Mia Burrus is a writer and artist who lives in a restored one-room schoolhouse in the country north of Cobourg. (She also answers to her given name of Anne-Marie, in which guise she still makes occasional forays to the GTA to provide accounting support to charities there.) 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, and mindful and mindless, crafting poems, and multi-dimensional, multi-media 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 in the Juried Show at the Art Gallery of Northumberland this year.
Janice Barrett
This week we present an encore presentation of our interview with Janice Barrett.
Janice is a mother of three. She says her children are her proudest accomplishments. She is a journalist, playwright, ghostwriter and a novelist. She has also written a memoir and given workshops about memoir writing. She is a member of the Canadian Authors Association. Her novel, a thriller, set in the last years of the Vietnam War, is titled AUTHORIZED CRUELTY and was released by Blue Denim Press in 2023.
Gordon Pitts
Meet Gordon Pitts an award winning journalist and author, who was a reporter and editor on Canadian daily newspapers for four decades. In addition, he has written eight books of Canadian business biography and a series of local histories based on his home town of Madoc, Ontario, and of Hastings County. His biographical works include his 2020 release of Unicorn in the Woods, How East Coast Geeks and Dreamers Are Changing the Game, long-listed for Canada’s National Business Book Award and named one of the Globe and Mail’s Top 100 Books for 2020. He won the National Business Book Award for Stampede: The Rise of the West and Canada’s New Power Elite, his book on the business leaders of the Canadian West. A former high school teacher in Brighton, Ontario, before he became a journalist, Pitts retired from daily journalism in 2013. In retirement, he has turned to telling stories of the “country north of Belleville” – as poet Al Purdy called the rugged area from the Madoc area to Bancroft – including a narrative on the murder of a police constable in 1926 and his most recent release, an account of a financial scandal that shook Hastings County in 1914. These days, he divides his time between Madoc’s Moira Lake, where his family has lived for 150 years, and Toronto
Karen Walker
This week we talk with Karen Walker. Karen is a long-time resident of Cobourg, who began writing flash fiction, prose poetry and erasure poetry in 2019. Her work has been published more than one hundred print and digital literary publications and anthologies worldwide. Karen also contributed to Hill Spirits V published by Blue Denim Press in association with Northumberland Festival of the arts in 2022.
Dave Vaughan
Dave Vaughan’s journey through the world of drama and storytelling is eclectic. In the neon glow of the early 1980s, Dave first stepped into the spotlight, breathing life into characters on stage in productions like “Inherit the Wind” and “L’il Abner.” However, the allure of the stage soon gave way to the pragmatic call of engineering, leading Dave down a divergent path in the transportation industry. For nearly three decades, Dave’s creative spark simmered quietly, overshadowed by the demands of his career. But in 2010 he made a triumphant return to the performing arts. This time, the silver screen beckoned, and Dave answered. His pivotal moment came with “Hokum,” a film by Jared Bratt that not only showcased Dave’s compelling lead performance but also benefited from his co-writing. This award-winning project marked a turning point, steering him towards the art of scriptwriting, a skill he honed at George Brown College. The transition from actor and scriptwriter to novelist seemed a natural progression. His debut novel, Ballet of Deception, weaves a tapestry of intrigue and drama. Not content to rest on his laurels, Dave is currently putting the finishing touches on his second novel, Babe Lincoln’s Twisted Tale, due for release later this year.
Shane Joseph
Shane Joseph is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers. He is the author of seven novels and three collections of short stories. Shane’s second novel, After the Flood, a dystopian novel of hope, released in 2009, won the Write Canada Award for best novel in the futuristic/fantasy category. His short fiction and non-fiction have appeared in literary journals and anthologies all over the world. His blog at http://www.shanejoseph.com is widely syndicated, he has a monthly column in The Sri Lankan Anchorman journal, and is the Book Reviews Editor for Devour Art & Lit Magazine. His most recent novel, Empire in the Sand, was released in September 2022. Shane is the owner and publisher of Blue Denim Press (www.bluedenimpress.com), a literary press he founded in 2011. He is responsible for editing, formatting, cover design, production, distribution, and promotion at his press. To date, the press has published over 40 titles (fiction and non-fiction) in paperback and e-book formats. In particular, Shane loves editing to release the story from within the words.
Patricia Calder
Patricia Calder is a writer and photographer who loves nature. As a photographer, she created a website, showed her horse images at the Royal Winter Fair, visited Sable Island to photograph the feral horses and BC’s Great Bear Rain Forest to capture images of the Spirit Bears, and mounted several solo shows around Northumberland County. As a writer, she has published a novel, Roadblock, short stories in anthologies, and articles in newspapers; the most notable of these were “Stand down, soldier” written during the war in Afghanistan, and “The Gifts of Alzheimer’s” published in the Globe and Mail. In recent years she has edited and published her Grandmother’s WW2 scrapbook, written a commentary on the series of documents, and helped prepare and arrange the material for publishing in The University of Windsor’s digital archives where the story of her Uncle Jack will be stored and available to readers from anywhere and at any time. Presently she is working on a fictional account of Jack Calder’s life as a navigator in the RCAF and a newspaperman and his relationship with his mother based on such letters as have been preserved, articles, written during the war by Jack Calder and Pat’s own close relationship with her Grandmother.
New Year’s Eve episode
This week we present our final holiday show for 2023. This is an encore presentation and you’ll hear stories from Les Robling, Tom Pickering (read by Chris Cameron) and from Ronald Mackay. Jessica Outram sings a Christmas song and Anne–Marie Burrus and Felicity Sidnell Reid read a poem. Please join us!
Happy New Year to all our listeners!
Holiday Show for Christmas Eve 2023
Join us to revisit our Christmas show for 2017. Gwynn and Felicity read Christmas stories and poems by famous as well as less well known authors and wish you our listeners a very happy Christmas and New Year
Holiday Show for 2023
Welcome to our new holiday program for 2023, with music from Matt Kowalyk , and poems from Gwynn Scheltema, Katie Hoogendam, and Felicity Sidnell Reid. Especially written for this episode, there are short stories by Ron Mackay, a long time member of our writing community in Northumberland, now living in the Netherlands, but still keeping in touch and from Chris Cameron our guest co-host today, with a story about a writer who seeks inspiration and to break his writer’s block by retreating to a cabin in the snowy forest.
Please join us today and enjoy encore presentations of some of our previous Christmas shows in the last weeks of December.
With all best wishes for the holidays and for 2024 from all at Word on the Hills.
Word on the Hills Radio Program 