Cobourg Poetry Workshop
Third Thursday Reading Series
7:30 p.m.
doors open 7:00 p.m.
Thursday, August 21, 2025
Poets:
Michael Blouin
Hard Electric (Anvil Press)
Marie-Lynn Hammond
Linda Hutsell-Manning
Host:
The Northumberland Room
The Best Western Cobourg Inn
at the intersection of Elgin and Burnham
& Poetry Open Mike
Again along with the featured Readings, there will be
poetry Open Mike poets, who (having signed-up that evening),
will take to the microphone in 4 slots throughout the event:
before and after the first Featured Poet, after the Intermission and
at the end of the event.
Admission: PWYC (pay what you can)
Suggested minimum donation:
five dollars … $5.00 … five bux
Poetry Readings happen on the 3rd Thursday every month.
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We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts / League of Canadian Poets for Michael Blouin's Featured Reading.
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Michael Blouin has been a finalist for the Amazon First Novel Award, the bpNichol Award, and the CBC Literary Award. He has been the recipient of the Lilian I. Found Award, the Diana Brebner Award, and the Archibald Lampman Award. His novel Chase and Haven won the ReLit Award for Best Novel, an award he received again for his novel Skin House. He is an instructor at the University of Toronto, a guest lecturer for Carleton University, and serves as an adjudicator for both the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. He lives in Kemptville, Ontario.
Michael Blouin is a full member of the League of Canadian Poets.
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Hard Electric is Michael Blouin’s third book of poetry, a road-tripping, bridge-burning collection of the author’s hard-won and soft-edged reflections that seem to stutter-step towards resolution while tumbling down a decided slant towards disaster. “Where Does My Heart Beat Now” was Celine Dion’s first North American hit and in it she asks: ‘Where do all the lonely hearts go?’
In Hard Electric Blouin presents a bleakly unsettling but ultimately life-affirming treatise that hints at his fascination with the same question and perhaps shuffles into the neighbourhood of an answer. That neighbourhood is peopled with late-night bars of Key West’s Duval Street, the sharp spice of BBQ joints, sunburned beach motels, and Christmas lights frozen to February trees. And Susan Sarandon’s cousin.
It’s a book not for the faint of heart, but for the lonely-hearted, and for those who know them well.
Praise for Hard Electric:
Advance “One of the most moving books I’ve ever read, with some of the wisest lines ever written.”
— bill bissett
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Marie-Lynn Hammond is a member of the Cobourg Poetry Workshop.
Since moving to the poetically inclined Town of Cobourg, Marie-Lynn Hammond has renewed the practice of composing poetry.
Best known for musical performance, Marie-Lynn is a founding member of Stringband, one of Canada’s seminal folk groups and indie-record pioneers. Estelle Klein, co-founder of the Mariposa Folk Festival, called Marie-Lynn one of Canada’s best songwriters.
Marie-Lynn’s bilingual play about her grandmothers, De Beaux Gestes & Beautiful Deeds, was nominated for a Dora award and toured Canada. Three other plays and a co-written screenplay have all been professionally produced.
She has also penned articles for publications such as Chatelaine and the Toronto Star.
She hosted two national CBC radio shows, Summershift and Musical Friends.
Thirty years ago, Marie-Lynn trained as an editor. Since then, she’s proofread and edited everything from cookbooks to novels to United Nations reports.
In 2010 she had the pleasure of copyediting Esi Edugyan’s first Giller-prize winner, Half-Blood Blues.
Mostly retired from editing now, Marie-Lynn’s focusing on her own projects. She has been exploring digital photography and art -- harking back to an earlier time that included two years at art school.
She co-wrote "Moon Storm Rising" in the YA genre; the author name, Kayden Quinn, actually represents a team effort by Marie-Lynn and Michael Kaufman.
In addition to the aforementioned activities, Marie-Lynn rides horses, rescues cats, and occasionally still performs.
Samples of her music and writing can be found on her website at www.marielynnhammond.com
More of her songs can be found on YouTube and SoundCloud.
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Linda Hutsell-Manning is a member of the Cobourg Poetry Workshop.
Linda Hutsell-Manning's writing career spans 46 years and includes poetry, plays, TV, short fiction and novels.
Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1940, Hutsell-Manning moved with her parents to Southern Ontario, completing high-school in Cobourg. Dreaming of a performing arts career, she studied dance, voice, acting and performed on-stage during her school years. In 1959, she began a Radio and TV Arts course at Ryerson Institute in Toronto. Disappointed by the lack of performance focus, she left the program, married and attended Toronto Teachers College, graduating in 1961.
