Stephanie Domet leaving CBC Radio's Mainstreet

Stephanie Domet is hanging up the headphones and departing as host of CBC Radio's Mainstreet later this year to return to her roots as an artist and writer.

Domet, who has worked at CBC for 13 years and hosted the afternoon show for the past seven, made the announcement during her show Tuesday afternoon.

"I have loved working here," Domet said in an interview. "I have been so lucky to have such a band of creative, hard-working, irreverent people around me who have made me better every day and in every way."

CBC's senior managing director for Atlantic Canada, Denise Wilson, said Domet will be missed in the host's chair by the huge following of engaged listeners the Mainstreet team fostered over the past number of years.

"She'll be remembered for great interviews with artists and politicians alike, and for helping to break the Northern Pulp story, but would likely prefer to be forgotten as the person who created #stormchips," Wilson said.

Return to writing

The #stormchips hashtag took off on social media and even resulted in a Maclean's magazine article. She created the hashtag following a conversation with radio news reader Ryan Pierce about her love of potato chips and the need to stock up on them before the next big winter storm.

More importantly, her July 2014 interview with Paul Sobey about pollution at the Northern Pulp mill in Pictou County and government's inaction launched a major discussion about the issue and resulted in change.

"It's not every day the Sobeys speak publicly about issues," Domet said about the story, which took on a life of its own and which she calls one of the highlights of her time as host of Mainstreet.

"As a host of the afternoon show you don't often get to do that."

Domet, who has published two books — Homing, which won the 2008 Margaret and John Savage First Book Award, and Fallsy Downsies, which won the 2014 Jim Connors Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction — said she felt pulled back to that life.

"I bottled up a lot of feelings [while hosting Mainstreet] and it's time to contribute to the discussion in another way," she said.

Domet, who is working on her third novel with the help of a small grant from the Nova Scotia government, said she'll still have to earn a living and would love to be a columnist.

"I'll put it together in a lot of different ways, which is what artists do in Nova Scotia," she said.