Writers Radio

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 fig...

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 be...

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 S...

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...

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...

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...

"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&apos...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 thou...

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....

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....

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....

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...

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 aut...

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,...

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&apos...

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 reconc...

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...

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 rea...

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...

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 poli...