Alumna Emma Hogg, a Sault Ste. Marie-based author, has a new novel out. Picket Fences is published by Tidewater Press.

In an article in the Sault Star, Hogg said the publisher pushed her to take her writing to another level.

Hogg talked about and read from her new work at the online Toronto’s Word on the Street book and magazine festival in September.

The book’s main character, Sloane Sawyer, finds her ambition to become a graphic designer has not been realized. She struggles with the apparent loss of dreams and is unable to recognize her ability to revise her future, Hogg says in the article. Ultimately, she begins to understand that she has the power “to control the controllable and accept the uncontrollable.”

Picket Fences is available at www.amazon.ca, www.chapters.indigo.ca and at www.tidewaterpress.ca. Hogg graduated from U of G with a B.A. in 2003.

Picket Fences is her sixth novel.

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Articles in The Sarnia Journal and The National Post described her important work in the African country.

Connor graduated from U of G with a masters degree in political science and international development in 2004. 

A senior humanitarian and development professional, she has spent about 15 years in resource mobilization, program management and leadership roles in a number of conflict-affected environments. 

Her work has especially focused on emergency response, food security, child protection and resilience programming. World Vision is currently assisting the country cope with outbreaks of both COVID-19 and Ebola. 

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, she oversees a staff of 400 staff and an annual budget of $40 million.

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A University of Guelph grad leading the fight against wildfires in southern British Columbia is finding that his physics degree has come in handy.

In recent years, Bryce Moreira’s job as aviation specialist with the Kamloops Fire Centre has been intensely demanding, given the highly combustible conditions in B.C.’s forests. But Moreira, 29, says he is able to keep his cool in part because of the practical skills he learned studying physics at U of G.

“When I finished my degree and moved back to B.C., I was unsure of my next step,” said Moreira. “But because of my degree I was able to get a job with the BC Wildfire Service in the winter, a job that was directly applicable to physics.”

He oversees deployment of helicopters for transporting firefighters or dumping water on fires.

Depending on the size of the fire, the response can involve anywhere from one to 30 helicopters. While Moreira is not a pilot himself, he sometimes finds himself in the co-pilot’s seat hovering over a blaze.

Operation parameters change constantly. Pinpoint calculations are needed to ensure the best possible response and outcome, he said.

Controlling a fire is exhausting, he said, but the sense of accomplishment is huge.

“It certainly can be a lot of pressure, but we all accept that pressure as part of the job we have,” he said. “I am looking for the best possible way to control and suppress the fire and to protect life and property. You have to take it one task at a time.”

His U of G education gave him a good foundation for understanding physics and its varied applications. His job mostly involves analysis and organization of complex and urgent firefighting strategies. The more fires burning, the more involved the strategy becomes. The skills in data analysis he learned at U of G have been indispensable in his work, he said.

The 2017 and 2018 fire seasons were the most extreme in the province’s history, burning more forest and forcing more evacuations than ever before. This year, conditions improved.

Moreira said the recent spike in the number and size of fires has been fuelled by climate change. Dry conditions caused by a lack of snowfall in winter and extreme temperatures in spring and summer are the major contributor, a perspective backed up in a recent study by Environment and Climate Change Canada.

Extreme fire seasons are likely to become more common as global temperatures continue to rise, according to the study.

In 2018, 2,117 fires covered more than 1.3 million hectares of land and cost the province $615 million to fight; in 2017, 1,500 fires covered more than 1.2 million hectares and cost about $650-million to fight. On average, about 42 per cent of fires are caused by people and 57 per cent by lightning.

“There is so much math involved in a physics program, and math explains things in a very technical and rudimentary way,” he said. “It helps explain the principles of how things operate and gives you an appreciation for larger ideas based on these simple principles.”

Originally from British Columbia, Moreira completed his U of G degree in 2013. He spent summers in Kamloops working for the BC Wildfire Service, a job that he began while in high school.

He gained hands-on experience fighting fires and landed a full-time job because of his ability to analyze data and solve problems.

“Being able to understand things from their basic principles and seeing the root cause helped me to solve unique problems that come up day-to-day in my work,” he said.

As a top high school volleyball player, Moreira competed for two years on the provincial team. He was an assistant coach on the Gryphons women’s volleyball team in 2012-13.

“Typically, I had a pretty good eye for technical skills,” said Moreira, who now coaches varsity volleyball in B.C. “I was able to add technical expertise and to support the whole team.”

With two record-breaking wildfire years in the province, recent fire seasons have been tough on crews and coordinators, he said. During time off, he gets rest and stays physically active to deal with the stress.

Moreira said it is difficult to witness the destruction wreaked on B.C.’s environment, but he credits his U of G education for his ability to focus on minimizing the damage.

