Weekend AM

The provincial budget came down this week, and some members of the arts community are concerned that promises have not been kept. We have a panel to discuss the topic in the last half hour of today's Weekend AM.

Douglas Hunter is a writer with an interest in discovery and the people who set out to find things and places, and why they set out to find those things and places. In the past, Douglas has written about Henry Hudson in Half Moon: Henry Hudson and the Voyage that Redrew the Map of the New World and about what drives people to seek the unknown in God's Mercies: Rivalry, Betrayal, and the Dream of Discovery. His latest book is The Race to the New World: Christopher Columbus, John Cabot, and a Lost History of Discovery.

RCA Theatre presents a new production of the award-winning play The Drowning Girls, written by Beth Graham, Daniela Vlaskalic and Charlie Tomlinson. In the play, three women recount how they've been wooed, wed, insured and then dead, known as victims in the "Brides in the Bath" murders. I visited the LSPU Hall this week during a rehearsal and spoke with Charlie, who also directs this production, about The Drowning Girls, and I asked Charlie how the play came into being.

Every two years, four choral singers - a soprano, alto, tenor and bass - representing each of the Canadian provinces, meet at a national convention to be a part of a National Youth Choir. The singers are chosen through a rigorous audition process. This year, all forty or so singers meet in Ottawa where they will receive workshops and take part in rehearsals with the internationally renowned conductor of Tafelmusik, Ivars Taurins, before they go on a short tour as the National Youth Choir. Two of the successful local singers joined me in the studio this week - bass Anthony Payne and alto Teri Slade - to talk about the upcoming experience. Douglas Dunsmore, the chair of the Newfoundland and Labrador auditions committee also sat in.

It's safe to say that Lanier Phillips' life had two distinct chapters. Before St. Lawrence. And after St. lawrence. His story that has become part of us. A man shipwrecked in a winter storm off the coast of Newfoundland forty years ago. A black man whose relationship to white people had been built on the subservience they were subjected to in 1940's America. Last winter Artistic Fraud Theatre group turned the Lanier Phillips story into a play that delighted and moved audiences at the LSPU Hall. Now the play is set to open in Toronto next week. I caught up with playwright Robert Chafe in rehearsals there.

Life can take us on some meandering journeys. One day you're on top of the world. Retired, and finally steeped in that project you'd been picking at for years. Then you find yourself on the precipice, clinging to life. That's the path Terry Hynes has travelled in the last year. At the end of his miraculous recovery, Tudor's Dark Legacy, Terry's first book was born. In this novel, Terry traces the infamous commander of the Black and Tans paramilitary organization, Henry Tudor. In real life Tudor fled almost certain assassination in Ireland and the IRA tracked him down to here, to Newfoundland. In Tudor's Dark Legacy a cast of fictional charatcers follow him as well. The whole matter concludes in Newfoundland a quarter of a century later. Terry Hynes dropped by our studio this week to talk about his book. And how close he was to never finishing it

Thomson's paintings influenced the Group of Seven and the exploration of Canadian identity through the ruggedness of the landscape in a distinctive painting style. His untimely death in 1917 generated many stories, sometimes factual other times not, that culminated in a legendary mystery. Although we do have access to his works, some letters and factual information, to this day, Tom Thomson remains mostly elusive to most historians. The Rooms is also hosting an event to go with the exhibit: An Evening of Tom Thomson, a Lecture accompanied by a film on Wednesday, April 13, at 7pm. Virginia Eichhorn, Director Curator of the Tom Thomson Art Gallery, will deliver the talk on Thomson and I spoke with her this week from Owen Sound. I asked her to tell me about Tom Thomson, the man.

Linden MacIntyre is a veteran broadcast journalist for CBC TV, the winner of nine Gemini Awards, co-host of The Fifth Estate, and the winner of the 2009 ScotiaBank Giller Prize for his novel The Bishop's Man. Now he's back with Why Men Lie, which is putatively the third novel in a trilogy that includes the Giller Winning Bishop's Man and his first novel, The Long Stretch. Linden will be in St. John's next week as the final reader in the E. J. Pratt Visiting author's series at Memorial University.

You may remember Monica Kidd for her stint as a reporter here at CBC, especially for her keen scientific reporting, for which she received official recognition from scientific advocacy groups in Canada. You may also know Monica as an adventurer, or as a mother, or you may be one of her patients - Monica is a doctor. But Monica is also well-known as a poet. Next week, she launches her latest collection of poems, Handfuls of Bone, and I spoke with Monica recently in the studio.

The Anna Templeton Centre for Craft, Art and Design is in need of a few young craftspeople. The Centre has put out the call for applications from young crafters to take part in an incubation program that will be housed in a brand new 4600 square foot facility in Quidi Vidi Village in St. John's. Beverly Barbour is the executive director of Anna Templeton and joins me in the studio this morning. Welcome back to the Weekend Arts magazine, Beverly.

George Murray is one of Canada's most highly regarded young poets. He follows the success of his fifth collection - Glimpse - Selected Aphorisms - with his latest collection, Whiteout. George had a little trouble with the book shipment for this week's launch - the package arrived and sat on his doorstep through a rain storm last week! But George says all the books are fine now - the water has been pressed out and these copies of Whiteout will be collector's items! I spoke with George on Thursday and our conversation began with chat about the launch of Whiteout and the difference between it and Glimpse, a much lighter book.

Angela Antle is the host producer of this program, the Weekend Arts Magazine, and I've been fielding questions about what she is up to ever since I took over this chair last April. Angela has taken a year's leave to work on a reality television series, Majumder Manor. It will be a 12-part documentary on the W network this spring. But Angela received even more amazing news recently when she was invited to the Cannes Film Festival's television wing as part of MIPformats, billed as "an international pitching event for companies with innovative concepts for new, non-scripted entertainment formats."

Creator and director of some of the most original, influential and popular theatre in the province over the past twenty years [that's a trick, being all three of those, I'll tell you!], founder of Artistic Fraud of Newfoundland in 1995, winner of the prestigious Siminovich Prize in 2004, recipient of the John Hirsch Prize and an honorary doctor of letters, Jillian Keiley stands poised to take over theatre in Canada! Or at least Ottawa, because this past week, Jillian Keiley became the country's newest director of English Theatre at the National Arts Centre there.

Operation Homespun - the next Generation, an exhibition of contemporary knitting, opened at the Craft Council Gallery in St. John's last weekend. You'll remember we helped get out the call for knitters to take up Anna Templeton's traditional knitting pattern book and put a 2012 twist on anything they found in there. Well, the results were overwhelming and the group show that was born from that competition proves the point - knitting rocks! Shirley Scott was one of the curators of the show, a well-known knitter in her own right. I visited the gallery this week and spoke with Shirley about Operation Homespun. I began by asking her about the response to the call for pieces.

Don McKay was announced as the winner of this year's Winterset Award at a ceremony in Government House in St. John's on Thursday. Mack speaks with Don in the WAM studio.