Carving out a creative career: an interview with Mark Leiren-Young

I'm your host, Emma. And a little tidbit about me this week is that as a humanities graduate, I love to read. My friends and I have a book club and I'm really excited because our guest today is actually an author, and I can't wait to add some of those books to our book club list. But before I introduce our guest today, I'd love to also introduce my wonderful host, Katy.

It just came out this year. It's really good. I would highly recommend. Before we jump into today's conversation, I want to acknowledge that, as always, we are recording at the University of Victoria, which is located on the traditional territory of the Lekwungen peoples. We want to extend our gratitude for being here as uninvited guests on this land, And we want to acknowledge the Songhees, Esquimalt, and WSANEC peoples whose historical relationships with the land continue to this day.

I'm just coming up on my 4th year of getting to live and work and learn and play here. Every single one of those years has been an honor and a privilege. It's one that I I really don't take lightly.

And he hosts the Skaana podcast where he covers ocean related environmental issues. It's so good. If you haven't had a chance to listen, definitely check it out. He toured Canada as half of the comedy duo, Local Anxiety. And he won the Leacock medal for humor for his memoir, Never Shoot A Stampede Queen, a rookie reporter in the caribou. This is the story of his first year in the real world after graduating from UVic. Welcome to the show, Mark. We're so happy to have you today.

And no theater companies exist without their grant applications. Oh. So they kinda went, oops. So while I was in Strathroy going, now what do I do? Because I had this absolute mix in terms of what I'd studied, what my CV looked like even after graduating.

I'd done journalism. I'd done theatre. So I was sending up resumes to various newspapers in Ontario and got this call from the Williams Lake Tribune. And I did not even know where Williams Lake was. And it turned out that a friend of mine had recommended me to the Williams Lake Tribune as, like, this great reporter.

He'd also lied and said I was a great photographer. So I did not know how to take photo. Keep in mind, this was in the days of film. And cameras that required you to know what you were doing and only take 12 shots. I arrived in Williams Lake with my dad's camera, which I did not even know how to load.

There was no career plan, but I have a vivid memory that was just on the verge of graduating. And across from campus, there was a Mexican restaurant and I remember going there a few days before graduation going, I'm doomed. I got a bachelor of fine arts. I think this is basically what's known as a waiter's degree. The waiter comes up to me and he sees my UVic binder.

And what are you studying? And I said, well, theatre and creative writing. And they expect him to laugh and say, of course, that's what my degree's in. And instead he says, oh, yeah. My degree's in microbiology. I graduated in something I really enjoyed. I hope he really enjoyed microbiology. But all I could think of was that felt like one of those things your parents tell you to study.

You know what? I did 5 years studying something I love. If I end up a waiter, great, but at least I've done 5 years studying something I love.

I know it's a lot, so you don't have to remember everything. You can focus on the stuff that excites you the most, but we'd love to hear more about your journey.

I ran and started the school paper at my high school in Vancouver. Those were the most intentional things I've ever done. Journalism and theatre led to writing TV that started with animation, that turned into every kind of TV imaginable. I've done odd translations of anime where I've been given a 100 episodes of a series in Japanese and been told, make sense of this, turn this into stories that we can use. Different animated series I've written for ages from preschool all the way up to, I don't know, whoever still reads.

The work that I did in television where I was writing for preschool led to me writing kids books for Orca Book Publishing, which is based in Victoria. Working on my 7th kids' book, This is Octopus. This is out next year. Just got a contract for my 8th kids' book, which is, again, environmental issues. I've written 2 comic memoirs and then non-fiction books.

I once wrote a theme park ride for a theme park in Singapore, House of Horrors. Oh, while I was still in high school and while I was at university before I transferred from UBC to UVic, I'd sing telegrams. I have done acting before. Check me out on the 1st season finale of reboot The Guardian Code on Netflix. I am the villain in that.

And then I've got the UVic teaching, which has almost all been random, so much of it. And then really the world shut down, and I took over a whole bunch of stuff during the pandemic because before that, I was like, yeah, I'll teach the odd class. And almost all of those were somebody in the department going, wanna do a comedy class? Like, sure, that'd be fun, right? But I was really careful to protect my time for my writing.

Then the DC and Marvel classes happened, and those were so much fun. And I am pitching a book based on the stuff that I cover in those classes. And podcasting, I've interviewed some just astonishing people. So, yeah, very little of it was fully intentional.

