False Stories

You leave the scene with a very nice shirt

Jude lives in a home where he solves problems for his anonymous employer

— I have a dream about looking for something that I never find — Kari Hohne, “Looking for Something,” Café au Soul, https://www.cafeausoul.com/oracles/dream-dictionary/looking-for-something/, viewed October 14, 2026 —

It happened in your childhood

— I read some excerpts from my memoir about minimalism — Less and Less: Personal Minimalism (Ottawa: William & Park, 2023) — [email protected] —

Gastronomic highs and lows

Of monkeys, millionaires, and lattes

|INTERVIEW GUEST| 

Julie Rak (FRSC) holds the Henry Marshall Tory Chair in the Department of English and Film Studies and is a Strategic Research Chair in Arts at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. Her research focus is nonfiction, including books such as False Summit: Gender in Mountaineering Nonfiction (2021), Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market (2013), and Negotiated Memory: Doukhobor Autobiographical Discourse (2004). She is the co-author with Sonia Boon, Candida Rifkind, and Laurie McNeill of The Routledge Introduction to Auto/biography in Canada (2022). 

|SELECTED WORKS| 

• Sonja Boon, Laurie McNeill, Julie Rak, and Candida Rifkind, The Routledge Introduction to Auto/biography in Canada (Routledge, 2023)
• Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013)
• “Teaching Secrets: Reading Alice Munro for Information," The Typescript, July 26, 2024, https://sites.google.com/ualberta.ca/julie-rak/public-work —

It's hard enough to know what's true in real life, and even harder in fiction — The biography mentioned in the episode: Wayne Jones, My Sam Johnson: A Biography for General Readers (Ottawa: William & Park, 2023) —

Sometimes it's loud and sometimes it's still