On our first show for Poetry Month this year, we interview poet, Kate Rogers. Kate’s poetry collection, The Meaning of Leaving, launches in Toronto on April 20th. Homeless City, a chapbook co-authored with Donna Langevin, debuted in the first week of January 2024. Kate recently won first place in the subTerrain magazine 2023 Lush Triumphant Contest for her suite of poems, “My Mother’s House.” Her poetry also recently appeared in Where Else? An International Hong Kong Poetry Anthology. She has been published in such notable journals as World Literature Today; Cha: An Asian Literary Journal and The Windsor Review. She is a Co-Director of Art Bar, Toronto’s oldest poetry reading series. More at: katerogers.ca
radio series
Tom Cruikshank
This is an encore presentation of our interview with Tom Cruickshank in 2023. Tom’s current big project started out as a straightforward architectural inventory of Hamilton Township’s older buildings. The township had never catalogued its heritage before and in , 2016, Tom proposed he was the guy to do it. Retired from a career in journalism, he has an abiding interest in local history and heritage architecture, a subject he has pursued in no less than five books. His work includes Old Ontario Houses, Old Toronto Houses and The Settler’s Dream. For the better part of 25 years, he worked in the Canadian magazine industry, first as editor of the locally produced Century Home and later, Harrowsmith Country Life. Nowadays, he freelances for Watershed magazine.
Maria Kordas Fraser
Meet Maria Kordas-Fraser. Maria was born on Point Pelee, just south-east of Leamington, Ontario; her parents being share-croppers, arrived in Canada as DPs after WWII. Eleven days after her birth, her mother brought her to the lakeshore farm on the hill, west of Port Granby, which her father had just bought, and she grew up on this farm. After studying at U of T and Teachers’ College she taught elementary school and was a school librarian until she discovered the joys of teaching Adults at Durham College. She is grateful for the year she got to teach International Students at Niagara College. Before she retired, she took a year to study Spiritual Psychotherapy and Spiritual Direction using it primarily to do her own therapy work, as well as understand others better. She enjoys writing short stories, facilitating Women’s Circles, exploring nature spirituality, bird-watching and practising compassion for animals. She has self-published a family history and is currently working on a memoir about the Port Granby Community where she grew up.
Karl Fliesser
This week we talk to Karl Fliesser, who has not chosen to write a standard biography, addressing education and career but rather to focus on present objectives. He is seeking a publisher for a children’s book, a book of short stories, and some poetry. He is also hoping to collaborate with a musician and co-write lyrics. Karl is an inveterate traveller and has visited 17 countries, mostly as a young man, and has lived in a great variety of places too, Vienna, Kitzbuhel, Salzburg, Orillia, Aurora, Windsor, Toronto, Scarborough, Bowmanville, Halifax, Victoria BC, Terrace BC, Stewart BC, Laguna Beach California and Putney and Highbury Islington in England. The accommodations were as eclectic as the cities themselves. Karl says, “I had many unforgettable adventures while navigating this “Global Village” and at times I had visits from the grim reaper to keep me on my toes!”
Lois Gordon
Lois Gordon is a writer and editor, with several humorous essays published in anthologies and articles appearing in lifestyle magazines. Her second mystery novel, “Death at Iron House Lodge”, was shortlisted for the Arthur Ellis “Best Unpublished Novel” award in 2016, and several essays have won awards. Currently, she works part-time as an editor for a digital marketing company. Lois wrote her first stage play three years ago for a community theatre in Ancaster, Ontario. The new experience rekindled her passion for writing and she has since written three more scripts for the amateur acting company. Since moving to Northumberland three years ago, Lois has volunteered with community theatre and the Northumberland Festival of the Arts, hoping to become more fully involved with the vibrant arts scene in the county.
Susan Statham
Join us to hear Susan Statham discuss the sixth volume of Hill Spirits with us. Author and artist, Susan Statham is Chair of the Spirit of the Hills Writers Group. She has edited and contributed to all the Hill Spirits anthology series and is accepting submissions in prose, poetry and pictures for Hill Spirits VI to be published in September as part of Northumberland Festival of the Arts 2024.
Today she has come to tell us about that newest edition. The sixth volume in the series of writing by local and regional authors from five counties was first initiated by members of the Spirit of the Hills Writers’ Group in 2012.
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.
Gordon Pitts
Meet Gordon Pitts an award winning journalist and author, who was a reporter and editor on Canadian daily newspapers for four decades. In addition, he has written eight books of Canadian business biography and a series of local histories based on his home town of Madoc, Ontario, and of Hastings County. His biographical works include his 2020 release of Unicorn in the Woods, How East Coast Geeks and Dreamers Are Changing the Game, long-listed for Canada’s National Business Book Award and named one of the Globe and Mail’s Top 100 Books for 2020. He won the National Business Book Award for Stampede: The Rise of the West and Canada’s New Power Elite, his book on the business leaders of the Canadian West. A former high school teacher in Brighton, Ontario, before he became a journalist, Pitts retired from daily journalism in 2013. In retirement, he has turned to telling stories of the “country north of Belleville” – as poet Al Purdy called the rugged area from the Madoc area to Bancroft – including a narrative on the murder of a police constable in 1926 and his most recent release, an account of a financial scandal that shook Hastings County in 1914. These days, he divides his time between Madoc’s Moira Lake, where his family has lived for 150 years, and Toronto
Karen Walker
This week we talk with Karen Walker. Karen is a long-time resident of Cobourg, who began writing flash fiction, prose poetry and erasure poetry in 2019. Her work has been published more than one hundred print and digital literary publications and anthologies worldwide. Karen also contributed to Hill Spirits V published by Blue Denim Press in association with Northumberland Festival of the arts in 2022.
Dave Vaughan
Dave Vaughan’s journey through the world of drama and storytelling is eclectic. In the neon glow of the early 1980s, Dave first stepped into the spotlight, breathing life into characters on stage in productions like “Inherit the Wind” and “L’il Abner.” However, the allure of the stage soon gave way to the pragmatic call of engineering, leading Dave down a divergent path in the transportation industry. For nearly three decades, Dave’s creative spark simmered quietly, overshadowed by the demands of his career. But in 2010 he made a triumphant return to the performing arts. This time, the silver screen beckoned, and Dave answered. His pivotal moment came with “Hokum,” a film by Jared Bratt that not only showcased Dave’s compelling lead performance but also benefited from his co-writing. This award-winning project marked a turning point, steering him towards the art of scriptwriting, a skill he honed at George Brown College. The transition from actor and scriptwriter to novelist seemed a natural progression. His debut novel, Ballet of Deception, weaves a tapestry of intrigue and drama. Not content to rest on his laurels, Dave is currently putting the finishing touches on his second novel, Babe Lincoln’s Twisted Tale, due for release later this year.
Word on the Hills Radio Program 