Writers Radio: Recent Episodes
The Writers Radio Contributors
Writers Radio Podcasts...…discuss and present recent work being created by talented people, special events and all things writerly; an audio space where the inner world meets the outer. Writers Radio producers capture guest writers, interview authors and present them reading their work. A podcast episode is available after being broadcast. Episodes broadcast on Writers Radio at the beginning of each hour and continue for two weeks. Then that is replaced with a new one and the previous episode appears in the Podcasts Library. A new program starts every second Monday. Writers Radio is a registered nonprofit society in British Columbia, Canada.
Program 2 of 3: Readings from the anthology
Deena Metzger: Dreaming Another Language; She Will not Kill
Introducing The Literature of Restoration
Miriam Greenspan: Seeing in the Dark, from the section
To Witness: Seeing in the Dark
Sharon Rodgers Simone, Fired Anew, from the section
Fired Anew: What it Means to Heal
Cynthia Travis, Listen With Your Feet, from the section
The Grammar of Animacy
Nancy Windheart, Aspen Ways of Knowing, from the section
What We Know in Our Bones
Go to WritersRadio.ca and listen to the current episode.
Writers Radio is a free 24/7 non-commercial internet radio station that presents new and recognized writers reading their own work.
Writers Radio is proud to be a registered nonprofit society in British Columbia, Canada.
Edited from the first ten years of the online literary journal "Dark Matter: Women Witnessing," this anthology is a heartfelt and inspiring collection of written and visual responses inspired by dreams, visions, and activism, all aimed at healing our fractured relationship with the earth.
Sixty-seven authors from six countries have contributed to this anthology of 79 pieces, spanning 572 pages, divided into nine sections.
Go to WritersRadio.ca and listen to the current episode.
Writers Radio is a free 24/7 non-commercial internet radio station that presents new and recognized writers reading their own work.
Writers Radio is proud to be a registered nonprofit society in British Columbia, Canada.
American Bloodlines, Reckoning with Lynch Culture combines memoir with reportage and cultural criticism to interrogate and complicate the traditional narrative about how lynch culture is created in families, communities and institutions.
Summer 1936, Owensboro Kentucky.
In just four and a half minutes, an all white, all male jury convicts Rainey Bethea, a young Black man, of the rape and murder of an elderly white woman.
Bethea is hanged near the banks of the Ohio River in the last documented public execution in America.
Bethea's story comes to author Sonya Lea, who was born in Owensboro, through her family. She reckons with its truths and the broader implications of systemic racism, not just in the past, but in today's culture, politics and justice systems.
Go to WritersRadio.ca and listen to the current episode.
Writers Radio is a free 24/7 non-commercial internet radio station that presents new and recognized writers reading their own work.
Writers Radio is proud to be a registered nonprofit society in British Columbia, Canada.
Penny Allport is a poet, wordsmith, painter, teacher and mentor living in Victoria, Canada. As a life-cycle celebrant, she co-creates ceremonies and rituals with individuals, couples and groups, to weave words which serve and express the sometimes un-expressible mysteries of love, life and loss.
Go to WritersRadio.ca and listen to the current episode.
Writers Radio is a free 24/7 non-commercial internet radio station that presents new and recognized writers reading their own work.
Writers Radio is proud to be a registered nonprofit society in British Columbia, Canada.
I have made of myself into a long river of words, a plain flatlands meander of words looping back, looping ahead.
from Encrypted by Arleen Paré
Prolific, award-winning Canadian poet Arleen Paré joins Ingrid Rose in conversation about her books: Paper Trail (2007), Leaving Noe (2011), Lake of Two Mountains (2014), He Leaves His Face in the Funeral Car (2015), The Girls with Stone Faces (2017), Earle Street (2020), First (2021), Last (2022, Chapbook), Time Out of Time (2022), Don’t Tell: Family Secrets (2022, co-edited with Donna McCart Sharkey), Absence of Wings (2024), Encrypted (2025).
Go to WritersRadio.ca and listen to the current episode.
Writers Radio is a free 24/7 non-commercial internet radio station that presents new and recognized writers reading their own work.
Writers Radio is proud to be a registered nonprofit society in British Columbia, Canada.
POEMS: Kelsey Andrews and Jacinda Oldale
There is a connection between the work of Canadian poets Kelsey Andrews and Jacinda Oldale. Both women have been writing poetry for most of their lives, using it as a means to understand and express their personal experiences, covering life's challenges and their responses to the natural world, day by day. Poetry is their chosen tool for transformation.
Go to WritersRadio.ca and listen to the current episode.
Writers Radio is a free 24/7 non-commercial internet radio station that presents new and recognized writers reading their own work.
Writers Radio is proud to be a registered nonprofit society in British Columbia, Canada.
Women Who Write is the title chosen by a group of eight women for their writing group, which formed after they met in a Simon Fraser University continuing studies creative writing class in Vancouver, facilitated by Ingrid Rose. This gathering occurred over ten years ago. The eight of them, with ages ranging from their sixties to early nineties, continued to meet monthly and recently published a chapbook of their poems and stories. Recording their work for this program, The Pace of Grace, Women Who Write also serves as an opportunity to honour the memory of one of the eight poets, Donna Nanson, whose piece is read by her husband, Derrick.
Host / Producer: Ingrid Rose, Music / Producer: J. Gary Sill
Go to WritersRadio.ca and listen to the current episode.
Writers Radio is a free 24/7 non-commercial internet radio station that presents new and recognized writers reading their own work.
Writers Radio is proud to be a registered nonprofit society in British Columbia, Canada.
DEATH OF PERSEPHONE: A MURDER
An award-winning Canadian poet reimagines the Greek myth of Persephone in her 2024 release from Caitlin Press.
“Hardboiled detective tropes meet classical myths and free-form poetry. A breathtaking work of imaginative cross-pollination”
Will Ferguson, Giller Prize-winning author of 419
“In Death of Persephone, Blomer stalks back alleys, asking urgent questions: Why is the violence against women and girls in myth still haunting us today?...Blomer walks us out of the old story and into this essential retelling”
Ariel Gordon, poet and author of Fungal: Foraging in the Urban Forest.
Stylistically varied and always engaging, an excerpt from this long-form poetry book won the Gwendolyn MacEwen poetry prize in 2021.
Go to WritersRadio.ca and listen to the current episode.
Writers Radio is a free 24/7 non-commercial internet radio station that presents new and recognized writers reading their own work.
Writers Radio is proud to be a registered nonprofit society in British Columbia, Canada.
Feet of Clay, the title of Graem Castell's epic memoir, refers to the awful behaviors of mankind. This highly enjoyable book [the book, not the title] is filled with pointers to more enlightened living.
At 86, Graem looks back on an adventurous life with humour and very few regrets. As a young child, he fled with his mother and baby brother from the Japanese invasion of Malaya in 1942; at 19, he served as an officer with the legendary Gurkhas in the jungles of Malaya; in his mid-twenties, he opened a spectacularly successful restaurant in "Swinging London" with others to follow; and founded a spiritually-based community on the Scottish island of Iona in his early thirties. His adventures had hardly begun.
Go to WritersRadio.ca and listen to the current episode.
Writers Radio is a free 24/7 non-commercial internet radio station that presents new and recognized writers reading their own work.
Writers Radio is proud to be a registered nonprofit society in British Columbia, Canada.
Postcards from Katherine is a series of short personal essays that Katherine Govier publishes for free on her website, katherinegovier.com. In this program, she muses on the series and reads from several of her “postcards.“
Canadian author Katherine Govier is known for novels such as The Ghost Brush (The Printmaker’s Daughter in the US), which imagines the life of Katsushika Ōi, the talented daughter of Japanese artist Hokusai. She founded The Shoe Project, a writing workshop that helps immigrant and refugee women tell their stories using shoes as a metaphor. Katherine has been recognized by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association for Excellence in Arts and was awarded the Order of Canada in 2019.
Go to WritersRadio.ca and listen to the current episode.
Writers Radio is a free 24/7 non-commercial internet radio station that presents new and recognized writers reading their own work.
Writers Radio is proud to be a registered nonprofit society in British Columbia, Canada.
Angela J. Grey
Angela writes about race, equity, and the impact of colonization on all peoples in Canada. She offers a unique perspective on children of the African/Caribbean diaspora who are adopted into white families- a part of Canadian history that is not well documented. Angela is a graduate of the Vancouver Manuscript Intensive (VMI) and a recipient of the Canada Council for the Arts - Explore and Create - grant (2022).
Go to WritersRadio.ca and listen to the current episode.
Writers Radio is a free 24/7 non-commercial internet radio station that presents new and recognized writers reading their own work.
Writers Radio is proud to be a registered nonprofit society in British Columbia, Canada.
Readings in Three Voices by Medwyn McConachy
"to seek a new life free of social constraints and prejudice based on class or race."
Medwyn McConachy could not have imagined, when she left England in 1966, that she would become a writer and fiber artist, live in cities, the north, and on an island, become a witch, and change her first name from Janet to Medwyn.
Medwyn reads three excerpts from her series of creative non-fiction, memoir-based essays written from the perspectives of friends, family members, and her younger self, Janet.
Go to WritersRadio.ca and listen to the current episode.
Writers Radio is a free 24/7 non-commercial internet radio station that presents new and recognized writers reading their own work.
Writers Radio is proud to be a registered nonprofit society in British Columbia, Canada.
Ethel Whitty says, "I write about extraordinary, ordinary women searching for their own truths."
Ethel Whitty was born and raised on Cape Breton Island, in Nova Scotia, on the east coast of Canada. Those were years when the depth and warmth of the culture had to be balanced against the island's isolation and the struggles of working-class people. The experiences and community of her childhood significantly influenced her fictional characters and narratives in "The Light a Body Radiates."
Since moving to Vancouver, Ethel has served as the Director of the Carnegie Centre in Vancouver's downtown eastside for twelve years, where she drew inspiration from the resilience and spirit of resistance she discovered in that community.
Go to WritersRadio.ca and listen to the current episode.
Writers Radio is a free 24/7 non-commercial internet radio station that presents new and recognized writers reading their own work.
Writers Radio is proud to be a registered nonprofit society in British Columbia, Canada.
Barbara Baydala from Ladner, BC, writes A Family of Poems
I’ve recently been contemplating a collection of writings about my father and have realized through assembling these poems for Writers Radio that I can’t write about my father without placing the two of us amidst our family in all its many guises.
Vancouver poet Colette Gagnon revisits her memoir-based poetry, further exploring the use of form. This suite of five poems centres around the grief and loss of her brother Phil and includes an excerpt from a childhood narrative entitled Lure.
Thematically, these are haunted voices-- of dream, reverie, elegy, foretelling.
Go to WritersRadio.ca and listen to the current episode.
Writers Radio is a free 24/7 non-commercial internet radio station that presents new and recognized writers reading their own work.
Writers Radio is proud to be a registered nonprofit society in British Columbia, Canada.
Twice a year, we have a themed call for submissions from our pool of writers. I didn’t know what to expect when I asked for Good Bedtime Stories. Serendipity was at work.
Jeremy Page and Alison Goeller met in an online class on mystery writing and were eventually paired off to critique each other's work. They've kept in touch and occasionally send each other their work. Ingrid Rose and Peter Buckman are cousins.
These authors read for us in this episode:
Jeremy Page: The Ghost of Haversham Halt
Alison Goeller: Murder in Provence
Ingrid Rose: Power of Attraction
Peter Buckman: The Spectre of the Stones
Author, editor, and translator Jeremy Page lives in Lewes, England. He writes both prose and poetry. Jeremy is a former Director of Language Studies at the University of Sussex and the founder of the literary journal The Frogmore Papers.
Alison Goeller is a former professor of American literature, now living in Uzès, a medieval town in France. Her murder mystery series features locksmith Will Sargent and his wife, Poppy, characters inspired by Alison’s locksmith uncle, Gil Deming, and his wife, Phyllis.
Memoirist, lyric prose writer, creative writing teacher, and editor Ingrid Rose lives in Vancouver. She is a co-producer of Writers Radio.
English author Peter Buckman has written books, plays, and scripts for film, television, and radio. His long career in publishing includes founding Ampersand Agency, a UK-based literary agency representing commercial and literary fiction and non-fiction authors.
Go to WritersRadio.ca and listen to the current episode.
Writers Radio is a free 24/7 non-commercial internet radio station that presents new and recognized writers reading their own work.
Writers Radio is proud to be a registered nonprofit society in British Columbia, Canada.
The loneliness of narrative, the loneliness of seeking truth, is our human condition. It is our task as writers. Betsy Warland
Betsy’s popular inquiry into the act of writing, Breathing the Page, Reading the Act of Writing is in its second edition with an additional ten essays. Betsy reads one of these essays: Narrative Position, for this program.
In our conversation, Betsy elaborates on her personal quest to understand and articulate her unique narrative position, "person of between" in their own life and work.
Go to WritersRadio.ca and listen to the current episode.
Writers Radio is a free 24/7 non-commercial internet radio station that presents new and recognized writers reading their own work.
Writers Radio is proud to be a registered nonprofit society in British Columbia, Canada.
Re-imagining a classic fairy tale with puppeteer, puppet builder, performer, director and filmmaker Kris Fleerackers.
Bored and tired of doing chores, little Lotte Grimm sneaks a peek at a ‘broken’ fairy tale her older brothers have collected. To fix it, she finds a way to enter the story and save its heroine, but not everything goes as planned…
Go to WritersRadio.ca and listen to the current episode.
Writers Radio is a free 24/7 non-commercial internet radio station that presents new and recognized writers reading their own work.
Writers Radio is proud to be a registered nonprofit society in British Columbia, Canada.
Radical Acts of Love
How We Find Hope at the End of Life
Janie Brown has been an oncology nurse, first in Glasgow, then Vancouver for four decades.
She is the founder of the Callanish Society which, through programs and retreats, creates a healing space for people who have been irrevocably changed by cancer.
“With Radical Acts of Love, Janie Brown demonstrates the power of a book to transform, in fact to turn things upside down. She turns death into life, despair into hope, sorrow into joy, and pain into love with these twenty astonishing encounters with the dying. We all know somewhere in the back of our minds that a deeper understanding and acceptance of death is supposed to release us into an even fiercer embrace of life—this wonderful book made me, for the first time, truly feel and believe it. Unforgettably wise, kind and wonderful.”
Stephen Fry
Order Radical Acts of Love from your library or favourite bookseller. It is also available as an e-book from Kindle and Apple Books, and an audio book.
Go to WritersRadio.ca and listen to the current episode.
Writers Radio is a free 24/7 non-commercial internet radio station that presents new and recognized writers reading their own work.
Writers Radio is proud to be a registered nonprofit society in British Columbia, Canada.
meditations on art, myth, archaeology, ceremony, and death
Come, anguish. Help us manage / the plainsong of an open shore, / its language of high tide rich and close, / close and hard to see.
