Drama at NFOTA24: episode 1

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This week, Word on the Hills is delighted to have four playwrights with us to tell us about the plays they have written and will be presenting this September at Northumberland Festival of the Arts NFOTA 24. Anne Page has been a performer, writer and producer in and around the Canadian theatre scene for many years. Anne has a deep connection with Cobourg. Her parents grew up, met and married here and though they moved away frequently returned to spend time with their extended families. Peter Paylor’s plays will be produced this year in Brockville, Belleville, Elliot Lake, Port Hope, Sault Ste. Marie, and Wilberforce and Cobourg . Peter is Artistic Director for River & Main Theatre Company at Theatre in The Wings in Belleville. For over thirty years, Marcia Johnson has been a Toronto-based theatre artist, who also works in audiobooks as a director and narrator. She has written numerous plays which have been performed by companies across Canada including Stratford. At the end of last year, she was in the first cohort of playwrights to take part in the Slaight Playwrights Residency at the Banff Centre. Sean Carthew is a long-term Port Hope resident. He is the Founder and artistic Director of Port Hope’s Ontario Street Theatre, which has produced, created and performed well over 250 productions in and around Northumberland County. Sean will have two plays performed at the Port Hope Arts Festival in August and one, Go Fish, at NFOTA.

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Patrick Muldoon

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This is a re-run of a programme Patrick made with Word on the Hills last year. Patrick Muldoon is the Branch Supervisor of the Warkworth Public Library, which is a part of the Trent Hills Library system.  He has always loved libraries and reading.  Patrick has degrees in English Literature and Education and before coming to the library, he had a 27 year career as an elementary school teacher.  The highlights of his teaching career included introducing children to Shakespeare and touring the county with student performances of many Shakespeare plays. Since retiring from education, he has been working at developing the collection and programs at the Warkworth Library.  His plans for making the Warkworth Library a dynamic community hub are well under way and he is here today to share what has been happening at the library, and his upcoming plans.

Dave Carley

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On Sunday at 1.00 pm join us to hear Dave Carley discussing his plays and telling us about his career as a playwright, director and curator. Dave’s stage and radio plays have had over 450 productions across Canada, the United States, and around the world. They include Writing with our Feet, Conservatives in Love and  Midnight Madness. He has also written dramatizations of novels, including Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman; Al Purdy’s A Splinter in the Heart; and, in progress, Farley Mowat’s And No Birds Sang.

Dave’s plays often deal with human rights concerns and include Taking Liberties; The Last Liberal; and Twelve Hours. His play Canadian Rajah – first read at Wesleyville Village church – has its Asian premiere this fall in Malaysia. He has just completed a new drama, Hope is a Bird, about the elusive Ivory-Billed

Woodpecker. Dave’s radio plays have been broadcast by the BBC (UK), CBC (Canada), ABC

(Australia) and NPR (USA). He is also curating ten-minute play events for the Port Hope Festival in August and the Northumberland Festival of the Arts in September, festivalofthearts.ca


Linda Hutsell Manning

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This week we welcome Linda Hutsell Manning. Linda’s publications include four picture books, three juvenile plays, two mid-grade novels and Polka Dot Door scripts as well as a literary novel, That Summer in Franklin, a two-act comedy,  A Certain Singing Teacher,  VOS Theatre, a memoir, Fearless and Determined, Blue Denim Press, about her 1960’s teaching experiences a one room  elementary school west of Cobourg  and Finding Moufette, Pandamonium Publishers, a picture book about a cat lost in a Christmas Eve snowstorm,  released in 2023.  A novella, Heads I Win, Tails You Lose, AOS Publishers has just been released and is available in bookstores and on Amazon. Linda has also written many pieces of short fiction and poetry published in literary magazines. Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, she now lives near Cobourg Ontario where she writes in a century old farmhouse.  www.lindahutsellmanning.ca. 

