Antony Di Nardo has written nine books of poetry. His award-winning 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 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 was published by Wet Ink Books. Antony’s present project is his collection Cloudspotting which he will present with his insights into the work of Antonio Damasio at the Accenti Festival of the Arts hosted by the University of PEI in Charlottetown this coming June.
Recent Programs
T J Best
This week’ show is an encore presentation of our interviews with TJ Best. TJ is the host and organizer of a monthly poetry Open Mic held in Madoc, called First Tuesday Muse, and has been published in a number of journals in both Canada and the United States including: The Waterwheel Review, Ghost City Press, Untethered Magazine, and above/ground Press. TJ (formerly known as Tamara ‘tah-mah-rah’) is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns. After spending many years in Toronto, TJ moved to the Quinte Region in 2011 and homeschooled their two children for ten years. TJ is also an experienced Community Worker with a focus on client support. In addition to these many “hats”, TJ also maintains a medicinal garden at a historic site and is passionate about outdoor education.
Phyliss Wright
Phyliss Wright’s journey as a poet started in university days, when she edited a literary magazine in Colorado during the tumultuous sixties, where she also taught mountain climbing and piton-craft. She returned to writing poetry after a stint in the Marines as an air traffic controller. Poems are a way she explores the world and her own thoughts about life. Her work is shaped by her adventures in Afghanistan, Spain, Poland, and Siberia. But her formative work began in widowhood, when she served as a hospital director in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa of Pakistan, and then as a teacher in the United Arab Emirates. She wrote with the Kent State University Writers Group for over twenty years and still meets with them remotely. Recently she married Canadian, Eric Wright, who is a Northumberland writer. A new resident of Port Hope, she writes with the Cobourg Poetry Workshop, has two children, four grandchildren and a cat who came with her from the United Arab Emirates.
PJ Thomas
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.
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.
Word on the Hills Radio Program 