What Happened Next: a podcast about newish books

Waubgeshig Rice

My guest on this episode is Waubgeshig Rice. Waubgeshig is the Anishinaabe author of four books, including the short story collection Midnight Sweatlodge (2011), and the novels Legacy (2014) and Moon of the Crusted Snow (2018). As a journalist, he has worked for various outlets, including CBC Radio One. He also hosted, along Jennifer David, the Storykeepers podcast, which focused on Indigenous writing. He has won the Independent Publishers Book Award, the Northern 'lit' Award, and the Debwewin Citation for Excellence in First Nation Storytelling. Waubgeshig’s most recent book is Moon of the Turning Leaves, published in 2023 by Random House Canada. That novel was a #1 national bestseller and a finalist for the Aurora Award for Best Novel. Book Riot said that Moon of the Turning Leaves is “gripping, to say the least, and it’s a haunting read that’ll linger in the recesses of your mind for quite some time.”
Waubgeshig and I talk about how being a very in-demand author is a little bit like touring in a rock band, about the pleasures of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, which he was introduced to by his friend (and the current premier of Manitoba) Wab Kinew, and about how he is not yet closing the door on a possible third book in the series that began with Moon of the Crusted Snow.
This podcast is produced and hosted by Nathan Whitlock, in partnership with The Walrus.
Music: "simple-hearted thing" by Alex Lukashevsky. Used with permission.

David Bergen

My guest on this episode is David Bergen. David is the author of numerous acclaimed novels and short-story collections, including The Case of Lena S, which won the 2002 Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award, and The Time In Between, winner of the 2005 Giller Prize. Four of his books have won the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award. David’s work has also won the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction and the John Hirsch Award, and been nominated for the Manitoba Book of the Year, the Relit Prize, and the International Dublin Literary Award. Four of his books have won the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award. He himself was awarded the Matt Cohen Award in 2018, in honour of a distinguished lifetime contribution to Canadian literature.
His most recent novel is Away from the Dead, published in 2023 by Goose Lane Editions. Author and former What Happened Next guest Omar El Akkad called Away from the Dead “a deceptively stunning novel… written by one of Canada’s best.”
David and I talk about adding his name to the opposition to the Giller Prize’s association with Scotiabank, about the crime novel he wrote a decade ago that will finally get published next year, and about the advice he wishes he’d given Ron McLean when Ron defended one of David’s books on Canada Reads. (David and I also bond over not yet having read Middlemarch.)
This podcast is produced and hosted by Nathan Whitlock, in partnership with The Walrus.
Music: "simple-hearted thing" by Alex Lukashevsky. Used with permission.

Christine Estima

My guest on this episode is Christine Estima. Christine is a journalist, author, and performer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Walrus, VICE, the Globe and Mail, Chatelaine, Maisonneuve, and elsewhere. She was shortlisted for the 2018 Allan Slaight Prize for Journalism, longlisted for the 2015 CBC Canada Writes Creative Nonfiction prize, and was a finalist for the 2011 Writers’ Union of Canada short prose competition. She’s also been a contestant on reality TV competition… twice!
Christine’s debut book is The Syrian Ladies Benevolent Society, published by House of Anansi Press in 2023 and included in the CBC’s list of Best Canadian Fiction for that year. Maisonneuve said that the book “weaves a haunting tale of how the pain of loss … reverberates across generations."
Christine and I talk about dealing with sexist idiots, about how she uses moments of rejection to propel her forward in her writing and her career, and about her new book, a fictional take on a notorious and tragic literary relationship.
This podcast is produced and hosted by Nathan Whitlock, in partnership with The Walrus.
Music: "simple-hearted thing" by Alex Lukashevsky. Used with permission.
 

