My guest on this special live episode is Anne Michaels. Anne is an internationally award-winning novelist whose books have been translated into more than forty-five languages. She is the winner of the Orange Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the Trillium Book Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and has been shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize and twice for the Giller Prize. She has also been twice longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her novel Fugitive Pieces was made into a feature film. Her most recent novel, Held, was published by McClelland & Stewart in 2024, and shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Giller Prize. Alice Jolly, writing about Held in The Observer, said that “at the heart of this book lies the question of how goodness and love can be held across the generations. For Michaels, our final task is ‘to endure the truth.’”

Anne and I spoke live onstage at Humber Polytechnic’s Lakeshore Campus on July 10th, as part of Humber’s Summer Workshop in Creative Writing (which I also coordinate). This is an edited version of that conversation.

Anne and I talk about how, despite being both an internationally bestselling author and a fairly shy person, she has never developed a public persona for things like onstage interviews, about the importance of, in her words, “distillation, distillation, distillation” in her novel-writing process, and about the idea of writers who revise their work even after it has been published.

This podcast is produced and hosted by Nathan Whitlock, in partnership with The Walrus.

Music: "simple-hearted thing" by Alex Lukashevsky. Used with permission.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

My guest on this episode is Steve Paikin. Steve is an author, journalist, and broadcaster who hosted TVO’s nightly current affairs show The Agenda for 19 years, until that show ended earlier this summer. He is an officer of the Order of Canada, a member of the Order of Ontario, and the author of eight books. His most recent book, John Turner: An Intimate Biography of Canada's 17th Prime Minister, was published by Sutherland House in 2022. The Globe & Mail called John Turner “an insightful portrait of a powerfully talented but deeply conflicted individual who influenced the story of our country, mostly for the better.”

Steve and I talk about his decision to leave The Agenda (and the legendary broadcaster whose advice planted the seed for that departure), about why he chose to write a deeply researched biography of a man who was Prime Minister for a whopping 79 days, and about taking on not just one, but three new book projects.

This podcast is produced and hosted by Nathan Whitlock, in partnership with The Walrus.

Music: "simple-hearted thing" by Alex Lukashevsky. Used with permission.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

My guest on this episode is Valérie Bah. Valérie is a multidisciplinary Québécois artist, filmmaker, documentarian, photographer, and writer whose first book was the collection The Rage Letters, translated from the French and published by Metonymy Press. Valérie’s most recent book is their first novel (and first book in English) Subterrane. That book was published by Véhicule Press in 2024 and was the winner of the Amazon Canada First Novel Award. The Montreal Review of Books said that Subterrane “hums with high-context, sublingual information, the kind that resists total comprehension joyfully and exactingly.”

Valérie and I talk about the surreal experience of winning the Amazon First Novel Award (including the timely consumption of edibles), about how they feel at home in multiple artistic mediums and practices at once, and about their recurring lottery-winning fantasies, which involve a very particular make of car.

This podcast is produced and hosted by Nathan Whitlock, in partnership with The Walrus.

Music: "simple-hearted thing" by Alex Lukashevsky. Used with permission.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.