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.
poetry
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.
Frances Boyle
This week’s programme is a rerun of our interview with Frances Boyle who visited Cobourg last spring to give a reading for The Cobourg Poetry Workshop’s Third Thursday Readings series. Frances is, most recently, the author of Openwork and Limestone (Frontenac House, 2022). Her earlier books are the poetry collections This White Nest (Quattro Books, 2019) and Light-carved Passages (BuschekBooks 2014), Seeking Shade (The Porcupine’s Quill, 2020) an award-winning short story collection, and Tower, (Fish Gotta Swim Editions, 2019), a novella. Frances’s writing has appeared throughout North America and internationally. Raised in Regina, she has long made Ottawa home, with involvement in the literary community including serving on the board of Arc Poetry Magazine for more than 10 years.
Gwynn Scheltema
Today we talk with Gwynn Scheltema, an award-winning fiction writer and poet whose work has been published online and in print in various media. Many of her stories and poems are influenced by her experiences growing up in Africa. Fascinated by words, she enjoys sharing her love of language and has taught for over 25 years in community and private colleges at conferences and many workshops. With her business partner, Ruth Walker, she runs Writescape.ca, which offers coaching, editing, writers workshops and retreats. She is the co-host of Word on the Hills which has been running on 89.7 FM since the fall of 2013. She is also the president of Northumberland Festival of the Arts and will be deeply engaged in this volunteer work for the arts in the coming months as NFOTA prepares for the 2024 festival. Her most recent publications are two books of poetry; a chapbook entitled Ten of Diamonds (Glentula Press, 2021) and a new collection of poems, Everchild, published by Aeolus House and released this month.
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Michael Fraser
Michael Fraser is published in Best Canadian Poetry in English 2013 and 2018. He has won numerous awards, including Freefall Magazine’s 2014 and 2015 poetry contests, the 2016 CBC Poetry Prize, the 2018 Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Competition, and the League of Canadian Poets’ 2022 Lesley Strutt Poetry Prize. His latest collection, With My Eyes Wide Open is published by Exile Editions.
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Frances Boyle
Meet Frances Boyle, who recently read in The Third Thursday’s Reading series in Cobourg. Frances is the author of Openwork and Limestone (Frontenac House, 2022). Her earlier books are the poetry collections This White Nest (Quattro Books, 2019) and Light-carved Passages (BuschekBooks 2014), Seeking Shade (The Porcupine’s Quill, 2020) an award-winning short story collection, and Tower, (Fish Gotta Swim Editions, 2019), a novella. Frances’s writing has appeared throughout North America and internationally. Raised in Regina, she has long made Ottawa home, with involvement in the literary community including serving on the board of Arc Poetry Magazine for more than 10 years, volunteering with literary festivals and leading workshops.
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Kim Fahner
This week we welcome Kim Fahner. Kim lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her most recent book of poems is Emptying the Ocean (Frontenac House, 2022) and her first novel, The Donoghue Girl, will be published in Spring 2024 with Latitude 46 Publishing. She was the fourth poet laureate for Sudbury (2016-18) and was the first woman appointed to the role. Kim is the Ontario Representative for The Writers’ Union of Canada (2020-24), a full member of the League of Canadian Poets, and a supporting member of the Playwrights’ Guild of Canada. Kim may be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com. She is visiting Cobourg to take part in the March Third Thursday Reading organized by The Cobourg Poetry Workshop. At that event, she will read from, Emptying the Ocean.
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Renee Sgroi
This week our guest is Renee Sgroi. Renee was born and raised in Toronto. She holds a PhD from the University of Toronto and her poetry has been published in numerous Canadian journals and anthologies. A member of the League of Canadian Poets, The Writers Union of Canada, an executive member of the Canadian Authors Association (Toronto branch), as well as a contributing editor for Arc Poetry, Renée’s poems have been published in The Windsor Review, the /tƐmz/ review and The Prairie Journal among others. She recently won 2nd prize in the Carmen Ziolkowski Poetry Prize and continues to make long and short lists worldwide including that for the Fish Poetry Prize. In 2019, her unpublished novel was shortlisted for Canada’s Guernica Prize. She recently read at an Ontario Poetry Society event held in Cobourg. She lives in the GTA with her husband and children.
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J D Carpenter
David Carpenter grew up in Toronto, earned degrees at York University and Queen’s University, taught high school English for 25 years at Leaside High School in Toronto, and ran the Special Education program for 14 of those years. He publishes under the name J D Carpenter and began his writing career as a poet, but later turned to fiction, primarily murder mysteries: The Devil in Me (McClelland & Stewart, 2001); Bright’s Kill (Dundurn Press, 2005); 74 Miles Away (Dundurn Press, 2006); Twelve Trees (Dundurn Press, 2008) and The County Murders (Cressy Lakeside Books, 2016). A second Joe Horn mystery, The Lake Pirates was published by Cressy Lakeside Books in 2020. But David has now returned to writing poetry and has just published a collection, launching October 23rd, at Books and Company in Picton, titled A ROAD THROUGH THE CORN, PRINCE EDWARD COUNTY POEMS 1982-2022, as well as continuing work on a major revision to a Campbell Young mystery which he put aside several years ago. So though he told us that his biography hadn’t altered except in that he had grown several years older since he was last our guest, it seems there’s plenty to add to it
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Antony Di Nardo
This week we are re-broadcasting a show we made last spring with Antony Di Nardo. Antony has written six 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. His collection “Forget – Sadness – Grass” was released by Ronsdale Press this summer. The winner of the inaugural Don Gutteridge Poetry Award, “Through Yonder Window Breaks” has recently been published by Wet Ink Books.
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