Carl Wilson

My guest on this episode is Carl Wilson. Carl is the music critic at Slate and also writes for The Globe and Mail, Hazlitt, The New York Times Magazine and many other online and print publications. His work has been included in two of Da Capo Books' annual Best Music Writing collections. Carl’s first book was Let’s Talk about Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, which Carl himself describes as being about “aesthetic conflict, class, and Céline Dion.” That book was originally published in 2007 by Bloomsbury as part of the 33 1/3 series of books about popular music. An expanded edition was published in 2014 that included essays by  Nick Hornby, Krist Novoselic, Ann Powers, Mary Gaitskill, Sheila Heti and others, as well as a new afterword by Carl.
The LA Review of Books said that  "Let's Talk About Love...is not just a critical study of one Céline Dion album, but an engaging discussion of pop criticism itself."
Carl and I, of course, talk about Céline’s recent performance at the Paris Olympics, about the unlikely popular and academic success of Let’s Talk About Love, and about the two book-length works he wants to complete—one a biography of a beloved writer and singer-songwriter, the other an argument for the legitimacy of crying as a critical response to great art.
This podcast is produced and hosted by Nathan Whitlock, in partnership with The Walrus.
Music: "simple-hearted thing" by Alex Lukashevsky. Used with permission.

Peter Darbyshire

My guest on this episode is Peter Darbyshire. Peter is an author, journalist, and communications professional whose debut novel, Please, won the KM Hunter Award for Best Emerging Artist and the ReLit Award for Best Novel. He is also the author of the novel The Warhol Gang and the story collection Has the World Ended Yet? He works as Communications Officer for BC’s Provincial Health Services Authority.
I’m doing something slightly different in this episode, because Peter actually has three books that are about to be published: The Mona Lisa Sacrifice, The Dead Hamlets and The Apocalypse Ark, which are all part of his Cross series of supernatural thrillers. All three books are being published in October by Wolsak & Wynn. However, all three were previously published by another indie press in 2013, 2015, and 2016, respectively. The Vancouver Sun said, in its review of the Cross series, that Darbyshire “writes with the unfettered delight of a gluttonous reader trapped in a library in his own mind, drawing promiscuously from myth, folk tale, religious texts and apocrypha, literature, music and philosophy.”
Peter and I talk about how running the COVID-19 social media response for a provincial health authority gave him a new perspective on the apocalypse, about the process of getting the Cross series reprinted—and why it needed to be—and about how the stretch of time since his last new work of fiction speaks to something of a crisis of faith when it comes to his own writing‑but also a sense of liberation.
This podcast is produced and hosted by Nathan Whitlock, in partnership with The Walrus.
Music: "simple-hearted thing" by Alex Lukashevsky. Used with permission.

Michael Christie

My guest on this episode is Michael Christie. Michael is the author of the 2012 story collection, The Beggar's Garden, which was longlisted for the Giller Prize, shortlisted for the Writers' Trust Prize for Fiction, and won the Vancouver Book Award. His 2015 novel If I Fall, If I Die was also longlisted for the Giller Prize, as well as the Kirkus Prize, and was selected as a New York Times Editors' Choice Pick, and was on numerous best-of-the-year lists. His essays and book reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Globe & Mail. Michael’s most recent novel is Greenwood, which was published in 2019 by McClelland & Stewart. That books was a national bestseller and won the Le Prix du Livre de Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines and the 2020 Arthur Ellis Award for Excellence in Canadian Crime Writing. It was also shortlisted for the 2020 Forest of Reading Evergreen Award, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize, and longlisted for the Giller Prize, and was a 2023 Canada Reads Finalist. The New York Times Book Review called Greenwood “superb” and said it “penetrates to the core of things.”
Michael and I talk about how his writing career has been influenced by his previous semi-pro skateboarding career, about converting Greenwood into a TV series, and about how while working on his new novel, he had to resist the temptation to copy the narrative formula that had worked so well in Greenwood.
This podcast is produced and hosted by Nathan Whitlock, in partnership with The Walrus.
Music: "simple-hearted thing" by Alex Lukashevsky. Used with permission.

Deborah Dundas

My guest on this episode is Deborah Dundas. Deborah is a writer and journalist who has worked as a television producer and as the Books Editor for the Toronto Star, where she is currently an opinion editor. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including Maclean’s, the Globe and Mail, the National Post, Canadian Notes and Queries, the Belfast Telegraph, and the Sunday Independent. She also teaches Creative Non-Fiction at the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies. Deborah’s first book is On Class, which was published by Biblioasis Books in 2023. That book was A Hamilton Review of Books Best Book of 2023 and was shortlisted for the 2024 Speaker’s Book Award. The Winnipeg Free Press called On Class “a nifty, provocative little book.”
Deborah and I talk about her work on the most picked-over and discussed literary story of the decade, which are the revelations about the late Alice Munro and her family, and about how she initially wanted to say no to working on that story. We talk about some of the progress and great conversations about class she has seen witnessed publishing her book, and how she feels just a little less like an outsider in Canada’s literary culture.
 
