Book Room #20 - Michelle Berry, Hunter Street Books

Michelle Berry is the author of nine books, including a new novel entitled The Prisoner and the Chaplain, coming next year from Buckrider Books - the fiction imprint of Hamilton, Ontario's Wolsak and Wynn publishers. Michelle is a dedicated servant to literature, having taught creative writing in various post-secondary programs around the country, having served on the boards of some of Canada's oldest and most prestigious literary organizations including The Writers Union of Canada, and having reviewed many of her fellow Canadian writers for The Globe & Mail newspaper.

All of that has not been enough for Michelle. Now she wants to grab you by the wrist, drag you over to a bookshelf and show you all the wonderful books you can buy in her brand new books store, Hunter Street Books, in beautiful Peterborough, a city ripe with literary history and excellent places to read while sipping wine.

Michelle joins us in the Book Room to freak out a little bit about opening a book store.

Sandy Crawley provides all the music to the podcast, for which we thank him again and again.

Book Room #19 - Nicole Dixon

Today's guest is a woman of many talents. Nicole Dixon is a writer, of course - an award-winning author of short fiction and essays. She is a former teacher and librarian, and a current permaculture home-farmer on her company-town plot of land in New Waterford, Cape Breton, on Canada's Atlantic coast. As you will hear, she has also taken to raising chickens.

Nicole spent the winter of 2015 at the Berton House Writers Retreat in Dawson City, Yukon - a very cold and dark place. While in Dawson, Nicole's fascination with permaculture led her to a unique view of the local lifestyle, and she wrote out her thoughts on all that in a wonderful essay called Permaculture on the Permafrost in Canadian Notes & Queries magazine.

Nicole joined me over skype from her lovely home on Cape Breton, to talk about chickens and writing and everything in between.

Silver Donald Cameron & Marjorie Simmins: Book Room #18

For the first time ever, I have two guests at once in the Book Room. Silver Donald Cameron and Marjorie Simmins, partners in life and now in business, are setting out this week on a bold, some might say slightly crazy cross-Canada book and film tour. Driving themselves, their two dogs and their cultural products from Cape Breton on the Atlantic coast to Vancouver on the Pacific coast. Silver Don and Marjorie launch two new books and an environmental documentary, with stops, readings and parties in every major centre along the way.

Marjorie Simmins has written a memoir about injury, recovery and the astounding power of animals to connect with and heal us. Year of the Horse (Pottersfield Press) is available now in book stores. Silver Don, after a career spanning 17 books, many of them award winners, has self-published his latest title, Warrior Lawyers, a collection of interviews with crusading legal professionals dedicated to saving the environment through the courts. Warrior Lawyers' companion film, Green Rights: The Human Right to a Healthy World, will be screened across the country during the tour.

Listen to this episode of the Book Room above, on Soundcloud, and/or download it through iTunes (where you also can, and should, subscribe to the podcast).

Jael Ealey Richardson: Book Room #17

The Book Room podcast returns! My first guest of the new season is Jael Ealey Richardson, author of not one but two books called The Stone Thrower. Richardson's 2012 memoir (The Stone Thrower, Dundurn Press, 2012) about her understanding of and relationship with her famous father, star quarterback Chuck Ealey, has been adapted into an illustrated children's book from Groundwood Books (The Stone Thrower, Groundwood Books, 2016, illustrated by Matt James).

Jael and I spoke late into one evening last month about the books, her father, her current projects -- which include the creation and sustaining of Brampton Ontario's wonderful Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD) -- about her experience growing up black in a country that likes to think of itself as post-racist, and of course about the Toronto Blue Jays. Jael has met more Blue Jays than I have, and I burn with an envy that can barely be contained.

Listen to this episode of the Book Room above, on Soundcloud, and/or download it through iTunes (where you also can, and should, subscribe to the podcast).

Groundwood Book's 2016 edition of The Stone Thrower.

Dundurn Press's 2012 edition of The Stone Thrower.

Note to sound nerds (of which I am one): For ease of scheduling, I've made the decision to do much of the Book Room podcast interviewing over Skype, which has meant a host of new sound quality challenges and a brand new home studio set-up. I promise I will stop swallowing the microphone as I do more episodes.