In her conversation with Ingrid Rose, Miranda discusses how lifelong themes and experiences are interwoven in this book, like the white lines which connect the stones on the cover of her book. Like love renewed while visiting the Bridestones, (sandstone rock formations in Yorkshire). Or world seen from bird's-eye perspective in a poem from her book, The Aviary.
Miranda Pearson has homes in Vancouver and Kent, England, where she grew up. She came to Canada as a psychiatric nurse and still works in the health care field in Vancouver.
She has an MFA from University of British Columbia; she is an editor and creative writing instructor.
Bridestones, (2024) is her sixth book of poetry, published as part of the juried Hugh McLennan Poetry Series by McGill-Queen's University Press. Of her previous titles both The Fire Extinguisher and Harbour were nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and The Aviary, (2006) won the Alfred G. Bailey Prize from the Writers Federation of Newfoundland.
Order Bloodstones from the publisher, your local bookstore, library, or favourite online retailer. It is available as an e-book from Amazon and Kobo, but sadly not from Apple Books.
Go to WritersRadio.ca and listen to the current episode.
Writers Radio is a free 24/7 non-commercial internet radio station that presents new and recognized writers reading their own work.
Gambit, a word from chess, struck our producer, Ingrid Rose, as appropriate to the daring and wide-ranging work created recently by authors from our growing Writers Radio community.
Each program in this two part series is scheduled for three weeks instead of two while our producers take a summer break: Ingrid is off to France and Carole is getting a new hip.
PART 2
Elizabeth Cunningham, Look to This Day, Poems for Doris McCarthy
“ Look to This Day: Poems for Doris McCarthy is a rich ekphrastic dialogue between poet Elizabeth Cunningham and painter Doris McCarthy, [1910-2010]. Poet Jenna Butler wrote about this book, " McCarthy’s paintings, and her cottage on Georgian Bay, became a refuge to Cunningham during the weary years of the pandemic; they also became profound connection points between two deeply creative women, important links between shared views of the more-than-human world and its exquisite beauty. Look to This Day is the most engaged sort of homage: it is an intimate and intelligent exploration of the very ways of seeing and holding space in the world that underpin McCarthy’s work.”
Kevin Spenst, A Bouquet Brought Back from Space, Anvil Press, 2024.
Kevin writes of this book: I live in a bachelor suite in a building named the Stanley Park Manor in Vancouver’s West End...A Bouquet Brought Back from Space contains a crown of sonnets dedicated to my friend Jeff Steudel, who also lived in this building decades ago, written immediately after I’d learned of Jeff’s passing. My book takes inspiration from Rilke in several ways, one of which is through Jeff’s fascination with Rilke and how he wove his words and ideas through his own poetry. Rilke became more and more important to some of the book’s overall themes of angels, isolation and love.
Susan Dambroff, A Chair Keeps the Floor Down, Finishing Line Press, 2021
These poems are dedicated to the children Susan had the privilege of teaching, and who taught her. Written after retiring from a rich career as a special education teacher in San Francisco, as a way to honor each heartbreak and celebration she encountered, and to move into the next more spacious journey of her life. As a teacher she would corral the children into loops of captivating play just as the poems do as they witness taking the journey out of the classroom into the lives of their families and communities.
Alison Goeller, Frozen in Love (A Will Sargent Mystery)
Alison Goeller, who lives in Provence, writes short stories and mystery novels. Frozen in Love is the second of a four part series featuring Will Sargent. "The idea to write a series of murder mysteries set in the fictional village of Wilburne, Vermont, and featuring a local locksmith (Will Sargent) and his bookish wife (Poppy) was inspired by my uncle Bill Deming--a real locksmith-- and his wife Phyllis, both long-time residents of the village of Shelburne, Vermont. In Frozen in Love a restaurant manager is found dead inside a meat freezer. When Poppy discovers an unusual smell emanating from her husband’s brand-new winter gloves, a dangerous journey to solve the murder ensues."
ORDER these fine books:
Elizabeth Cunningham, Look to This Day, Poems for Doris McCarthy was published by Elizabeth's business, Waterside Arts, in time for the twentieth anniversary celebration of the Doris McCarthy Museum at University of Toronto in May 2024.
ORDERS: Waterside Arts: 5-1106, 7th St, Nelson, BC, V1L 0A1, Canada
Kevin Spenst, A Bouquet Brought Back from Space, may be ordered from the publisher, Anvil Press, and is available through bookstores and online retailers.
Susan Dambroff, A
Go to WritersRadio.ca and listen to the current episode.
Writers Radio is a free 24/7 non-commercial internet radio station that presents new and recognized writers reading their own work.
Gambit, a word from chess, struck our producer, Ingrid Rose, as appropriate to the daring and wide-ranging work created recently by authors from our growing Writers Radio community.
This will be a two part series; each program will run for three weeks instead of two while our producers take a summer break: Ingrid is off to France and Carole is getting a new hip.
PART 1
Cathy Stonehouse: Dream House, A Poem, Nightwood Editions, 2024, short-listed for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Award (2024)
Cathy writes about this reading: "Dream House emerged after the experience of visiting my mother in a nursing home in the UK, where I grew up, and emptying her small house, in a matter of days...the book begins with an evocation of the journey to the nursing home, and, by association, from life to death. A poem about my mother and one about my grandmother then follow. This long poem is therefore an attempt to both celebrate and question my inheritance from them as daughter, grand-daughter, poet and ultimately mother to my own daughter."
Tariq Malik: Blood of Stone, poetry, Caitlin Press, 2024
Tariq has written: "In Blood of Stone Tariq Malik revisits Kotli, the 1,000-year-old city of his formative years in the province of Punjab, Pakistan following partition. Marked by the traumas of dislocation and migration, the city and its inhabitants share secrets and longings, chronicled and imagined by Malik as he gives voice to a personal history that precedes his experiences as an immigrant in Canada."
Chad Norman: Parental Forest, poetry, Ace of Swords Publishing. 2024
"In Chad Norman's poetry, the world is created and re-created with great attention to details and beings involved...where everything is connected and interchangeable - a person, a plant, a bird, a tree. Each poem sounds like a secret recipe for medicine, the healing effect of which the author knows and generously shares with us" Halyna Kruk, fellow poet & professor of European and Ukrainian baroque literature, Ivan Franko National University of Lviv.
Cornelia Hoogland writes:
"I'm pulling together a new collection of poetry with the working title Snowing Inside. Does Snowing Inside evoke an image for you? Some of the many poems go back 20 years and I'm choosing the ones that want, need, to talk to each other. I'm creating a conversation.
Plus, my life has changed. How is something the book will take up. The thing I've noticed about the newest poems, which is that, the closer I am to the terminus of my life, I'm 70, the more vivid are the long connections to my beginnings: a trajectory with a philosophical bent. Here's a line that might underscore the book. We were taught there's a heaven above, but not how on earth to live in between."
All the books in this Writers Gambit series are available from online retailers and may be ordered from your favourite bookstore. Happy summer reading!
Produced by Ingrid Rose, Carole Harmon and Gary Sill, Writers Radio programs reach deeply into the collective mind of our times. We broadcast from Halfmoon Bay, on traditional tribal land of the self-governing shIshalh Nation, on the west coast of Canada.
We express our profound regret for past and present injustices done to all indigenous peoples through colonization, and our gratitude to them for their wisdom teachings and land stewardship which are much needed guidance today and into the future.
Go to WritersRadio.ca and listen to the current episode.
Writers Radio is a free 24/7 non-commercial internet radio station that presents new and recognized writers reading their own work.
Consider the World Tree
her mantling green
our swaddling gown dismantled
an iron word falling
felling, disrupting
old growth's primal ground...
Susan McCaslin
Canadian poet and literary scholar Susan McCaslin lives in Langley, British Columbia. She is the author of seventeen books of poetry and ten chapbooks.
In Consider, (Aolus House, 2023), Susan explores her evolving experience of the figure of Jesus in relation to the wisdom teachers and activists of diverse spiritual traditions. By turns mystical and playful, provocative and insightful, many of the poems have ekphrastic inspirations.
In my conversation with Susan we focus on the connection between mystical experience and activism which I sense as themes of the book.
We also discuss Susan's role as editor of Walking Into God by E.D. Blodgett which was released in spring 2024 by Farleigh Dickinson University Press. Susan also reads from Walking Into God.
Carole Harmon, Writers Radio producer
edited by Susan McCaslin
Celebrated Canadian poet, E.D. Blodgett's final book of poetry
Author of over thirty books of poetry, and winner of many awards, Ted Blodgett's Walking Into God was written during his struggle with terminal cancer. It was published posthumously, produced as a labour of love by his friends, fellow artists, and contributors Susan McCaslin, Sheila Martineau, and Yukiko Onley.
"What interests me in poetry is the interplay of language, the page, and silence. Heaven falls out of words because possibility is in the page, another kind of heaven; I wonder if that's the only heaven we are given to know in life".
Edward Dickinson (Ted) Blodgett
Go to WritersRadio.ca and listen to the current episode.
Writers Radio is a free 24/7 non-commercial internet radio station that presents new and recognized writers reading their own work.
Listen to this lively event recorded May 4 at our studio in Halfmoon Bay on the Sunshine Coast in Canada.
Canadian authors Caitlin Hicks and Liz Long joined moderator Gord Halloran, pianist Gary Sill, and a live audience to discuss,
The child I was...the adult I became
This program was Writers Radio's first live event and it went very well. We wanted to create a conversation which reached beyond a lone listener to engage a live audience.
We began with brunch at Carole and Gary's home (sorry you will miss this part), then adjourned to Gary Sill's studio for readings and discussion.
This program is close to an hour long so take it in courses if you like but do listen to the end for the insightful discussion with our lively audience.
The Child I was—the adult I became
•Gary Sill, improvisational pianist (standing with arms crossed)
•Canadian artist Gord Halloran is our moderator
•Liz Long, author
•Caitlin Hicks, author
•Carole Harmon introduces Writers Radio
•Ingrid Rose with her hand up in the audience
Liz Long's book, Navigating Shitstorms: How to Find Your True Path When Life Gets Rough is part memoir and part self-help guide. Traumatized by the disappearance of her aunt when Liz was six, Liz has learned how to follow her heart voice from Victimtown to Freedomville.
Caitlin Hicks has published two engaging novels based on her own childhood growing up in a large Catholic family in Pasadena, Ca. Annie Shea is her creative and delightful main character in both A Theory of Expanded Love and Kennedy Girl. Annie will do anything to shine.
All three books are on Amazon but do ask for them from your favourite book seller.
Go to WritersRadio.ca and listen to the current episode.
Writers Radio is a free 24/7 non-commercial internet radio station that presents new and recognized writers reading their own work.
Atma Frans lives in Gibsons, on ancestral Sḵwx̱wú7mesh territory that is part of Canada’s Sunshine Coast.
She grew up in Flanders, a region of Belgium which was continuously invaded and occupied since Julius Caesar first conquered it in 52 BCE, and which only recently gained cultural and political autonomy.
Atma’s childhood was marked by intergenerational trauma: her parents were children in the Second World War, her grandparents in the First. Yet her work also pays tribute to another side of her Flemish heritage — the spirited perseverance Belgians are known for in spite of their troubled history, as well as their firm determination to enjoy the good things in life.
Go to WritersRadio.ca and listen to the current episode.
Writers Radio is a free 24/7 non-commercial internet radio station that presents new and recognized writers reading their own work.
The adventures that we wanted to have, the adventures that we did have kayaking for months on end in very remote parts of the world where there were tropical diseases, hippos, crocodiles, big seas, big sea crossings, or cycling, the whole length of Vietnam just after it opened up, I mean, some of these were really, really challenging adventures. I know there's no way that I could have brought a child along…
Maria Coffey in conversation with Carole Harmon
Author Maria Coffey grew up in a conservative Irish Catholic family with a mother who wished nothing more than to be a grandmother. Instead, Maria was introduced to the world of high risk adventure by her older brother who climbed mountains. She fell in love with a famous climber, Joe Tasker, who died on Everest. This was a turning point of her life. She began to write, moved from England to Canada, met and married veterinarian and photographer Dag Goering who loves adventure as much as she does. Maria and Dag have travelled the world in kayaks, by bike and on foot. They run an award winning adventure travel company called Hidden Places. Maria and Dag still explore the world together, scout and create new trips, and fund conservation work.
Maria and Bac
Meeting Vinh and Bac
The question of motherhood never altogether left Maria. In 1994 in Vietnam Dag and Maria met street children Vinh and Bac who they tried to help. Fortune didn't smile on their attempt to relocate the children in an SOS Children's Village.
Maria with Agnes and her son Adrian
Meeting Agnes
In 2011 Maria and Dag were on safari in Kenya where they met Agnes, a young Samburu woman facing difficult circumstances. With their help she realized her dreams of going to university. They remain very close to her and her two children.
Instead was published by Rocky Mountain Books in 2023. All thirteen of Maria's books are available online and make fascinating reading. She explores the hidden facets of extreme sport, topics rarely discussed and almost never spoken of in public.
Go to WritersRadio.ca and listen to the current episode.
Writers Radio is a free 24/7 non-commercial internet radio station that presents new and recognized writers reading their own work.
Alison Goeller is a former professor of American literature who taught in Philadelphia and at the University of Maryland overseas. She lives in Uzès, a medieval town in Provence.
Ingrid Rose discusses family secrets and the writing life with Alison Goeller who also reads her short stories Fallen and Pepita on this episode of Writers Radio.
Alison Goeller's short stories have been published in numerous literary magazines. She is the author of three mystery novels whose main character, Will Sargent, was inspired by her locksmith uncle. Frozen in Love and The Possessive Case are available on Amazon.
Alison is currently working on a novel about the Grand Tour of Europe, based on her great grandmother’s diary.
Read another of Alison's short stories, Tom, on the online platform, Discretionary Love.
Go to WritersRadio.ca and listen to the current episode.
Writers Radio is a free 24/7 non-commercial internet radio station that presents new and recognized writers reading their own work.
The life of Great Salt Lake is inseparable from our own.
We gather to bear witness to her beauty. We gather to grieve. We gather to create beacons of possibility. We gather to increase our tenderness towards brine shrimp, microbialites, and winged citizens of the air. We gather to carry each other through spells of despair. We gather to revere all that is vital and alive...
We continue to honor a great intelligence deserving of legally defensible personal rights, as we sing back to a ever-singing and sentient entity.
Nan Seymour, Great Salt Lake Vigil
Poet, teacher of writing, and community activist Nan Seymour lives near Great Salt Lake, which is in peril, as are inland saline seas around the world—from climate change but also from human generated polution and environmentally unsustainable practices which threaten their existence.
Dams on tributary rivers divert flow of water to the lake, which is shrinking. Sequestered toxic chemicals from industrial farms and industry which have settled on the lake bottom create dust storms of pollution as the lake recedes. Wildlife are forced to leave this habitat which is on the North American flyway for migratory birds.
Beginning in January 2022 Nan Seymour has spearheaded a daily vigil for the lake, corresponding to the seven week period of the Utah State legislative session.
