2024 Podcast Directory

PODCASTS 2024

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DIRECTORY

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2020

Barbara Baydala, Colette Gagnon
P105
Speaking Of Family
2024.12.23

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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, while assembling these poems for Writers Radio, that I can’t write about my father without placing the two of us within 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 on 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.

Jeremy Page, Alison Goeller, Ingrid Rose, Peter Buckman
P104
Good Bedtime Stories
2024.12.23

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Twice a year, we issue a themed call for submissions to 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 mystery-writing class and were eventually paired 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.

Adrienne Drobnies
P103
Where Science and Poetry Intersect
2024.12.02

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Vancouver poet, scientist, and environmental activist Adrienne Drobnies in conversation with Ingrid Rose.

Salt and Ashes, Adrienne’s debut poetry collection, won several prestigious awards. Judges commented, “A scientist mourning her husband in poetry is the heart of this extraordinary collection.”
Adrienne is currently working on a second poetry book featuring poems inspired by her Texas childhood.

Betsy Warland
P102
Narrative Position
2024.11.11

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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 her own life and work.

Kris Fleerackers
P101
Little Sister Grimm
2024.10.28

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Reimagining a classic fairy tale with puppeteer, puppet builder, performer, director, and filmmaker Kris Fleerackers.

Bored and tired of 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…

Janie Brown
P100
Radical Acts of Love
2024.10.14

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Radical Acts of Love
Twenty Conversations to Inspire Hope
at the End of Life

“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 through 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

anie Brown has been an oncology nurse in Glasgow and then in Vancouver for four decades.

She is the founder of the Callanish Society, which, through programs and retreats, creates a healing space for people irrevocably changed by cancer.

Order Radical Acts of Love from your library or favourite bookseller. It is also available as an e-book on Kindle and Apple Books, and as an audiobook.

Miranda Pearson
P093
Bridestones
2024.09.23

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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 Pearson discusses how lifelong themes and experiences are interwoven in this book, like the white lines that connect the stones on the cover of her book. For example, love renewed while visiting the Bridestones (sandstone rock formations in Yorkshire), or the world seen from a 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. She has an MFA from the University of British Columbia; has worked as an editor and creative writing instructor, and now practices visual art.

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.

Leslie Hill
P092
Dressed For Dancing
2024.09.09

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What does one do when fate steals the love of your life in only the eighth year of your relationship? This happened to memoirist Leslie Hill who also wrote, I wasn't going to commit suicide, but I could imagine waking up one day and deciding not to get out of bed. Ever.

From her essay, Grief:

Eventually I left my life in Canada and moved to the Findhorn Foundation, a New Age spiritual community in northern Scotland. It's a place where people are open, accepting and compassionate. I lived there for nearly six years, confronting all the feelings that I'd denied most of my life. By the time my visa had ended and I returned to Canada I could feel that the bits of grit from the past that I'd imagined clinging to me forever, had become pearls. The natural kind, lumpy and irregular, but my own. Grief and denial have become acceptance, understanding and maturity.

On leaving Findhorn Leslie wrote Dressed for Dancing which was characterized by former Associate Director of the Findhorn community, David Spangler, as: hands down the best book I’ve read in years about the modern Findhorn Foundation community. He also wrote, Dressed for Dancing drew me in from the first page and held me captivated throughout. Gracefully written, it has the excitement of a good novel but with the depth and insights that come from it being a true story of one woman’s spiritual awakening and journey.

Leslie Hill's essays have been published in Pilgrimage, Shark Reef, What I Didn’t Know: True Stories of Becoming A Teacher, the Tahoma Literary Review, Braided Way, and the Globe and Mail.

Dressed for Dancing was self published in 2012. It was one of ten nominees for the Whistler Independent Book Awards that year.

In my opinion, it deserves far more attention than it has received so far. Dressed for Dancing is available through the public library system. It may be ordered from Hager Books in Vancouver.

Findhorn

The history section of Findhorn Foundation website relates, Our story has a very unlikely beginning. Our founders hadn’t actually intended to create a community – rather, the community found them. On the way they turned a windswept wasteland into astonishing food gardens, and formed a centre that’s inspired change makers and explorers throughout the world.

