The Deep Dive from The Walrus The Walrus Podcasts

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
Credits:This episode of The Deep Dive was produced by Simran Singh, Yasmin Duale, and Angela Misri and edited by Angela Misri. Thanks so much toTajja Isen for joining us this week.
Music for this podcast is provided by Audio Jungle. Our theme song is “This Podcast Theme” by Inplus Music. Additional music includes “Ethereal Relaxation” by Kevin MacLeod.
Ethereal Relaxation by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/8719-ethereal-relaxation
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

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. 

But what might surprise you is that finding errors in your credit score is extremely common, and trying to fix it brings a whole other set of issues.
In this episode:We hear from award-winning journalist Emily Baron Cadloff, who wrote the cover story of the June issue of The Walrus.
She explains how credit scores have grown to hold so much power over our lives.
Baron Cadloff then debunks some popular misconceptions about credit scores and talks about how common credit-score errors are and how to avoid them. 
Finally, Baron Cadloff breaks down the main takeaways from her latest piece.
Links:
How Credit Scores Can Run—and Ruin—Our LivesCanada’s Middle Class Is on the Brink of RuinOwning Our PrivilegeCredits: 
This week’s episode was produced and edited by Yasmin Duale and Simran Singh. Thanks so much to Emily Baron Cadloff for joining us.

Music Credits:

“Impact Prelude” by Kevin MacLeod
Link: incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/7565-impact-prelude
License: filmmusic.io/standard-license

“Inspired” by Kevin MacLeod
Link: incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3918-inspired
License: filmmusic.io/standard-license

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.

For The Deep Dive, we spoke to Emily Austin, Lisa Bird-Wilson, Pik-Shuen Fung, Brian Thomas Isaac, Conor Kerr, and Aimee Wall. We asked each shortlisted author the same five questions, and we’ve taken some of their answers and woven them into this episode.

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.

It’s the long view on a story that is still developing and a war everyone hoped could be avoided. Lawrynuik is a journalist who has written for Foreign Policy, the Toronto Star, and New Scientist.

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.”

This week at thewalrus.ca, we excerpted Teresa Wong’s essay about her portrait series based on her toddler’s tantrums. It’s one of twenty essays in the new collection Good Mom on Paper: Writers on Creativity and Motherhood.

Teresa Wong is a writer-in-residence at the University of Calgary and the author of Dear Scarlet: The Story of My Postpartum Depression. Stacey May Fowles is an award-winning journalist, essayist, and novelist, the author of four books, and the editor of four anthologies. Jen Sookfong Lee was a columnist for CBC Radio One, has taught fiction at Simon Fraser University, and co-hosts the literary podcast Can’t Lit with Dina Del Bucchia.

Since COVID-19, we have all become more aware of death. We are bombarded with data on a weekly basis, watching charts and calculating deaths, all while trying to function in our daily lives. But our anxieties around death are not new, even if this pandemic is bringing them front and centre. What’s new is that everyone is talking about death rather than just those directly affected by it.

In this atmosphere, writer David Swick became fascinated by a unique postsecondary degree program in thanatology—the study of death—and by the students that feel compelled to dive deep into what is often a taboo subject. Swick is an assistant professor at the University of King’s College, in Halifax, where he teaches journalism ethics.