The vigil began in 2022 as one woman, Nan, living in a trailer on Antelope Island, supported by fellow writers and friends. It has grown in number, voice, and action to include other writers, fellow citizens, scientists, environmental groups, Indigenous voices, and occasional voices from abroad who have written about this vigil which is less a protest movement than a determined community statement of intent to save the lake.
n 2024 the vigil "walked the waves" around Utah State capital building, morning and evening, sometimes joined by law-makers.
Irreplaceable, a collective long poem of over 500 voices which has resulted from the vigil will be published in 2024.
coming in 2024, Beloved Water Body, poems by Nan Seymour
Nan's first book of poetry, Prayers Not Meant For Heaven, was published as a chapbook by Toad Hall Editions in 2021. You can order it from the publisher.
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"I walk along a corridor in the Museum of memory"
writes Onjana Yawnghwe.
Onjana Yawnghwe's grandfather was the last ruling head of Shan State in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma. He was the first president of unified Burma, which was set up as a hoped for democratic state.
In 1962 the first military coup of what is now the longest running civil war in modern times saw Onjana's parents fighting in the jungles of Burma, where her older brother was born. The family fled to Thailand, where Onjana was born, and finally immigrated to Canada with nothing but a pile of suitcases on a luggage cart.
Growing up Onjana was protected from her turbulent past by her family but suffered, nevertheless, the trauma and exclusions immigrants face. As an adult she revisits her turbulent ancestral history, distilling its essence in verse.
Work in Progress
Homes: A Pictorial Archive of Memory
Onjana Yawnghwe is also an illustrator as seen in this graphic memoir; view excerpts are on her website, Onjana Yawnghwe.com.
Rivers of Memory and Onjana's previous book of poetry, The Small Way, were published by Caitlin Press. They can be ordered from the publisher or your favourite bookstore or online book outlet.
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At this stage of my journey, I've returned to my ten year old self when poetry was as natural as a fresh stream.
- Yehudit Silverman
Whether writing of the war in Israel / Gaza, deaths of loved ones, or nature Yehudit Silverman distills a life spent as artist and healer in her recent poetry. In this episode we discuss both her writing and her work as a creative art therapist, author and film-maker.
The Story Within: Myth and Fairy Tale in Therapy & The Hidden Face of Suicide
Based on her clinical work in several hospitals, and as the former Chair, professor, in the Department of Creative Arts Therapies at Concordia University, Montreal, Yehudit understands the power of the arts for healing. Her book and film, T he Story Within - Myth and Fairy Tale in Therapy, as well as her film, The Hidden Face of Suicide, encourage others to discover their own creativity and resilience even in the face of great suffering.
Yehudit Silverman
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Pervin Saket is the pen name of a multi-genre poet, novelist, playwright, children's author and essayist who lives in Mumbai, India. She writes of identity and the purpose of language influenced by her family's Zoroastrian, ( Parsi ) faith and the caste system of her home country. Inspired by a forgotten woman from a timeless epic,
Inspired by a forgotten woman from a timeless epic, the Ramayana, Pervin’s novel Urmila rekindles questions of love, devotion and desire in contemporary India.
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My body on a bus stop bench is a place of high drama, writes poet Alison Braid-Fernandez in her poem, Blue Dot, which is included in the Montreal Poetry Prize 2022 Anthology.
Alison Braid-Fernandez is a Canadian poet who has lived in Prague, Vancouver and now London, England. Her work is informed by the legacy and environment of these unique locales and the relationships she has encountered with individuals, trains and buses, parks, fruit, colours, the devices we live with. Lately she has been writing ekphrastic poems which take their inspiration from art works but also from overlapping influences such as music and the written word. Their influences on the body are at the heart of Alison's poems.
The ekphrastic references are so complex, juicy and evocative that I decided to list them here as an aid to the listener in my fascinating interchange with Alison. Enjoy.
Blue Dot: after Dorothea Lasky, Animal, essays
Ekphrasis Yourself, Jennifer Nelson, Woodland Pattern Book Centre, woodland pattern.org
Embracing Confusion, Bryon Cherry, woodlandpattern.org
Light Upon the Body, after Adrienne Dagg, Luncheon in Room 206, Bau-Xi Gallery
Moving Continents, after Leonardo Cappiello, Chocolat Klaus, Library of Congress
Nectarine Heart #1 after John Wilde, Boxed Fruit #1: A Nectarine, Milwaukee Art Museum
Oranges, after Erin Armstrong, Between Two Minds, Bau-Xi Gallery
Alison Braid-Fernandez's first chapbook, Little Hunches was published with Anstruther Press (2020.) She is presently working on a short story collection, Look Both Ways and Other Stories. Visit her website to learn and read more.
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The world is made up of stories, many of which remain untold. History told from the point of view of grand achievements, harrowing deeds, or significant events omits the effects of history on personal lives, family, and community.
The childhood memoirs of Jadzia Prenosil and Elizabeth Herejk couldn't be more different, yet each illuminates the hardships faced by families following World War 2. Each memoir has been realized through new models of self-publishing.
Elizabeth Herejk's memoir, From Kendal to Canada: An Adventurous Spirit follows her childhood growing up in Kendal, a small market town in Cumbria, England, her interesting nursing career in Canada, and her varied retirement activities. Elizabeth regards From Kendal to Canada as legacy work written for her family and friends with emphasis on her European heritage. Life in Kendal was austere, a story of self-reliance and ingenuity at a time of food shortages and other privations which inevitably follow war.
Jadzia Prenosil's memoir, My Childhood Behind the Iron Curtain details an even grimmer post-war life. In 1968 Russia invaded Czechoslovakia and Jadzia's mother died unexpectedly. In the aftermath of this double tragedy her father remained in Europe and Jadzia and her sisters emigrated to Canada, sponsored by an aunt. Jadzia was seventeen. A brutal beginning to life in a new country.
Jadzia wrote this memoir in memory of her beloved mother and sisters for her family and friends in Vancouver. It illustrates how love and strength of family can endure great hardship.
Both authors self-published their memoirs through new publishing models which make this sort of project possible.
In her conversations with the authors, Ingrid Rose discusses the process each went through in bringing their memoir to fruition.
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Kat, the protagonist in Jane Callen’s novel, Bernini’s Elephant, leads the reader on a dark adventure of transformation. This tale of murder and redemption is set within contrasting environments in Canada and Italy with lush descriptions of Vancouver, the coastal wilderness of Vancouver Island, and the high art world of Florence and Venice.
“Genre-defying. Callen draws us deep into the vivid art world, conjuring the life and legacy of a young Italian painter and his muse, an older lover with a poisoned past. A literary mystery spanning two continents; the moral stakes of human desire create an intelligent and utterly absorbing read. A sensual, richly detailed glimpse of Italian architecture, art, family secrets, and above all: the struggles of love.”
—SUSAN DOHERTY, author of A Secret Music, and The Ghost Garden
Bernini's Elephant was published by Guernica Editions in May 2023. You may order it from the publisher or your favourite library, bookstore or online source.
Visit Jane's website to learn more of her writing and current projects.
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GOODBYE TO LAMPEDUSA
It is what they say
because the sea does not have footprints
to see where others have ended their journeys,
and today—this incandescent afternoon—
they tell you to follow
the path of the wind,
follow it to where the water leads you
as a new merchandise arrives
with a parcel of goodbye.
Goodbye is what they tell you
as your final parting gift, so close
your heart to unholy thoughts
about the waves.
Nigerian poet Salawu Ọlájídé joins host Ingrid Rose to discuss his chapbook, Preface for Leaving Homeland.
Ọlájídé is a Ph.D candidate at University of Alberta with a passionate interest in de-colonization. "Goodbye is a migrant word", Ọlájídé says of the title of his poem, Goodbye to Lampedusa.
Lampedusa, an island off the coast of Italy known for fishing and tourism has welcomed many African migrants in the past. In autumn 2023 the resources of this generous island were overwhelmed by Africans fleeing war and poverty, “We find people at sea – on boats and in the water – and we rescue them,” Pietro Riso, a local fisherman told Al Jazeera. “At times, we find bodies in our nets.”
Ọlájídé is also passionate about preservation of Indigenous language. "When I see Nigerian writers writing in English receiving national awards, I recognize an implicit gesture of exclusion going on as well. I wonder what kind of awakening could greet Nigerian literature if more indigenous voices were included in these literary spaces."
from a 2021 article, On the Politics of Language in Nigerian Literature, Ọlájídé Salawu Examines the Colonial Grounding of the Country's Literary Industry.NOTE!
Transcriptions of the poems in this episode will be available to view on the Writers Radio Listen page while the program is on air and with our Podcast.
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Epigraph to Holy Magic
Let wise men piece the world together with wisdom
Or poets with Holy Magic
Hey-di-ho
Wallace Stevens
Each chapter of Holy Magic has a colour palette. Each poem reflects a vibration of that colour. Many of the poems contain epigraphs of other writers or artists. Each section captures the mood of its colour. Archeology of Orange for instance, A Glass of Bitter Ale, Bluebirds.
It is a rainbow of a book.
In 2022 Priscilla Long released a book, Dancing with the Muse in Old Age, about thriving in old age. She is eighty.
Priscilla writes, "The book explores the old-age time of life of more than one-hundred dynamic elders—mostly but not entirely creators in the arts, both well-known and little known, both able-bodied and disabled. Their inspiring stories model for us all how to live in old age. The sections, “Composing Our Lives: Old Age” at the end of each chapter will help readers consider and better plan for a satisfying old age."
Priscilla Long is a Seattle-based poet, writer, editor and a longtime independent teacher of writing. She has been an activist in peace and social justice movements. She serves as founding and consulting editor of HistoryLink.org, the free online encyclopedia of Washington state history. She writes science, poetry, history, creative nonfiction and essay, and fiction. She has written a guide to creativity, Minding the Muse, and a how-to-write guide, The Writer's Portable Mentor.
Her books are available for order through libraries, bookstores and online.
Holy Magic was published in 2020 by Moon Path Press for which it won the Sally Albiso Poetry Book Award.
Dancing with the Muse in Old Age was published in 2022 by Epicenter/Coffeetown Press.
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Title: The Passion of a Poet
Episode: P075
START: January 01, 2024
ENDS: January 14, 2024
Length: 33' mins
Host/Producer: Ingrid Rose
Poetry is the hinge between the artist, having that moment, and the reader or listener, having their own moment in the silence of the first breath, after a poem. A poem is a medium, that says, "here, have this" it can do this, because it is compact. Because it carries you, like a magic carpet, across meaning. Because its intent is fleeting.
"Advocacy through story: an interview with Michelle Poirier Brown".
Michelle Piorier Brown: writer, performer, playwright, photographer, and former federal treaty negotiator is a writer with a desire for clarity. What is going on? She asks us to consider.
She describes, You Might Be Sorry You Read This, as a poetic memoir. It distills five decades of living through extreme childhood trauma, learning to live with PTSD, discovering her Cree, Métis roots at age 38 and finding her way through this maze to the page.
Join Michelle and Ingrid Rose, in conversation about personal and public identity and the challenges and opportunities in writing difficult histories.
Michelle Poitier Brown is an internationally, published writer and performer, currently living on the traditional unseeded territory of the silax peoples, in Vernon, BC. She is nehiyaw-iskwew and a citizen of the Métis nation. Her debut book of poetry, You Might Be Sorry You Read This, was published in the Robert Kroetsch Series from the University of Alberta press in Spring, 2022. It was shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch award for innovative poetry. In 2023, her chapbook book of poems and photographs, Intimacies, was published by Jack Pine press in 2023.
Adapted from the authors website
Order You Might Be Sorry You Read This,from your local library or a bookstore or direct from the publisher
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Elizabeth Cunningham
Jacinda Oldale
Kate Bird
Kathryn Alexander
Katherine Govier
Mara Alper and Elliott Levine
Sheila Martineau
It’s that time of year again, for those of us in the northern hemisphere, when daylight hours dwindle; it’s dark at five, then four.
For our annual celebration of this darkening season Writers Radio asked our authors to regale us with pieces written to the theme Belight. The response came from far and wide.
This has become a yearly tradition for Writers Radio. As with our Summertime special we are broadcasting this episode for three weeks, through the busy holiday season.
Katherine Govier of Canmore Alberta writes of seasonal light, beginning with the great opening line, My father was a lizard.
Kathryn Alexander's poems explore the intimate coastal landscape of Port Moody on Burrard Inlet.
Mara Alper of Ithaca New York wrote lyrics for When the World Feels Dark, composed by her friend and former husband, Elliot Z. Levine. The song is performed by Elliot Levine and Julie Hinton.
Vancouver author Kate Bird takes us on pilgrimage in Mexico.
Poet Jacinda Oldale, of Vancouver, BC writes, winter’s burn on my mind at the climax of summer.
Sheila Martineau of Vancouver writes of how Christmas annually restored her troubled parents, Franny and Sparky, to their young love.
Elizabeth Cunningham, of Nelson BC, closes the program with a trio of poems from her book, Watching the Light Below the Storm, published by Ekstasis Editions.
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In Navigating Shitstorms Liz Long turns her childhood trauma into a road trip. Travel with her to Victimtown. Listen to your Heart Voice and take the road to Freedomville.
When Liz Long was six, Lynda, her favourite aunt and babysitter, disappeared. She was nineteen. Although her body was discovered five years later, her case remains one of Canada's longest unsolved crimes. The trauma to Liz and her extended family was incalculable.
After fifty years of living with fear, depression and the extreme need to control Liz hit the road. In this engaging memoir she takes us on her journey to a healing centre she calls The Place. This inner work leads to an epiphany and she is able to witness the rigid structure she has lived within since her aunt's disappearance. This epiphany arrives with a fully formed idea for a book, a way to help others confront their own problems.
Having spent more than fifty years stuck in Victimtown, Liz knows the terrain as well as any local...Touring Victimtown’s most popular attractions—such as the Guilt & Shame Café, the Control Factory, the Denial Trails, and more—Liz demonstrates that while short visits offer life lessons and healing, extended stays lead to all kinds of problems. This groundbreaking framework to understanding the voices in your head will enable you to
• open healing conversations with yourself and others by equipping you with an accessible language to discuss mental health,
• reframe your shitty inner dialogues by embracing a new awareness, and
• discover your own route to Freedomville by learning to love yourself without limits or conditions.
from the publisher's website
https://greenleafbookgroup.com/titles/navigating-shitstorms
Liz Long lives in Sechelt on the Sunshine Coast, in Canada.
Navigating Shitstorms was published by Greenleaf Book Group in August 2023. It is available through Indigo in Canada, Barnes and Noble in the US and Amazon internationally.
Liz is hard at work on a follow up guidebook. She considers this her life's work. Visit her website: lizlongwrites.com to find out more.
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Keiko Honda is living a successful, busy life as a scientist of cancer epidemiology at Columbia University in New York City when one morning she abruptly loses all strength in her legs.
