Writers Radio

P122 The Last Wilderness : Carole Harmon “ I’m working in that part of Canada which stands on end.” Byron Harmon What is wild?   This question underlies Carole Harmon’s inquiry into the role her family played in the colonial history of western North America, specifically the Pacific Northwest in the USA and the Canadian Rockies.  The Last Wilderness centres on her paternal grandfather, Byron Harmo...

A Memoir Through Essays and Other Stories Ingrid Rose The body is Ingrid Rose's touchstone as she explores her life through stories and personal essays: • Her relationship with her twin brother, Tim • Her New York adventures as a young woman, waitressing in a jazz club and performing with Warm Rain, a spoken word and music ensemble  • Her spiritual and intellectual transformation from a young...

They Lived Ever After Stories and true accounts about the resilience of the human spirit, the importance of fairy tales, and creativity as a wellspring in troubling times. Una Suseli O'Connell: They Lived Ever After Medwyn McConachy: Vasilysa and the Coloured Stones Graem Castell: By Way of Beachy Head Mohamad Kebbewar: Fragmented From the Anthology, Off the Map: Vancouver writers with lived...

Dark Matter: Women Witnessing, Dreams Before Extinction Program 3 of 3: Readings from the anthology JoJo Donovan: Dispatches from the Collapse of Time Nora Jamieson: I Am Nothing Without My Dead Wendy Gorchinsky Lambo: Making Love With a Three Billion Year Old Woman Susan Cerulean: Bear Requiem Juliana Borrero Echeverry: Landscapes at the End of the World ORDER THE ANTHOLOGY HERE Dark Matter Women...

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 N...

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...

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...

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 in...

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), Earl...

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...

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 ch...

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...

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,...

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 daugh...

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 - Explo...

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...

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 h...

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 f...

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 P...

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 perso...

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 epis...

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...

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 renew...

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 Th...

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 Hous...