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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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…

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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.

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.

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.