She phones a friend to care for her twenty-month-old daughter and rushes to the hospital. Within hours, she can barely breathe. She soon discovers she is permanently paralyzed from the chest down due to a rare autoimmune disease with a frequency of approximately one case per million per year. Suddenly, she’s that one. As Keiko struggles for life, she learns through lived experience the importance of community to healing, one of her prior research interests at Columbia....
Seeking a wheelchair-accessible home closer to nature in which to raise her daughter, Keiko moves to Vancouver, Canada. She starts hosting informal artist salons, forms a mutually supportive group of artists and art-loving neighbours and then, surprisingly, becomes an artist herself. While her illness forced her departure from a career she spent twelve years building, it would ultimately provide the opportunity to live a life dedicated to community, friendship and art, as well as the continually evolving process of self-discovery as a mother, Japanese immigrant, survivor and artist.
—Caitlin Press
Making is Finding
Ingrid Rose and Keiko Honda discuss Keiko's happy childhood, living with her grandparents, the foundation which gave her the courage to re-invent her life.
In spring it is the dawn that is most beautiful. As the light creeps over the hills, their outlines are dyed a faint red and wisps of purplish cloud trail over them, I quietly recited to myself in Japanese. My favourite line from Sei Shonagon's The Pillow Book (written in tenth century Japan). It comes back to me every spring.
from Accidental Blooms
Accidental Blooms was published by Caitlin Press in October 2023. You may order it from the publisher or your favourite bookstore.
“Keiko Honda is sharing much more than a memoir. She is sharing a philosophy of love and care in a time of anxiety and uncertainty. She shares a journey of possibilities when adversity strikes with life-altering challenges. This book is both an evocation as well as an example of ‘seeing with the heart.’ Our world is a better place for Keiko Honda’s generous gift(s).”
—Bernard Perley, associate professor for Critical Indigenous Studies, UBC
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Tell all the truth but tell it slant.
Emily Dickinson
This Emily Dickinson quote greets you when you visit Seema Shah's website. I met Seema, a Vancouver writer and collage artist, in May 2023 at the exhibition of her work, Unthought Known, at B1 Gallery of The Beaumont Studios in Vancouver.
Seema was a recipient of The Beaumont Studios Artist to Watch Award 2022
Seema's creative work, both writing and collage, began after the onset of chronic illness. "Unthought Known" is a quote from psychoanalyst Christopher Bollis which refers to "experiences that reside within us, and that we in some way 'know,' but which we have never 'thought' or been able to put into words."
The exhibition consisted of collages which often incorporated cut up poems. One piece was a book, based on the plight of Humpty Dumpty.
Humpty Dumpty After the Fall is a collage of Seema's prose and poetry with excerpts from our zoom conversation.
I hope you enjoy listening.
Carole
Seema's work has been published in numerous magazines. She is shortlisted for the 2023 Contemporary Collage Magazine Awards.
While this program airs, she has work in Paper Play, an exhibition of collage artists at Outsiders and Others Gallery in Vancouver, November 4-25, 2023. She is longlisted for the Susan Crean Award for Nonfiction 2023.
Seema has also exhibited internationally and has an upcoming solo show, Where I Live, Feb-March 2024, at Small House Gallery, a dollhouse gallery in London, UK. The show will feature miniature 2D & 3D works and will be viewable online.
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I write about women heroes. Not obvious ones and not immediate ones, but women who are searching for freedom and worth in their lives despite complicated, risky circumstances.
Mary Carroll Moore
A forced landing on a stormy night in the remote Adirondack Mountains opens this novel.
Singer Red Nelson and her half-sister Kate, a Search and Rescue pilot, share a father, but have never met. Kate's Mom is the legal wife, Red's Mom is the mistress. Nevertheless, their father has been loving, and taught both daughters to fly.
It's hard to avoid spoilers while introducing this complex and exciting novel. Red flees the attack on her former husband, pursued by her revengeful former lover. Surprisingly, Red's Mother urges her to seek refuge with the sister she has never met.
Refuge leads to reconciliation in what Kirkus Reviews called this novel, "An exciting work of survival fiction with strong female characters."
Author and artist Mary Carroll Moore has been a journalist, food columnist, writing instructor and creator of a long running newsletter, Insights on the Writing Life.
Mary's Substack blog, Your Weekly Writing Exercise has over 3000 subscribers.
Her last three books (of nineteen total) have been self-published under her imprint, Riverbed Press. They include:
Your Book Starts Here, Create, Craft and Sell Your First Novel, Memoir or Not-fiction book.
A Woman's Guide to Search and Rescue is available in print, e-book and audio book formats through libraries, bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, and is a "hot new release" on Amazon.
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In 2012, poet Elee Kraljii Gardiner precipitously lost feeling in, and use of, her left side. The mini-stroke passed quickly but was symptomatic of something larger: a tear in the lining of an artery known as the tunica intima.
This long-poem memoir tracks the author’s experiences with un/wellness and un/re-familiarity with herself. Trauma Head disturbs and disorders language and syntax to reconcile appearance with experience.
Winner of the Cogswell Award for Literary Excellence, shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, and long listed for the Souster Award, Trauma Head has inspired vivid responses from fellow poets:
Intimate and powerful. An astonishing paradox as Elee Kraljii Gardiner stages a series of verbal break-throughs in her poetic testimony to what is incommunicable during and after a stroke.
Daphne Marlett
The unit of composition in Trauma Head is the page used as a mirror, a reflection of the synapses detonated by the poet as she triggers the intricate mechanisms of language. Elee Kraljii Gardiner seizes this linguistic dream (traum) world with skill and playfulness; these are poems to wake up from.
Fred Wah
Poet and editor Elee Kraljii Gardiner is a Director of Vancouver Manuscript Intensive.
She is the founder and creative mentor of Thursdays Writing Collective, a non-profit organization of Vancouver's downtown eastside writers, and editor and publisher of eight of its anthologies.
Trauma Head and her previous book of poetry, serpentine loop were published by Anvil Press. Order her books from the publisher or your favourite bookstore. Visit Elee's website for links to her recent publications and interviews.
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Night in the World explores entwined personal and ecological crisis, suggesting that our disconnection from nature underpins many of the challenges we face in these times.
Sharon English has penned a tender and powerful novel about the claims places make on our hearts, and how journeys into darkness are sometimes necessary to see through catastrophe. Night in the World explores the need to end our separations from each other and from nature — coming home, at last, to a beleaguered yet still beautiful world.
Freehand Books
Set in metropolitan Toronto, Toronto Island and the environs of Rice Lake near Peterborough, Ontario, Night in the World follows the lives of three major characters.
The sudden death of their mother catapults brothers Justin and Oliver into a downward spiral, triggering a crisis in lives which have already been unravelling.
Justin retreats from his business and family into drug abuse, Oliver, a former environmental journalist, tries to reclaim a childhood home on Toronto Island.
While Gabe, a graduate student conducting research on moth populations in the Peterborough area for her Masters thesis, confronts the troubling ethics of scientific study.
The plot rests on specific instances of environmental challenge, and how Justin, Oliver and Gabe respond to these challenges, entering into a dynamic relationship with the living world, and each other, which revivifies, in ways unique to each character.
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Kate Bird's photo is of her son at former Mt. Pleasant Outdoor Pool in Vancouver.
Here is a CBC article about the recent status of a citizen's campaign to build a new outdoor pool.
Writers Radio likes to gather writers around a theme. This episode is such an occasion. Each writer has responded to the question: Summertime..."and the living' is easy"...Is it?
In order of reading:
Donna Stephen:
The West Highland Way, spring 2023
Barbara Baydala:
poems inspired by words plus her poetic response to my question.
Kate Bird:
memories of Mt. Pleasant Outdoor Pool in Vancouver, lamenting its loss
Cynthia Sharp:
love poems
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*Hypatia of Alexandria, fell into history’s abyss.
Paradoxical, Hypatia's dilemma in Alexandria—
she goes into the streets as a free woman
is killed on the way home because
she goes into the streets as a free woman.
If Hypatia were the sea, she would be immense
fragments from Hypatia's Wake*
Hypatia of Alexandria, Neo Platonic philosopher, mathematician and astronomer, was murdered in 415 AD by a mob led by Peter the Lector (a Christian official in the service of Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria). She has been called a martyr for philosophy. Her torture and death included flaying, dismemberment, and burning.
Celebrated in her own time for her scholarship, widespread teachings, and egalitarian spirit, Hypatia embraced the Neo-Platonic philosophy of a divine First Cause known as the One, the First, or the Good. Neoplatonists believed that everything we see and know emanated from the Good.
Over the centuries Hypatia has inspired opponents of Christianity, been co-opted as a symbol of Christian virtue, been represented as a symbol of opposition to Catholicism, and in modern times she has become an icon of women's rights and the feminist movement.
Hypatia’s Wake addresses many false and fanciful representations about her life and death.
Hypatia lived and the flesh of her invisibility has not stolen her from us forever. We can claim her and wake her loss as we are awakened to her. When we give Hypatia back to the flesh of the world, we claim visibility.
Susan Andrews Grace
Visual artist and poet Susan Andrews Grace lives in Nelson BC. where she teaches writing at Oxygen Art Centre.
Hypatia's Wake, Susan's sixth book of poetry, was published in 2022 by Inanna Publications . Order from the publisher or your favourite bookstore.
Visit Susan's website to see her other publications and treat yourself to her visual art.
My visual art practice conceptually searches for the metaphysical in the ordinary: old cloth, rubble from demolition, rusty objects. It includes textile installation, mixed media, and sculpture and has been exhibited in (mostly) public galleries in Canada and the US over the last thirty years.
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Frightened of horses as a child, Oriane Lee Johnston takes up riding at age fifty. When she follows an inner calling to travel to Africa, she enters into a love affair with a species, a country, a person, and a way of life.
"An unexpected liaison with an African horseman builds a courageous and tender bridge across classic cultural divides. The backdrop is present-day Zimbabwe in all its political, economic and ecological complexities. Oriane Lee Johnston’s memoir takes the reader from her island home on the west coast of Canada into southern Africa as it is today, exploring ethical relations with land, with culture, the sacred and the human heart.
The story follows an inner call to the Mavuradonha Mountains in the eastern edge of the Zambezi Escarpment. The quest to preserve this wild and unspoiled bioregion parallels the campaign to protect the Great Bear Rainforest, the author’s birthplace in coastal B.C."
from the publishers blurb
Title: The Geography of Belonging
Sub Title: A Love Story of Horses and Africa
Episode: P065
START: July 24, 2023
ENDS: July 13, 2023
Length: 28 mins
Host/Producer: Ingrid Rose
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In the sequel to A Theory of Expanded Love, meet Annie Shea, an irrepressible and irresistible seventeen year old from a large Catholic family, (fourteen kids), who lives in Pasadena, CA in 1968.
Annie has been cast in a singing role for a showcase of songs from Hair. Also in Hair is Lucas, a black dancer from Watts. The director of the production is lecherous Father Sullivan. Annie’s older sister, Madcap, is thrown out of the house for dating a Jew. Their older brother is a reluctant medic in Vietnam.
It is 1968 and Bobby Kennedy is campaigning to be president on a social reform platform. When Annie sneaks out of the house to volunteer for Bobby Kennedy's campaign and meets up with Lucas, the fuels of young love, idealism, social upheaval, racism, assassination, the Vietnam War, and a young woman's inner reckoning come together in a bonfire of a story.
Caitlin Hicks' debut novel, (Light Messages Publishing 2015) won numerous awards and garnered reviews glowing with enthusiasm.
A Theory of Expanded Love is listed on Book Riot's, 100 Must Read Books About Women & Religion: fiction along with Paradise, Toni Morrison, The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood, The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston, The Patron Saint of Liars, Ann Patchett, A Whistling Woman, A.S. Byatt, The Color Purple, Alice Walker, Caitlin's favourite, The Dovekeepers, Alice Hoffman, and others. It's a great reading list.
Kennedy Girl was published in April 2023 by Sunbury Press, who also re-published A Theory of Expanded Love in 2023.
Caitlin suggests requesting both books through your local library.
Order both books direct from the publisher (USA) or through bookstores, Amazon, Kindle and Apple Books.
Visit Caitlin Hicks website to order an audio book of A Theory of Expanded Love, and check out her blog.
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A ballerina and a psychiatrist, who is a Holocaust survivor, embark on a tentative romance in 1960s New York.
“An affecting chamber piece with plenty to say about art, trauma, and healing.” Kirkus starred review.
"In placing the arc of a ballerina’s career opposite that of a Holocaust survivor struggling to live in a changed world, Toll has crafted an engaging romance, with poignant reflections on the ritual of remembrance."
Russell Janzen, a New York-based writer and a dancer with the New York City Ballet writing for Jewish Book Council Review.
Martha Anne Toll’s first novel was published by Regal Publishing in 2022 after winning their 2020 Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction.
Order Three Muses from Regal Publishing or your favourite book store.
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Writers Radio is a free 24/7 non-commercial internet radio station that presents new and recognized writers reading their own work.
“Some people travel to the ends of the Earth to help others. Dr. Maureen Mayhew is one such person, a fearless humanitarian who takes readers on an adventure to the outermost reaches of Afghanistan in her beautifully written and searingly honest memoir."
Roberta Staley, author of Voice of Rebellion: How Mozhdah Jamalzadah Brought Hope to Afghanistan
In 2000, Dr. Maureen Mayhew reluctantly accepted her first posting with Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), to Taliban occupied Afghanistan.
Over the next ten years Maureen returned, over and over, with MSF, and later with other Aid groups, to what she describes as a country with a medieval culture in all but the most populated cities. Learning to speak the local Pashto language, unusual for an aid worker, opened doors for Maureen, as she grew to know and love the country and its people. Her experiences led to a profound questioning of her own life and values.
Hand on my Heart was published by Caitlin Press in January 2023. It is widely available through Canadian bookstores, libraries, and online book sellers.
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Title: How To Clean A Fish
Sub Title: And Other Adventures In Portugal
Episode: P061
START: May 29, 2023
ENDS: June 11, 2023
Length: 23' mins
Host/Producer: Ingrid Rose
Perhaps it is saudade (longing, love and loss combined) that pulls me back to visit my other country as often as possible. When the opportunity arose for our family to live in Costa da Caparica for an extended period, it took only minutes to decide. We were going.
How to Clean a Fish is an inviting family travel story about an extended stay in Portugal, full of food and cooking adventures, language barriers and bureaucracy, and that irresistible need to connect with the culture of our birth.
Including maps, recipes, history, this is a marvellous glimpse into a life and a country - perfect summer reading.
How to Clean a Fish was published in May 2022 by University of Alberta Press. Order it from your favourite bookstore or library.
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Writers Radio is a free 24/7 non-commercial internet radio station that presents new and recognized writers reading their own work.