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“I started at OAC in ’39, the year the war broke out,” says Orr, a ’43 OAC alumnus who, as far as he knows, is the last surviving member of his graduating class.

“We didn’t know what to expect or what would happen.”

As the world became embroiled in a war that spread rapidly around the globe, post-secondary life in Guelph carried on normally, he says. There were nourishing meals served in Creelman Hall and all the milk you could drink. There were plenty of activities on campus to get involved in, and Orr led an active student life both on and off campus grounds.

But as his second year at OAC ended, the campus – consisting of the agricultural college, the Macdonald Institute and the Ontario Veterinary College – was repurposed for war.

“We had two years in residence and then the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) moved in and we had to move out and find an apartment off campus for the last two years,” says Orr.

The air force requisitioned a large portion of the campus, turning it into the RCAF Station Guelph, part of the Second World War British Commonwealth Air Training Plan. Among the station’s schools were one to train airmen and airwomen as chefs and a larger one to train wireless operators.

It was a temporary wartime measure, but a historic one. Orr recalls how the campus was dramatically transformed from a pastoral college environment to one teeming with military trainees.

The central hub of the campus was fenced off and tight security was imposed. The grounds and buildings became crowded, but classes continued.

Orr was required to take military training in his final two years of study. “We were in uniform about three or four days a week.”

Throughout his time at OAC, Orr was affected by the war deeply and personally.

“Every year we lost fellas who had joined up in the war,” he says, reflecting on his memories of that troubling time while sitting in a comfy chair in his small apartment in a Guelph retirement residence.

“I lost some good pals who were killed before it was over.”

There was a tradition each fall during the war years, Orr recounts, of students volunteering to go west to help with the harvest. The need for farm labour on the prairies was great during the war, with so many young men off fighting and so many having died.

“A few days after we returned for the fall semester in ’42, 49 of us Aggies went west for two weeks,” he says. “We took the train across the country. When the trains stopped, if we saw a store nearby we would all rush over to get a few things for the trip. It was a lot of fun.”

The work on the prairie farms was hard and the hours long.

“You got up bright and early in the morning, had a breakfast and then you had to go out and harness your team, hook it up to the wagon and out you went into the fields with your fork,” he says. “You forked the sheaves of wheat onto the wagon and when you had a load you went to the threshing machine and forked them into the thresher.”

Orr studied crop science at OAC but was encouraged by a beloved professor to take a one-year poultry specialist program after he graduated and completed his military service. At that time, the science of poultry nutrition, health and management was in the early stages of development.

Orr grew up around chickens on the family farm in southwestern Ontario. Feeding his mother’s flock of hundreds of hens was one of his many boyhood chores.

“My mother always had laying hens,” says Orr. “I think she got up to three or four hundred or more.”

The hens and their eggs, he says, helped put him through university.

With that special connection, it was not a great leap for him to study poultry.

After graduating from OAC, and serving in the military in Saint John, New Brunswick, and Goose Bay, Labrador, Orr returned to OAC to complete poultry program, then earned a master’s degree in poultry products in Pennsylvania. He would again return to Guelph as an OAC professor.

The poultry field would preoccupy him for the next roughly 45 years, years of investigating the processing of poulty, research ways to improve the yield of poultry meat and methods of ensuring egg quality.

The humble chicken and egg have long been dietary staples, but nothing like the industry of today, says Orr. “The changes in technology today sort of boggle my mind. Things we did by hand in the past are now all done by machine.”

While he is happy to have contributed to and witnessed the changing industry, Orr says, the years he spent teaching were his most rewarding.

“I really enjoyed the students,” he says, adding that seeing them mature, listening to them and helping them along in their development, and then watching them graduate, were the most rewarding aspects of his professional life.

In the following video, Hank Orr talks further about his time at OAC:

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Carvalho received her MFA in studio art at U of G, and has received numerous grants and awards from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council. Originally from Hamilton, Ont., she lives in Toronto.

Her paintings have foreboding undertones, exploring themes of time, darkness and withdrawal through images heavy with ecological destruction.

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Gillian Siddall will take over the top job at the prestigious Vancouver-based art school on Sept. 1. The story of her hiring appeared in the Vancouver Sun and other media across Canada.

Siddall served as vice-president academic and provost for three years at Toronto’s OCAD University. She lectured at U of G before becoming an English professor at Lakehead University, where she was named dean of social sciences and humanities. She earned a PhD from Western University.

An advocate of Indigenization and decolonization within the university sector, Siddall is also recognized as an accomplished jazz vocalist and choral singer. She co-founded the Guelph Jazz Festival.

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