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.
radio series
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.
Patrick Muldoon
This is a re-run of a programme Patrick made with Word on the Hills last year. Patrick Muldoon 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.
Dave Carley
On Sunday at 1.00 pm join us to hear Dave Carley discussing his plays and telling us about his career as a playwright, director and curator. Dave’s stage and radio plays have had over 450 productions across Canada, the United States, and around the world. They include Writing with our Feet, Conservatives in Love and Midnight Madness. He has also written dramatizations of novels, including Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman; Al Purdy’s A Splinter in the Heart; and, in progress, Farley Mowat’s And No Birds Sang.
Dave’s plays often deal with human rights concerns and include Taking Liberties; The Last Liberal; and Twelve Hours. His play Canadian Rajah – first read at Wesleyville Village church – has its Asian premiere this fall in Malaysia. He has just completed a new drama, Hope is a Bird, about the elusive Ivory-Billed
Woodpecker. Dave’s radio plays have been broadcast by the BBC (UK), CBC (Canada), ABC
(Australia) and NPR (USA). He is also curating ten-minute play events for the Port Hope Festival in August and the Northumberland Festival of the Arts in September, festivalofthearts.ca
Linda Hutsell Manning
This week we welcome 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, VOS Theatre, a memoir, Fearless and Determined, Blue Denim Press, about her 1960’s teaching experiences a one room elementary school west of Cobourg and Finding Moufette, Pandamonium Publishers, a picture book about a cat lost in a Christmas Eve snowstorm, released in 2023. A novella, Heads I Win, Tails You Lose, AOS Publishers has just been released and is available in bookstores and on Amazon. Linda 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 old farmhouse. www.lindahutsellmanning.ca.
Michael Pepa
WORD ON THE HILLS welcomes Michael Pepa as our guest this week. Michael has composed/written some 80 works for solo instruments, chamber groups, and orchestras. These have been commissioned and broadcast in Canada, the U.S., many European countries and Japan. He studied composition at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto graduating with an ARCT diploma. Having passed the necessary examinations in the Theory and Practice of Composition, he was admitted as a FELLOW (FTCL) of Trinity College of Music, London, England. He holds a Teacher’s diploma in the Art of Violin Playing (LTCL) from the same college. Michael also earned a Master of Arts in Music Education. As well as being the founder and artistic director of Les AMIS Concerts, he is the composer-in-residence of the Canadian Sinfonietta, a member of the Canadian League of Composers, SOCAN, and an Associate Composer of the Canadian Music Centre. http://www.musiccentre.ca/composers. Michael Pepa was born in Timisoara, Romania. He came to Canada in 1953, settling in Toronto with his family. He has lived in Cobourg, since 2014.
Matthew King
This week we celebrate the last week of poetry month with Matthew King. Matthew taught philosophy at York University for a number of years before he moved to the Marmora area in 2015—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.
Kathryn MacDonald
Our third celebration of Poetry Month features poet Kathryn MacDonald. Kathryn has published in Room, FreeFall and other Canadian literary journals and anthologies, as well as internationally in the U.K., U.S. and even Indonesia. Her poem, “Duty / Deon” won the Arc Award of Awesomeness (January 2021). “Seduction” was entered in the Freefall Annual Poetry Contest and published in Freefall (Fall 2020). Kathryn is the author of Far Side of the Shadow Moon: Enchantments (poetry chapbook), A Breeze You Whisper: Poems and Calla & Édouard (fiction), as well as a book of essays and recipes, The Farm & City Cookbook with its philosophy of “eat natural, eat local.” Kathryn lives in Belleville on the north shore of Lake Ontario where the Moira River flows into the Bay of Quinte. Kathryn taught literature as well as creative and nonfiction writing in Ontario’s college system in addition to facilitating writing workshops and coaching sessions. For pleasure she pursues photography and sketching.
Word on the Hills Radio Program 