Breakwater Book Breakouts: Monica Kidd, Rod Moody-Corbett, Willow Kean, Hosted By Noreen Golfman

Dr Noreen Golfman is Professor Emerita, Memorial University. She was the founding director of the St. John’s International Women’s Film Festival and chaired the board of the festival for thirty years. She’s been the president of the MUN Cinema Series for decades, Vice Chair of PictureNL, and co-chair of Business and Arts NL. In 2019 she received ACTRA’s Woman of the Year Award, and she was inducted into the Order of NL in 2023. She has been a board member and was chair of the Winterset Festival—all thanks to the wonderful late Richard Gwyn to whom one simply could not say no.

Monica Kidd is an award-winning journalist and multi-disciplinary writer. Her latest title, The Crane (Breakwater Books, 2025) is a novel set in Wyoming, St. John’s and Notre Dame Bay, 1968-1969, and features a young Vietnam war resister who finds himself in Newfoundland in the middle of an intergenerational story of war trauma. Kidd has published seven previous books of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, as well as shorter pieces in dozens of journals. She previously reported for CBC Radio in St. John’s before going to medical school at Memorial University. She divides her time between St. John’s and Calgary where she works as a family doctor. 

Willow Kean is an actor and writer from Labrador West who now resides in St. John’s. She holds a BFA in theatre from Grenfell College and has spent over twenty-five years working for numerous theatre companies across Newfoundland and Labrador. Most recently she’s appeared on film in The King Tide and onstage in Paul and Linda Plan a Threesome. She’s been shortlisted for the Cuffer Prize, longlisted for the NLCU Fresh Fish Award, and has won NL Arts and Letters Awards in both fiction and non-fiction. Willow was the winner of the Percy Janes First Novel Award in 2018, and the recipient of the 2015 Rhonda Payne Theatre Award. Her five-woman comedy Supper Club recently completed an island-wide Arts and Culture Centre tour, and can be seen onstage this summer at the Gros Morne Theatre Festival. Her first novel Eyes in Front When Running was published by Breakwater Books in 2023. Willow gets angry, cooks, and writes about it at thelittleredchicken.substack.com

Rod Moody-Corbett is the author of Hides (Breakwater Books), a Globe and Mail pick for Best Summer Reads of 2024, a 49th Shelf Book of the Year, and a #1 Alberta bestseller. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, Socrates on the Beach, and The Drift, among other publications. He is the recipient of the 2022 Howard O’Hagan Award for Short Story, winner of the CBC Canada Writes Peoples’ Choice Award for Short Story, and serves as a contributing editor for Canadian Notes and Queries.