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. The response came from far and wide.

This has become a yearly tradition for Writers Radio. As with our Summertime special we are broadcasting this episode for three weeks, through the busy holiday season.

Katherine Govier of Canmore Alberta writes of seasonal light, beginning with the great opening line, My father was a lizard.

Kathryn Alexander's poems explore the intimate coastal landscape of Port Moody on Burrard Inlet.

Mara Alper of Ithaca New York wrote lyrics for When the World Feels Dark, composed by her friend and former husband, Elliot Z. Levine. The song is performed by Elliot Levine and Julie Hinton.

Vancouver author Kate Bird takes us on pilgrimage in Mexico.

Poet Jacinda Oldale, of Vancouver, BC writes, winter’s burn on my mind at the climax of summer.

Sheila Martineau of Vancouver writes of how Christmas annually restored her troubled parents, Franny and Sparky, to their young love.

Elizabeth Cunningham, of Nelson BC, closes the program with a trio of poems from her book, Watching the Light Below the Storm, published by Ekstasis Editions.

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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 and her extended family was incalculable. 

After fifty years of living with fear, depression and the extreme need to control Liz hit the road. In this engaging memoir she takes us on her journey to a healing centre she calls The Place. This inner work leads to an epiphany and she is able to witness the rigid structure she has lived within since her aunt's disappearance. This epiphany arrives with a fully formed idea for a book, a way to help others confront their own problems.

Having spent more than fifty years stuck in Victimtown, Liz knows the terrain as well as any local...Touring Victimtown’s most popular attractions—such as the Guilt & Shame Café, the Control Factory, the Denial Trails, and more—Liz demonstrates that while short visits offer life lessons and healing, extended stays lead to all kinds of problems. This groundbreaking framework to understanding the voices in your head will enable you to

• open healing conversations with yourself and others by equipping you with an accessible language to discuss mental health,
• reframe your shitty inner dialogues by embracing a new awareness, and
• discover your own route to Freedomville by learning to love yourself without limits or conditions.

from the publisher's website

https://greenleafbookgroup.com/titles/navigating-shitstorms

Liz Long lives in Sechelt on the Sunshine Coast, in Canada.

Navigating Shitstorms was published by Greenleaf Book Group in August 2023. It is available through Indigo in Canada, Barnes and Noble in the US and Amazon internationally.

Liz is hard at work on a follow up guidebook. She considers this her life's work. Visit her website: lizlongwrites.com to find out more.

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Writers Radio is proud to be a registered nonprofit society in British Columbia, Canada.

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 autoimmune disease with a frequency of approximately one case per million per year. Suddenly, she’s that one. As Keiko struggles for life, she learns through lived experience the importance of community to healing, one of her prior research interests at Columbia....

Seeking a wheelchair-accessible home closer to nature in which to raise her daughter, Keiko moves to Vancouver, Canada. She starts hosting informal artist salons, forms a mutually supportive group of artists and art-loving neighbours and then, surprisingly, becomes an artist herself. While her illness forced her departure from a career she spent twelve years building, it would ultimately provide the opportunity to live a life dedicated to community, friendship and art, as well as the continually evolving process of self-discovery as a mother, Japanese immigrant, survivor and artist.

—Caitlin Press

Making is Finding
Ingrid Rose and Keiko Honda discuss Keiko's happy childhood, living with her grandparents, the foundation which gave her the courage to re-invent her life.

In spring it is the dawn that is most beautiful. As the light creeps over the hills, their outlines are dyed a faint red and wisps of purplish cloud trail over them, I quietly recited to myself in Japanese. My favourite line from Sei Shonagon's The Pillow Book (written in tenth century Japan). It comes back to me every spring. 
from Accidental Blooms


Accidental Blooms was published by Caitlin Press in October 2023. You may order it from the publisher or your favourite bookstore.

    “Keiko Honda is sharing much more than a memoir. She is sharing a philosophy of love and care in a time of anxiety and uncertainty. She shares a journey of possibilities when adversity strikes with life-altering challenges. This book is both an evocation as well as an example of ‘seeing with the heart.’ Our world is a better place for Keiko Honda’s generous gift(s).”

    —Bernard Perley, associate professor for Critical Indigenous Studies, UBC

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Writers Radio is proud to be a registered nonprofit society in British Columbia, Canada.

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, both writing and collage, began after the onset of chronic illness. "Unthought Known" is a quote from psychoanalyst Christopher Bollis which refers to "experiences that reside within us, and that we in some way 'know,' but which we have never 'thought' or been able to put into words."

The exhibition consisted of collages which often incorporated cut up poems. One piece was a book, based on the plight of Humpty Dumpty. 

Humpty Dumpty After the Fall is a collage of Seema's prose and poetry with excerpts from our  zoom conversation.

I hope you enjoy listening.

Carole

Seema's work has been published in numerous magazines. She is shortlisted for the 2023 Contemporary Collage Magazine Awards.

While this program airs, she has work in Paper Play, an exhibition of collage artists at Outsiders and Others Gallery in Vancouver, November 4-25, 2023. She is longlisted for the Susan Crean Award for Nonfiction 2023.

Seema has also exhibited internationally and has an upcoming solo show, Where I Live, Feb-March 2024, at Small House Gallery, a dollhouse gallery in London, UK. The show will feature miniature 2D & 3D works and will be viewable online.

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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.

Writers Radio is proud to be a registered nonprofit society in British Columbia, Canada.

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's Mom is the legal wife, Red's Mom is the mistress. Nevertheless, their father has been loving, and taught both daughters to fly.

It's hard to avoid spoilers while introducing this complex and exciting novel. Red flees the attack on her former husband, pursued by her revengeful former lover. Surprisingly, Red's Mother urges her to seek refuge with the sister she has never met. 

Refuge leads to reconciliation in what Kirkus Reviews called this novel, "An exciting work of survival fiction with strong female characters."

Author and artist Mary Carroll Moore has been a journalist, food columnist, writing instructor and creator of a long running newsletter, Insights on the Writing Life. 

Mary's Substack blog, Your Weekly Writing Exercise has over 3000 subscribers. 

Her last three books (of nineteen total) have been self-published under her imprint, Riverbed Press. They include: 

Your Book Starts Here, Create, Craft and Sell Your First Novel, Memoir or Not-fiction book.

A Woman's Guide to Search and Rescue is available in print, e-book and audio book formats through libraries, bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, and is a "hot new release" on Amazon.

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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.

Writers Radio is proud to be a registered nonprofit society in British Columbia, Canada.

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 reconcile appearance with experience.


Winner of the Cogswell Award for Literary Excellence, shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, and long listed for the Souster Award, Trauma Head has inspired vivid responses from fellow poets:
Intimate and powerful. An astonishing paradox as Elee Kraljii Gardiner stages a series of verbal break-throughs in her poetic testimony to what is incommunicable during and after a stroke.
Daphne Marlett
The unit of composition in Trauma Head is the page used as a mirror, a reflection of the synapses detonated by the poet as she triggers the intricate mechanisms of language. Elee Kraljii Gardiner seizes this linguistic dream (traum) world with skill and playfulness; these are poems to wake up from.
Fred Wah


Poet and editor Elee Kraljii Gardiner is a Director of Vancouver Manuscript Intensive.
She is the founder and creative mentor of Thursdays Writing Collective, a non-profit organization of Vancouver's downtown eastside writers, and editor and publisher of eight of its anthologies. 
Trauma Head and her previous book of poetry, serpentine loop were published by Anvil Press. Order her books from the publisher or your favourite bookstore. Visit Elee's website for links to her recent publications and interviews.

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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.

Writers Radio is proud to be a registered nonprofit society in British Columbia, Canada.

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 separations from each other and from nature — coming home, at last, to a beleaguered yet still beautiful world.

Freehand Books

Set in metropolitan Toronto, Toronto Island and the environs of Rice Lake near Peterborough, Ontario, Night in the World follows the lives of three major characters.

The sudden death of their mother catapults brothers Justin and Oliver into a downward spiral, triggering a crisis in lives which have already been unravelling. 

Justin retreats from his business and family into drug abuse, Oliver, a former environmental journalist, tries to reclaim a childhood home on Toronto Island.
While Gabe, a graduate student conducting research on moth populations in the Peterborough area for her Masters thesis, confronts the troubling ethics of scientific study.

The plot rests on specific instances of environmental challenge, and how Justin, Oliver and Gabe respond to these challenges, entering into a dynamic relationship with the living world, and each other, which revivifies, in ways unique to each character.

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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.

Writers Radio is proud to be a registered nonprofit society in British Columbia, Canada.

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 AD by a mob led by Peter the Lector (a Christian official in the service of Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria). She has been called a martyr for philosophy. Her torture and death included flaying, dismemberment, and burning.

Celebrated in her own time for her scholarship, widespread teachings, and egalitarian spirit, Hypatia embraced the Neo-Platonic philosophy of a divine First Cause known as the One, the First, or the Good. Neoplatonists believed that everything we see and know emanated from the Good.

Over the centuries Hypatia has inspired opponents of Christianity, been co-opted as a symbol of Christian virtue, been represented as a symbol of opposition to Catholicism, and in modern times she has become an icon of women's rights and the feminist movement.


Hypatia’s Wake addresses many false and fanciful representations about her life and death.

Hypatia lived and the flesh of her invisibility has not stolen her from us forever. We can claim her and wake her loss as we are awakened to her. When we give Hypatia back to the flesh of the world, we claim visibility.

Susan Andrews Grace



Visual artist and poet Susan Andrews Grace lives in Nelson BC. where she teaches writing at Oxygen Art Centre.

Hypatia's Wake, Susan's sixth book of poetry, was published in 2022 by Inanna Publications . Order from the publisher or your favourite bookstore.

Visit Susan's website to see her other publications and treat yourself to her visual art. 

My visual art practice conceptually searches for the metaphysical in the ordinary: old cloth, rubble from demolition, rusty objects. It includes textile installation, mixed media, and sculpture and has been exhibited in (mostly) public galleries in Canada and the US over the last thirty years.

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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.

Writers Radio is proud to be a registered nonprofit society in British Columbia, Canada.

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 reading:

Donna Stephen:
The West Highland Way, spring 2023
Barbara Baydala:
poems inspired by words plus her poetic response to my question.
Kate Bird:
memories of Mt. Pleasant Outdoor Pool in Vancouver, lamenting its loss
Cynthia Sharp:
love poems

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.

Writers Radio is proud to be a registered nonprofit society in British Columbia, Canada.

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 political, economic and ecological complexities. Oriane Lee Johnston’s memoir takes the reader from her island home on the west coast of Canada into southern Africa as it is today, exploring ethical relations with land, with culture, the sacred and the human heart.
The story follows an inner call to the Mavuradonha Mountains in the eastern edge of the Zambezi Escarpment. The quest to preserve this wild and unspoiled bioregion parallels the campaign to protect the Great Bear Rainforest, the author’s birthplace in coastal B.C."

from the publishers blurb

Title: The Geography of Belonging
Sub Title: A Love Story of Horses and Africa
Episode: P065
START: July 24, 2023
ENDS: July 13, 2023
Length:  28 mins
Host/Producer: Ingrid Rose

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.

Writers Radio is proud to be a registered nonprofit society in British Columbia, Canada.