Show Notes
Lou D’s intimate snapshots of Madonna, Jay-Z, and other VIPs are fascinating dispatches from a time before Instagram changed celebrity photography forever. Lou was backstage with some of the most iconic musicians of the 1980s and ’90s. As a photographer, he has recorded pop culture history in publications worldwide.
This week, we hear from Connor Garel, who was recently The Cannonbury Fellow at The Walrus. Connor is an arts-and-culture reporter with bylines in BuzzFeed, Fashion, Canadian Art, and of course, The Walrus.
More from The Deep Dive from The Walrus
Two former voices from The Walrus—Tajja Isen, the former digital editor, now editor-in-chief at Catapult magazine, and digital director Angela Misri, who by the time this episode is available will have moved on to Toronto Metropolitan University as its newest assistant professor. Misri talked to Isen about her new book, Some of my Best Friends: Essays on Lip Service. It’s an essay collection about race, justice, and the limits of good intentions. Tajja Isen is also the co-editor of the essay anthology The World As We Knew It: Dispatches from a Changing Climate. Some of My Best Friends is her debut essay collection. Angela Misri is a novelist and digital journalist based in Toronto. In this episode: Isen describes why she wrote this book and the journey she marked through writing it. Then Isen talks about the baggage people bring to the books they read and how she approached writing the nine essays in the collection. Isen then describes the toughest and easiest chapters to write and why absolution is a theme that shows up throughout. Isen also talks about the publishing industry and fighting the impulse to pigeonhole a book on a shelf or genre that is more than one thing. Finally, Isen gives some advice for new writers. Links: Why Success in Canada Means Moving to America
Credit scores are often the deciding factor for people’s most important financial milestones. Whether it’s getting approved for a mortgage, buying a car, or getting a loan, those three digits can make or break a person’s life.
This week, we announced the authors shortlisted for this year’s Amazon First Novel Award. This is the forty-sixth time this prize is being given out, and The Walrus is thrilled to be part of it.
Since 2015, Canada had deployments of ground troops in Ukraine, working to reform the country's military after the invasion of Crimea. In light of Russia’s most recent invasion of Ukraine, Sarah Lawrynuik wanted to take a look back at what the Canadian Armed Forces did there and how the training it provided has affected the country's ability to hold off Russian advancements.
Bridging the distance between being a mom and being an artist can feel impossible at times. A new anthology edited by Stacey May Fowles and Jen Sookfong Lee explores “the fraught, beautiful, and complicated relationship between motherhood and creativity.”