My guest on this episode is Christine Estima. Christine is a journalist, author, and performer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, The Walrus, Vice, the Globe and Mail, Chatelaine, Maisonneuve, and elsewhere. She was shortlisted for the 2018 Allan Slaight Prize for Journalism, longlisted for the 2015 CBC Canada Writes Creative Nonfiction prize, and was a finalist for the 2011 Writers’ Union of Canada Short Prose Competition. She’s also been a contestant on a reality TV competition … twice!

Christine’s debut book is The Syrian Ladies Benevolent Society, published by House of Anansi Press in 2023 and included in the CBC’s list of best Canadian fiction for that year.

Christine and I talk about dealing with sexist idiots, about how she uses moments of rejection to propel her forward in her writing and her career, and about her new book, a fictional take on a notorious and tragic literary relationship.

My guest on this episode is Carl Wilson. Carl is the music critic at Slate and also writes for the Globe and Mail, Hazlitt, The New York Times Magazine, and many other online and print publications. His work has been included in two of Da Capo Press’s annual Best Music Writing collections. Carl’s first book is Let’s Talk about Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, which he himself describes as being about “aesthetic conflict, class, and Céline Dion.”

That book was originally published in 2007 by Bloomsbury Publishing as part of the 33 1/3 series of books about popular music. An expanded edition was published in 2014 that included essays by Nick Hornby, Krist Novoselic, Ann Powers, Mary Gaitskill, Sheila Heti, and others, as well as a new afterword by Carl.

Carl and I talk about, of course, Céline’s recent performance at the Paris Olympics, about the unlikely popular and academic success of Let’s Talk about Love, and about the two book-length works he wants to complete—one a biography of the beloved singer-songwriter David Berman, the other a treatise on the legitimacy of crying as a critical response to great art.

My guest on this episode is Peter Darbyshire. Peter is an author, journalist, and communications expert whose debut novel, Please, won the K. M. Hunter Artist Award for best emerging artist and the ReLit Award for best novel. He is also the author of the novel The Warhol Gang and the story collection Has the World Ended Yet? He works as communications officer for BC’s Provincial Health Services Authority.

I’m doing something slightly different in this episode, because Peter actually has three books that are about to be published: The Mona Lisa Sacrifice, The Dead Hamlets, and The Apocalypse Ark, which are all part of his Cross series of supernatural thrillers. All three books are being published in October by Wolsak & Wynn. However, all three were previously published by another small indie press, in 2013, 2015, and 2016 respectively.

Peter and I talk about how running the COVID-19 social media response for a provincial health authority gave him a new perspective on the apocalypse, about getting the Cross series reprinted—and why it needed to be—and about how the stretch of time since his last new work of fiction speaks to something of a crisis of faith when it comes to his own writing.

My guest on this episode is Michael Christie. Michael is the author of the 2012 story collection The Beggar’s Garden, which was longlisted for the Giller Prize, shortlisted for the Writers’ Trust Prize for Fiction, and which won the Vancouver Book Award. His 2015 novel, If I Fall, If I Die, was also longlisted for the Giller Prize, as well as the Kirkus Prize, and was selected as a New York Times Editors’ Choice Pick and was on numerous best-of-the-year lists. His essays and book reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Globe and Mail.

Michael’s most recent novel is Greenwood, which was published in 2019 by McClelland & Stewart. That book was a national bestseller and won Le Prix du Livre de SQY and the 2020 Arthur Ellis Award for Excellence in Canadian Crime Writing. It was also shortlisted for the 2020 Forest of Reading Evergreen Award, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize; it was also longlisted for the Giller Prize and was a 2023 Canada Reads finalist.

Michael and I talk about how his writing career has been influenced by his previous semi-pro skateboarding career, about converting Greenwood into a TV series, and about how, while working on his new novel, he had to resist the temptation to copy the narrative formula that had worked so well in Greenwood.

My guest on this episode is Deborah Dundas. Deborah is a writer and journalist who has worked as a television producer and as the books editor for the Toronto Star, where she is currently an opinion editor. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including Maclean’s, the Globe and Mail, the National Post, Canadian Notes and Queries, the Belfast Telegraph, and the Sunday Independent. She also teaches creative nonfiction at the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies.

Deborah’s first book is On Class, which was published by Biblioasis in 2023. That book was a Hamilton Review of Books best book of 2023 and was shortlisted for the 2024 Speaker’s Book Award. The Winnipeg Free Press called On Class “a nifty, provocative little book.”