This podcast is produced and hosted by Nathan Whitlock, in partnership with The Walrus.
Music: "simple-hearted thing" by Alex Lukashevsky. Used with permission.
 

Jackie Khalilieh

My guest on this episode is Jackie Khalilieh. Jackie is a writer and former teacher whose first book, the YA novel Something More, was published by Tundra Books in 2023. That novel was shortlisted for the Ruth & Sylvia Shwartz Award, as well as the Snow Willow Award, and was selected for several Best of the year lists, including by the New York Public Library and Audible Books Canada. Publishers Weekly called Something More a “thought-provoking and thoroughly entertaining debut that centers questions of identity via a fresh lens."
Jackie and I talk about how her identities as a person with autism and a Palestinian-Canadian inform the kinds of stories she wants to tell, about some of the negative response her book has received from readers who perhaps wanted its autistic main character to conform to a particular ideal, and about how she can’t on GoodReads without stripmining the site for data and projections about her own writing career.
 
This podcast is produced and hosted by Nathan Whitlock, in partnership with The Walrus.
Music: "simple-hearted thing" by Alex Lukashevsky. Used with permission.

Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer

My guest on this episode is Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer. Kathryn is the author of the novels All the Broken Things, Perfecting, and The Nettle Spinner, as well as the story collection, Way Up, which won the Danuta Gleed Award. Her work has been published in Granta Magazine, Maclean’s Magazine, The Walrus, Joyland, This Magazine, and elsewhere. Her fiction has won a Danuta Gleed Award and been nominated for The Amazon First Novel Award, the Toronto Book Award, CBC Canada Reads, and the Relit Award. 
Kathryn’s most recent book is Wait Softly Brother, which was published by Wolsak & Wynn in 2023 and was longlisted for the Giller Prize. The Toronto Star said that Wait Softly Brother is “rich with the true stuff of imagined lives, and the imagined stuff of true lives,” and “is a glorious enchantment indeed.”
Kathryn and I talk about how the enormous emotional, existential, and even geographic changes she has gone through in past decade have impacted her writing—for the better—about how Wait Softly Brother came out of a very public writing experiment after she started to think her career was over, and about her compulsive need to transform every experience into the seed for more writing.
This podcast is produced and hosted by Nathan Whitlock, in partnership with The Walrus.
Music: "simple-hearted thing" by Alex Lukashevsky. Used with permission.
 

Kelly S. Thompson

My guest on this episode is Kelly S. Thompson. Kelly is a former Logistics Officer in the Canadian Armed Forces who began writing about her military experiences in a blog for Chatelaine magazine. She wrote about those experiences again in her debut book, Girls Need Not Apply, which was published in 2019 by McClelland & Stewart, named a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book, and became an instant bestseller. Kelly teaches Creative Nonfiction at the University of King’s College. Her most recent book, the memoir Still, I Cannot Save You, was published by McClelland & Stewart in 2023, and was also an instant bestseller. It was shortlisted for the 2024 Evelyn Richardson Non-Fiction Award. Rachel Matlow, author of Dead Mom Walking, wrote that “with this heartwrenching yet hopeful book, Kelly has turned her loss and grief into something beautiful.”
Kelly and I talk about how her current writing practice is informed by her years in the military and by her experiences with chronic illness, about the worst response to her writing she has ever received, and about how publishing Still, I Cannot Save You has led to some expected, but no less agonizing difficulties with her extended family.
A quick warning: this conversation covers some very difficult and traumatic territory, such as addiction and domestic abuse.
 
This podcast is produced and hosted by Nathan Whitlock, in partnership with The Walrus.
Music: "simple-hearted thing" by Alex Lukashevsky. Used with permission.