Located on the Moray Peninsula in northeast Scotland, Findhorn Foundation community is named for Findhorn River. It evolved after spiritual seekers Eileen and Peter Caddy and their friend Dorothy MacLean lost their jobs managing Cluny Hill Hotel in Forres, Moray Peninsula, in the 1960's.

Living in a shared trailer, with the Caddy's three sons as well, they planted a garden which was so remarkable it attracted international attention. Eileen's spiritual guidance and Peter's practical horticultural skills were guided by Dorothy's communications with entities she called the overlighting angels, or devas, of plants and other natural elements. Others joined them and the community grew, eventually taking over Cluny Hill Hotel and building an eco-village.

In 2023 Findhorn underwent another transformation; Covid, and a fire on their property, had challenged the financial viability of the community. The broader programming was stopped and in 2024 the Foundation began offering much smaller programs at locations in the west of Scotland as they feel their way forward to a new operational model.

Alison Goeller, Elizabeth Cunningham, Kevin Spenst, Susan Dambroff
P091
Writers Gambit, Part 02
2024.08.19

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Gambit, a word from chess, struck our producer, Ingrid Rose, as appropriate for the daring, wide-ranging work recently created 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 for 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, the poems honour each heartbreak and celebration she encountered and help her 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 the journey moving 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 the 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 Chair Keeps the Floor Down, may be ordered from the publisher, Finishing Line Press.

Alison Goeller: The Possessive Case and Frozen in Love, Will Sargent mysteries, may be ordered from Amazon.

Happy summer reading!

Cathy Stonehouse, Tariq Malik, Chad Norman, Cornelia Hoogland
P090
Writers Gambit, Part 01
2024.07.29

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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 detail 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 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!

Susan McCaslin
P089
Consider
2024.07.15

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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, 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 draw on ekphrastic inspiration.

In my conversation with Susan, we focus on the connection between mystical experience and activism, themes I sense throughout the book.

We also discuss Susan's role as editor of Walking Into God by E.D. Blodgett, published in spring 2024 by Farleigh Dickinson University Press. Susan also reads from Walking Into God.

Carole Harmon, Writers Radio producer

Liz Long and Caitlin Hicks
P088
The Child I Was, The Adult I Became
2024.07.01

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Listen to this lively event, recorded on 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 that 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 to follow her heart's voice from Victimtown to Freedomville.

Caitlin Hicks has published two engaging novels based on her childhood growing up in a large Catholic family in Pasadena, CA. Annie Shea is the 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 available on Amazon, but do ask your favourite bookseller for them.

Atma Frans
P087
A Belgian Childhood: Poems
2024.06.17

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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 that has been 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, despite their troubled history, as well as their firm determination to enjoy the good things in life.

Maria Coffey
P086
Instead
2024.06.03

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The adventures we wanted to have, and did have, kayaking for months on end in very remote parts of the world, where there were tropical diseases, hippos, crocodiles, big seas, and big sea crossings, or cycling the whole length of Vietnam just after it opened up. Some of these were really, really challenging. I know there's no way 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 in her life. She began to write, moved from England to Canada, and 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 was never altogether left to Maria. In 1994 in Vietnam, Dag and Maria met street children Vinh and Bac, whom they tried to help. Fortune didn't smile on their attempt to relocate the children to 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.

Alison Goeller
P085
Other Voices
2024.06.20

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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.
In this episode of Writers Radio, Ingrid Rose discusses family secrets and the writing life with Alison Goeller, who also reads her short stories Fallen and Pepita.

Alison Goeller's short stories have appeared 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.

Nan Seymour
P084
Beloved Water Body
2024.03.11

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The life of the 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 cultivate 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 honour a great intelligence deserving of legally defensible personal rights as we sing back to an ever-singing, 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, threatened by climate change, human-generated pollution, and environmentally unsustainable practices.
Dams on tributary rivers divert water from the lake, which is shrinking. Sequestered toxic chemicals from industrial farms and industry have settled on the lake bottom, creating dust storms of pollution as the lake recedes. Wildlife are forced to leave this habitat, which lies on the North American flyway for migratory birds.

Beginning in January 2022, Nan Seymour has spearheaded a daily vigil for the lake, aligning with the seven-week Utah State legislative session.