Title: Dead And Alive (part 3), Living With Ancestors
Sub Title: Surviving Conquest
Episode: P060
START: May 15, 2023
ENDS: May 28, 2023
Length: 28' mins
Host/Producer: Carole Harmon
Veni, vidi, vici. This oft quoted Latin phrase, I came, I saw, I conquered, attributed to Julius Caesar in ca. AD 46, expresses the prevailing sentiment of western colonialism for the last 2000 years
In Healing With Land and Ancestors, Gillian Goslinga writes of the land and home she recently moved to, on the Rio Verde River in southern Colorado, and her discovery of its ancient traumatic history which is still perceptible today. She writes of her efforts to release and rebalance dark energies of events, which occurred on the land, and parallel events in her own life.
In Buffalo Spirit Roams This Land, Carole Harmon investigates opportunities and challenges of the idealistic buffalo reintroduction project in Banff National Park, Canada. Carole's personal essay is a fictional look at real events, situations, and people. Similar projects are underway in Europe and other locations in North America
Surviving Conquest is Part 3 of Dead and Alive: Living With Ancestors, a collaboration between Writers Radio and the online journal, Dark Matter Women Witnessing.
You may listen to or download Parts 1 and 2 of this series as podcasts on the Writers Radio Website, or your favourite podcast provider.
Go to WritersRadio.ca and listen to the current episode before it becomes a podcast.
Writers Radio is a free 24/7 non-commercial internet radio station that presents new and recognized writers reading their own work.
Title: On The Edge Of Fear
Episode: P059
START: May 01, 2023
ENDS: May 14, 2023
Length: 29'' mins
Host/Producer: Ingrid Rose
Jan Redford's End of the Rope: Mountains Marriage and Motherhood, caused ripples when it was released by Penguin Canada in 2018.
Journalist Marni Jackson, who authored The Mother Zone, a shortlisted finalist for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour in 1993 described it thus:
Climbing mountains becomes a source of both joy and loss for Jan Redford as she finds her own gutsy route through that other wilderness, of marriage and motherhood. Cheryl Strayed, move over: End of The Rope is a rambunctious, funny, heart stopping memoir that carries us along on an electric current of risk and courage.
In conversation with host Ingrid Rose, Jan Redford, rock climber, white water kayaker, mountain biker and mother, explores fear that constant companion in sports as in life. Jan reads from the Epilogue of her 2018 memoir, End of the Rope: Mountains Marriage and Motherhood. She also gives us a sneak peak of her memoir in progress, Who Shall I Be Today? which is a prequel to End of the Rope. Jan reads the chapter, The Move or Big Butt, about an incident from her childhood.
Visit Jan's website. End of the Rope: Mountains, Marriage and Motherhood is widely available, order it from your favourite bookstore or library. We look forward with anticipation to Who Shall I Be Today? A question with deep resonance for us all.
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Writers Radio is a free 24/7 non-commercial internet radio station that presents new and recognized writers reading their own work.
Title: Dead And Alive (part 2)
Sub Title: An Unprecedented Level of Imagination
Episode: P058
START: April 17, 2023
ENDS: April 30, 2023
Length: 21' mins
Host/Producer: Carole Harmon
Sharon English and Sharon Simone are writers and friends who have been deeply influenced by the writing of Barry Lopez, in particular his final book, Horizon, which issues the call for "an unprecedented level of imagination" in facing the challenges of warming climate, species extinction, and continuing global conflict.
In this episode of Dead and Alive, Being With Ancestors Sharon English reads her section of this collaborative essay in which she confronts the fate of her family's ancestral homestead in Ontario.
Dark Matter Women Witnessing, an online literary journal founded and edited by Lise Weil of Montreal, Canada: publishes writing and visual art created in response to an age of massive species loss and ecological collapse. it is a home for dreams, visions, and communications with the non-human world—especially those with messages for how we might begin to heal our broken relationship to the earth.
Dead and Alive: Being With Ancestors is a collaboration between Dark Matter Women Witnessing and Writers Radio drawn from the current issue of the journal which showcases writing by Cynthia Travis, Sharon English, Gillian Goslinga and Carole Harmon, as well as a conversation moderated by Lise Weil which threads through the three episodes.
Read Dark Matter Women Witnessing online. If you are a writer, consider submitting to this wonderful journal. You can read about editors Lise Weil and Kristin Flyntz here.
Sharon English is an author and teacher. Her first novel, Night in the World was published in 2022 by Freehand books. A 49th Shelf 2022 Book of the Year
Night in the World is a splendid and searing novel, pressed up against the tremors of our times...astonished by the way Sharon English turns Toronto inside out, making the city a wild and watery landscape, bringing the beyond-the-human close.
Catherine Bush, author of Blaze Island and The Rules of Engagement
Stay Tuned for Part 3 of Dead and Alive, Living With Ancestors featuring Gillian Goslinga and Carole Harmon which will be on air May 15-28, 2023.
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Writers Radio is a free 24/7 non-commercial internet radio station that presents new and recognized writers reading their own work.
Title: What I Miss
Sub Title: Swimming In Stories
Episode: P057
START: April 03, 2023
ENDS: April 16, 2023
Length: 28'' mins
Narrator Veda Hille
Host/Producer: Ingrid Rose
Join Ingrid Rose and Veda Hille in celebrating the remarkable life of Veda's mother Rosanna Hille, as revealed in her recently self-published memoir, Swimming in Stories, The River of My Life.
Rosanna Hille's memoir looks back on a life brimful of creativity and adventure. It begins with family history, postwar childhood in Denmark, emigration to Canada, coming of age in a Danish Quaker school, the turbulent 1960s, and meeting her future husband. Then she joins a spiritual group in search of a different kind of life. Raising her children in a rural community, she begins to explore her creativity as a textile artist.
For many people this would be the main story, not for Rosanna Hille. Once her children are grown she embarks on a career in community development. As the chair of Susila Dharma International, a humanitarian, grass-roots inspired NGO that supports community development projects, Rosanna literally travels the globe from rural tribal villages to meetings at the United Nations over her long career.
Now in her seventies, and suffering from Parkinson's, Rosanna has immersed herself in the writing she always wished to pursue and never found time for. Despite her illness, she continues revelling in her indomitable life.
What I Miss, the last chapter of Swimming in Stories, finds Rosanna in her garden at home in Vancouver, contemplating a life of questions, service, connection, and love. It is read by Rosanna's daughter, Veda Hille, a well known Vancouver musician, composer and song-writer.
You can order Swimming in Stories as print or E-Book on Veda Hille's website here.
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Writers Radio is a free 24/7 non-commercial internet radio station that presents new and recognized writers reading their own work.
Title: Dead And Alive (part 1)
Sub Title: Being With Ancestors
Episode: P056
START: March 20, 2023
ENDS: April 02, 2023
Length: 28' mins
Host/Producer: Carole Harmon
Dark Matter Women Witnessing, an online literary journal founded and edited by Lise Weil of Montreal, Canada publishes writing and visual art created in response to an age of massive species loss and ecological collapse. It is a home for dreams, visions and communications with the non-human world, especially those with messages for how we might begin to heal our broken relationship to the earth.
Dead and Alive: Being With Ancestors is a collaboration between Dark Matter Women Witnessing and Writers Radio. Readings and discussions are drawn from the current issue of the journal. Writing by Cynthia Travis, Sharon English, Gillian Goslinga and Carole Harmon is showcased, as well as a conversation moderated by Lise Weil which will thread through the three episodes.
River of Kin by Cynthia Travis
Cynthia Travis recounts the story of her family's traumatic history on an acreage beside the Colorado River. It is set against the backdrop of the natural history of the river itself and its historic relationship with the Mohave people who still live, and have lived for thousands of years, across the river from what was her family's farm.
River of Kin is a story of misplaced idealism which, by ignoring the eco-system of the Colorado River and imposing modern technology and farming methods, created an ecological disaster instead of the modern triumph of food production her father dreamed of.
This is above all a story of redemption, of learning from past mistakes, of righting wrongs of the past through awareness, community, ritual, and the intention to heal.
Read Dark Matter Women Witnessing online. If you are a writer, consider submitting to this wonderful journal. You can also read about editors Lise Weil and Kristin Flyntz there.
Cynthia Travis is a writer, photographer and documentary film-maker. Her blog, Earth Altar, features Full Moon and New Moon posts about her relationships with the animals, plants and insects in her home garden, as well as thoughts on peace building, soil health and the wisdom of the breakdown.
She is the Founder and President of the non-profit peace building organization Everyday Gandhis, dedicated to community reconciliation, trauma healing and ecological restoration in Liberia, West Africa.
River of Kin is drawn from Cynthia's forthcoming book: Atlas of Sorrow: A Natural History of Empire and Family.
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Allen 'Mercy' Quincy, the protagonist of this novel, writes as he begins his journal:
If I go to my memories directly I'll never survive. I will take the longer road and lay an ambush. I will describe my world. I will tell you about Ruby.
The Mercy Journals is set 1n 2047 in the wake of a third world war. Owing also to runaway effects of climate change and the collapse of nation/states, over a third of the global population has already died.
Former soldier Allen "Mercy" Quincy suffers from PTSD and is haunted by guilt and lingering memories of his family. When he meets a dancer named Ruby, she breathes new life into his carefully constructed existence. He begins to journal.
Here are some great comments from reviewers and readers to entice you:
"Part Lord of the Flies, part Romeo Dallaire's Shake Hands With the Devil, I came out of this book deeply touched by the characters who moved through it, but also more alert. There's a sense of the prescient in this novel - of where we could end up if we're not careful."
Aislinn Hunter, author of The World Before Us
"Not since Margaret Atwood's Snowman have we met such a desperate and compelling hero as Allen Quincy, doing his best to survive in a post-apocalyptic world."
Merilyn Simonds, author of The Convict Lover
"Casper's wry lament for the world is utterly unforgettable. She creates a slow apocalypse and finds real human voices and aching in the collapse and rebirth of society."
Emily Schultz, author of The Blondes
The Mercy Journals (Arsenal 2016) is Claudia Casper's third novel. It won the prestigious Philip K. Dick Award for Science Fiction. Her debut novel, The Reconstruction, was a national best-seller.
Learn more about Claudia on her website and blog. and order her books from your favourite bookstore.
Following its broadcast dates, this program becomes a Podcast on writers radio.ca/podcasts and from your favourite podcast provider.
Writers Radio broadcasts from Halfmoon Bay on the Sunshine Coast in Canada, ancestral land of self governing shíshálh Nation of the Coast Salish peoples. We are grateful for their land stewardship and wisdom teachings.
Carole Harmon
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Writers Radio is a free 24/7 non-commercial internet radio station that presents new and recognized writers reading their own work.
Immersions: KAREN McDIARMID
Ski to Assiniboine: JANE NEWMAN
beauty and terror—flux is at the crossroads
Karen McDiarmid and Jane Newman are friends, visual artists, writers, cold water swimmers and lovers of wilderness adventures at the edge of safety. Both lived in the Canadian Rockies for many years but now live on Cortes Island off the west coast of British Columbia, in Canada.
Karen McDiarmid is a photographer and psychotherapist who has worked in Bhutan, Tibet, the Middle East, and Baffin Island. She spent her childhood summers at a family cottage on Shawnigan Lake, on Vancouver Island, where Immersions re-members her childhood while winter swimming in Shawnigan Lake.
in Banff in the Canadian Rockies, Jane Newman raised a family and maintained an art practice informed by nature and by found materials overlooked and discarded. Jane worked with private and government organizations within the Banff Centre Leadership program, exploring creativity as a resource for problem solving.
Ski to Assiniboine re-members a winter journey which went awry and the death of a dear friend.
Karen McDiarmid's recent artwork includes painting as well as photography; both may be viewed at her Karen McDiarmid Photography & Art website (https://karenmcdiarmid.net/).
Jane Newman's mixed media and assemblage artworks may be viewed on her blog, en plein air (https://janenewman.blogspot.com/).
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Susan McCaslin, Canadian poet, essayist, and literary scholar, lives in Fort Langley, BC, in Canada.
She first met Ted Blodgett in 2011 in Calgary, Alberta, where both read from their recent volumes of poetry published by the University of Alberta Press in its Currents series.
Demeter Goes Skydiving, Susan McCaslin
Apostrophes vii: Sleep, You, a Tree, E.D. Blodgett
I looked up, way up, into the eyes of this gentle giant of a poet, Susan comments in her conversation with Writers Radio host, Ingrid Rose.
When Ted and his wife Irena moved to Surrey, BC, the two poets became friends. Susan was privileged to witness Ted's poetry as it emerged, specifically his prolific output toward the end of his life. Ted said, I don't know where the poems come from.
Susan's most recent published work is Heart Work, Ekstasis Editions, 2020. For an overview of her work visit Susan's website.
Edward Dickinson (Ted) Blodgett (1935-2018) had a long teaching career and published many volumes of poetry. Accomplished musician as well as translator, he received the Governor General Award for Poetry in 1996 for his collection Apostrophes: Woman at a Piano and a Governor General Translation Award for Transfiguration in 1999.
Ted's final book of poetry, Walking Into God, was edited posthumously by Susan McCaslin. Its publication is forthcoming from Fairleigh Dickenson University Press.
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Edward Feuz Jr : A Story of Enchantment is part biography, part personal memoir. It is remarkable in telling the story of client and guide from the point of view of the client, not as journal accounts of mountains climbed, but in remembrance of an enduring life-long friendship. It is full of anecdotes and history.
In 1899 Christian Haesler and Eduard Feuz, mountain guides from Interlaken, Switzerland signed the first seasonal contracts with the Canadian Pacific Railroad to spend the summer guiding in the Canadian Rockies and Selkirk Mountains. This program was part of a CPR campaign to advertise their hotels and back country lodges, reached by travelling to the mountains on their trains.
Other guides followed, and a second generation, including Edward Feuz, Jr.
Donna Stephen tells Edward's story, from his youth in Interlaken to his death, at age 96, and beyond. Edward Feuz Jr. was perhaps the most renowned of the Swiss guides hired by the CPR; he also worked as a private guide. Edward is credited with over a hundred first ascents and new climbing routes, he was never involved with a fatal accident.
Donna Stephen's parents were in love with mountains. They were married in the Canadian Rockies and spent every summer learning how to climb from the Swiss Guides who worked at Lake Louise. This became a lifelong passion which they shared with their daughters, Donna and Cindy. The Stephen family visited every summer and Edward Feuz Jr. took them under his wing. Both girls became climbers, taught by the best.
I’m always amazed by individuals who dedicate part of their lives to commemorating someone whom they admire, not as a job, not for money, grants, or prestige, not to commemorate an ancestor, but in appreciation and gratitude.
Edward Feuz Jr : A Story of Enchantment was published by Rocky Mountain Books and may be ordered from your favourite bookstore or library. It was a finalist for The Jon Whyte Award – Mountain Literature (non-fiction) at the 2022 Banff Mountain Book Competition.
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Two Poets write of their homeland, and their dislocation.
