Jeffrey Innes

October 25, 2017 by

Interviewed by Kaylan Mackinnon

Jeffrey Innes is the lead singer and writer in Yukon Blonde, a Vancouver indie rock band. Since starting the group in 2008 he has gained an international following and acclaim for hits like “Saturday Night.” The band, originally from Kelowna, BC, are currently working on their fourth album. I was inspired to interview Jeffrey Innes because his songs tell such beautiful stories, and it is incredible knowing that Yukon Blonde belongs to our very own Canada. I talked to Jeff about his writing process, how it all got started for him, and

advice on how you can jumpstart your own writing career. 

Yukon Blonde is an internationally acclaimed band! You must be happy with the success you’ve had. Would you say there was a song the band and you wrote that put Yukon Blonde on the map?

I would say our song “Stairway” did pretty well for us, but both “Saturday Night” and “I Wanna Be Your Man” would be the two songs that helped get us out there much more that any others.

For readers who haven’t heard your music yet, please describe your sound and style in a few words.

This is always the hardest question for any songwriter. Either you compare yourself inaccurately to your influences and inspirations or, in my case, you feel you’re constantly changing and don’t want to pin yourself down. I mean, ok, I recognize that we’re an alternative indie pop/rock band with electronic or psychedelic tendencies and sometimes we’re pastiche. What does that even mean? I think it means we just sound however we want to whenever we want to. In the past, we’ve had guitars, drums, harmonies, cool bass lines and synths.

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Arushi Raina

October 19, 2017 by

Interviewed by Dominika Lirette

Arushi Raina is a young adult fiction writer who lives in Vancouver. A consultant by day, she fills her remaining hours with writing. Arushi grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa but, at 25, she’s a citizen of the world. So far she has lived in Egypt, Nigeria, India, the US, UK and now Canada.

Her first novel, When Morning Comes, was published in June of 2016. Publishers Weekly described it as “a riveting and accomplished debut.” The book centres around the fictional lives of four teenagers living in Johannesburg in 1976, right before the Soweto uprising. I caught up with her over the phone.

I read that you’ve been trying to write a novel since high school. What drew you to wanting to be a writer from such a young age?

To some extent, escapism. I think most people who start wanting to write, especially early on, they’re very attracted to living in alternative worlds. That’s one thing.

And then two, I think there’s just an overpowering need to have stories turn out a little bit different or characters say something a little bit different than they did. So you start creating your own versions of stories that you love in the way you’d want to tell them.

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J.B. MacKinnon

October 6, 2017 by

Interviewed by Stefan Labbé

J.B. MacKinnon is a non-fiction writer steeped in deep-dive book research and a fair share of shoe-leather reporting.

His most recent book, The Once and Future World, was a national bestseller and won the U.S. Green Prize for Sustainable Literature. MacKinnon is widely known for co-writing The 100-Mile Diet (with partner Alisa Smith) which chronicles the personal dietary experiment that helped spark the local food movement. His first book, Dead Man in Paradise won the Charles Taylor Prize for best literary non-fiction. The story traces the assassination of his uncle, a priest gunned down in the Dominican Republic as the country struggled under the heel of dictatorship.

When I first met MacKinnon, he struck me as a freelancer’s freelancer. Part of that has to do with the fact that he has won 11 National Magazine Awards and has written for publications ranging from National Geographic to The New Yorker. But he has also avoided the milieu of a traditional newsroom. Instead, he seeks that clean break from day to day life, slipping away to his broken-down cabin in Northern British Columbia or punctuating his day with rock climbing or birdwatching.

Naturally, I asked MacKinnon for an interview over an outdoor pint. It was December and the nylon awning overhead bulged with winter rain. He agreed on the spot, as long as it didn’t interfere with a whirlwind of reporting trips to Japan, Iceland and Arizona. Several weeks later, we swapped rain and beer for sun and tea in a lazy café in central Vancouver. 

How did you get started in this kind of work?

When I went to university I was looking around for something extracurricular to do. The student newspaper seemed intuitively appealing to me, so I signed up with The Martlet and I just really enjoyed it. I did more work for the newspaper than I did for my classes.

I never learned how to do journalism, so from the get-go I would over-report everything. I mean quite literally, among my first stories for The Martlet, I would be trying to get comments from the ministers responsible for the areas I was writing about, or the premier. I mean, ridiculous—things that I would never do today. And sometimes, oddly enough, I actually got them. I would just follow the stories as far up the line as I could take them every time and then write them way too long. So I was feature writing pretty much immediately.

And then two years into university I had a mix-up with my student loans and I wasn’t able to go back for my third year. Circumstances forced me to try to turn freelance writing into a paying gig. It didn’t pay well, but it worked and that was the end of my university career.

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