For nearly as long as there have been podcasts, there have been podcasts about stories. Three recently launched podcasts take a slightly different approach to the writing life, from Pamela Hensley’s deep dives into an author’s body of work (How I Wrote This) to Nathan Whitlock’s conversations with authors who are between writing books (What Happened Next), to Dr. Syrus Marcus Ware’s podcast (No Future No Cry) that features original speculative fiction from writers, artists, and activists who imagine what the future could look like. 

Q&Q recently spoke to all three to find out more about how their podcasts work.

Pamela Hensley

How I Wrote This

Writer and editor Pamela Hensley first got the idea to start a podcast when she returned to Montreal after spending time away during the pandemic and began working with Yolk Literary Journal, where she is the managing editor. She launched How I Wrote This in October 2023, and the nine episodes of the first season feature a longform interview with Montreal-based authors, starting with Heather O’Neill and including others such as Kim Thúy and Sean Michaels. Each season focuses on writers who live in a particular city, so after spending time with those in her home base, Hensley went to Berlin for season two, where she interviewed eight authors, including Canadian Jonathan Garfinkel. A three-episode bonus on the authors longlisted for this year’s Giller Prize launched in early November, and Hensley will be travelling to Brooklyn this month to interview authors for season three. 

Hensley produces the podcast with support from the Community Digital Arts Hub in Montreal, where she records her interviews. Distribution is through Knockabout Media. 

I’m interested to know how you came up with the idea for How I Wrote This – how did it come to be a podcast? 

I got involved with a local Montreal journal and I was reminded how writing is very solitary but the community is quite vibrant – when you get a bunch of writers together all they want to do is talk about writing and books. At Yolk, we have events, and we have launches, we have something called egg the poets. We have all these things happening, and writers show up, and then we start talking about books. I realized that there is a small community out there who loves these conversations. 

And I thought, ‘If I could record those and talk to any author who is interested in doing the same thing, then I could bring them to everybody and I could ask them anything.’ It became quite tempting, the idea of doing something like that. 

Had you ever done anything like a podcast before?  

No. Not at all. It is a lot more work than I ever anticipated. 

How did that first season go? 

It went great. People were so candid. I don’t just talk about their latest work, I talk about their body of work, so I read just about everything they’ve published. It gives me a sense of what their concerns are and what motivates the writing. It’s more about their whole journey and how one work leads to another.

What has been the most surprising thing to you about doing this? 

Probably how heartfelt the conversations are, how candid the authors are. 

Do you have a particular example or two in mind? 

Everyone, honestly. I had one author who broke down crying twice; we had to stop the recording. And let me just say, I’m not looking for that. But when you talk about personal things and when you’ve got a story that is shattering, you’re reliving it and you get emotional. For a lot of the authors, what they write about is what matters to them, and so it’s emotional. It’s not personal. I have no interest in digging into personal things that they don’t want to share. I’m just interested in what is inside a creative person; what gets to them so they make art. 

What do you think this podcast offers listeners?

It gives them a better sense of who an author is and how the stories they write have come about. I always say it’s a show about the story behind the stories. You know when someone says, imagine you could have dinner with anyone living or dead, and then you picture yourself across the table asking Churchill or Ella Fitzgerald or Hemingway questions? I really admire writers and I want to know more, and I think a lot of people are also interested in the personal experiences that shape a writer’s life and their journey.

Syrus Marcus Ware

No Future No Cry

The idea that would become the six-episode podcast No Future No Cry first came to artist, activist, and professor Dr. Syrus Marcus Ware when he was driving to a friend’s home in 2020 for one of those first lockdown-busting outdoor, socially distanced meetings. While in the car, the co-founder of Black Lives Matter Canada was thinking about how the future seemed particularly uncertain at that time for so many reasons. What would the future look like if it were imagined by artists, writers, and activists on the margins? Ware asked about 40 people to write short fiction of between 1,000 and 2,000 words set at some point in the next 100 years. 

A six-episode first season of the podcast launched in late October 2024. Each episode features an original short fiction from writers such as Sandy Hudson, Chase Joynt and Samantha Curley, and Yousef Kadoura. After a reading of the story by the author, Ware interviews the author about their work. Ware is the creator and host of the podcast, which was produced as part of his fellowship with Vancouver-based nonprofit 221A and in collaboration with Visitor Media and support from the Canada Council. Work on selecting the six stories that will comprise the episodes of the second season is already underway. 