After graduation, Hutsell-Manning moved to military radar sites across Canada with her husband, James, who was installing computers (the size of two dozen refrigerators strapped together) on the Norad Pine Tree Defence Line. From 1963 to 1965, she taught eight grades at S.S.#2 Hamilton Township, a one room, one stove, cold water tap elementary school west of Cobourg.
Her husband's subsequent career changes eventually moved them in 1968 to Guelph, Ontario. Here, with three young children and intending to return teaching, she began courses at the University of Guelph. Two of her Canadian Literature professors, Doug Daymond and Leslie Monkman, strongly encouraged her to pursue a writing career and, after graduating in 1975, with continuing support from her husband and children, she began writing full-time.
Relocating from Guelph to an old farm house outside Cobourg, she worked on short fiction and poetry while publishing a book review column in The Cobourg Sentinel Star as well as articles in various Canadian magazines, and hosting a Readings series locally.
A twist of imagination gave her intriguing lines that became her first children's book, a story in verse, Wondrous Tales of Wicked Winston, published by Annick Press in1981.
Five scripts for TVO's Polka Dot Door followed (1981-1993). During this period, appalled by the lack of suitable plays for elementary school productions, she created three juvenile musicals: Freddykid and Seagull Sam, 1982, Merch the Invisible Wizard, 1983 and The Great Zanderthon Takeover, 1984; all produced at Kawartha Summer Festival and still available through Playwrights Canada.
Two picture books followed: Animal Hours, published by Oxford University Press 1990 and Dinosaur Days, published by Stoddart Publishing 1993. Curent distribution is through Fitzhenry & Whiteside.
In 1998 & 1999, she travelled to Coburg, Germany and Luxembourg to read and promote her work, as well as research locations for her future juvenile time-travel novel series.
In 2000, her juvenile play, Marcie Saves the Circus won the Maxim Mazumdar New Play Competition, Alleyway Theatre, Buffalo, NY.
Hutsell-Manning’s Wonder Horn Time-Travel Series consists of five juvenile novels: Jason and the Wonder Horn, Coteau Books 2002, Jason and the Deadly Diamonds, Coteau Books 2004; Jason and the Portrait Pirates ready for publication, while Jason and the Angel of Mons and the fifth novel (as yet unnamed) are works-in-progress.
Her two educational children's books Otto Discovers FM, 2006 and Otto Hears Everything, 2005 were written in English for Opticon Denmark, and have been translated into ten languages.
As well as her ongoing juvenile publications, Hutsell-Manning continued to have poetry and short fiction published in literary magazines and anthologies including Quarry, lichen, Litwit, Prairie Journal of Canadian Literature, and Great Canadian Murder and Mystery Stories. A monologue from her play Going it Alone, was published by Nuage Editions in Plays by Women for Solo Performers.
Her first literary novel, That Summer in Franklin, was published by Second Story Press in 2011, with subsequent promotional book tours across Canada during 2012,reading in book-clubs, bookstores and libraries. She continues to utilize Facebook, Goodreads, Twitter and Linkedin to expand awareness and maintain reader contact.
A novella, Heads I Win, Tails You Lose, was short-listed in Quattro Books 2014 Novella Competition.
In 2017, her two act comedy A Certain Singing Teacher, was premiered by VOS Theatre in Cobourg, Ontario, a memoir excerpt “The Front Road School”, was published in Hill Spirits III, by Blue Denim Press and a children’s Christmas story, Finding Moufette, was published electronically by Common Deer Press, Toronto.
During 2018, a short story, “Balancing Act” appeared online in The Danforth Review and The Tangling of Years, the sequel novel to That Summer in Franklin was completed and edited by professional editor Janice Zawerbny.
In October 2019, her creative non-fiction memoir, Fearless and Determined: Two Years Teaching in a One-Room School was published by BLUE DENIM PRESS, Cobourg and lauched at the Northumberland Art Gallery.
During COVID, she gave a number of ZOOM readings of Fearless and Determined and learned Power Point to create a slide show of the memoir’s illustrations.
In 2023, a picture book Finding Moufette was published by Pandamonium Publishers, Hamilton.
In 2024, a novella Heads I Win, Tails You Lose was published by AOS Publishers, Montreal.
In 2025, a short story “The Killing Room” is TBP by At Bay Press Winnipeg, part of their From the Heart series.
Also check out other Arts events in Cobourg, Literary Art events in Cobourg, Workshops in Cobourg.
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