Because if I wrote a play, I knew that somehow I could make it happen. When I was starting out, if you wrote TV or film, the odds of you being able to make it happen with your own friends and your own gear, which you can now kinda do. And even with TV, you can't do that now on your own. You need somebody to write you a stupidly big check. Yeah.

So I thought, I don't wanna write things that never get done. But I got into TV. I was coming from journalism. I was comparing to journalism. Like, there was one gig that I had where I was writing what were called interstitials for CBC.

And interstitials were when the host comes on and says, coming up after hockey net in Canada, we've got this show. And then there's like 30 seconds of blah blah. And I actually wrote those during intermission during connect games going, I'm getting paid like several $100 a shot for writing something during intermission. And they think I'm really good because I'm actually doing research and they've never had anybody research them. But I had written what's known as a spec script, a fake script of a real episode of TV for X Files.

And I'd only done X Files because I had friends who worked on the X Files. They could smuggle scripts out to me. I wrote my own version of an X Files script. And the person who saw me on stage at the arts club doing a comedy show was there with a friend of mine and said, it's too bad he doesn't write for kids because we could use somebody really funny. We're doing this new show called Reboot.

And my friend said, oh, he writes for kids because I was writing I wrote kids' plays. She went, wow, I wonder if he's got a TV sample. I have this X Files thing. What I did not know was that Gillian Anderson was married to one of their animators. Oh my god.

Next thing I knew I'm sitting in the room going, so you're the X Files writer, Yeah. You're gonna be writing an episode of X Files with parodies of Fox Mulder and and Dana Scully, and I'm suddenly reading an X Files episode for fax modems and Dana Nelly with Gillian Anderson playing Dana Nelly and Duchovny is like I'm not doing this stupid cartoon. Fortunately I had a friend I went to high school with so I said yeah My friend Scott can probably thank DeConvy. Yeah. So he was, and Scott has had a tremendous animation career.

So it was a mix of accident and having the material there. Yeah. Right? Really the most amazing gig I think I've ever done was I got to write the orca exhibit for the Royal BC Museum.

And he said, no. No. We hire a writer to write the panels. We need somebody who knows how to write for kids. Well, of course, I've been writing kids TV.

So I went, I can write for kids. Can I write your panels? How do I get to write your panels? I was brought in and invited to write the panels and basically write the exhibit. And they very quickly realized that because I'd done all this research both for the book and for the podcast, that I was connected to most of the people they were interviewing for research.

I knew a lot of the stories. I knew a whole bunch of things about whales that the curators didn't. I mean, they knew epic amounts of science that I did not understand. But in terms of the pop culture of it all, I had done all this research in terms of the history of captivity, who all the various whales were. My proudest contribution was that we should not be using the numbers to refer to these orcas.

We should not be referring to them as j 35, but as Tahlequah. If you look at the exhibit, you'll notice that every orca was referred to by the name they'd been given to the point where they used the names and then the numbers in parentheses where traditionally it will be the other way around. Mhmm. Everything about the museum thing was so amazingly cool and telling the story of the southern residents. But again, speaking of career twists, if somebody told me when I started going, oh, yeah, one day you're gonna be the whale guy.

Like there are people that just call me like the whale guy now. And I'm like, that was because I found one story, and to my mind that one story was science fiction. And it was the story of Moby Doll, the first ever orc in captivity. And I wrote this book, The 100 Year Old Whale. I've told that story in so many different forms.

I'm still finishing a documentary on that story. But what obsessed me about it, at the point I was doing this, I had no idea that Moby was a southern resident dorka, that the family was endangered. But also when I took on the Mobi story, it was an incredibly inspiring story about how we'd done all these horrible things to southern resident orcas and the population was recovering. And everybody I was interviewing was talking about the recovery of these orcas. So I went, I will make a movie about Granny, the 100 year old whale, and I will talk about this incredible story about recovery.

And as we're making the movie, the orcas just start to drop. And this goes from this incredible, inspiring, wow, is it nature resilient story to, wow, aren't humans horrible and isn't this sad? And it was just shell shocked. I, like, I seriously don't think I would have ended up doing any of the work that I did if I hadn't jumped on to the story when it was happy. To me, Moby Doll was a science fiction story.

It was first contact with alien species. I was trying to write about the transformation in cultural attitudes towards orcas that took place over an incredible short period of time.

It's a little tragic. But with The Whales, that was absolutely an accident. Then the accident compounded because The Killer Whale Who Changed the World was was wrapped in the first draft. And I was getting phone calls, emails from the people I'd interviewed saying, oh, do you know this whale story? Do you know this? Do you know this is happening? This is happening? And I'm trying to explain. Look. I'm I'm a freelance journalist.

