, and writing. She is now doing a final edit on her second novel and has started her third.

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Known as “The History Guy of Brighton” Dan Buchanan is engaged in many activities related to local and Ontario history, he is a frequent speaker to historical and social organizations, the author of three books and the founder of Brighton History Week. In 2015 Dan published his first book, Murder in the Family: The Dr. King Story.  His third book is being released  in August 2020, entitled The Wreck of HMS Speedy: The Tragedy That Shook Upper Canada. Dan is a founder of the annual Brighton History Week. Since 2000 Dan has done community genealogy research and provides the details at www.treesbydan.com. He has a database of well over 100,000 individuals radiating out from his own families who settled in the north end of Brighton Township.

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Join us here to learn how authors may be launching their new books in this difficult time of pandemic. Heather M. O’Connor is an award-winning writer of books for kids and teens. She is also an editor and workshop presenter. Her first picture book Fast Friends, illustrated by Claudia Dávila, is published by Scholastic Canada and available in both English and French from July 21st, 2020. In 2015 she visited us on Word on the Hills to tell us about Betting Game, when her debut novel with Orca Books was published. She also writes short stories, fantasy and historical fiction. Heather lives in Peterborough, Ontario.

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This weekend we are rebroadcasting the show we made last summer with Jessica Outram when she was appointed fourth Poet Laureate of Cobourg. During the past year Jessica has begun a number of the projects she was planning then and several more in response to Covid. Subscribe to Poetry Present which will bring you a poem by a local poet every Saturday morning and, to find out more about Jessica, her life and work visit her blog at sunshineinajar.com

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This week we welcome Vicki Delany. Vicki is one of Canada’s most prolific and varied crime writers and a national bestseller in the U.S. She has written more than thirty-five books and is currently writing four cozy mystery series: the Tea by the Sea mysteries for Kensington, the Sherlock Holmes Bookshop series for Crooked Lane Books, the Year Round Christmas mysteries for Penguin Random House, and the Lighthouse Library series (as Eva Gates) for Crooked Lane.Vicki is a past president of the Crime Writers of Canada and co-founder and organizer of the Women Killing It Crime Writing Festival. She is the 2019 recipient of the Derrick Murdoch award for contributions to Canadian crime writing. Vicki lives in Prince Edward County, Ontario.

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Sharon Ramsay Curtis talks about the evolution and publication of her latest picture book, GLADIOLA SLEEPS IN. Sharon is the author and illustrator of two picture books for young children. She is also a watercolour artist, potter and gardener. Sharon says, ” I love useful things and my pottery, while decorative, is always functional and ergonomically designed. I am inspired by growing things, change, words and their meanings, colours, lines, and patterns. These are the elements, which show up in my work most frequently. I create because creating is the conduit by which I am able to best understand the world and myself.”

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This week Word on the Hills talks by Zoom to Bruce Kauffman. Bruce is a poet, editor, event organizer, workshop facilitator and lives in Kingston. He has had four collections of poetry published, the most recent – last year’s, ‘an evening absence still waiting for moon’. He also produces and hosts a radio show called ‘finding a voice’ at CFRC 101.9 FM Kingston. And he organizes and hosts a monthly poetry open mic. which began in 2009.

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This week we talk to Erika Rummel. Erika  is the author/editor of many non-fiction, historical works, and an established novelist. Last year one of her historical novels, THE INQUISITOR’S NIECE, a story from the time of the Spanish Inquisition, received the award for “best historical novel” from the Colorado Publishers’ Association. This year has been particularly busy; three books on which she worked during 2018/19 have come home “to roost” all at the same time: the first, a translation from the German of a biography of the philosopher and humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam; the second a non-fiction book about the man who was Austria’s Chancellor when the Nazis occupied the country in 1938 and who was imprisoned until he was liberated by the Allies in 1945. The book is about the strategies he and other prisoners used for their emotional and intellectual survival. The third book is a new historical novel, THE ROAD TO GESUALDO, set in 16th century Italy which is about to be released and has received enthusiastic pre-publication reviews.

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Jan Thornhill was born in Sudbury and grew up living on the outskirts of small communities where the fields and woods became her world.  She chose to go to OCAD after leaving school and when she graduated, decided to try free- lancing as an illustrator and to her surprise found employment this way for over 10 years.  After she met her husband Fred in 1981, Jan started writing, and in 1987 wrote and illustrated her first children’s book – the Wildlife ABC, which is still in print. 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]  and, most recently, the TD Children’s Literature Award for The Tragic Tale of the Great Auk. Jan lives with her husband Fred in a house they built in the woods near Havelock, Ontario.

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This week, we talk to Karen Ralley, from Prince Edward County, on Zoom. Karen was raised in Milford, the village where her great-great-grandfather William Byron Scott (1843-1921) owned and operated historic Scott’s Mill. One of her early articles was a history of Scott’s Mill which was published in The County Magazine in 1977. Karen’s short stories, poetry and journalism have been published in Lake Effect, The Queen’s Feminist Review, Ultraviolet, County Magazine, express, Umbrella, and Independently Reviewed.  One of her short stories was recently published in The County Wave, an anthology of stories by county writers. She is currently working on a novel and now lives outside Picton in a century farmhouse on 12 acres of land, with her husband writer, J D Carpenter.

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