This week we welcome Marie Prins the author of a middle-grade, time-travel book THE GIRL FROM THE ATTIC, published in 2020 from Common Deer Press. Her picture book WHO’S WALKING DAWG? was launched from Red Deer Press on October 15, 2024. Her short stories for children, memoir, nature pieces, and poetry can be found in the Hill Spirits Anthologies II – VI. She lives with her artist husband Ed Hagedorn in a historic, octagonal house in Colborne, Ontario.
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Linda Hutsell Manning
This is an encore presentation of one of our interviews with 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, which was premiered by VOS Theatre, a memoir, about her experiences as a teacher of eight grades at S.S.#2 Hamilton Township; a one room, one stove, cold water tap elementary school west of Cobourg from 1963 to 1965. She 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 farmhouse. www.lindahutsellmanning.ca. Her children’s story Finding Moufette, has been released by Pandamonium Publications.
Janice Barrett
Janice Barrett is a proud mother of three. She worked at the Unemployment Insurance Office in Hamilton from 1973-1988 at which time she became a stay-at-home mom. She was a freelance journalist for The Weekend Focus and The Grimsby Independent newspaper where she was given her own column. An article she wrote for The Ottawa Citizen garnered attention from the producer of W5 who invited her to be a guest on their show, which she declined. She was the opening act for Coast to Coast Canada’s Tenacious Literary Series held at The Laura Secord Homestead. She gave a seminar at The Niagara Falls Literary Festival on How to Write a Memoir. The first play she wrote, Dearly Departed, won a playwright contest where she was paid and a snippet of her play was performed at The Essential Collective Theatre. That afforded her an interview at The Tarragon Theatre. Her first historical fiction, Authorized Cruelty was published on October/1st/2023. Please join us for our conversation with Janice.
Ted Barris
This week we are rebroadcasting an episode which we made with historian and journalist Ted Barris in 2023. Ted’s writing has regularly appeared in the national press, as well as magazines as diverse as Air Force, esprit de corps and Zoomer. He has also worked as host/contributor for most CBC Radio network programs, PBS in the U.S. and on TV Ontario. And after 18 years teaching, he recently retired as a full-time professor of journalism at Toronto’s Centennial College. He is the author of 20 bestselling, non-fiction books, including a series on wartime Canada: Juno: Canadians at D-Day, June 6, 1944 … Days of Victory: Canadians Remember 1939-1945 … Behind the Glory: Canada’s Role in the Allied Air War … Deadlock in Korea: Canadians at War, 1950-1953. Victory at Vimy: Canada Comes of Age, April 9-12, 1917 Breaking the Silence: Veterans Untold Stories from the Great War to Afghanistan. His 17th book, The Great Escape: A Canadian Story won the 2014 Libris Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award (shared with astronaut Chris Hadfield). In 2018, HarperCollins published Barris’ 18th book Dam Busters: Canadian Airmen and the Secret Raid against Nazi Germany about the famous 1943 attack on the Ruhr River dams that powered Nazi Germany’s industrial war production. The RCAF Association awarded Ted Barris and Dam Busters its 2018 NORAD Trophy for unequalled contributions to the preservation of Air Force values, traditions, history and heritage.� Rush to Danger: Medics in the Line of Fire was Ted’s 19th book and was long-listed for the 2020 Charles Taylor Prize for Non-Fiction in Canada.Ted’s 20th book, Battle of the Atlantic: Gauntlet to Victory was published in the fall of 2022 and immediately landed on the Globe and Mail and Toronto Star bestsellers lists. Following the book’s publication, Ted received word that he had received Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee Award, recognizing extraordinary contributions to our community and Canada.� And these are just the books that have established Ted as the preeminent historian of Canada’s military.
Susan Statham
This week we welcome Susan Statham. Susan is an author, artist and editor. She’s a graduate of Algonquin College, the University of Waterloo, the Ottawa School of Art and the National Portrait Academy. She is president of the Cobourg Art Club and Chair of the Spirit of the Hills Writers’ Group. A former librarian, Susan lives in an Ontario hamlet with her husband and their French Bull dog, Arthur Conan Doyle, aka Artie. Susan has very busy life as a visual artist but she is also a novelist and the editor of Hill Spirits VI an anthology of writing by authors from our region. Today she is here to discuss her latest novel TRUE IMAGE.
Patricia Calder
WORD ON THE HILLS Sundays at 1.00 (wordonthehills.com.)
Patricia Calder is a writer and photographer, who loves nature. 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 Rain Forest to capture images of the Spirit Bears, and mounted several solo shows around Northumberland. As a writer, she has published a novel, Roadblock, short stories in anthologies, and articles in newspapers; the most notable of these were “Stand down, soldier” written during the war in Afghanistan, and “The Gifts of Alzheimer’s” published in the Globe and Mail. In recent years she has edited and published her Grandmother’s WW2 scrapbook, successfully submitted, written a commentary on the series of documents, and helped prepare and arrange the material for publishing in The University of Windsor’s digital archives where the story of her Uncle Jack will be stored and available to readers from anywhere and at any time. She has been working on a fictional account of Jack Calder’s life as a navigator in the RCAF and a newspaperman and his relationship with his mother based on such letters as have been preserved, articles, written during the war by Jack Calder and Pat’s own close relationship with her Grandmother. I FLEW INTO TROUBLE is about to be released.
Ken Morden
This week we welcome Ken Morden. Ken has run and owned several businesses – printing company, marketing company, horse breeding farm and an online art gallery.
Four years ago, he took up writing, fulfilling a long term objective to write a historical fiction of his family. Since then, he has written four thrillers and is currently working on a fifth.
He resides in rural Port Hope with his wife, Caroline, and 2 dogs and is president of two community arts organizations, Friends of Music and Spirit of the Hills Arts Association.
Sher Leetooze
Join us for an encore presentation of interviews with Sher Leetooze we made last year. Sher wanted to write all through school, and to that end submitted material to the annual High School Year Book. In 1994 she published her first local history book and it was an instant success. Sher went on to publish the history of all the other townships in the former county where she lives. From this sprang other books, WW1 Nursing Sisters, Clarington’s Home Children, and a History of the Churches of Old Durham. In between these she wrote a trilogy following the people known as Bible Christians from England to their new homes in Canada. Sher then went on to compile genealogy source books, gardening books, wild plant books and a couple of cook books. Her latest endeavour has been in the world of fiction – a book of short stories, a novella, The Queen’s Pawn and a novel just about ready to go to the printer called Finding Sean McRory.
Donna Wootton
This week we talk with Donna Wootton about her new novel, The Age of Privilege. Donna is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers. She is a member of TWUC (The Writers Union of Canada), PEN International, and SOTH (Spirit of the Hills – Northumberland). Her book about her late father, who was a charter inductee in Canada’s Lacrosse Hall of Fame, is called MOON REMEMBERED. It was published in 2009 and is archived in Trent University’s Library. Most recently her poetry was published in The Divinity of Blue (a collection from CCLA-Canada Cuba Literary Alliance), The Beauty of Being Elsewhere (a travel anthology), and Musings from the Heliconian Club. Her novels include Leaving Paradise (2008), What Maisie Missed (2018) and Isadora’s Dance(2021). Now her new novel is being released by AOS Press.
Jennifer Bogart
This is an encore presentation of an interview with 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 ninth 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.
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