“I’m still so early on in my career. My best work is still ahead of me,” says Hannah Rittner. Maybe in her eyes, however she is certainly being noticed by others, including the organizations behind the Canadian Jewish Playwriting Competition which…
Thomas Hoy hadn’t thought about a career in music—until he came to King’s. “The whole music thing really started there. I found my musical community at King’s in first year. Then I went on to compose music for plays staged by the King’s Theatrical…
Throughout his 30-year journalism career, Stephen Maher has relocated several times and worked as a general reporter, restaurant critic, political reporter and magazine correspondant. While his career has continually evolved, one thing that’s held…
Lyndsie Bourgon has her writing sights set on poachers. Tree poachers. “Poaching wood around the world is incredibly lucrative,” Lyndsie says, then adds, “but people don’t always pay much attention to it because trees don’t have the same kind of…
When Amy Shira Teitel looks up at the night sky she sees not just the twinkling lights, she sees stories. “I can’t look at the moon,” Amy says, “and not think about the stories of the people who went there. Or the planets and not think about the…
Scott Christensen did a little time travelling in 2019. He had enrolled in a program to teach creative writing offered at the University of Cambridge in England. “I walked around King’s College at Cambridge,” Scott says, “and it took me back to my…
Photo: Joan Baxter in November 2018 in southern Burkina Faso, with Roger Guibre (left), Thierry Bayala (centre), and Armand Bayala (right). Whether it’s reporting on a revolution in Burkina Faso, a failed coup d’état in Cameroon, or the prospect…
Paul Brothers is nothing if not strategic. He figures out what he wants, then he figures out how to get it. “I had a goal when I was a teenager that I would be on national television as a sports anchor before I turned thirty,” Paul says, a little…
Shannon Brownlee discovered a kind of academic freedom when she went to King’s. “I never felt like I was, what’s the word? Grade grubbing? It was never about the grade,” Shannon says. “It was about the material and the learning—learning for the joy…
Life has been a series of epiphanies for Lezlie Lowe. There was the one she had while studying in the Contemporary Studies Program (CSP). “I found that I could study philosophy, but I didn’t have to think about or write about old stuff by white…
A long lasting collaboration, a relatively rare event in Canadian theatre, began one day when Alex McLean held auditions for a King’s Theatre Society (KTS) production he was to direct. Sue Leblanc had only just started acting but she gave it a…
Kate Cayley has published works of fiction, collections of poetry and produced several plays; but she didn’t always know she was a writer. After graduating from King’s, she and some fellow alumni started a theatre company called Stranger Theatre,…
Griffin McInnes is an award-winning playwright and theatre director. Not bad for a guy who hadn’t considered that as a career path before going to university. “I was never a drama kid,” Griffin says. “I didn’t do drama in high school. It didn’t…
“I was walking across the King’s quad when I got the call,” Chloé Hung explains. “I had got the part of Juliet! I was jumping up and down!” To get a lead role in a King’s Theatrical Society (KTS) production of Romeo and Juliet was a big deal for a…
When Johanna Skibsrud was just 18, she felt restless. Part of it was being a teen wanting to get on with life and to become a writer. But there was something else. She had finished the Foundation Year Program (FYP) at King’s and it had been, well,…
Just imagine this—whale sharks and tiger sharks lurking around you. And up above, moving silently through the ocean off Costa Rica, three hundred hammerhead sharks glide by. It’s just another day at work for Alex Mifflin. “Underwater, you feel like…
Laura Armstrong knew it would be tough finding a job in journalism after graduating. “I gave myself five years to find a career in this industry,” she says, knowing that the writing and communications skills she developed at King’s would help her…
Telling a good story about Harriet Alida Lye and her life during and after King’s is an easy task. The difficulty comes in deciding which story. It could be about the work she is currently doing at the McMichael Art Gallery. Harriet is the social…
Wanda Taylor is probably one of the busiest people you’ll ever meet. If you ask her what she does she’ll say, “I am an author, an educator and a social justice activist. I’m also an artist and I try to incorporate all of that into everything I do.”…