Shadi Eskandani and Sareh Farmand are Iranian born Canadian immigrant writers and friends. Join them in readings from their poetry and in conversation with Ingrid Rose.
SAREH was born in Tehran and lived there until she was two; she lived briefly in Germany and Italy, and finally immigrated to Canada.
Her new release, Pistachios In My Pocket was published by At Bay Press of Winnipeg, Manitoba. It was selected by CBC Books as “Best Book of Poetry Selection, 2022.” CBC had this to say:
Here is a new voice to the conversation on global citizenship and multiculturalism, as themes of loss, home, and belonging are explored in a new way through a wide socio-political lens and personal accounts of a family's unique, yet universal experiences...
Order this book from your favourite bookstore, Massey Books, or or At Bay Press.
SHADI writes In her blog post, The Abandonment of Iranian Feminists:
"For decades, the voices of Iranian feminists, especially those living in Iran, have been silenced in many spaces, including the mainstream, the academic left, and activist movements in the west....There has been nowhere, other than amongst ourselves, to express our grief and outrage for what’s been happening in Iran for almost 44 years."
Until age nine Shadi lived under the rule of the Islamic Republic, during the Iran-Iraq war. Now she lives in Toronto, and she writes! Her recently debuted poetry chapbook, Contusions was the 2020 Locked Horn Press Urgency Chapbook winner.
LHP is in San Diego. Canadian orders for Contusions may be placed through Massey Books.
Visit Shadi's website, https://shadieskandani.com/
Carole Harmon
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Writers Radio is a free 24/7 non-commercial internet radio station that presents new and recognized writers reading their own work.
A DOOR IS OPENING:
Part 2 of 2
We invited contributors to Writers Radio to share with us their thoughts on this theme as we approach 2023.
Shoes are a metaphor for journey and transformation. This was Canadian novelist Katherine Govier’s inspiration when she founded The Shoe Project in 2011. This collaborative project connects women immigrants to Canada with Canadian writing and performance mentors in order to create stories and performances based on experiences of leaving one home to come to another.
From Canmore in the Canadian Rockies Katherine recalls working with women refugees from Afghanistan online during the pandemic, alongside fellow mentors Caroline Adderson, a novelist from Vancouver, and Nan Hughes Poole, a mezzo-soprano who lives in Banff.
Physicist and writer Julian Shillcock joins us from Lausanne, Switzerland with an excerpt from his novel which investigates the question, what does it mean to be mentally healthy or ill?
Poet Elizabeth Cunningham, from Nelson BC, celebrates the life of beloved Canadian landscape painter Doris McCarthy, 1910-2010.
Poet Kathryn Alexander, of Port Moody on the west coast of Canada, takes us on a journey through the annual spiral of light in which a new soul enters the world. We are all light eaters, she concludes.
Our well wishes go out to you, dear listeners and contributors, through the open doorways of our hearts, into the coming year.
Go to WritersRadio.ca and listen to the current episode before it becomes a podcast.
Writers Radio is a free 24/7 non-commercial internet radio station that presents new and recognized writers reading their own work.
A DOOR IS OPENING:
Part 1 of 2
We invited contributors to Writers Radio to share with us their thoughts on this theme as we approach 2023.
In Nova Scotia, Chad Norman, confronts his life as he looks forward to challenges and hopes of a new poetry project.
Kate Bird of Vancouver embarks on an unintentionally solo walking tour which re-invigorates her perspective on life.
In the changing urban environment where he grew up in England, Jeremy Page muses on the meaning of home.
On Galiano Island, off the west coast of Canada, Sarah Knoebber raps her way out of Covid and looks to the future.
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Writers Radio is a free 24/7 non-commercial internet radio station that presents new and recognized writers reading their own work.
Featured Songs: Fine Tuning • Afghanistan: The Lost City • Dervish Drums.
Gary Sill will entertain you with his music in the third of a three part series featuring the work of producers of Writers Radio.
This program touches on highlights of Gary's musical career as a young rock musician in the band, Wayboard; producing programming for ACCESS Educational Network and CKUA radio; and as student and assistant to Hidayat Inayat Khan, renowned composer, violinist, conductor and teacher of Universal Sufism. Best known for his piano improvisations, Gary is now embracing new forms of composition and presentation.
In her conversation with Gary, Ingrid Rose probes the spiritual wellspring of all Gary's musical endeavours.
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Writers Radio is a free 24/7 non-commercial internet radio station that presents new and recognized writers reading their own work.
No glasses, playing in the snow; this is a black-and-white photograph of my mother taken by my father before I was born, likely in the first year of their marriage. I hand coloured the print many years later, in the 1970's, when I was her age.
Each fall the writers radio team takes a turn at presenting our own work. This is my turn for 2022. Ingrid and I both chose to write of our mothers; our vivacious mothers had a lot in common. 2022 is the twenty-fifth anniversary of my parent's deaths, two months apart in 1997.
Queen of Flowers weaves my mother's death with snippets of her life, set against the unfolding panorama of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and our wonderful Queen Elizabeth.
Ingrid's heartfelt piece, The Singer and the Song aired earlier this fall and is now a podcast on our website.
Carole Harmon
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Writers Radio is a free 24/7 non-commercial internet radio station that presents new and recognized writers reading their own work.
Jon Whyte (1941-1992) was a Canadian author whose soul work was poetry but who also wrote books of history about his beloved Canadian Rockies. Unlike many Canadian artists who pursue careers in America and Europe, or in academia, Jon Whyte chose to root his life and work in the Canadian west, its people and history, especially the mountains, and in particular the Bow Valley. He was born in Banff and lived most of his adult life in that small mountain community.
Paley, an epic poem about the death by avalanche of a brilliant young mathematician on April 7, 1933, near Skoki, in the Canadian Rockies is based on an actual event.
When I was planning this series with Jon’s friend and colleague, Brian Patton, we hoped to find a recording of Jon reading his own work, to hear his voice once again, but also because he was a masterful reader.
The Jon Whyte fonds, in the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies in Banff, contains a number of recordings of Jon’s work. Most of them are performances recorded at the Banff Centre, or by CBC, and feature actors.
Paley was the only piece read by Jon we could find, but what a find it was! It is an incomplete recording, missing the introductory biographical paragraph about Paley, and also missing the ending. I have taken the liberty of reading these missing sections to complete the poem
On the Writers Radio website, in the About section, is a page with a longer bio, reading list, and full length recordings of Minisniwapta: Voices of the River and Paley, as included in this program.
Some of Jon’s published work may be found online, and through the library system. Thank goodness for libraries.
The Jon Whyte fonds are housed in the Archives of the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies in Banff.
Go to WritersRadio.ca and listen to the current episode before it becomes a podcast.
Writers Radio is a free 24/7 non-commercial internet radio station that presents new and recognized writers reading their own work.
Jon Whyte (1941 - 1992) was a Canadian author whose soul work was poetry but who also wrote books of history about his beloved Canadian Rockies. Unlike many Canadian artists who pursue careers in America and Europe, or in academia, Jon Whyte chose to root his life and work in the Canadian west, its people and history, especially the mountains, and in particular the Bow Valley. He was born in Banff and lived most of his adult life in that small mountain community.
Jon was instrumental in igniting and spreading culture in Banff as manager of Banff Book and Art Den in its early days, in helping found Summerthought Publications, also in Banff, and as a columnist for the Banff rags: Summit News and Banff Crag and Canyon. He was an environmental activist, acting as the town conscience on many topics.
Host Carole Harmon is joined in this program by Brian Patton who was Jon’s friend and colleague. Brian and Carole will chat about Jon, and Brian will read from Jon’s Crag and Canyon column, Where People and Mountains Meet.
After Jon’s death, Brian compiled a selection of these short essays which were published by Altitude Publishing as Mountain Chronicles.
In her foreword to Mind Over Mountains, a retrospective compilation of Jon's major literary work edited by Henry Vandervlist in 2000 and published by Red Deer Press, Myrna Kostach, a friend and colleague, writes;
Of all the people I know, Jon was the one who most hugely enjoyed his own life—books, friends, conversations, wordplay, dictionaries, food, treks, beasts, ghosts, lore—so much so that his joy spilled over into the lives of any who drew near him…he died too young, he deserved more time, he was hauled away in the middle of a thought, a passion, a meal, and we will never know what it was he was about to tell us, show us, summon us to…he would have made an extraordinary old man. Let us imagine him.
Jon's work is out of print but may be found in libraries, and some titles on line. In the About section of this website is a longer bio, a reading list, and the full production of Jon's last completed work, Minisniwapta: Voices of the River.
Go to WritersRadio.ca and listen to the current episode before it becomes a podcast.
Writers Radio is a free 24/7 non-commercial internet radio station that presents new and recognized writers reading their own work.
"You called up love as rainmakers call upon the rain" Ingrid Rose writing about her mother in "Embracing Her"
In keeping with our Harvest theme, Ingrid Rose re-members her mother in Embracing Her.
Writers Radio launched in November 2020. On our first anniversary we inaugurated an annual tradition of including work by our three producers: Ingrid Rose, Gary Sill, and myself, Carole Harmon, in our programming so that we reveal ourselves as well as the writers we have represented.
In this episode we celebrate the work of Ingrid Rose.
Embracing Her is a «re-membering» of Ingrid’s mother, Irene Rinna Rose. Ingrid was born into a non-practising Jewish family. Like her father, she was an atheist and involved in left-wing politics until she began to follow a spiritual path.
The program will close with Ingrid’s ekphrastic poem, Song of Songs. This poem was written to accompany the paintings of 50 Jewish artists at the Sidney and Gertrude Zack Gallery in 2018. This exhibition celebrated Israel’s 70 years of song and dance.
Ingrid Rose is a writer, teacher of writing, and co-host and co-producer of Writers Radio. She was born and raised in London, England but now lives in Vancouver, Canada.
Ingrid has published in Canadian literary journals: CV2; Emerge 2001; the anthology Sustenance, edited by Rachel Rose; and Musicworks Magazine 2011 (a prizewinning story).
The State of Our Father is forthcoming in the anthology Don't Tell: Family Secrets edited by Arlene Paré and Donna McCart Sharkey (Demeter Press 2023).
Episode: P043
Broadcast dates: September 19 to October 02, 2022
Length: 38'' mins
Host: Carole Harmon
New releases by Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch and Tariq Malik share themes of the human consequences of war which continue to play out long after the war has ended.
Winterkill is set during the Holodomor, which means death by starvation in Ukrainian. This was a man made famine created in 1932/33 by Joseph Stalin. The Holodomor starved to death millions of people in Ukraine, rural Russia and Kazakhstan as part of Stalin's plan to modernize agriculture through creating collective farms and eliminating peasant farmers. This genocide went virtually unnoticed in the west.
Exit Wounds follows the forced migration of Tariq and his family from the Punjab following the religious partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. Their home in the village of Kotli was in the epicentre of this conflict; an estimated million people died in this area. Escaping, Tariq's profession of industrial engineer took them to Kuwait and then Iraq. They inadvertently found themselves in war after war. Finally they immigrated to Canada.
Winterkill is published by Scholastic in Canada and the USA. It will be widely available through the library system as well as bookstores.
Exit Wounds will be released in fall 2022 and may be pre-ordered from Caitlin Press.
Listen to previous episodes: Traitors Among Us with Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch and Exit Wounds with Tariq Malik as podcasts on the Writers Radio website.
In the spirit of HARVEST, this autumn’s programs will recall people and events, underscoring their importance which reverberates in today’s world when we remember.
Elizabeth Cunningham of Nelson, British Columbia is a writer, teacher and visual artist who loves collaborating with others. Both her life and her work demonstrate a wide range of interest and commitment, which seem to flow through time and experience.
In this episode we spotlight her 2021 poetry release, Watching the Light Below the Storm. Then Elizabeth and I discuss her creative non-fiction memoir, Marty's Place and her next poetry offering, Airborne which are works in progress, with readings from both.
Marty's Place fits our autumn theme of harvest very well.
Marty's Place was The Village Bookstore owned by Marty Ahvenus. It opened in 1961 in the Gerrard Street Village in Toronto; a creative hub of the 60's and 70's which eventually gave way to the inevitable high-rises of urban renewal. Marty Ahvenus was an early supporter of emerging Canadian authors Margaret Atwood, bpNichol and many others.
Elizabeth worked for Marty in her late teens, and at Coach House Press, working on her own projects among others. Her memoir of these times recalls the early flowering of CanLit which is evident in the blooming garden of Canadian books today.
Two poems from Airborne complete the program, accompanied by Doug Jamieson's original music by the same title.
Watching the Light Below the Storm and Elizabeth's earlier poetry book, A Fragile Grace are available through bookstores or direct from the publisher, Ekstasis Editions.
Smoke and Mirrors, a chapter from Sheila Martineau’s memoir, I Wanted to Tell You This: a memoir of magic, music, and madness, untangles the challenges she endured as the ‘disobedient daughter’ of brilliant but brutal, misguided parents and the strategies she used to combat and escape.
Her father was a professional magician and commercial artist. Her mother was a gold-medal classical pianist. They were high school sweethearts who performed together on stage and married while still in their teens.
Sheila Martineau PhD is a writer, copy editor, book designer, and social researcher who collaborates with artists, architects, and publishers. Her scholarly articles and doctoral dissertation focused on issues relating to childhood trauma.
sheilamartineau.com.
Rewriting Resilience: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Childhood Resilience and the Politics of Teaching Resilience to 'Kids at Risk. (UBC, 1999)
Families, in turn, are knit together or torn apart by the stories we tell ourselves and each other.
Clarissa Green understands the world-creating power of stories. The author, who died in August, 2020 after seeing her book to publication, practised as a family therapist in Vancouver for decades, specializing in the dilemmas of adult children and their frail, elderly parents.
Clarissa reads from her book Grownupedness, a meditation on what she learned, both in her clinical practice and in her own family. Her particular interest is in the way that adult children and their parents all yearn to be seen by other family members as competent, mature adults. Hence the playful title of this remarkable book, “Grownupedness.”
These are deftly sketched accounts of family pain, laughter and renewal as families respond to the traumas of aging and the looming presence of death. Green, who worked hard in local creative writing programs and writers’ groups to perfect her craft as a storyteller, brings these fraught moments of family dynamics to life with vivid descriptions and telling anecdotes.
Episode: P039
Broadcast dates: July 25 to August 07, 2022
Length: 30 mins
Host: Carole Harmon
Katherine Govier's historical novel, The Ghost Brush celebrates the life of Oei (hey you) the daughter, student, assistant and eventually fellow artist of Katsushika Hokusai, the most famous artist of the Edo period (1603 - 1867) in Japan . In The Ghost Brush Oei is a ghost narrator of her own life.
There is in this book a mystery to be solved; an intimate look at Edo, a closed culture poised on the brink of opening itself to the west; a portrait of a lifelong relationship between father and daughter; and a view into a closed and secret culture in which women were currency and citizens were not permitted to accrue wealth.