The vigil began in 2022 as a single woman, Nan, living in a trailer on Antelope Island, supported by fellow writers and friends. It has grown in numbers, voices, and actions 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.

In 2024, the vigil "walked the waves" around the Utah State capital building, morning and evening, sometimes joined by lawmakers.

Irreplaceable, a collective long poem of over 500 voices that 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.

Onjana Yawnghwe
P083
We Follow The River
2024.04.22

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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 also the first president of unified Burma, a hoped-for democratic state.

In 1962, the first military coup in 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 eventually 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, yet still experienced 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. Excerpts are available 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, your favourite bookstore, or an online book outlet.

Yehudit Silverman
P082
I Am Not The Darkness
2024.04.08

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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 about the war in Israel/Gaza, the deaths of loved ones, or nature, Yehudit Silverman distils a life spent as an 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 filmmaker.

The Story Within: Myth and Fairy Tale in Therapy & The Hidden Face of Suicide

Based on her clinical work in several hospitals and her role as former Chair and 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, The 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

Pervin Saket
P081
To Push the Limits of Identity
2024.03.25

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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 about 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 the timeless epic Ramayana, Pervin’s novel Urmila rekindles questions of love, devotion, and desire in contemporary India.

Alison Braid-Fernandez
P080
Tender, a poetics ekphrasis
2024.03.11

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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, 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 by the relationships she has encountered with individuals, trains and buses, parks, fruit, colours, and the devices we live with. Lately, she has been writing ekphrastic poems that draw inspiration from artworks and from overlapping influences such as music and the written word. These 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.

Carole Harmon

Blue Dot: after Dorothea Lasky, Animal, essays

Ekphrasis Yourself, Jennifer Nelson, Woodland Pattern Book Centre, woodlandpattern.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 currently working on a short story collection titled Look Both Ways and Other Stories. Visit her website to learn and read more.

Elizabeth Herejk, Jadzia Pernosilz
P079
Two Journeys To Self Publishing
2024.02.26

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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 was realized through new models of self-publishing.

Elizabeth Herejk's memoir, From Kendal to Canada: An Adventurous Spirit, follows her childhood in Kendal, a small market town in Cumbria, England; her 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 an emphasis on her European heritage. Life in Kendal was austere, a story of self-reliance and ingenuity amid food shortages and other privations that 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 family strength can endure great hardship.

Both authors self-published their memoirs through new publishing models that 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.

Jane Callen
P078
Murder, Art, Love
2024.02.12

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The Transformation of Kat

Kat, the protagonist of Jane Callen’s novel Bernini’s Elephant, leads the reader on a dark journey of transformation. This tale of murder and redemption unfolds across contrasting settings in Canada and Italy, with lush descriptions of Vancouver, the coastal wilderness of Vancouver Island, and the high-art worlds 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 about her writing and current projects.

Olajide Osalawu
P077
Loss Is A Thing Of Hope
2024.02.12

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Goodbye to Lampedusa
It is what they say
because the sea leaves no footprints
to mark 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 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.

Olajide Osalawu

Nigerian poet Salawu Ọlájídé joins host Ingrid Rose to discuss his chapbook, Preface for Leaving Homeland.
Ọlájídé is a Ph.D. candidate at the 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 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 preserving 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."
In 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 on our podcast.

Priscilla Long
P076
Holy Magic
2024.01.15

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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 poems include epigraphs by other writers or artists. Each section captures the mood of its colour. For instance, Archeology of Orange, A Glass of Bitter Ale, and Bluebirds.

It is a rainbow of a book.

In 2022, Priscilla Long released 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.

Michelle Poirier Brown
P075
Passion of the Poet
2024.01.01

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Poetry is the hinge between the artist, in that moment, and the reader or listener, in 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, and because its intent is fleeting.

"Advocacy through story: an interview with Michelle Poirier Brown".

Michelle Poirier 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 and 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 Poirier Brown is an internationally published writer and performer, currently living on the traditional unceded 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 of poems and photographs, Intimacies, was published by Jack Pine Press.

Adapted from the author's website

Order You Might Be Sorry You Read This from your local library or a bookstore, or directly from the publisher

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