Outlook on Radio Western

BAM! 2025 - coming to you live on location. Yep, October is more recognisable for being Breast Cancer Awareness Month, but while Blindness Awareness Month is less familiar to some, it sounds better, more straightforward, rolling off the tongue as acronym than BCAM. This week on Outlook, with the start of a new month…October, we’re highlighting BAM even though, we always say, every month is BAM for...

Milk worms, silkworms, and webs - oh my! It was a Silkworm September. From Chicago to Northern Ireland, where are we now? Some find it amazing we get out much at all. This week on Outlook - sister/co-host Kerry’s recovering from another sickness and makes good use of the “mute” button, brother/co-host Brian is raving about his double Silkworm dream trip, and BF (3rd co-host Barry) he’s researching...

The Music Director at Radio Western says: I’m just so grateful to have you guys on our station, to have Outlook here on our programming, and congratulations on reaching your 300th episode. Note at this point: we are a radio show first, as our theme states, and then become this podcast, if anyone was unaware of how and where we started/start each week - 94.9 on the dial locally, streaming audibly l...

Guest Maria says: “God I just Love the feel of a good paperback.” To that co-host Kerry replies emphatically: “Books are thrilling!” “Working in the book industry and having a fresh book…the smell of a fresh book, there’s nothing like it,” says Maria Johnson of Girl Gone Blind. This was her life, for many years, before the age of fifty and before she started over in health and fitness and then as...

September has arrived and it’s Labour Day with Laura Bain. Laura is wrapping up school and starting a new job and she’s back on Outlook to tell us all about travel, transitions, and changes she’s made since she was last on air with us. Speaking of schooling, Laura has been on an academic journey in psychology and social work, having just completed a Masters in Social Work, taking her own time to g...

Content warning: (Please do take care while listening as this episode discusses themes around suicidal ideation and death. If you are in distress currently, across Canada you can call or text 9-8-8 toll free from anywhere around the country. *** We’ve known of this returning guest for years and first had her on with us back in 2021 - during Covid when she made podcasts from inside her closet, like...

After our conversation with today’s guest, check out our thoughts on how theatre and performance spaces can work to be more inclusive and can work towards a greater focus on meeting the access needs of intersecting humans in artistic spaces. As Brian shares about his really missing out on being in those spaces, Kerry shares about others who are out there, if you know where to look as reflections f...

She’s just a girl and she’s on fire She’s living in a world and it’s on fire. —Alicia Keys It’s a slow burn summer, burn as in the wildfires ravaging communities and landscapes across Canada while 18-year-old Canadian competitive swimmer Summer McIntosh is on fire, winning multiple medals at the World Championships, and this is another mixed bag episode in mid summer on the August long weekend as...

Bumbleberry and BF Barry back with us again. It’s not all roses on Outlook this week, though it’s another Disability Pride Month episode (celebrating brother/co-host Brian’s July transplant anniversary) and we’re talking poutine and pickle fries to mark the occasion. Actually, we discuss an evening out for the three of us at a family wedding as sister/co-host Kerry shares about her blind/female fa...

K: “Community is so important. To knowing you’re not alone and then showing up for each other. H: 100 percent. K: even when a situation is scary and people are thinking about their own situations of course but also thinking about their loved ones and their neighbours. H: We will only survive this with community. We will only survive this together. We will only survive this by showing up for each o...

“We will carve our place into time and space.” —Wild Things, Alessia Cara It’s powerful outcry, a protest and empowerment song by Alessia, as sister/co-host Kerry loves music that’s unapologetic - Things are heating up during July’s Disability Pride Month (DPM). This week on Outlook we’re continuing the Pride talk on another mixed bag with brother/co-host Brian’s baseball adventures, reading image...

As we cross over from June’s Pride Month into July’s Disability Pride, let’s just say it is a summer of PRIDe with us here. This week on Outlook we’re talking about the connections, the intersectionalities between those celebrating LGBTQIA2S+ and celebrating living with disability. Yes, we know that the idea of “feeling proud” of living with disability (in this society which stigmatises anything n...

Bf Barry says of summer starting, revving up, especially for co-host Kerry: Barry says “hanging out and hanging in” But as we greet the summer season, we’re hanging out with someone Kerry came across through Steph McCoy of the fashion, style, and inclusion platform "Bold Blind Beauty". Of course, it’s about the representation which I think is very important, also for the generations that are young...