Deborah and I talk about working on the most-discussed literary story of the decade: the revelations about the late Alice Munro and her family, and about how she initially wanted to say no to working on that story. We talk about some of the progress and great conversations about class she has seen since publishing her book, and how she feels just a little less like an outsider in Canada’s literary culture.

My guest on this episode is Jackie Khalilieh. Jackie is a writer and former teacher whose first book, the YA novel Something More, was published by Tundra Books in 2023. The novel was shortlisted for the Ruth & Sylvia Shwartz Award, as well as the Snow Willow Award, and was selected for several best of the year lists, including by the New York Public Library and Audible Books Canada. Publishers Weekly called Something More a “thought-provoking and thoroughly entertaining debut that centers questions of identity via a fresh lens.”

Jackie and I talk about how her identity as an autistic person and a Palestinian Canadian inform the kinds of stories she wants to tell, about some of the negative response her book has received from readers who perhaps wanted its autistic main character to conform to a particular ideal, and about how she can’t go on Goodreads without stripmining the site for data and projections about her own writing career.

My guest on this episode is Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer. Kathryn is the author of the novels All the Broken Things, Perfecting, and The Nettle Spinner, as well as the story collection, Way Up. Her work has been published in Granta Magazine, Maclean’s Magazine, The Walrus, Joyland, This Magazine, and elsewhere. Her fiction has won a Danuta Gleed Award and been nominated for The Amazon First Novel Award, the Toronto Book Award, CBC Canada Reads, and the Relit Award.

Kathryn’s most recent book is Wait Softly Brother, which was published by Wolsak & Wynn in 2023 and was longlisted for the Giller Prize. The Toronto Star said that Wait Softly Brother is “rich with the true stuff of imagined lives, and the imagined stuff of true lives,” and “is a glorious enchantment indeed.”

Kathryn and I talk about how the enormous emotional, existential, and even geographic changes she has gone through in past decade have impacted her writing—for the better—about how Wait Softly Brother came out of a very public writing experiment after she started to think her career was over, and about her compulsive need to transform every experience into the seed for more writing.

My guest on this episode is Kelly S. Thompson. Kelly is a former Logistics Officer in the Canadian Armed Forces who began writing about her military experiences in a blog for Chatelaine magazine. She wrote about those experiences again in her debut book, Girls Need Not Apply, which was published in 2019 by McClelland & Stewart, was named a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book, and became an instant bestseller. Kelly teaches Creative Nonfiction at the University of King’s College. Her most recent book, the memoir Still, I Cannot Save You, was published by McClelland & Stewart in 2023, and was also an instant bestseller. It was shortlisted for the 2024 Evelyn Richardson Non-Fiction Award.

Rachel Matlow, author of Dead Mom Walking, wrote that “with this heartwrenching yet hopeful book, Kelly has turned her loss and grief into something beautiful.”

Kelly and I talk about how her current writing practice is informed by her years in the military and by her chronic illness, about the worst response to her writing she has ever received, and about how publishing Still, I Cannot Save You has led to some expected, but no less agonizing difficulties with her extended family.

A quick warning: Kelly and I joke around a lot in this episode, but there are also a few tears: the conversation covers some very difficult and traumatic territory, such as addiction and domestic abuse.

My guest on this episode is Rollie Pemberton. Rollie is a writer, rapper, producer, poet and activist who performs under the name Cadence Weapon. His album Parallel World won the 2021 Polaris Music Prize and his writing has been published in Pitchfork, The Guardian, Wired, Toronto Life, and Hazlitt. Rollie has also acted as Poet Laureate for his hometown of Edmonton, Alberta. He also recently released a song and a video celebrating that city’s hockey team and its run for the Stanley Cup. Rollie’s debut book is the memoir Bedroom Rapper: Cadence Weapon on Hip-Hop, Resistance and Surviving the Music Industry, which was published by McClelland & Stewart in 2022.

The Toronto Star called Bedroom Rapper “an intriguing window into a creative mind that takes creativity and the constant betterment of that creativity very seriously.”

Rollie and I talk about his relentlessly curatorial approach to art and the world, about the need for more and better artistic criticism, and about why he thinks books and writing will soon eclipse music as his central creative pursuit.

