Hugh Brewster

felicity936 1 Comment

This week we welcome Hugh Brewster to the programme. Being able to create books about history is a dream job for Hugh, since he’s always been enthralled by history. As an editor for Scholastic from 1972 to 1984 in both Toronto and New York, he was involved in the creation of Scholastic’s Canadian children’s publishing program. Between 1984 and 2004 he was the publisher of Madison Press Books in Toronto where he helped to create a number of successful books for both adults and young readers, including Exploring the Titanic, which has sold over one million copies and Titanic: An Illustrated History, which provided inspiration for James Cameron’s epic movie.

As an author, he has written fifteen books including Anastasia’s Album (1996) which won both the Silver Birch and Red Cedar Awards.  And he has won multiple awards for many of his other books including Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, a Governor General’s Award nominee in 2007, and From Vimy to Victory which was a Finalist for the T-D Canadian Children’s Literature Award and the Norma Fleck Award in 2015. An adult book RMS TITANIC: Gilded Lives on a Fatal Voyage was a national bestseller and published in six countries in 2012. He has written several plays and LAST DAY, LAST HOUR: Canada’s Great War On Trial was presented in the fall of 2018 as the centerpiece of Cobourg’s Armistice 18 commemoration which he helped organize. His latest book, published in Fall ’22, is UNSINKABLE LUCILE: How A Farm Girl Became the Queen of Fashion and Survived the Titanic. 

Part 1:

Part 2:

Jay Dart

felicity936 Leave a comment

This week we welcome Jay Dart. Jay is a Canadian drawist, author and designer whose practice includes bookworks, animated videos and mixed media installations. Dart’s work has been shown in galleries and art fairs including exhibitions in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa and Regina and recently at the Art Gallery of Northumberland; as well as internationally in Paris, New York, and Amsterdam. He is the recipient of multiple grants and honors including from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and a National Magazine Award for editorial illustration. His work has been featured on CBC Radio and TV including a profile on The Exhibitionists. He is a graduate of the University of Guelph’s Fine Art programme. Currently, he lives and draws with his family in a small hamlet outside the sprawl of Toronto, and he teaches Drawing and Design at Durham College and Sheridan College.

J D Carpenter

felicity936 1 Comment

 This week we welcome back J.D. Carpenter to Word on the Hills. David was born in Toronto in 1948. Some years later, he graduated from York University with a B.A.Hons. and then from Queen’s with a B.Ed. He worked as a journalist for Daily Racing Form in Montreal, Windsor, Fort Erie and Toronto before becoming a teacher. After four years of teaching elementary school, he began 25 years of teaching English and then became Head of Department for Special Education at Leaside High School in Toronto He is the author of six books of poetry. His most recent, A Road through the Corn: Prince Edward County Poems, 1982-2022 was published by Cressy Lakeside Press in 2022. He is also the author of six novels, including a series featuring sleuth Campbell Young and his friends set in the racing world so familiar to this writer. He is at present working on the final draft of Black Tupelo, the concluding volume in this series. The County Murders (Cressy Lakeside, 2016) has a new protagonist, a journalist based in a small town in Prince Edward County.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Shelagh Mathers (S M Hurley)

felicity936 1 Comment

Author Shelagh Mathers retired from her law practice in 2020, just as the pandemic moved into full gear. Though she misses the people she worked with she doesn’t miss the practice. And she quickly settled into retirement and did a fun turn as a co-host of a local radio show, The County, Naturally. Recently however she stepped back from that to focus full time on Book # 3 in her series about Augie De Graaf, Prince Edward County Crown Prosecutor, which is now proceeding apace. Her second book in this series is called The Sevens and was published in 2020. She now spends a lot of time at the cottage with family, including a new granddaughter, who, like all grandchildren, is the most wonderful thing in the world!

Part 1:

Part 2:

Jennifer Bogart

felicity936 1 Comment

This week we talk to Jennifer Bogart. Jennifer is a writer, with three adult novels and two middle-grade books to her credit. For many years she was a publisher and editor at Morning Rain Publications and then became the owner of Let’s Talk Books, Cobourg’s independent book store. The store was featured in a Globe and Mail article in 2019 and is now celebrating its seventh year in business. She frequently hosts writers, whose books she admires and arranges very successful readings for them, as well as organizing a number of book clubs at the store for readers of different genres.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Patrick Muldoon

felicity936 Leave a comment

This week we talk with Patrick Muldoon. Patrick 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.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Pat Calder

felicity936 Leave a comment

This week we welcome Patricia Calder. Pat is a photographer and writer who loves nature. After retiring from a busy career as an English teacher, she has lived in the quiet village of Colborne where she writes in a sunroom overlooking Lake Ontario in the distance, her gardens at closer range, and birdfeeders. When she is thinking, she has a pleasant view out her window to inspire her stories. During her career as a teacher, she taught in 13 different schools, colleges, and at York U. 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 Rainforest to capture images of the Spirit Bears, and mounted several solo shows around Northumberland County. As a writer, she published a novel, Roadblock, and several stories in newspapers and anthologies locally; the most notable were “Stand down, soldier” written during the war in Afghanistan, and “The Gifts of Alzheimer’s” published in the Globe and Mail.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Tom Pickering

felicity936 2 Comments

Meet Tom Pickering. The majority of Tom’s work life has been as a technical writer. His first job after graduation from the University of Alberta was to write training manuals for a company based in Edmonton. Several years after school, he returned to Ontario and continued with technical writing at IT and engineering related companies. Along the way, Tom amused himself with an avocation in art, studying at the Ontario College of Art, and in community theatre, where he performed onstage and wrote and directed plays. In later years, Tom moved to Northumberland County and continued his interest in theatre with the Northumberland Players for several years. More recently, Tom participated in the 2022 edition of the Northumberland Festival of the Arts, which brought together a wide assortment of artistic talent that was showcased across multiple venues within the county. Here he was introduced to new experiences, deepened existing friendships and made new ones. He is also a member of the Spirit of the Hills Arts Association and belongs to one of the Writer Critique groups that meet regularly to share and critique work of the group’s members. He lives in Cobourg with his wife Tracy and his dog Lily.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Chris Cameron and John Unruh

felicity936 Leave a comment

 Please join us to hear Christopher Cameron and John Unruh tell us about their adventures in podcasting. Christopher is presently engaged in making podcasts of his latest book. Thorneside Stories; A Mix of Sun and Cloud  and John has completed his series of podcasts of his novel The Ziggurat.  They tell us about how they found the platforms they publish on, about the programmes they use to record their readings, the challenges they faced in making the recording and why they love doing it.

Part 1:

Part 2: