"You called up love as rainmakers call upon the rain" Ingrid Rose writing about her mother in "Embracing Her"

In keeping with our Harvest theme, Ingrid Rose re-members her mother in Embracing Her.

Writers Radio launched in November 2020. On our first anniversary we inaugurated an annual tradition of including work by our three producers: Ingrid Rose, Gary Sill, and myself, Carole Harmon, in our programming so that we reveal ourselves as well as the writers we have represented.

In this episode we celebrate the work of Ingrid Rose.

Embracing Her is a «re-membering» of Ingrid’s mother, Irene Rinna Rose. Ingrid was born into a non-practising Jewish family. Like her father, she was an atheist and involved in left-wing politics until she began to follow a spiritual path.

The program will close with Ingrid’s ekphrastic poem, Song of Songs. This poem was written to accompany the paintings of 50 Jewish artists at the Sidney and Gertrude Zack Gallery in 2018. This exhibition celebrated Israel’s 70 years of song and dance.

Ingrid Rose is a writer, teacher of writing, and co-host and co-producer of Writers Radio. She was born and raised in London, England but now lives in Vancouver, Canada. 

Ingrid has published in Canadian literary journals: CV2; Emerge 2001; the anthology Sustenance, edited by Rachel Rose; and Musicworks Magazine 2011 (a prizewinning story).

The State of Our Father is forthcoming in the anthology Don't Tell: Family Secrets edited by Arlene Paré and Donna  McCart Sharkey (Demeter Press 2023).

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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.

Episode: P043
Broadcast dates: September 19 to October 02, 2022
Length:  38'' mins
Host: Carole Harmon

New releases by Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch and Tariq Malik share themes of the human consequences of war which continue to play out long after the war has ended.

Winterkill is set during the Holodomor, which means death by starvation in Ukrainian. This was a man made famine created in 1932/33 by Joseph Stalin. The Holodomor starved to death millions of people in Ukraine, rural Russia and Kazakhstan as part of Stalin's plan to modernize agriculture through creating collective farms and eliminating peasant farmers. This genocide went virtually unnoticed in the west.

Exit Wounds follows the forced migration of Tariq and his family from the Punjab following the religious partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. Their home in the village of Kotli was in the epicentre of this conflict; an estimated million people died in this area. Escaping, Tariq's profession of industrial engineer took them to Kuwait and then Iraq. They inadvertently found themselves in war after war. Finally they immigrated to Canada.

Winterkill is published by Scholastic in Canada and the USA. It will be widely available through the library system as well as bookstores.

Exit Wounds will be released in fall 2022 and may be pre-ordered from Caitlin Press.

Listen to previous episodes: Traitors Among Us with Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch and Exit Wounds with Tariq Malik as podcasts on the Writers Radio website.

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.

In the spirit of HARVEST, this autumn’s programs will recall people and events, underscoring their importance which reverberates in today’s world when we remember.

Elizabeth Cunningham of Nelson, British Columbia is a writer, teacher and visual artist who loves collaborating with others. Both her life and her work demonstrate a wide range of interest and commitment, which seem to flow through time and experience.

In this episode we spotlight her 2021 poetry release, Watching the Light Below the Storm. Then Elizabeth and I discuss her creative non-fiction memoir, Marty's Place and her next poetry offering, Airborne which are works in progress, with readings from both.


Marty's Place fits our autumn theme of harvest very well. 

Marty's Place was The Village Bookstore owned by Marty Ahvenus. It opened in 1961 in the Gerrard Street Village in Toronto; a creative hub of the 60's and 70's which eventually gave way to the inevitable high-rises of urban renewal. Marty Ahvenus was an early supporter of emerging Canadian authors Margaret Atwood, bpNichol and many others.

Elizabeth worked for Marty in her late teens, and at Coach House Press, working on her own projects among others. Her memoir of these times recalls the early flowering of CanLit which is evident in the blooming garden of Canadian books today.

Two poems from Airborne complete the program, accompanied by Doug Jamieson's original music by the same title.

Watching the Light Below the Storm and Elizabeth's earlier poetry book,  A Fragile Grace are available through bookstores or direct from the publisher, Ekstasis Editions.

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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.

Smoke and Mirrors, a chapter from Sheila Martineau’s memoir, I Wanted to Tell You This: a memoir of magic, music, and madness, untangles the challenges she endured as the ‘disobedient daughter’ of brilliant but brutal, misguided parents and the strategies she used to combat and escape.

Her father was a professional magician and commercial artist. Her mother was a gold-medal classical pianist. They were high school sweethearts who performed together on stage and married while still in their teens.

Sheila Martineau PhD is a writer, copy editor, book designer, and social researcher who collaborates with artists, architects, and publishers. Her scholarly articles and doctoral dissertation focused on issues relating to childhood trauma.

sheilamartineau.com.

Rewriting Resilience: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Childhood Resilience and the Politics of Teaching Resilience to 'Kids at Risk. (UBC, 1999)

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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.

Families, in turn, are knit together or torn apart by the stories we tell ourselves and each other.

Clarissa Green understands the world-creating power of stories. The author, who died in August, 2020 after seeing her book to publication, practised as a family therapist in Vancouver for decades, specializing in the dilemmas of adult children and their frail, elderly parents.

Clarissa reads from her book Grownupedness, a meditation on what she learned, both in her clinical practice and in her own family. Her particular interest is in the way that adult children and their parents all yearn to be seen by other family members as competent, mature adults. Hence the playful title of this remarkable book, “Grownupedness.”

These are deftly sketched accounts of family pain, laughter and renewal as families respond to the traumas of aging and the looming presence of death. Green, who worked hard in local creative writing programs and writers’ groups to perfect her craft as a storyteller, brings these fraught moments of family dynamics to life with vivid descriptions and telling anecdotes.

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.

Episode: P039
Broadcast dates: July 25 to August 07, 2022
Length:  30 mins
Host: Carole Harmon

Katherine Govier's historical novel, The Ghost Brush celebrates the life of Oei (hey you) the daughter, student, assistant and eventually fellow artist of Katsushika Hokusai, the most famous artist of the Edo period (1603 - 1867) in Japan . In The Ghost Brush Oei is a ghost narrator of her own life.

There is in this book a mystery to be solved; an intimate look at Edo, a closed culture poised on the brink of opening itself to the west; a portrait of a lifelong relationship between father and daughter; and a view into a closed and secret culture in which women were currency and citizens were not permitted to accrue wealth.

Oei became an acknowledged painter in her own time despite the restrictive social rules women lived under in the Edo period. Her significant contributions to Hokusai's later works are now acknowledged by some scholars, including attributions for some paintings credited to her father. Nevertheless her death and the fate of her paintings continues to be shrouded in mystery.

The sequel to The Ghost Brush, The Red Fuji, in which the ghost of Oei continues to search for her lost paintings is in a long lineup somewhere between finished manuscript and bookstores. We will announce a release date in our Writers Radio newsletter when we know it.

The Ghost Brush was published by Harper Collins. In the US it was titled The Print Maker's Daughter. 

An extended edition of the book is available as an e-book from Apple Books and Kodo in the collection Katherine Govier Three Book Bundle In this edition there is another character, Rebecca, who becomes obsessed with Oei and joins the hunt for her lost paintings and for answers to questions of attribution of Hokusai's later works.

Find out more about this author and her other novels on her website: katherinegovier.com

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.

Much of Heather Menzies' adult life has been spent writing, researching, teaching and giving talks throughout the world about critical issues of our time. Understanding herself to be a seeker, and feeling the limits of the current academic discourse, she welcomed the inner debate between her intellectual self and the self that knew there were other experiential ways of "knowing".

In conversation with writers radio host Ingrid Rose, she tells the remarkable story of an early experience as a child, her connection to something much larger than her known world, and reads from her book, Reclaiming the Commons for the Common Good, A memoir and manifesto about re-connection with her Highland Scottish ancestors who had lived by the laws of the Commons until the English "Clearances" drove them from the land they knew in their bones.

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.

Jane Mortifee’s 2018 novel, Out of the Fire, could be read as a balm for the troubled, chaotic times we find ourselves in. It tells of a quest for forgiveness and healing from the ravages of vengeance, bitterness and hate.

On the riverbank near an African village, a violent act sets into motion fates that intertwine and continue to bring anguish and torment through to the next generation. How can reconciliation and forgiveness ever bring healing when grief, revenge and destiny continue to play out their purpose? When a devastating fire rips through the village, lives are lost and survivors are changed forever. 
 
The scene Jane Mortifee reads for this writers radio program takes place several years after the fire. A meeting between the young woman, Ntombi, and young man, Mantla, in the first flush of awareness of their mutual attraction. The story is as much about the characters as it is the potency of the tribal earth which is Africa and the powerful spiritual healers. The trials undertaken through different destinies to find resolution.

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.

Writer: Shamcher Bryn Beorse

Episode: P036
Broadcast dates: June 13 to June 26, 2022
Length:  44'' mins
Host: Carole Harmon

Carol Sill in conversation with Carole Harmon

Airdate: May 30 - June 12, 2022 - at the top of each hour, every hour

Join host Carole Harmon in conversation with Carol Sill, publisher of the previously unpublished memoir of Shamcher Bryn Beorse, A SUFI WENT TO WAR.

Shamcher (his Sufi name) was a Norwegian engineer, economist, author, and Sufi who distinguished himself in WW2 as spy, strategist and soldier often working with MI 5 and resistance fighters.

Carol Sill became Shamcher's close friend and student in his later years when he lived in Bremerton, Washington on the west coast of the USA. Since Shamcher's death in 1980 Carol has worked as archivist and publisher to bring his published and unpublished manuscripts of philosophy, essays, fiction, and memoir to the public.

Carol hesitated to publish A Sufi Went to War, which Shamcher completed in 1979, in a time of relative world peace. The war in Ukraine has revealed a need for fresh perspectives and a more nuanced understanding of history.

Shamcher Bryn Beorse was the student and friend of sufi mystic Inayat Khan. A celebrated musician in his native India, Inayat Khan spread the spiritual and practical message of love, harmony and beauty through his music and teachings in Europe and America between 1910 and 1926.

Shamcher recalled:
After one of Sufi Inayat’s talks, a listener asked, “Should a Sufi be a pacifist?”

Said Inayat, “If people of goodwill lay down their arms today, they will be forced into war, forced to fight—not FOR their ideals but AGAINST them.”

Three of Inayat’s children shortly afterwards distinguished themselves in World War II. I went over the hill to serve, though pacifists screamed at me.

In this episode Carol reads the chapter, To Kidnap a Head of State.

This was an actual plot to kidnap Hitler in the midst of World War 2 which, had it succeeded, would have ended the war. It is by no means the only incident of espionage, daring and mysterious occurrences in A Sufi Went to War which may be ordered on Amazon.

Carol Sill edits and publishes The Shamcher Bulletin, a newsletter on Substack. She also publishes a newsletter of her own writing on Substack, Personal Papers: Writing from the intersection of imagination and reality.

A Sufi Went to War, and other titles by Shamcher Bryn Beorse are published by Alpha Glyph Publications on Salt Spring Island, BC, Canada.

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.

Writer: Shamcher Bryn Beorse

Episode: P035
Broadcast dates: May 30 to June 12, 2022
Length:  36''
Host: Carole Harmon

Carol Sill in conversation with Carole Harmon

Airdate: May 30 - June 12, 2022 - at the top of each hour, every hour

Shamcher Bryn Beorse was a Norwegian engineer, economist, author, and sufi who distinguished himself in WW2 as spy, strategist and soldier often working with MI 5 and resistance fighters.

His memoir of that time was completed in 1979, a year before his death. It was published in May 2022 by Alph Glyph Publications and may be ordered through Amazon.

This program is focused by a reading of the chapter: To Kidnap a Head of State, the plot to kidnap Hitler developed in 1943 by prominent individuals within the German military and Allied Forces. Had it been allowed, it would have ended the war. This is by no means the only incident of espionage, daring and mysterious occurrences in this compelling memoir.

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.