Where did No Future No Cry come from?

I was really fortunate to spend time with Octavia Butler in 2005. She said the way she wrote her stories was she just followed the trajectory that we were currently on and imagined where we might be in 20 years, 30 years. 

So I thought, ‘well, what would happen if I asked activists and writers and artists and systems change organizers what they imagined would happen if we continued on the road that we were on?’ I asked a bunch of people to write a story set in the next hundred years that told us a bit about what was happening in the future. 

I was reacting to the situation where the future seemed decidedly uncertain. For those of us who were in abolitionist movements and organizing around activism, we realized that a lot of people were having trouble imagining something different, and that’s where artists come in. Artists can help us imagine all sorts of different futures.

The choice to share these stories in the podcast medium is an interesting one – what was it about the medium that made you think this project would be a good fit for audio? 

I remember being a child in the ‘70s and ‘80s listening to radio stories, and they really inspired me. I would just sit there and imagine. So I thought, ‘what would happen if we all got to curl up with a cup of tea and listen to someone dreaming into the future, and to really go on a journey?’ You hear these bits of audio of the bicycle in Tiffany King’s story, for example, as they’re riding through the streets of Atlanta – these bits of the soundtrack of the stories felt really important to help people make the imaginative leap. 

Why was it important to you to include interviews with the author with each episode?

I love being able to pull back the veil and show how and why people made the things that they made, to be in conversation with these changemakers at a time when their stories bring out their anxieties and their worries and their dreams. In the interviews we got to dig a little deeper, and hear about why. The interviews are almost like a reading guide that helps you at the end of a book. You can listen to the story again after hearing the interview, and maybe pick up different things and dive a little deeper. But also hopefully, fundamentally, by revealing how and why the authors made the choices that they made, it might inspire other people to write their own stories about the future. 

How did people respond when you reached out to them asking for stories? 

I was inspired a bit by the incredible book Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements that adrienne maree brown and Walida Imarisha put together where they invited people who had never written before to write stories. Some of the people I wrote to had never written anything before: they were activists, they were organizers, and they weren’t necessarily tapped into artistic production. So some of the people I asked were like, ‘Me? You want me to write a story? What could I possibly say?’ They had lots of ideas of what the future could look like, but they hadn’t put it on paper or told it in story form. That was the first thing. The second thing was that people really felt excited. We were in this revolutionary moment, this catalytic moment – which I think we’re still in to some extent – and people had a lot they wanted to share about what they wanted to see for the future, or what they were worried was coming in the future. 

What has been most surprising about this project for you?

The thing that surprised me the most was that even in moments of strife and despair and worry and anxiety artists can help us dream and imagine that we’re going to make it. I think about these stories and about how they’re offerings of possibility. Even when they’re eerie. The other thing that really surprised me was how easy it seemed to be for activists to imagine the future. Activists are in a good place to be involved in speculative fiction because they’re also daring to dream that another world is possible.

What do you think it is about speculative fiction that makes it such a natural fit to difficult moments in time? 

2024 has been a hallmark, like a pinpoint moment for a lot of speculative fiction authors. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine famously has the episode about the Bell riots that are set in August 2024, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower starts in July 2024. 2024 to me still feels like a made-up year: I’m a child of the 70s; it doesn’t seem real. 

We’re living in the time of the shiny metal space outfits with the deep-v triangle in all of those science fiction shows from the ‘60s – we’re living in that future moment right now. Naturally people are starting to think, well, what do the next hundred years look like? What is possible? 

But we’re also in a crisis, quite frankly: a climate crisis, a crisis of racial injustice, a crisis of conscience in our social world, and I think there is a recognition that things have to change and they have to change quickly if we’re going to survive this. 

What better way to imagine the kind of changes that we want to see than to write speculative fiction stories about what might be coming? It was really important to hear stories not only from the center but from the margins, to hear from those of us who are in the underground who maybe haven’t had the same kind of representation in a white supremacist world but who we need to hear from now as we think about the future.

Nathan Whitlock (Kendra Marjerrison)

What Happened Next: A Podcast About Newish Books

Launched by Hamilton, Ontario-based author Nathan Whitlock in May 2023, this weekly podcast operates almost in opposition to the way books and writing are typically covered in media: no one is promoting anything. Whitlock interviews authors who are between books, and has the kind of wide-ranging and long-form conversations that are not always possible in shorter, publication-date-adjacent formats. 