Oei became an acknowledged painter in her own time despite the restrictive social rules women lived under in the Edo period. Her significant contributions to Hokusai's later works are now acknowledged by some scholars, including attributions for some paintings credited to her father. Nevertheless her death and the fate of her paintings continues to be shrouded in mystery.
The sequel to The Ghost Brush, The Red Fuji, in which the ghost of Oei continues to search for her lost paintings is in a long lineup somewhere between finished manuscript and bookstores. We will announce a release date in our Writers Radio newsletter when we know it.
The Ghost Brush was published by Harper Collins. In the US it was titled The Print Maker's Daughter.
An extended edition of the book is available as an e-book from Apple Books and Kodo in the collection Katherine Govier Three Book Bundle In this edition there is another character, Rebecca, who becomes obsessed with Oei and joins the hunt for her lost paintings and for answers to questions of attribution of Hokusai's later works.
Find out more about this author and her other novels on her website: katherinegovier.com
Much of Heather Menzies' adult life has been spent writing, researching, teaching and giving talks throughout the world about critical issues of our time. Understanding herself to be a seeker, and feeling the limits of the current academic discourse, she welcomed the inner debate between her intellectual self and the self that knew there were other experiential ways of "knowing".
In conversation with writers radio host Ingrid Rose, she tells the remarkable story of an early experience as a child, her connection to something much larger than her known world, and reads from her book, Reclaiming the Commons for the Common Good, A memoir and manifesto about re-connection with her Highland Scottish ancestors who had lived by the laws of the Commons until the English "Clearances" drove them from the land they knew in their bones.
Jane Mortifee’s 2018 novel, Out of the Fire, could be read as a balm for the troubled, chaotic times we find ourselves in. It tells of a quest for forgiveness and healing from the ravages of vengeance, bitterness and hate.
On the riverbank near an African village, a violent act sets into motion fates that intertwine and continue to bring anguish and torment through to the next generation. How can reconciliation and forgiveness ever bring healing when grief, revenge and destiny continue to play out their purpose? When a devastating fire rips through the village, lives are lost and survivors are changed forever.
The scene Jane Mortifee reads for this writers radio program takes place several years after the fire. A meeting between the young woman, Ntombi, and young man, Mantla, in the first flush of awareness of their mutual attraction. The story is as much about the characters as it is the potency of the tribal earth which is Africa and the powerful spiritual healers. The trials undertaken through different destinies to find resolution.
Writer: Shamcher Bryn Beorse
Episode: P036
Broadcast dates: June 13 to June 26, 2022
Length: 44'' mins
Host: Carole Harmon
Carol Sill in conversation with Carole Harmon
Airdate: May 30 - June 12, 2022 - at the top of each hour, every hour
Join host Carole Harmon in conversation with Carol Sill, publisher of the previously unpublished memoir of Shamcher Bryn Beorse, A SUFI WENT TO WAR.
Shamcher (his Sufi name) was a Norwegian engineer, economist, author, and Sufi who distinguished himself in WW2 as spy, strategist and soldier often working with MI 5 and resistance fighters.
Carol Sill became Shamcher's close friend and student in his later years when he lived in Bremerton, Washington on the west coast of the USA. Since Shamcher's death in 1980 Carol has worked as archivist and publisher to bring his published and unpublished manuscripts of philosophy, essays, fiction, and memoir to the public.
Carol hesitated to publish A Sufi Went to War, which Shamcher completed in 1979, in a time of relative world peace. The war in Ukraine has revealed a need for fresh perspectives and a more nuanced understanding of history.
Shamcher Bryn Beorse was the student and friend of sufi mystic Inayat Khan. A celebrated musician in his native India, Inayat Khan spread the spiritual and practical message of love, harmony and beauty through his music and teachings in Europe and America between 1910 and 1926.
Shamcher recalled:
After one of Sufi Inayat’s talks, a listener asked, “Should a Sufi be a pacifist?”
Said Inayat, “If people of goodwill lay down their arms today, they will be forced into war, forced to fight—not FOR their ideals but AGAINST them.”
Three of Inayat’s children shortly afterwards distinguished themselves in World War II. I went over the hill to serve, though pacifists screamed at me.
In this episode Carol reads the chapter, To Kidnap a Head of State.
This was an actual plot to kidnap Hitler in the midst of World War 2 which, had it succeeded, would have ended the war. It is by no means the only incident of espionage, daring and mysterious occurrences in A Sufi Went to War which may be ordered on Amazon.
Carol Sill edits and publishes The Shamcher Bulletin, a newsletter on Substack. She also publishes a newsletter of her own writing on Substack, Personal Papers: Writing from the intersection of imagination and reality.
A Sufi Went to War, and other titles by Shamcher Bryn Beorse are published by Alpha Glyph Publications on Salt Spring Island, BC, Canada.
Writer: Shamcher Bryn Beorse
Episode: P035
Broadcast dates: May 30 to June 12, 2022
Length: 36''
Host: Carole Harmon
Carol Sill in conversation with Carole Harmon
Airdate: May 30 - June 12, 2022 - at the top of each hour, every hour
Shamcher Bryn Beorse was a Norwegian engineer, economist, author, and sufi who distinguished himself in WW2 as spy, strategist and soldier often working with MI 5 and resistance fighters.
His memoir of that time was completed in 1979, a year before his death. It was published in May 2022 by Alph Glyph Publications and may be ordered through Amazon.
This program is focused by a reading of the chapter: To Kidnap a Head of State, the plot to kidnap Hitler developed in 1943 by prominent individuals within the German military and Allied Forces. Had it been allowed, it would have ended the war. This is by no means the only incident of espionage, daring and mysterious occurrences in this compelling memoir.
Lawrence Feuchtwanger joins Ingrid Rose to discuss his work and read from his poetry book, Refugee Song, and from his unpublished novel, Skin.
Lawrence writes:…of the sweetness. tenderness, disillusionment and bitterness of growing up and coming of age amidst the tumult and aching beauty of South Africa
…of the legacy of wanderings and displacements of my parents, and their parents, and their parents’ parent’s parents, exiles and refugees from a hostile European anti-Semitism
…of my own self-imposed exile, drifting through continents and countries—from South Africa to England, through Europe and overland from Cairo back to Johannesburg and from there to Canada, to Vancouver and now here, Gabriola Island, grateful to live and write on the traditional lands of the Snuneymuxw First Nation.
Refugee Song is available from the publisher, Signature Editions or your favourite bookstore.
Marsha Skrypuch in conversation with Carole Harmon
Aired: May 2 - 15, 2022
Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch writes about war from a young person’s point of view. She is the author of more than twenty books for young people; many shine a spotlight on the complicated history of World War 2 and its aftermath, still being enacted today in the war in Ukraine.
Her protagonists are children and teens who must cope with the horrors of war as active participants, finding their way with resilience, courage, and wit.
Traitors Among Us is based on the very real Soviet 'Silence Camps' in the Soviet Zone and Soviet Union following the end of World War 2. Krystia and Maria, teen-age sisters from a small town in Ukraine, have separately survived harrowing wartime situations. As the book opens it is 1945. World War 2 is over, but not the repercussions of the war. Krystia and Maria, together at last, have sought asylum in the American Zone—a transient and short lived interlude of safety.
Marsha’s books are widely available in bookstores and libraries in audio, book form and e-book. They are published by Scholastic in Canada and the US.
Fiona Tinwei Lam is a well loved Vancouver poet who became the City of Vancouver's sixth Poet Laureate in 2022. In conversation with Ingrid Rose, Fiona discusses her legacy project, City Poems Contest, in which youth, emerging, and established poets are invited to create poems. These poems would foster greater understanding about significant historical, cultural and ecological sites on the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tseil-Waututh peoples now known as the City of Vancouver.
The winners will be announced in June, 2022. In 2023, these winning poems will be offered as source material for City Poems Contest Phase Two, in which film makers will compete to turn winning poems into video-poems.
Fiona Tinwei Lam is the author of Intimate Distances (finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Prize), Enter the Chrysanthemum and Odes & Laments. She also authored the illustrated children's book, The Rainbow Rocket.
Visit Fiona's website, https://fionalam.net/, to learn more about City Poems Contest (and how to order her books!)
A position such as Poet Laureate can overshadow the work of the poet so honoured. In this Writers Radio episode Fiona reads poems about the evolving life of a young family.
Intimate and sometimes raw poems about family—challenges of motherhood are described from the vantage points of a daughter and of a mother.
Listen and enjoy!
Jeremy Page in conversation with Carole Harmon
Aired: April 4 - 17, 2022
Jeremy Page is a writer, editor, playwright and translator. He was Director of the Centre for Language Studies at the University of Sussex.
Carole Harmon comments:
I'm struck by the fellowship of writers who pursue similar means of reaching readers and listeners. Jeremy is founding editor of the long running literary journal, Frogmore Papers, and a member of Needlewriters, a co-operative which showcases writers from Sussex and Kent in England. My co-producer, Ingrid Rose, studied at the University of Sussex. Small world.
Dance Me To The End Of Love is the story Jeremy has chosen to read for Writers Radio listeners. The famous Leonard Cohen song is like a recurring minor character in a story which traces love and loss, illness, death, and renewal in the relationship of two friends and their beloveds.
Jeremy's writing is influenced by the writing of philosopher and journalist Albert Camus, one of the Twentieth Century's great writers. His 1947 novel La Peste foreshadowed the 1949-53 polio epidemic and our own Covid-19 Pandemic.
This story has another resonance with the time we are living in. Leonard Cohen's inspiration in writing Dance Me To the End Of Love; "arose from a photograph that I saw when I was a child, of some people in striped pyjamas prison uniforms with violins playing beside a smoke stack and the smoke was made out of gypsies and children, and this song arose out of that photograph." Leonard Cohen
The program closes with Jeremy reading two poems from his latest collection, The Naming and The Return.
BETWEEN TWO
Daniela Elza
Airdate: March 21 - April 3, 2022
A new Writers Radio episode broadcasts at the top of each hour, every hour. Listen at writers radio.ca!
Daniela Elza in Conversation With Carole Harmon
Daniela Elza's poems explore the space between two: people, species, media, times.
In this episode poems from her 2020 release the broken boat probe the break-down of her twenty year marriage.
We also discuss Daniela's collaborations with other artists.
Poems from milk tooth bane bone led to a melding of talents with Soressa Gardner in the album, crow morphologies.
Soressa Gardner (SelfDeconstructy Music) is a vocalist, laptop composer/improviser, and sometimes songwriter.
Both artists have intense and unusual relationships with crows. The resulting spoken word/sound creations are haunting: the thin noose of light, from the album, wraps up the program.
the broken boat is available from Mother Tongue Publishing and your preferred bookstore, as are some other titles by Daniela.
milk tooth bane bone (Leaf Press 2013), and other books by Daniela Elza, are available directly from Daniela's website, Strange Places.
crow morphologies, and other works by Soressa Gardner, are available through Soressa's Bandcamp page.
Episode: P029
Broadcast dates: March 07 to March 20, 2022
Length: 23 mins
Host: Ingrid Rose
Kate Bird in conversation with Ingrid Rose
Kate Bird's first camera was a gift from her father, with whom she came to share his love of photography. Through every hardship and many moves in a troubled life, Kate’s father preserved the photographs he’d taken in his early years as an outdoorsman, and his collection of 1940s black-and-white negatives came to her.
Kate Bird's career as a librarian and researcher has been shaped by her love of photographs and their ability to capture both life at its most dramatic and the quiet beauty of the world. Her collection of essays, A Memoir In Pieces, is about family history, memory and photography.
In this Writers Radio episode Kate reads excerpts from two essays: Archival Record AN1940s, which was shortlisted for the Malahat Review’s 2021 Constance Rooke CNF Prize, and About Face.
Photo enthusiasts take note:
Kate Bird researched, edited and authored three books of photographs published by Greystone Books between 2016 and 2019. They can be ordered from the publisher or your favourite bookstore.
•Vancouver in the Seventies: Photos From A Decade That Changed the City
•City On Edge: A Rebellious Century of Protests, Riots, and Strikes.
•Magic Moments in BC Sports: A Century in Photos
Checkout the podcasts of previous episodes!
Subscribe to the Writers Radio free program announcement newsletter!
Episode: P028
Broadcast dates: February 21, 2022 to March 06, 2022
Length: 27'' mins
Host Ingrid Rose
After-effects of Colonialism
Broadcast Dates: February 21 - March 6, 2022
1947
In one of its final colonial acts on the Indian sub-continent, Great Britain partitioned disputed Punjab into Indian and Pakistani territories. Ten million people were dislocated and millions died as Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and other religious minorities, who had lived together Were forced to abandon their homes.
Tariq Malik
was born into this chaos in Kotli, a village in Western (Pakistani) Punjab in 1951. The effects of this displacement and violence have shaped his life.
As an adult Tariq, who'd become a chemical engineer, moved to Kuwait to support his family, as his father had done before him. Harsh desert sands with buried corpses and land mines continue to inspire his present day writing.
Tariq emigrated to Canada and now lives in Vancouver. He writes poetry, historical fiction, and short stories about his own experiences of displacement, and that of others.
Exit Wounds, (poetry) will be released by Caitlin Press in fall 2022.
Rainsongs from Kotli, (short stories), is available from Amazon.
Tariq's poems are included in Unmooring the Komagata Maru – Charting Colonial Trajectories, (UBC Press, 2019)
Nights of Kleptomania, (poetry) and Chanting Denied Shores, (fiction), can be ordered from the author: Tariq Malik
Episode: P027
START: February 07, 2022
ENDS: February 20, 2022
Length: 26'' mins
Host Carole Harmon
In PART 1 we hear of Percy Shelley's drowning in 1822 at age 29 in the Ligurian sea, off the coast of the town of Viareggio, Italy, when his sailing boat capsized in a storm. We also hear how Chad Norman came to write Squall in the voice of Mary Shelley.
PART 2
Squall: Poems in the Voice of Mary Shelley
Chad Norman discusses his experience as a man attempting to plumb the psyche of a woman he greatly admires who has been dead for over two hundred years.
Chad also elaborates on the fate of Mary Shelley following her husband's death; she struggles as a single mother and author, one he believes is undervalued to this day.
Frankenstein ; or, The Modern Prometheus, published in 1818, is Mary Shelley's best known work. She went on to publish several other novels. The Last Man, 1826, was prescient. Set in late twenty-first century Europe, a mysterious pandemic sweeps across the globe resulting in the near extinction of humanity.
Squall is beautifully illustrated with black-and-white line drawings by Judith S. Bauer of Parrsboro Nova Scotia.
Published by Guernica Editions as part of the Essential Poets Series, Squall may be ordered from the publisher, your favourite bookstore or online. It is not available as an e-book.
If you are intrigued to delve into the writing of Mary Shelley, various compilations and individual novels are available in print. Both Kindle and Apple Books have inexpensive editions of the Collected Works.