Charlotte Bell is not likely to ever take the road well travelled. And part of the credit for that, she says, goes to King’s. “Within the King’s community I learned, for the first time, that being outside the box is okay. There was no rush to be,…
Sarah Fulford loved the notes her King’s professors gave her on the bi-weekly essays she had to write. She says, “I was quite bad at the beginning but I was much better by the end because I got such good feedback.” It was the feedback, as much as…
Shani Hamilton Greenlaw watched as the clouds rolled in and the rain began. It was a sweltering 42 degrees. She saw the lightning flashing on the horizon. The temporary bleachers, where more than twelve thousand people would soon be sitting, were…
There is a scene in the short film Bound, directed by Daniel Boos, that is intense and rife with suspense. An immigrant worker at a sawmill hands over a twenty dollar bill to a shopkeeper. Wrapped inside the bill is a note but we don’t see what’s…
“I was a poor, young Mennonite woman from the Prairies with little children. I was of no account to the world. I was nothing.” That could so easily be the beginning of a novel. But it is not. It is Miriam Toews talking about who she was when she…
It was a tense time for Dorian Geiger. He was living in Doha, Qatar, working for Al Jazeera English. He had written most of a feature article for the website about three families in Hong Kong who had hidden the American whistleblower Edward…
Stephen Marche had a great job. It was 2007 and he was professor of Renaissance drama at the City College of New York. “It was really rewarding,” he says. “I loved my job there.” Then he got the news: his wife, Sarah Fulford (BAH ’96), had been…
Adrian Lee knows there is much more of the Canadian story to be told. And as the opinions editor at Maclean’s magazine he can help tell it through the voices not always heard. He says he wants the opinions section, which he edits and curates, to be…
Stephanie McGrath says, “companies and organizations are starting to realize the only way they can reach people is with interesting stories.” And for a content strategist, that’s great news. Stephanie works for VERB Interactive in Halifax as Vice…
Anjali Pala stood in the National Gallery in Ottawa and stared. And compared. And made notes. “We spent a lot of time with the paintings, examining them against our proofs,” she says. “We were surrounded by scribbled Post-its and Pantone chips.”…
In a verse penned some time ago, Shauntay Grant writes, ”My mother says when I was young I’d follow her, room-to-room, asking the same question: ’Why’? I think that ever since I’ve been asking. I hope I never find the answers. It’s the questions…
When Davis Carr wants to do something new, chances are it will get done. “That’s how it was at King’s,” she says. “You just go for it.” So one evening she was in a pub in downtown Ottawa. “A friend turned to me and said, ‘Hey you know how to edit…
When a humanitarian disaster happens, the people affected need more than just the physical necessities. They need information. Where can they find accommodation? How do they register with the police? When is it safe to return home? That’s where…
Andrew Murphy still gets chills when he thinks about it. It was at the 2014 Inside Out Film Festival in Toronto. Andrew, as Director of Programming for the LGBT focused festival had brought in the film Matt Shepard Is A Friend of Mine. The capacity…
Kristi Bryson thinks parents who are not professional singers probably sing more to their children than she does. But she will sing a Mozart aria or two to her young son and certainly some Christmas carols. But little Matthew knows his mother’s…
Ticking away on a computer screen in the lobby of a building at the University of Dundee in Scotland, is the entire sequence of the human genome. The entire thing. The constant parade of the letters GCAT, that represent the building blocks of DNA,…
A writer’s mind is a curious place. There are a multitude of pathways and alleys. It can be a bit like where poet and short fiction author, David Huebert, wrote when he began work on his PhD at Western University in London, Ontario. “It’s in a…
It’s hard to imagine how a bout of tendonitis could lead to an Oscar nomination, a place in the FIN Atlantic International Film Festival Gala, and a great gig with the National Film Board (phew!), but it did for Ariel Nasr. This part of his…
Leah Collins Lipsett can plunk out a tune on a ukulele, but she is more at home at a piano. She began playing at the age of six and talks proudly of her final recital to earn her Bachelor of Music degree from King’s and Dalhousie. She nailed it,…
Natalie Meisner is both thoughtful and eloquent when she talks about her craft as playwright. “I do think of the play as a kind of exquisite blueprint. It is still a work of art but it isn’t really breathing, it isn’t alive until people inhabit…