Michael Pepa

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WORD ON THE HILLS welcomes Michael Pepa as our guest this week. Michael has composed/written some 80 works for solo instruments, chamber groups, and orchestras. These have been commissioned and broadcast in Canada, the U.S., many European countries and Japan. He studied composition at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto graduating with an ARCT diploma. Having passed the necessary examinations in the Theory and Practice of Composition, he was admitted as a FELLOW (FTCL) of Trinity College of Music, London, England. He holds a Teacher’s diploma in the Art of Violin Playing (LTCL) from the same college. Michael also earned a Master of Arts in Music Education. As well as being the founder and artistic director of Les AMIS Concerts, he is the composer-in-residence of the Canadian Sinfonietta, a member of the Canadian League of Composers, SOCAN, and an Associate Composer of the Canadian Music Centre. http://www.musiccentre.ca/composers. Michael Pepa was born in Timisoara, Romania. He came to Canada in 1953, settling in Toronto with his family. He has lived in Cobourg, since 2014.

Matthew King

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This week we celebrate the last week of poetry month with Matthew King. Matthew taught philosophy at York University for a number of years before he moved to the Marmora area in 2015—or, as he likes to say, “what Al Purdy called ‘the country north of Belleville’”—where he tries to grow things, counts birds, and takes pictures mostly of flowers with bugs on them. Over the last several years, catalyzed in part by winning the Spirit of the Hills Festival Poetry Prize in 2019, he has increasingly been concentrating his energies on poetry. In 2020 he won the FreeFall magazine poetry contest; in 2023 he was a runner-up for Plough Quarterly’s Rhina Espaillat Poetry Award, won Arc magazine’s “Award of Awesomeness” for June, and had a poem selected for Best Canadian Poetry 2024. Others of his poems have appeared in various magazines in print and online.

Kathryn MacDonald

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Our third celebration of Poetry Month features poet Kathryn MacDonald. Kathryn has published in Room, FreeFall and other Canadian literary journals and anthologies, as well as internationally in the U.K., U.S. and even Indonesia. Her poem, “Duty / Deon” won the Arc Award of Awesomeness (January 2021). “Seduction” was entered in the Freefall Annual Poetry Contest and published in Freefall (Fall 2020). Kathryn is the author of Far Side of the Shadow Moon: Enchantments (poetry chapbook), A Breeze You Whisper: Poems and Calla & Édouard (fiction), as well as a book of essays and recipes, The Farm & City Cookbook with its philosophy of “eat natural, eat local.” Kathryn lives in Belleville on the north shore of Lake Ontario where the Moira River flows into the Bay of Quinte. Kathryn taught literature as well as creative and nonfiction writing in Ontario’s college system in addition to facilitating writing workshops and coaching sessions. For pleasure she pursues photography and sketching.

Allan Briesmaster

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This week we celebrate Poetry Month with Allan Briesmaster. Allan is a poet, freelance editor and publisher, active on the Toronto-area literary scene for many years. He has been a workshop leader and reading series organizer and was a partner in Quattro Books in 2006-2017. He currently operates his own small, independent press, Aeolus House, specializing in custom-designed, limited-edition books of poetry. The most recent of Allan’s nine poetry collections are The Long Bond: Selected and New Poems, from Guernica Editions in 2019, and Windfor, from Ekstasis Editions in 2021. He has read his poetry, given talks, been on panels, and hosted events at venues from Victoria to St. John’s. He is a Life Member of The League of Canadian Poets and of The Ontario Poetry Society. Due to an unexpected problem with the sound on the programme when it was recorded recently, this episode is is an encore presentation from 2021. The episode originally proposed for this week will be re-recorded for broadcast this summer.

Kate Rogers

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On our first show for Poetry Month this year, we interview poet, Kate Rogers. Kate’s poetry collection, The Meaning of Leaving, launches in Toronto on April 20th. Homeless City, a chapbook co-authored with Donna Langevin, debuted in the first week of January 2024. Kate recently won first place in the subTerrain magazine 2023 Lush Triumphant Contest for her suite of poems, “My Mother’s House.” Her poetry also recently appeared in Where Else? An International Hong Kong Poetry Anthology. She has been published in such notable journals as World Literature Today; Cha: An Asian Literary Journal and The Windsor Review. She is a Co-Director of Art Bar, Toronto’s oldest poetry reading series. More at: katerogers.ca

Tom Cruikshank

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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.