Our guest says: “Let me tell you, nothing…nothing in the world is as satisfying as fighting a salty gamer bro online in Mortal Combat, winning a match, and then telling them - hey you just got beat by a blind, trans girl. Have a good one. No rematch!” We featured a sibling pair, Zoe and Jessica (both born with the same blindness condition as us, LcA) on our Siblings episode four years ago and Zoe...

It all started with a trip to Cuba. Our guest on Outlook this week explains: At one moment in life you don’t really know what you’re doing and then, all of a sudden, you get this opportunity and a huge passion just grew out of it. From Belgium to Canada, Linsay Lusyne has a love of travel, opening it up to everyone along the way starting with a previous experience training blind people on navigati...

LOOK OUT - Goose crossing ahead! Not all take kindly to the following of directions. Communication takes practice. Patience is needed to get where you’d like to be. Last week was National Accessibility Week (beginning on the final Sunday of May) and this time on Outlook (where “accessibility” is a given) we discuss the unhelpful helpers, how we orient ourselves, plus goose crossings and fermented...

The theme for National AccessAbility Week this year is “ Breaking barriers together: Paving the way for an inclusive future .” Established in 2017, National AccessAbility Week celebrates, promotes and showcases the diversity, inclusion and accessibility in this country, and highlights some of the important initiatives aimed at creating an Accessible Canada. We begin and end in Cornwall with this o...

Irish bells, to kick things off, to celebrate Oyster on her seventh birthday like the bells worn around her neck as she runs free at her favourite place. It’s our post-election Mixed Bag show on Outlook this week, until the next one when sister/co-host Kerry and Regular co-host Barry can hopefully be back in studio with brother/co-host Brian. In the meantime, it’s early May and we’re looking back...

“Blind baseball - it’s like the great equaliser. I’ve found the experience of playing the adaptive sports just as fulfilling, motivating, and frankly competitive as the sports I played as a sighted person growing up.” Our guest on Outlook this week was used to adversity in life, having faced both grief and treatment of a serious chronic illness as a teenager. When Zach Ship was newly blind, years...

“On the way to the library, I flew a kite.” We here on Outlook decide to begin this particular Mixed Bag episode with the above quote, start to a social media status, because we on this show love libraries/love books and love the outlook of writer Leona Godin, also close friend of this radio show/podcast, but really because elections make us want to take a break to fly a kite too. As the federal e...

Speaking on the Canadian (Can lit) literary scene and on April/May’s The Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD) specifically, Canadian author and accessibility advocate Amanda Leduc says: It’s impossible to have something that’s 100 percent accessible all the time. We’re always working towards a more accessible world, working towards making those adjustments, bit by bit by bit. And that’s where I t...

Taking a big bite out of life, brother/co-host Brian has returned from a birthday celebration trip to New York City and he’s back and telling us all about it. He shares about his accessible travel and airport experiences at Toronto Pierson, JFK, and LaGuardia, the music show “An Evening With Ida and Tsunami” at Bowery Ballroom he attended with friend/Outlook guest Nefertiti Matos Olivares on Birth...

We’re running to keep up with the train of time, yet through slivers of memory, on this yearly audio diary looking back on the year that was. It’s our original podcast, Ketchup On Pancakes, and we’re recapping 2024 as 2025 rushes forward in a blur. On this one, we’re joined by friend/boyfriend Barry Toner from Ireland, someone who’s joined us in the past, down in the basement where it all took pla...

Records sound better than t-shirts. Today we’re talking literature and CanLit, sports, and music around the theme of accessibility as we continue to promote women in the arts for the remainder of Women’s History Month. Well this week on Outlook we’re discussing wearing our message on our clothing as The Festival of Literary Diversity’s (FOLD) schedule of events and festival sign-up has gone live o...

“When I was a little girl, I used to dream as a man, because I wanted to do things that women didn’t do back then such as traveling to Africa, living with wild animals and writing books," said Dr. Jane Goodall. "I didn’t have any female explorers or scientists to look up to but I was inspired by Dr. Dolittle, Tarzan and Mowgli in The Jungle Book — all male characters. It was only my mother who sup...