It took a full year, a journey from Victoria to St John’s, and 500 musicians recorded individually. The result - Rich Aucoin’s extraordinary album We’re All Dying to Live. That massive and complicated project, says the 2006 King’s grad and…
It is a long way from a class on the history of alchemy at King’s to a stop at Yonge and Bloor on the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) subway. A long way geographically, but not so far in Haritha Popuri’s fertile brain. “I was thinking about…
As a “roving troubadour” Al Tuck is hard to pin down, but he’s content with that.“Since King’s, I’ve become the kind of performer I hoped and imagined I would be. I’ve had varying degrees of success, but I don’t care—I’ve been able to do what I…
On a special shelf in Ian Kenny’s room at the University of Amsterdam sit three letters. He treasures them. They are glowing letters of reference from three of his professors at King’s that helped him win the prestigious Amsterdam Merit Award. It…
Pamela Halstead can tell you how tough it used to be in the world of Canadian theatre. “I have a playwright friend who jokes that there was a time when he couldn’t get his work produced because he didn’t have a coal miner or fisherman or fiddle in…
“For me,” says Lindsay Cameron Wilson “a recipe is never just a recipe. It’s a neighbourhood. It’s a family. It’s a story.” And she tells those stories on her cooking show Love Food (Clerisy Entertainment) on Eastlink TV, on her podcast - The Food…
Samantha Robertson’s degree in English and Comparative Religion from King’s and subsequent Master in English from Dalhousie led first to an editorial position with Dark Horse Comics, and then to her current position as a localization writer/editor…
Heather Blom’s contemporary studies at King’s revealed a natural talent for bridging disciplines and communities.“Language and art, scientific language and artistic language - in the end, it boils down to communication and how different methods of…
In his valedictory address, Mitchell Cushman left fellow graduates with a closing thought: “Most of us came to King’s because we weren’t ready to label ourselves as part of any specific profession … our entire experience has been a foundation: one…
“When I was in FYP I thought I wanted to be a philosophy guy with a music hobby, and now I’m a music guy with a philosophy hobby,” folk singer Ben Caplan observes. Since the 2011 release of In the Time of Great Remembering, Ben’s time for pondering…
“King’s is the best place to go and be a weirdo” says Evany Rosen. As a standup comic, actor, writer and early member of the Halifax-based comedy group “Picnicface,” perhaps she may be more authoritative on the subject than average. “You can strike…
For moviegoers, Blackbird is an award-winning production about the juvenile detention system. For producer Marc Almon, the film is the biggest risk he’s ever taken.“There were periods of production when I thought I was going to go bankrupt. It was…
In her final year of high school, Roberta Barker saw the reading list for King’s Foundation Year Program (FYP) and knew she had found the right program. As a teenager, Barker had trained in classical music and opera. While the FYP lecture hall…
“Architecture is about building places for people to live in, and philosophy is actually a huge part of that,” Andrew Choptiany’s antics on campus earned him the RL Nixon Award for Best Contribution to Residence Life that year. While many credit…
When Pete Pachal started the one-year bachelor of journalism degree program at King’s, he was immediately struck by the school’s sense of support and community. “Everybody who was there wanted to be there. When you have people who really want to…
Thanks to Margaret Evans, Maggie to her friends, there is a gang of American actors who know all about toques and poutine. Maggie and two fellow King’s grads, Graeme Gillis (BJH ’95) and Jeff Margolis (BA ’98) were working on their master’s degrees…
It was a Sunday night in June 2013. Ruth Spencer was in her tiny New York apartment with a few colleagues from The Guardian US where she was Community Editor. Edward Snowden, the man who had leaked thousands of documents from the American National…
It could be a mass shooting like the one in Las Vegas in the fall of 2017. Or a van plowing into pedestrians along a Toronto street in the spring of 2018. If it is a big story Emanuella Grinberg will be at her desk at CNN in Atlanta writing. She’s…
“We just kind of hit it off, complementing each other’s personality,” says Laura Vingoe-Cram. She’s talking about her friendship with Karen Gross. Both were theatre buffs, taking advantage of what King’s had to offer. “Laura and I were quite…