I’ve been writing all over the shop for a good couple of decades. These are some selected highlights from the last few years—there are long trails of newspaper and radio work before this. But this is what you get for now. You don’t need to read my old film reviews, I promise.
Recent Work
- On In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova for the Georgia Review.
- Letter from the Pamirs, on a dream of an impossible garden high in the Badakhshan mountains, for The Calvert Journal.
- A slow journey up and down the Wakhan valley on the border of Tajikistan and Afghanistan, as the inaugural recipient of the Studio D Radiodurans travel writing grant.
- On Horizon by Barry Lopez for The Georgia Review.
- Mother Superior — The Saturday Paper. A quiet story from the edge of Lake Superior about grief, renewal, and the art of listening.
- How to Clone a Forest — Smith Journal (PDF). The otherworldly story of David Milarch and the Archangel Tree Project.
- Barry Lopez: On the edge, calling back — a centerpiece feature interview for The Alpine Review.
- A couple of pieces for Roads & Kingdoms/CNN’s Explore Parts Unknown: Can Newfoundland’s fisheries make a comeback? and this one about a butcher in my hometown.
- Winy Maas on the Tianjin Binhai Library — Azure. This cover story was a frank Q&A about a stunning but fraught project in China by the Dutch firm MVRDV.
- Cold Front — Monocle (PDF). Reporting from Iceland on the coming political realities for the Arctic as the sea ice retreats.
- If these walls could talk — Smith Journal (PDF). Uncovering the stories of missile strikes and dark prison sites from the buildings and rubble left behind, with Eyal Weizman and his research agency Forensic Architecture.
I have a stubborn/stupid tendency to write for places that don’t have decent online presences, but feel free to ask me for PDFs of anything mentioned below. Recently I’ve been focussed on my own magazine but here’s a few more things I’ve done for Modern Farmer on Australia’s dairy wars, CNBC on Canada’s energy future, and my editorial from that time I guest edited one of my favourite mags, The Lifted Brow.
I’ve been a correspondent for Monocle in Canada, Australia, and the South Pacific. I’ve covered current affairs, business, lifestyle and culture for both the magazine and Monocle 24 radio. I’ve interviewed everybody from prime ministers, foreign ministers and multinational CEOs through to artisan bakers and avocado farmers. Lots of mayors, too. So many mayors. Here are a couple of my favourite features (mostly paywalled, ask me for the real deal).
- Trouble in Paradise. I travelled to Vanuatu to interview their then-PM (now in prison, I believe) and various village chiefs and community leaders about the struggles they face to build a sustainable economy as the tides rise around them. Here’s a companion radio piece about the island’s murky historical relationship with the sandalwood industry.
- Rise and Shine. For this cover story, which was huge amounts of fun to report, I went behind the scenes of Australia’s morning media, checking out breakfast radio control rooms, the floors of troubled newsrooms and the harshly lit studios of tabloid TV shows.
One of my favourite relationships over the years was with the now sadly defunct Australian magazine Smith Journal. I’m not sure where to even start cataloguing the kinds of things I wrote for them (and none of it is online), but let’s give it a go.
- Sound That’s Way Out — A feature profile of pioneering soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause.
- Evolutionary Architecture — The wildly utopian handbuilt structures of “natural architect” SunRay Kelley.
- Things I Know. For this regular feature in the magazine, I spoke at length with some incredible men—the likes of Errol Morris, Chris Hadfield, Chuck Klosterman, Ira Glass—and basically got to ask them what they’d come to learn about life. Here’s one I particularly love, with Benjamin Ferencz, the last surviving prosecutor of the Nuremberg Trials. One day I’ll do something with the audio of all these beautiful conversations. Pester me, alright?
- Features. There was a cover feature on Edward Burtynsky, a profile of the owner of the world’s largest record collection, a cultural history of the MP3 format, an appreciation of the radiogram, and, maybe my fave, a profile of a guy trying to walk off the end of the Minecraft map.
