The 2013 Toronto Jazz Festival descends on the city this Friday with a huge “free for all” event. That means all of Friday’s programming at every Jazz Festival venue is, yes, completely free of charge. There will be concerts from local favourites Molly Johnson and Mary Margaret O’Hara, plus a show by Smokey Robinson and Martha Reeves, who will be launching the fest from its epicentre, Nathan Phillips Square.

Here’s a rundown of some of the shows worth checking out on Friday—and during the rest of the festival, when you’ll actually have to pay.

Folks who are planning on having a swim in the pool at Scadding Court Community Centre over the next few days may find themselves a little disappointed. Those who want to go fishing, however, will probably be ecstatic.

For the rest of the week, the Community Centre will be holding its annual Gone Fishin’ event, meaning its indoor pool will be an indoor fish pond. The pool has been drained, dechlorinated, and refilled with 2,000 rainbow trout, to be caught by local children and families.

Photo courtesy of Legoland.

If you think playing with Lego is strictly for children, think again. Graeme Dymond is Canada’s first master model builder at Vaughan’s Legoland Discovery Centre, where he has taken his life-long passion for the interlocking blocks and turned it into a paying career. Since he started in January, he’s worked with other master model builders in Texas and California, and logged countless hours dropping his creations to see how they break. It’s all part of a training process that he describes as like a “cheesy kung fu movie—I had to ‘unlearn what I had learned,’ ” in order to make Lego structures that can stand up to the constant “love and affection” that Legoland’s pint-sized visitors can inflict.

Our interview with Dymond is below.

Torontoist: If I understand correctly, you just play with Lego all day, right?

Graeme Dymond: I’m very involved with all aspects of the facility. I work with the staff to ensure guests are having as positive an experience as possible, as we are still a new site and developing what it means to deliver memorable experiences to our guests. I do build models for the site, but I also have to make sure that we have enough Lego on site for kids to play with, as well as maintain that Lego—make sure it is a safe and sanitary environment. Our Lego models get a lot of extra love from our younger visitors, so there is a good deal of maintenance involved. As well, I am involved with the occasional promotion for our site, and get to go and speak about all of the great things we do at Legoland.

One other important aspect of my job is teaching model building to the children who come to visit. Every month, we have a new model in our master model workshop that we teach kids how to make, and I spend a good deal of my time teaching kids how to build these models, which are designed to showcase some important Lego building techniques, such as interlocking, SNOT pieces (SNOT is an acronym for Studs Not On Top, which allows for ‘sideways’ building and building in all directions), colour theory, and just general ways to help make models better and stronger.

Lego is often thought of as a kid’s toy. How did you keep your passion for it alive into adulthood?

Honestly, I’m just a big kid at heart, and I think Lego brings that out in everyone. It is really a toy for all ages, a timeless toy. I say that because it has remained the same for decades now. You can take Lego from a store shelf today, and Lego from 30 years ago, and they are fully compatible. There is a near-infinite diversity of playing possibilities with Lego. In fact, with just six standard two-by-four Lego bricks, you can make over 915 combinations. So, with a standard set that comes with anywhere from 20-2000 pieces, you can imagine that there really are nearly limitless possibilities.

A First Look at Legoland Toronto

Tell me about applying for this job. I gather it was more like an audition than a traditional interview.

It was, yes. A two-day-long, very public audition! It was very different because my Lego building has always been fairly private. I’m not very much into posting my own creations online, or displaying them. For me, playing with Lego has always been more about storytelling and personal expression, whereas what I see online, structurally and aesthetically, I feel that other people’s creations often blow mine out of the water. Still, I’m no Lego slouch! But the weekend audition was two full days of Lego building, all day long. There were different timed rounds, and themes for each round. We had 15 minutes to build during the first round—our theme was animals—so we would built whatever we could in that time, and then the next round we had sports, and so on.

Interacting with the kids who where there was where my storytelling came into play. Being trained as a teacher, and having worked as a learning consultant, I spent a lot of time talking to people, and telling stories, so I always like my Lego creations to tell a story. I don’t like my creations to be static; I like to integrate multiple parts and have them interact. So when I talked about my builds, I always had a story as to why I built them, and had the Lego reflect that story as well. I found that really worked well with kids, because it engages their imagination and takes it beyond just a structure.

What’s your favourite part of the job?

