Dear Sad Goat — Bill Richardson

Real letters and true stories-intriguing, delightful and entirely unexpected-sent to Bill Richardson from passionate CBC radio listeners across Canada.

Since the autumn of 1997, Bill Richardson has been hosting a national afternoon radio program on CBC Radio One. Richardson's Roundup has a cult following of about a million listeners a week. It is a daily anthology of music, fiction, poetry, radio drama, anecdote and reflection. The heart of the show is the wide variety of domestic tales listeners relate through either letters or calls to a toll-free line: 1-888-723-4628, better known as 1-888-sad goat.

Listeners love the notion of a sad goat, somewhere out in the ether, fielding and transmitting their calls. Before long, and with no engineering on the part of the Roundup crew, calls and letters addressed to Dear Sad Goat took over and imparted a particular character to the show: whimsical, odd, tangential, domestic, humorous and sometimes melancholy.

For over six seasons, tens of thousands of Canadians of all ages and from every region have contacted Dear Sad Goat to tell their stories about families and friends. Stories about the joys and mishaps of travelling abroad. Stories about births and deaths and all the rites of passage that fall between: learning to shave, or kiss, or knot a necktie or build a campfire.

Dear Sad Goat is a collection of some of the most memorable of these letters and phone calls: raw and sentimental, sweet and subversive, funny and tender, these are the everyday stories of everyday Canadians that reflect life in every part of Canada, all of them told extraordinarily well.