Chris Frey

March 10, 2014 by

Chris-Frey-Bio-Pic-wideInterviewed by Roquela Fernandez

Chris Frey is the Editor-in-Chief of Hazlitt, an online magazine based in Toronto. He is also the director of digital publishing at Penguin Random House of Canada.

Once upon a time in Georgetown, Guyana, Frey was mugged, sort of. After a fairly lengthy tussle with his two potential muggers, Frey did what any rational person would do in this situation: dropped to his knees and feigned an asthma attack. Frey’s subsequent article Where Do You Think YOU’RE Going? (published at unlimited) won Gold at the 27th Annual Western Magazine Awards.

Frey has won many other awards besides, including five National Magazine Awards. One of which was for producing an online video, Pagelicker 01: Irvine Welsh.

Frey has contributed to the Globe and Mail, The Walrus, Azure, Maisonneuve, CBC Radio, and Canadian Geographic. He was the founding editor of the website Toronto Standard and the magazine Outpost, and is the Toronto correspondent for Monocle magazine. His forthcoming book Broken Atlas: The Secret Life of Globalization is a character-driven, multinational investigation into what it means to be modern in the twenty-first century.

When you were little, what did you want to be when you grew-up?

I didn’t have a clue. I was a bizarre, lonely child—for a long while I wanted to get into politics. I adored Pierre Trudeau. Basically I wanted to be an equally suave, Anglo Trudeau. Or Bobby Orr.

[Note: It’s difficult to imagine Frey as a bizarre or lonely even as a child. He looks like a way cooler, less uptight Clark Kent – more stripes, chunkier glasses. I bet he gets invited to a lot of parties, but then again maybe even Superman had some lost years.]

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Interview Tagged With: ,

Elizabeth Bachinsky

January 21, 2014 by

ELIZABETH-BACHINSKY-nov2013-800x450Interview by Nicole Boyce

Elizabeth Bachinsky is the Editor of EVENT Magazine, an award-winning journal published out of Douglas College in its 42nd year of publication. Bachinsky is the author of five collections of poetry. Her work has been nominated for the Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and the George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature. Her second collection, Home of Sudden Service, was nominated for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry. She is a graduate of UBC’s MFA Creative Writing program and a creative writing instructor at Douglas College.

I spoke to her on the phone, as she was—in typical multitasking style—en route to a meeting of EVENT’s fiction board. She was delightfully friendly, funny and candid.

How did you become interested in literary magazine editing?

I’ve always been interested in magazine editing. I had a friend not long ago who sent me a copy of a literary magazine that I edited in high school called Free Word. It was just a little photocopied pamphlet that we were publishing at Thomas Haney Secondary in Maple Ridge. I had totally forgotten that I’d ever done that, but I did, and I was also involved in the yearbook, that kind of stuff. I wanted to be a publisher for a long, long time. Even when I was a little kid, I’d rewrite fairytales and draw pictures with them and put them in laminated covers and staple them. But I didn’t start doing it for money, like, as a “job-job,” until I worked at PRISM international. I was the Assistant Editor there, then the Poetry Editor.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Interview Tagged With: ,

Mary Schendlinger

April 8, 2013 by

MarySchendlingerBy Tristan Koster

A lot of us have dreams of writing a bestseller or that groundbreaking article, but very little of that ever comes to light without the work of accomplished editors and publishers. For more than forty years Mary Schendlinger has been editing and publishing literary works. She’s also a writer who specializes in comics and creative nonfiction, much of which has been published in the literary magazine that she co-founded: Geist.

In addition Mary is the author of Prepare to be Amazed: The Geniuses of Modern Magic, Power Parenting Your Teenager, The Little Greenish-Brown Book of Slugs and many articles, comics and reviews. She has edited books for Douglas & McIntyre, Greystone Books, Raincoast Books, Heritage House, Calypso Books, and Arsenal Pulp Press, and has worked as the editorial/production assistant and promotions manager in-house at Talonbooks and Harbour Publishing. She teaches both at UBC and SFU.

In an email correspondence she described her career as “not a very commercially successful one” but Mary has been able to support herself and her family and her path reflects the kind of career that many of us could only dream of.

What got you started writing?

I don’t know because I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember. I was just one of those kids who was always writing stories. There are some comics that I made; I thought they were just little pictures with words on them. Many years later I found out they were comics. I didn’t know they were comics at the time, first of all because I was little, and second because my dad disapproved of comics so we didn’t have any around. It’s probably why I like them so much. My dad was a great guy but he disapproved. Later I did other things, to make a living, and I had kids. But the writing was always there.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Interview Tagged With: ,