My guest on this first episode of The Walrus era is John Vaillant. John is a Vancouver author and journalist whose acclaimed, award-winning nonfiction books, The Golden Spruce and The Tiger, were national bestsellers. His debut novel, The Jaguar’s Children, was a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award. John has written for, among others, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and… The Walrus. John’s most recent book is Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast, which was published by Knopf Canada in 2023. Fire Weather was a national bestseller, and won the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize For Political Writing, the Baillie Gifford Prize For Nonfiction, and the 2024 J.W. Dafoe Book Prize, in addition to being a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize, a National Book Award, the Hubert Evans Prize, and a Pulitzer Prize. The Guardian called the book “an urgent warning—and an all-consuming read.”

John and I talk about how the devastating things he writes about in Fire Weather really are our new reality, about the fact that he is still talking publicly about the book almost every single day—even a year after it was published—and about why the novel he had been planning to write instead of Fire Weather will probably remain unwritten.

My guest on this episode is Alissa York. Alissa is the author of the novels Mercy, Effigy (which was shortlisted for the Giller Prize), Fauna and The Naturalist (which was winner of the Canadian Author’s Association Fiction Award, and the short fiction collection, Any Given Power. Alissa’s essays and articles have appeared in The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, Brick magazine and elsewhere, and she teaches at Humber College, where she is the coordinator for the Creative Writing program. Full disclosure, we used to have offices right across the hall from each other at Humber.

Alissa’s most recent book is Far Cry, which was published by TK in 2023 by Random House Canada. The Toronto Star said Far Cry is “dazzling and brilliant” and called it “a transfixing, glorious novel.”

Alissa and I talk about the Humber Creative Writing program, how she makes herself disconnect from social media, and most other social things, when she is working on a book, and where she begins when she is starting a new novel.

My guest on this episode is Cody Caetano. Cody is a writer and an off-reserve member of Pinaymootang First Nation. He also works as a literary agent at CookeMcDermid. Cody’s debut memoir, Half-Bads in White Regalia, was published Penguin Canada’s Hamish Hamilton imprint in 2023 and was a national bestseller. It won the 2023 Indigenous Voices Award for Best Published Prose, was shortlisted for the 2023 Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction, and was longlisted for the Toronto Book Award, the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, and Canada Reads. It was named one of the best books of the year by The Globe and Mail and CBC Books.

The Toronto Star said about Half-Bads in White Regalia that “Caetano’s voice leaps off the page with a rhythmic, hip-hop style right from the first page.”

Cody and I talk about some of his pre-publishing jobs, and how they relate to his current ones, about how he handles being someone from a very different background than most people in the book world, and what it’s like to be a writer who is also an agent—someone who knows how the sausage gets made.

My guest on this episode is Nina Dunic. Nina is writer, editor, and journalist whose has done work for the Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, CBC Docs and others. After winning a number of short story contests less than a decade ago, Nina turned to writing fiction. Nina’s first book is the novel The Clarion, which was published by Invisible Publishing in 2023. The Clarion was longlisted for the Giller Prize and just last week, it won the Trillium Prize. It was also named one of the Globe and Mail’s Best Books of 2023, and the Best Canadian Debut of 2023 by Apple Books. It also appeared on the CBC’S list of Best Canadian Fiction of 2023.

The Toronto Star called The Clarion “a wonderful, and promising, debut.”

Nina and I talk about her how she has dealt with nervousness around getting interviewed – it involves cognac – about maintaining distance between her fiction writing self and her real self, and about the surreal feeling she gets watching her debut book, which she was certain would disappear without a trace, get all of this recognition from critics, readers, and award juries. (We recorded this conversation shortly before she won Trillium Prize, but we talk about that, too.)

My guest on this episode is… me. That’s because my most recent novel, Lump, was published exactly one year ago this week by the Rare Machines imprint of Dundurn Press, so I am officially in WHAT HAPPENED NEXT territory.

My guest interviewer on this episode is Julie S. Lalonde. Julie is an internationally recognized women’s rights advocate and public educator. Her book Resilience is Futile: The Life and Death and Life of Julie S. Lalonde was published by Between the Lines in 2020. It was named one of the best books of the year by CBC Books and the Hill Times and won the 2020 Ontario Speaker’s award. It also won an Independent Publisher Book Award in 2021. (In addition to all that, Julie was the very first guest I had on this podcast.)

Julie and I talk about the differences between publishing your first book and publishing your third, how to deal with other authors sucking up all the sales and attention, and the author I consider my dream-get for this podcast.