Episode: P026
START: January 24, 2022
ENDS: February 06, 2022
Length: 28'' mins
Host Carole Harmon
Squall, Part 1: Poems in the Voice of Mary Shelley
In Mary Shelley's Tempest, his introduction to Squall, Poems in the Voice of Mary Shelley, George Elliott Clarke wrote:
I've known Chad Norman for thirty years. He's written fine work before, but Squall is one of his best....Certainly Mary Woolstonecraft Shelley is rendered brilliantly herein, both as the creator of a masterpiece, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818) and as the critical curator of a spouse-maker's legacy.
Mary Shelley's husband, Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, drowned at age 29 in the Ligurian sea, off the coast of the town of Viareggio, Italy, when his sailing boat capsized in a storm. The Shelleys' relationship was passionate, scandalous, haunted by tragedy; a union of artists as well as a marriage.
Percy Shelley’s body, recovered after days in the ocean, was burned on the beach by public order for health reasons. Women weren’t allowed to attend such occasions but Mary was given and preserved Percy’s charred heart in a box.
It is this which imaginatively locates each of the poems in Squall; on that beach, with that box, as Chad Norman re-imagines Mary Shelley reviewing her marriage in light of this final tragedy.
Clarke also comments in Mary Shelley's Tempest,
we witness Mary Shelley in communion with her own soul...
Squall, PART 2: Poems in the Voice of Mary Shelley, Airing February 07, 2022
My zoom conversation with Chad Norman about writing Squall was long and fascinating. We couldn't seem to stop talking. I have broken this conversation into three parts: two episodes about the writing of the book and a separate section (to be put on Writer's Radio website as an additional podcast) about the trials of launching his book during a pandemic.
The first episode explores the germination of Squall and the process of writing it. The second episode focuses Chad's experience as a man attempting to plumb the psyche of a woman he greatly admires who has been dead for over two hundred years. Chad locates this investigation squarely within the wave of the women's liberation movement of which Mary Shelley's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was a forerunner.
Squall is beautifully illustrated with black-and-white line drawings by Judith S. Bauer of Parrsboro Nova Scotia.
Published by Guernica Editions as part of their Essential Poets Series, Squall may be ordered from the publisher or your favourite bookstore or online. It is not available as an e-book.
If you are intrigued to delve into the writing of Mary Shelley both Kindle and Apple Books have inexpensive editions of the Collected Works and various compilations are available in print editions.
P025 Loss and Resilience
Colette Gagnon, Margot Blum, Meharoona Ghani
Airdate: January 10 - 23, 2022
A new Writers Radio episode broadcasts every two weeks at the top of each hour, every hour. Listen at writers radio.ca!
All living beings: humans, creatures, Earth itself experience trauma and loss. The ability to endure is the resilience each must activate, which has sustained life on Earth for billions of years.
Colette Gagnon’s memoir based poetry memorializes her family. The dead can dream us, she writes in For Leaving.
Colette dedicates her poems to family members and events: the death of her mother, the violent death of her brother Phil, and childhood events explored in her longer narrative piece, Lure dedicated to her Father and brother Phil.
Margot Blum’s poems are set within our collective entrapment by Covid. Past and present intertwine—invocations of lost love remembered with overarching perspectives of who, where, and when we are.
Meharoona Ghani’s intricate sestinas chart her experiences as a long time sufferer of Multiple Sclerosis. Her concurrent spiritual journey weaves body mind and spirit as she struggles with the ideal and experience of divine guidance.
Colette Gagnon and Margot Blum live and write in Vancouver, Meharoona Ghani on Vancouver Island, Canada.
COSMIC BOWLING
Cornela Hoogland & Ted Goodden
Airdate Dec. 27 2021 - January 9, 2022
A new Writers Radio episode broadcasts every two weeks at the top of each hour, every hour. Listen at writers radio.ca!
The collaboration between poet Cornelia Hoogland and artist Ted Goodden, who live on Hornby Island off the west coast in Canada, began as a life partnership.
Now it’s expressed through their interwoven artistic responses to the 64 archetypes, or hexagrams, of the Chinese Book of Changes, or I Ching, the oldest system of classical divination, and one of the oldest books in the world.
Imagine 64 wise texts informing AND responding to Ted Goodden’s sixty-four small clay figures of a naked man holding a ball, embracing a ball, leaning on a ball, throwing a ball, and so on.
Imagine Cornelia Hoogland responding to both sculptures and hexagrams in the context of her own life with sixty-four six line poems.
First an exhibition, now a book: Cosmic Bowling
Cosmic Bowling is available through Guernica Editions, your favourite bookstore, or online retailers.
You will also enjoy the 4 minute video made by film maker Ed Carswell for the launch of Cosmic Bowling.
WINTER SPELL
9 writers remember and muse on the turning of the year
Aired December 13 to December 26, 2021, Length: 35'
Host, Carole Harmon
9 writers remember and muse on the turning of the year
Broadcast dates: Dec. 13 - 26. 2021
To celebrate the coming season we invited writers who participated in one of our programs during the past year to share memories or musings on the turning of the year in any of its manifestations as celebration, contemplation, cycle and renewal.
•Medwyn McConachy: Winter in the North
•Chris Kammler: When I Rise
•Sonya Lea: Solstice Celebration
•Sarah Knoebber: Burrowing Through
•Una Suseli O'Connell: Kris Kringle and Associates
•H.C Phillips: Return Instinct
•Julian Shillcock: Christmas Story
•Zoe Dagneault: Christmas 85
•Jacinda Oldale & Raw Honey: This Year
THREE COMTEMPLATIONS
Kurt Trzcinski, David Miller and Garry Ward
P022, aired November 29 to December 12, 2021
Length: 25'
Host Carole Harmon
Poetry + Essay + Jazz Poetry
Kurt Trzcinski composes a poem suite upon visiting Glacier Bay Alaska.
David Miller collaborates with pocket gophers.
Garry Ward riffs on life and music.
KURT TRZCINSKI lives in Victoria on Vancouver Island, Canada. His work and studies as a biologist lead him far afield. With the mind of a scientist and the heart of a poet, his Glacier Bay Suite takes us deep into the intermingled reality we live in of personal/global, human/other than human, climate change/adaptation.
DAVID MILLER lives on twenty acres of cultivated wilderness surrounded by urban sprawl of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. His humorous essay on how to deal with pocket gophers without becoming a murderer is a reminder there are other ways of being with the abundant life around us.
GARRY WARD lives in New Westminster, BC. He is a self-described prairie boy who ran away from home to join the band. Fellow Traveller is a jazz poem in which he is reader and musician, writer and composer. It's from his chapbook, Life After Midnight: a collection of jazz poetry.
CELEBRATING ONE YEAR ON AIR
Ingrid Rose, Carole Harmon and Gary Sill
This Episode aired from November 15 to November 28, 2021. Length: 38'
Hosts, Ingrid Rose, Carole Harmon and Gary Sill
Writers Radio celebrates its first anniversary.
Our thanks to the forty writers who joined us this year and to our listeners in 100 + countries!
Ingrid, Gary and Carole are so delighted to reach this milestone. For this anniversary episode we offer our own work, as well as a conversation between the three producers, musing on where we have been and where we are going.
Ingrid Rose reads Under the Weather, which reflects so clearly our common anxieties within a planetary perspective at this unique time in our planet's history.
Gary Sill presents his piano composition, Orpheus Rising which he composed for the Sonic Boom Festival in Vancouver in 2019. On that occasion it was performed by Michael Parkes but in this rendition Gary has orchestrated the performance using computer software.
Carole Harmon reads two 'eco poems' as Ingrid has styled them. Paradesa is a poem inspired by Columbia Icefield in the Canadian Rockies. Congress With Fire is a tiny story set at Grassi Lakes, also in the Canadian Rockies.
Writers Radio airs around the world through our website and radio aggregators who have widened our distribution to worldwide listeners of English speaking radio.
We have averaged between 650 and 1000 listeners for each episode with an average listening time of over 30 minutes. Listeners in Canada, the USA and Germany comprise our largest audience but we have listeners in the UK, Ethiopia, France, India, Bolivia and many other countries.
BIG READER
Susan Olding
P020, November 01 to November 14, 2021
Length: 30'
Host, Ingrid Rose
Big Reader; essays
Susan Olding
"If these essays were glass bells and you struck them one by one with your favourite pen, they would ring with the purest, clearest notes, each chapter in its singularity contributing to the gorgeous orchestral music that this book is. Olding has found exactly the right balance between the details of her life and the wide reach of research and obsession..."
Lorna Crozier, Canadian poet
Susan Olding "turns to the library to read her own life". Her literary essays reference books she has read, their effect on her at the time she read them and their continuing influence. The titles of the essays reference the location or circumstance germane to reading each book. Books read become her lifelong companions and teachers.
In this episode Susan chats with Ingrid Rose about her essay, Beach Reading which cycles around her recurring encounters with Doris Lessing's famous book, The Golden Notebook.
Big Reader was released in May, 2021 and may be ordered from the publisher, Freehand Books, your favourite bookstore, or online from Chapters Indigo or Amazon.
Susan Olding's previous book Pathologies: A Life in Essays, was selected by 49th Shelf and Amazon.ca as one of 100 Canadian books to read in a lifetime.
LIBERTY'S CHILDREN
Judith Lapadat and Gail Madjzoub
This Episode aired from October 18 to October 31, 2021. Length: 29'
Host, Carole Harmon
Gail Madjzoub
CRIMSON INK : A Novel of Modern Iran
1955-2011
Based on historical facts, Crimson Ink traces the multi-generational interweaving of three Iranian families through decades of great social change and upheaval. The novel is grounded in Gail's knowledge and experience of living within an extended Iranian Baha'i family over the course of her twenty year marriage.
The setting of Gail's reading is in the city of Shiraz, Iran. It’s early Autumn of 1955. The country is gradually emerging from the throes of its most recent clergy-led pogrom against its largest religious minority, the Baha’is.
Six year old Fareshteh and her mother Farah set the stage for the turbulent events to come.
Judith Lapadat
THE AGE OF GRANDCHILDREN
Judith Lapadat's coming of age novel takes place in the imagined near future, in a world ravaged by climate change. Best friends Becca and Honor have grown up in an all-female collective sheltering beneath the ruins of a bombed university.
Honor is a runner who carries trade packages to the wall surrounding their shelter, Becca is her watcher. Mother Stella is their group leader in this closed society. Judith's readings take place over a two day period which will awaken the girls to aspects of their world they have never suspected.
One of our intentions at Writers Radio is to welcome writers from beyond our immediate community and aquaintance. Writing is a solitary practice so groups like Salish Sea Writers and Oceanside Writers Group on Vancouver Island, which both Judith Lapadat and Gail Madjzoub participate in, are invaluable for developing manuscripts.
Crimson Ink may be ordered through bookstores or Amazon.
The Age of Grandchildren is the first novel in the Beyond Hope Series for which Judith is looking for a publisher.
Both authors are hard at work on sequels.
Towne Crier, Troubadour
Kevin Spenst
Host, Ingrid Rose
Towne Crier, Troubadour
In conversation, Ingrid Rose and Vancouver poet Kevin Spenst explore the territory of poem as performance, not on a stage but beyond cultural venues, in city and forest, from park benches and on poetry walks as reader's words interact with listeners in life. During Covid, Kevin performed over thirty physically distanced pop-up readings in person while most of the world was on Zoom.
And then he reads: surprising, hilarious, heart stopping poems with lines such as "...you can blame my tin ear for heeding the metallurgy of the dead" (from Hearts Amok: A Memoir in Verse).
In Ignite, Kevin sounds his father's schizophrenia; with wit and compassion.
Kevin is the poetry mentor at Simon Fraser University Continuing Education, The Writers Studio. His books may be ordered from your favourite bookstore or the publisher, Anvil Press and include: Hearts Amok: A Memoir In Verse and Ignite; Jabbering With Bing Bong.
Visit Kevin's website for upcoming encounters you may wish to attend.
Host, Ingrid Rose
"The Causes"
Cathy Stonehouse is known for her poetry, short stories, and critical writing. These skills are keenly focused in her debut novel, The Causes.
Jose´Ramirez is a nineteen year old conscript in Argentina's invasion of Islas Malvinas in 1982. In English this archipelago, off the coast of Argentina in the south Atlantic, is known as the Falkland Islands.
Cathy was a teenager in England when this conflict broke out. The British fleet, with a rousing send off by Margaret Thatcher, sailed 8000 miles across the Atlantic to protect what had been a British Protectorate since 1841.
This strange war, which was never actually declared, saw extreme armed combat for 72 days. In the way of modern wars, it also never really ended. Argentina considers Islas Malvinas a province of Argentina and Britain still administers its Protectorate.
This clash of realities mirrors the experience of some of the Argentinian combatants, including the novel's protagonist, José, who were tortured by their own officers as the conflict overlapped with Argentina's ongoing Dirty War.
Whether declared or not, the multi-faceted effects of war are born by those who fight them, their families, and the societies in which they live. This is what Cathy writes about.
By choosing an Argentinian protagonist Cathy steps outside the usual narrative around the colonial history of these islands which were whaled by American, Scandinavian and European ships from the mid 1700's onward. These islands are among the wildest and inaccessible places on Earth. The indigenous population is birds.
In their conversation Cathy and Ingrid Rose discuss the process of writing this novel which has been gestating since Cathy was a teenager.
Mysterious, gripping, poetic and magic-realist, The Causes is a love story for a threatened planet, set in Argentina, Spain, the UK and the South Atlantic. (from the author's website)
Traces On The Page
Host, Ingrid Rose
In conversation with Ingrid Rose, Jen Currin reflects on the challenge she has encountered in writing her recent short story collection, Hider/Seeker:
"...we can get maybe 10% or even less of lived experience onto the page."
This quest to capture the ineffable nature of relationship permeates all Jen's work, as beloved poet and now as a teller of tales.
Hider/Seeker was published in 2018 by Anvil Press. This book and Jen's award-winning poetry titles: School, The Inquisition Yours, Hagiography, and The Sleep of Four Cities are available through local bookstores and online suppliers such as Amazon.
Lost Coast Writers
Host, Ingrid Rose
A special summer episode curated by Susan Dambroff featuring writers from the Lost Coast Writers Retreat in northern California
Susan Dambroff - Introduction
Chris Kammler - The Whistlin' Gal
Jeff DeMark - Guatemala
Chris Kammler - Spring Again 1 & 2
Chris Orr - The Library of Kisses
Home and Away
Coming To Terms With Loss and Identity
Host, Ingrid Rose
Writers on this episode include:
Mara Alper:
What Do You Take When You Don't Know Where You're Going?
Mara discovers...it isn't a dream but a powerful ceremony.
Janice Masur:
Shalom Uganda: A Jewish Community on the Equator
Janice remembers her childhood community.
Daniela Cohen:
Hilda and Justice
Daniella asks, can a lost home ever be refound?
Carol Groumoutis:
Home is Where You Are (Greek)
Carol affirms in her poem, the Greek would never not be Greek.