In July 2024, the podcast moved to The Walrus, where it is now hosted (and whose designers created a logo template that Whitlock updates each week with the new guest image – an improvement, he says, from the one he came up with on his own).

So far, Whitlock has produced more than 80 episodes of the podcast, and has spoken with Canadian authors who work across genres, from Waubgeshig Rice to John Vaillant, Lynn Coady to Deborah Dundas, and many more.

Can you tell me a little bit about why you decided to start What Happened Next?

As part of my job at Humber College, I had been creating podcasts for faculty. I really enjoyed making them. When I switched jobs at Humber and became a full-time professor instead, I was no longer making the podcast, and I missed it. 

And so I thought, well, what would I make it about? I had some ideas and thought the easiest one would be an author interview podcast, but I don’t want people to come on and promote their books, because as important as I think that is, and as happy as I am that there are some outlets, still, where you can do that, I would find those conversations really boring. 

I really wanted to have conversations that were like the ones I have when I meet authors at launches or at bars or backstage at festivals, where they complain about their publicists, or about how their publishers didn’t send the books, or they didn’t get any reviews for their last book, or a review got the name of the book wrong, or whatever it is. 

I wanted to make a podcast where I talked about the real frustrations and those weird little triumphs that authors and writers face, to have something close to those backstage conversations. So I decided that I would only talk to authors when they’re between books. 

When you started putting the podcast together, did you have a sense of where it would take you?

No. Starting a podcast is easy, and you can get three episodes in without breaking a sweat. What I did know, though, is that the hard part is in keeping one going. When I decided early on that it would be weekly, I knew I was going to be kicking myself a little bit later on for that decision, and I occasionally do. 

Mostly I knew it was just going to be a lot of work, and I didn’t really think in terms of what kind of audience it might have. I think I had a sense that there would be some interest in slightly more candid author conversations than what you might hear on a radio or on a breakfast-television type interview, but I had no sense if anybody would actually care or if it would be so incredibly niche that it’s almost not worth doing. 

It seems as if that has not turned out to be the case. 

Well, even if it did, I mean, I write literary fiction novels, so I’m used to doing things that are so incredibly niche they’re almost not worth doing but I just do them anyway. I’m not dissuaded by obscurity. 

How are you coping with the relative lack of obscurity that the podcast has received?

What’s been really cool is finding out that there are authors out there listening. Before I had Waub Rice on the podcast, he had posted that [What Happened Next] was his favourite books podcast. And I was like, ‘Who showed it to Waub Rice? How did he find out about it?’

And then I sent a message to Miriam Toews to try and get her on this podcast – which will happen at some point, she’s just in the middle of working right now. In her polite decline, she said, “I love it, I love listening to it.” That was a shock too – like, what? Why are you listening to it? You have so much else in the world you could be doing. That has been surprising and gratifying. 

The concept of the podcast allows you to ask questions and cover material that isn’t usually covered in author interviews. Not that they’re wilfully overlooked, it’s just that there’s not time or space to –

It’s also just not necessarily appropriate. Talking about whether there was anything you hoped your book would do that didn’t happen, that’s not a conversation you would have while you’re promoting it. 

I had a whole conversation with David Bergen a few episodes ago about his decision to withdraw from all official Giller Prize events and why he was publicly associating himself with the people who are looking to have Giller divest itself from Scotiabank funding. I followed it up by saying that he is a very established writer who has won the Giller and has been shortlisted for it many times, and many other awards, and asked if he was a first-time writer, and the same situation was happening, would he have done the same thing, would he have publicly taken his book out of the running for the prize and disassociated himself – in the way a lot of authors have this year. And he was very honest. 

He said, “I don’t know; I hope I would have had the courage, but I honestly don’t know.” He also said the people who are really brave are the ones who’ve actually withdrawn this year, because [the prize is] a big deal, because it made his career.  

That kind of conversation you’re not going to get into on Breakfast Television just before someone comes in and makes flapjacks or does wine pairings for Halloween. That’s not the conversation you can have. But you can have it if it’s a little more longform. 

You’re going to keep going forever, obviously. 

I have no end plan. There will always be new authors; there will always be people who are between books. 

I hope that it’s the kind of podcast that you can listen to every episode and enjoy, whether you know the author or are into that genre, because I don’t think it’s so focused on their books as books – it’s more about careers.

These interviews have been edited and condensed.