At that time, I was writing for a lot of different places, but it's like the walrus will take 1 orca story from me every year. And then they feel

None of them want a lot of these stories my wife said well why don't you do a podcast where you just interview these people and I said no I've done a podcast before there's technical stuff involved I do not like doing technical stuff But she actually said, what if I produce? If I produce, will you interview all these people? This really did come from somebody saying, have you heard this amazing orchestra? And then Wales really took over because Transbadm Mountain Pipeline was happening, and I reached out to a friend who was covering and watching all the hearings for Dogwood. I said, look, I'm not seeing anything about the whales.

I said, I haven't seen a single mention of the orcas. And he went, one person's mentioned them in passing. I'm like, seriously, no one's mentioned them at the hearings at all? He went, no. I wrote a story for the National Observer where I'd interviewed all of these different people.

I said, what does the Trans Mountain pipeline mean for the southern residents? And all of them answered with the word extinction. I was getting this answer over and over again and either being told, can't quote me on that, or I'd say, so you're gonna talk to the commission and go to the hearings. Right? I said, oh, I can't.

I said, why can't you? I said, well, I was one of the consultants on the report. I don't have standing. I can't because I work for the Department of Fisheries Notions. Therefore, I don't have standing. And then they'd all go, but you are. Right? And I went, No. I'm I'm a journalist. We don't do that.

Every single person who I consider the person to speak to this is saying I'm not allowed to speak to this. I remember calling the guy from Dogwood the night before the Victoria hearing. Please tell me somebody's mentioned the orcas. And he went, no. I'm like, I don't wanna do this. I don't wanna do this. I sort of knew the fallout if I did it. And I wrote a speech, delivered the speech. The response was epic. And immediately after that, I was told I was no longer a journalist.

Yeah. Places that would hire me to write articles now were very clear I could only write op eds because I'd taken a public political stand. That was the orcas taking over my life entirely. Yeah. And since then, there are things that I can say that a scientist is not allowed to. If David Suzuki says this, you go, of course, he's saying this. He's David Suzuki's gut, the organization.

Like, they're not studying theater. They're not studying creative writing. You work on this course called creative being, and I would love for you to speak on how you, like, tap into that creative capacity that's in all of your students and in people who aren't necessarily making a career out of this in the way that you have.

And I said, what was your original vision for it? And I said, the original vision for this class was basically introduce everybody in fine arts to the aspects of fine arts they don't know. So I went, okay. That seems like my happy place. So when I pitched to do the course, I said, I would like bring in people who cross boundaries and genres.

I want to bring in guests who cross worlds. One of my favorite guests for this is Carey Newman, who's an artist, who's also been an opera singer, who's also a writer, who's also made films. And I'm like, I wanna talk about how all of these come together. And the gift for me of doing this on Zoom during the pandemic was I was able to bring in the best people in the world were doing nothing.

My dream class was one of the classes that started off this term. My students have to move at some point. Because I thought, if you're a theater student, you know, getting up and doing a theater exercise, that's just Tuesday. Yeah. But if you're a business major and you're taking this class, that's a scary thing to do. I brought in a choreographer. I brought in Trina Stubble who got the entire class moving. I'm like, yes. That's what I wanna see in this class. I've booked in clowns before.

I brought in the Wonderheads last term. They went, could we bring in our whole show and sort of preview? Yes. Side 4 Wonderheads with full mask in that classroom, letting the students try the masks on to get a sense of what it was like to walk around a mask. The Phoenix season this term was starting off with a 100 years of Broadway.

I reached out to the choreographer and director of that, Pia Wyatt, and she brought in the entire cast. And I started off FA 101 with 10 people singing and dancing and doing an entire 10 minute excerpt from, 100 Broadway. For a theater student, that's Tuesday. For a business student, maybe that actually gets them in to see a show. But that's my goal for that class.

It's just like how many different things can I possibly expose you to in, like, 9 guest lectures? How many different art forms? Can I bring in a stand up comic? Can I bring in a dancer? Can I bring in a clown? I said I want them to get that all of these areas of creativity overlap.

Don't ask for permission. Don't worry what your grades are. Don't wait for your professor to approve the piece. Put your stuff out there. Take chances. The degree is not going to magically confer gigs to you. I did a business writing class once, and, you know, my big thing was look around the room. Somewhere in this room, somebody's gonna give you your first gig or say no to you when you apply for your first gig. Yeah. Just to remember you were mean.