Word Work: Recent Episodes
Peter Stockland
Peter Stockland talks with writers and teachers, journalists and activists, politicians and preachers, musicians and linguists, thinkers and talkers - and everyone else whose work relies on the use – sometimes abuse – of words. Check for regular short story readings on Fiction Fridays.
Morris, a middle-aged lawyer and recovering alcoholic, returns to his birth place with Elizabetta, a newly sober young woman he sponsors at AA. While she evangelizes for sobriety, he must confront the uncertainties in himself. (approx. 36 mins.)
The story is followed by conversation about addiction, recovery and the elusive beauty of ordinary life (approx. 15 mins).
Contact:
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fictionfriday7@gmail.com
Peter Menzies is a Canadian particularly well positioned to engage the now roiling debate pitting free speech against increased government regulation of the Internet and social media. Starting out at a local newspaper, Menzies went on to become a National Newspaper Award winning journalist and ultimately publisher of the Calgary Herald, then one of Western Canada’s largest and among Canada’s most profitable, newspapers.
He then spent 10 years with the CRTC, Canada’s broadcast regulator, becoming vice-chair of telecommunications while Internet, social media, and wireless services experienced explosive growth.
His response to calls for increased government control of social media platforms is summed up: "We are heading in a very troubling direction."
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Website:thewordworker.ca
Caylan Ford has been a senior policy advisor to Global Affairs Canada, done extensive humanitarian work, and won multiple awards for her contributions to a documentary on forced labour in China. But in 2019, this holder of Master’s degrees in International Relations and International Law from George Washington University and the University of Oxford respectively was, as she puts it, publicly destroyed during her candidacy in an Alberta election campaign. The New Democratic party, then the media, labeled her a “white supremacist.” In November 2020, she filed a $7 million defamation suit because of the allegations. Our Word Work conversation explores what it means to live in a society where the abuse of language is a path to the abuse of power.
Zsolt Alapi, Montreal writer, teacher and micro-press publisher, discusses his 2020 novel Landscape With the Fall of Icarus. Along the way, he offers Word Work listeners his reflections on the future of text, politically correct sex, and the Catholic nuns who gave him freedom to be a literary bad boy.