This weekend, we welcome April Potter to Word on the Hills. April is a local poet, freelance writer, and artist in Port Hope. She graduated from York University with a literature degree and also studied philosophy. She has built a freelance copywriting and marketing business, Potter Creative, since moving to Northumberland County in 2014. Her poetry is published under the name Estlin Edwards. She has writ ten for 102.1 The Edge in Toronto, Sunwing Travel, Kawartha Now, and more. Her first book of poetry will be out this year. You can find her art and postcards for sale at Purpose Thrift Shop in downtown Port Hope. She also writes local business features and theatre reviews at Featured in Northumberland, on Instagram and Facebook.
poetry
Phyliss Wright
Phyliss Wright’s journey as a poet started in university days, when she edited a literary magazine in Colorado during the tumultuous sixties, where she also taught mountain climbing and piton-craft. She returned to writing poetry after a stint in the Marines as an air traffic controller. Poems are a way she explores the world and her own thoughts about life. Her work is shaped by her adventures in Afghanistan, Spain, Poland, and Siberia. But her formative work began in widowhood, when she served as a hospital director in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa of Pakistan, and then as a teacher in the United Arab Emirates. She wrote with the Kent State University Writers Group for over twenty years and still meets with them remotely. Recently she married Canadian, Eric Wright, who is a Northumberland writer. A new resident of Port Hope, she writes with the Cobourg Poetry Workshop, has two children, four grandchildren and a cat who came with her from the United Arab Emirates.
PJ Thomas
Canadian poet, PJ Thomas writes and publishes poetry in the Kawartha Lakes region of Ontario. She has launched three full collections in the Water Trilogy; Undertow (2020), Waves (2022), and Drifting (2024). Thomas wrote the lyrics to three songs on the Rick Fines Juno Award-nominated album, Solar Powered Too. Her work has been published in magazines, newspapers, and anthologies. Thomas’s books have met with critical acclaim. She recently received a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts to write her next manuscript, Afterwaves. Thomas is a member of both the League of Canadian Poets, and The Writers’ Union of Canada. As an experimental poet, she creates verse about the local geography, the cosmos, natural bodies of water, community, and how they shape emotion. Ms. Thomas makes her home with her cat by the Otonabee River.
Matthew King
This Sunday we welcome you to an encore presentation of an episode we made last spring with Matthew KIng. Matthew taught philosophy at York University for a number of years before, in 2015, he moved to the Marmora area—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.
Gwynn Scheltema
After over 20 years of diversified experience in accounting, education, and administration GWYNN SCHELTEMA decided to stop counting beans and start counting words. Since then, Gwynn has been a columnist, magazine article writer, ghost writer and a fiction editor for Lichen Arts & Letters Preview literary journal. Her award-winning fiction and poetry have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies and, Ten of Diamonds was published in 2021 by Glentula Press. Her latest poetry collection Everchild was published by Aeolus House in 2023. Gwynn co-hosts and co-produces Word on the Hills radio series on Northumberland 89.7FM and writes, edits, coaches and teaches creative writing. At present however her focus is on the preparations for NFOTA24 which she leads. This year the festival will take place in September again and Gwynn is here to tell us all about it.
Felicity Sidnell Reid
Meet Felicity Sidnell Reid. While Felicity taught high school English, History, ESL and Drama for the TDSB, she also wrote poetry and short stories, two mystery novels with a friend, designed costumes for university, school and amateur dramatic societies and directed school plays. She is the author of ESL is Everybody’s Business (with Frances Parkin) and a series of textbooks for language learners. Her books include: Alone: A Winter in the Woods (Hidden Brook Press, 2015, e-book in 2020), The Yellow Magnolia (Glentula Press 2021)and The Many Faces (Aeolus House, 2022 e-book 2023). Her poetry, short fiction and memoir have been published in anthologies, journals and collections. She is the co-producer and cohost of Word on the Hills in which the hosts interview area writers and invite them to read from their work. This programme has been running on Northumberland 89.7 FM for eleven years. She is presently secretary of the Board of Directors for Northumberland Festival of the Arts, 2024.
Allan Briesmaster
Our guest this week is Allan Briesmaster. He is a poet, freelance editor and publisher who’s been 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. His new book Later Findings has just been released. 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.
Gwynn Scheltema
After over 20 years of diversified experience in accounting, education, and administration Gwynn Scheltema decided to stop counting beans and start counting words. Since then, Gwynn has been a columnist, magazine article writer, ghost writer and a fiction editor for Lichen Arts & Letters Preview literary journal. Her award-winning fiction and poetry have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies and, Ten of Diamonds was published in 2021 by Glentula Press. Her latest poetry collection Everchild was published by Aeolus House in 2023. Gwynn co-hosts and co-produces Word on the Hills radio series on Northumberland 89.7FM and writes, edits, coaches and teaches creative writing. At present however her focus is on the preparations for NFOTA24 which she leads. This year the festival will take place in September again and Gwynn is here to tell us all about it.
Antony di Nardo
Word on the Hills welcomes Antony di Nardo to talk about the poetry event, WOW, scheduled for September 15th as part of the Northumberland Festival of the Arts and his own work. Antony has written seven books of poetry. His work appears widely in journals and anthologies across Canada and internationally, and has been translated into several languages. His long poem suite May June July was winner of the Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Prize for 2017 and was short-listed for a National Magazine Award. He spent the last years of a teaching career in Beirut where he launched his first book of poetry Alien, Correspondent in 2010. He is an active member of the League of Canadian Poets and the Cobourg Poetry Workshop. The winner of the inaugural Don Gutteridge Poetry Award, Through Yonder Window Breaks has been published by Wet Ink Books. His latest collection Forget – Sadness – Grass was released by Ronsdale Press.
Mia Burrus
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.
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