Our guest this week is Heidi Croot. This is an encore presentation from 2014. Heidi graduated with an Honours B.A. in English from the University of Western Ontario, in London, Ontario, and landed a dream job in corporate communication with IBM Toronto. She followed this line of work in the long-term care, municipal government, and health & safety industries, before hanging a freelance shingle. An award-winning (now mostly escaped) business writer, Heidi has been published in numerous trade publications as a ghostwriter for employers and clients, and under her own byline. She lives with her husband in Ontario’s beautiful Northumberland County, and is working on a memoir.

This week we are replaying an early interview with Ruth Clarke. Ruth is the author of a number of books of nonfiction, but has sometimes used fictional characters as narrators in her historical works. She has also written a field guide to Alderville’s Black Oak Savannah, with biologist and artist Rick Beaver, and Buffers, Boundaries and Barricades, a coffee table book of photographs and musings. Her short stories, memoirs and journalism have been published in anthologies, journals, magazines and newspapers.

This summer we plan to look back over the years to the first programmes we archived in 2014. This week we are rebroadcasting a conversation between Gwynn and Felicity made to introduce themselves to the audience for Word on the Hills. We hope you enjoy it.

This week we are delighted to welcome Shane Joseph again to Word on the Hills. Shane is a well-known Canadian novelist, blogger, reviewer, short story writer, and publisher at Blue Denim Press. He began writing as a teenager living in Sri Lanka and has never stopped. He is the author of an ever increasing number of novels and three collections of short stories. His short stories and articles have appeared in several Canadian anthologies and in literary journals around the world. You can find out more about Shane at his website www.shanejoseph.com

In this episode, Gwynn interviews Felicity about how Word on the Hills began and her new book of poetry Where Sun Meets Shadow. Felicity invited Gwynn to partner her in a proposal  for this radio series, Word on the Hills, when the new radio station northumberland897.ca  was looking for content in 2013. To our enduring surprise it has run ever since and is now the longest running series on 89.7 FM.  In 2015, Felicity’s novel Alone: A Winter in the Woods was released by Hidden Brook Press, followed by the e-book in 2020. Her first poetry collection The Yellow Magnolia was released in 2021 followed by The Many Faces, Aeolus House, 2022. This year Aeolus House published her new poetry collection Where Sun Meets Shadow. Her short fiction and poems have been published in both print and online journals and anthologies.

Welcome to Patricia Calder! Pat Calder started writing as a teenager. Inspired by an uncle who reported for the CBC, she secretly wrote stories about her life in the 50s and 60s. As a young adult she travelled around Europe as far as Moscow. Inspired by Russian writers she studied in university, she explored communism. The secret of the night her 3-year-old brother died came out at a family event. When she began writing as a retiree, these early memories reappeared in her writing: nature, equality, and loss. In a parallel life, she was developing her eye as a photographer. Spirit of the Hills has been a major influence and support for Pat as a writer and as a photographer, with its arts shows and writing critique groups.

This week we welcome Ted Staunton. Ted Staunton wrote his first story long ago, as a class assignment at university. He barely handed it in on time, but he’s glad he did: it became the picture book Puddleman. Now the author of something like fifty books, he writes for all ages, and he’s getting better. His YA novel Who I’m Not won the 2014 CCBC John Spray Mystery Award. Ted’s work has also been nominated for Silver Birch, Red Maple, Hackmatack, Arthur Ellis, BC Stellar, and City of Toronto awards, among others. His work has also been published internationally, in a variety of languages. Ted speaks, performs, and leads workshops in schools, libraries and festivals across Canada. As well, he teaches the Writing Children’s Fiction courses at George Brown College.