Please join us for the second of our holiday programmes, This time you can hear stories by Diane Taylor, Antony Di Nardo, Kim Grove and Ronald Mackay. And if you want still more variety, Gwynn and Chris  read a couple of their own favourites about the season.

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This week we are broadcasting the first of three holiday shows for 2019. Shane Joseph starts with a reading of his recollections, some good and some not so good, of past Christmases. Then Linda Hutsell Manning reads an excerpt from her  recently published memoir, describing one of the highlights of the educational year, the Christmas concert at her one-room school. Al Seymour has a story about the joys of sledding and how his protagonists overcome a group of bullies.And Les Robling remembers how the holiday was celebrated during his youth in Wales.The stories are interspersed with a little music, commentary and best wishes for the season from  your hosts Gwynn Scheltema, our new team member, Chris Cameron and Felicity Sidnell Reid.

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Novelist Shelagh Hurley grew up in Ottawa.  In truth, she grew up at the cottage on the Rideau Lake system, which her parents bought and built in the early 60s, so it’s very much in her bones. It’s on the same lake as the Queen’s Biology station. Each summer as a child she saw adults spending their time pooting about having a blast– that’s how it appeared to her, but of course they were doing all manner of research. She thought this wonderful, so she went to Queens, did a biology degree and then a Masters in New Brunswick and then back to Queens to do a PhD, which got hijacked by her going to law school which is another story. She’s been a small-town lawyer her entire career, over thirty years, in Picton. She’s always written, both as a lawyer (but only some of that writing is fiction), and as “writer”.  Blackwater Bluff is the first novel she’s let out of the gate. Along the way, there were children and the vagaries of life, and always the cottage, to which she and her partner will retire in the very near future. Then she hopes to get back to where she started, chasing birds and insects, and writing.

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Caroline Everson was born in England and came to Port Hope with her family as a young child. She still lives there today. She graduated from the University of Western Ontario with a BA in Geography, and has worked in banking, retail, advertising & small businesses while raising three children. She also found time to write. In the past, her work has been published in local newspapers and magazines, and she has won two writing contests with her short fiction. Some of her stories were included in “It Ain’t Shakespeare”, a collection published by Cobourg’s Pollard Writers Guild in 2004. Caroline’s first book sale came in 2007. “Ali Runs With the Pack” was part of an educational program from Scholastic Canada. Her picture book, “Song on the Wind”, was published at the end of 2017. It’s an end-of-the-day poem, beautifully illustrated by Anne Marie Bourgeois.

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This week we play our interview with poet, Kate Rogers, who has lived and worked in Hong Kong for many years. While visiting Cobourg in the summer, to read her poetry, she told us about living in Hong Kong and the strength of the protests by young people against the extradition law proposed by the Hong Kong government and the erosion of freedoms in the city. She respects and admires the protesters’ bravery and determination to continue their fight for their “Five demands, not one less” and is deeply concerned about the the growing violence of the police in the face of the protest movement. Kate also talks about her repatriation to Canada this month, and her concept of home.
Kate Rogers’ poetry has appeared in literary journals in the U.S., Canada, UK; Hong Kong; Japan and Malaysia. Highlights include World Literature Today; the Fieldstone Review (University of Saskatchewan); Tamaracks: Canadian Poetry for the 21st Century; Algebra of Owls; Voice and Verse; Twin Cities Cinema (Hong Kong-Singapore); Juniper; The Guardian; Asia Literary Review; Cha: an Asian Literary Journal; The Goose: a journal of Arts, Environment and Culture; Many Mountains Moving and Kyoto Journal. Her poems won second place in the 2018-2019 Big Pond Rumours Contest. They have been shortlisted for the 2018 Vancouver Tagore Society Contest and the 2017 Montreal International Poetry Prize. Kate’s latest poetry collection is, “Out of Place” (Aeolus House–an imprint of Quattro Books– Toronto, 2017). Kate will repatriate to Canada from Hong Kong in late November 2019. 

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This week meet Greg Kieszkowski who was born in Poland and came to Canada with his family when he was 15. Settling here wasn’t all that easy but Greg graduated from high school took a business diploma from George Brown College and then studied Philosophy and English at York graduating from there with a teaching diploma in 2000. He has taught at an Ajax high school for nearly 20 years. Two years ago he took a 3 day workshop and since then has started writing. His first book called Quintessential Quotations was released recently and he is planning a whole series

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Matthew KIng grew up in Etobicoke, and was deeply shaped by his summers at the cottage his grandfather built on Wollaston Lake in Hastings County. He began writing poetry in high-school in a largely unsuccessful attempt to get girls to fall in love with him. He veered from English into philosophy  and published a book based on his doctoral work titled Heidegger and Happiness: Dwelling on Fitting and Being. He taught at York until 2014, and in 2015 he moved to the Marmora area with his partner Brenda and their three cats. Since then he has made the trek back from philosophy to what Heidegger calls the “neighbouring mountaintop” of poetry. He is the winner of the poetry prize in Spirit of the Hills Writing contest this year.

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Linda Hutsell-Manning has eleven published children’s books, poetry/short fiction in literary magazines and a novel, That Summer in Franklin to her credit. She has taught Community College creative writing and given countless school/library workshops across Canada. Her two-act comedy, A Certain Singing Teacher premiered in 2017. Her memoir of her early days as a teacher,  in a one room schoolhouse in Cobourg has just been released by Blue Denim Press.

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We interview Shane Joseph, who began writing as a teenager living in Sri Lanka and has never stopped. His latest novel, released in 2019, is Milltown, a tale of intrigue in a small Ontario town.  His career stints include: stage and radio actor, pop musician, encyclopedia salesman, lathe machine operator, airline executive, travel agency manager, vice president of a global financial services company, software services salesperson, publishing editor, project manager and management consultant.  He feels that he has lived many lives in just a single lifetime, always starting from scratch with only the lessons from the past to draw upon. He talks about his latest writing and the release of Hill Spirits IV at the launch and concert at SOTH’s Festival of the Arts On October 26th. Shane will be MC at the event

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