My favourite part of the job is sharing the love of Lego with kids who really truly love it, and bringing them to that “aha” moment where they realize that they can create something new and cool from what they’ve learned. I know that what I’ve shared with them will live on through their constructions, and know that they are going to continue to pursue their love of Lego.

Where can you take a resume with the words “Legoland master model builder” on them? It seems like such a niche type of role.

A very good question. I think that the role has really stretched me in a number of ways, but I’d really like to find new ways to bring my love of Lego to more and more people, and help encourage kids to challenge themselves to develop and grow and to follow their dreams—whether Lego or otherwise—but to have them know that it is a possibility to do what you love and make a career out of it.

It’s funny because the role requires a number of skills—teacher, artist, entertainer, administrator, manager, marketer—and I have found that there have been a number of opportunities to develop all of those aspects in this role.

I Want Your Job finds Torontonians who make a living doing exactly what they love to do, in any field, and for any salary, and asks them how they did it.

Photo courtesy of Daily Planet.

Dan Riskin is a scientist, but his day-to-day work hardly fits the popular image. For instance, not too many scientists get the chance to interview an astronaut, live in space, for a broadcast. But the co-host of Discovery Canada’s Daily Planet (which is about to air its last episode of the season) recently did just that, scoring a chat with Commander Chris Hadfield during the astronaut’s stint on the International Space Station.

“I could see him floating while he was answering my questions, in space,” says Riskin. “It’s hard to get across how cool that is without using swear words. Just unreal.”

Raised in Edmonton, Riskin did his undergraduate at the University of Alberta then attended York University for his master’s degree (he did his thesis on bats), followed by a PhD at Cornell (on bats again), and a post-doc at Brown. With a 2010 offer for a university faculty position in New York City, Riskin thought to himself: “Well, goodbye Canada. I guess I’ll be living in the states.” Then, he got a life-changing phone call from Daily Planet.

“They asked me to interview [to become a host],” he says. “And I haven’t looked back.”

Torontoist: How did you and Daily Planet find each other?

Dan Riskin: It just sort of worked out. I worked with Animal Planet in the U.S. on a show called Monsters Inside Me, about parasites, which was absolutely vulgar and awesome. Based on that I did some appearances with Craig Ferguson on his show, and I think the people at Daily Planet noticed those. They knew [previous host] Jay Ingram was about to step aside and they invited me.

How has the transition to television been?

It’s been awesome. I was worried whether it would be as intellectually stimulating as academics, and it is. Instead of narrowly focusing on one thing so much that you can’t get enough of it, you sort of open up your world. I’m an expert on how bats move—how they fly and how they crawl—and you can fill your days with that. I did, for many years. But now, I have to know about Chris Hadfield, and tornadoes, and beetles, and chemistry. Every day I’m learning about subject areas I knew very little about before. And I’ve been freed up to explore things I didn’t have time for before. It’s not a washed-down version of being a scientist; it’s a more colourful version of it.

What have been some of the most exciting moments?

Well, every time I talk to Chris Hadfield I get goosebumps. And along the way, doing these late-night TV show appearances and sitting on a couch with Cameron Diaz or talking with that dude from The Big Lebowski, Jeff Bridges. There are just these moments where you’re meeting these people that are really cool, which is one of the wonderful perks of having this job.

You got to meet Cameron Diaz and Jeff Bridges?

Yeah. It’s crazy, eh? Five years ago, I was this scientist with my head up my own butt looking at how bats crawl and now I’m doing different stuff. It’s all about being excited about the world and waking up in the morning and thinking, “All right, let’s learn how much we can. Let’s have a fun day.” I did that for many years as a scientist, and now I do it as the host of Daily Planet.

The world’s rewarding, an incredible place, and it’s a wonderful privilege to spend my time exploring it. But I’m not the only person with a job like that. It’s very similar to just being a scientist.

It’s interesting how connected the two are.

I spent a long time training to be a scientist and thought that was going to be my career trajectory. I still spend a lot of time reading scientific papers and connecting with my scientist friends, and that’s shaped how I see the world.

What I’m trying to get across every night on Daily Planet is that if you explore the world and really engage with it, it’s just beautiful. Science is a great way to see beauty that you can’t really see otherwise. The world is beautiful if you see it through a scientific lens, and so trying to share that beauty with everyone who watches Daily Planet is a wonderful challenge and very rewarding, and I still get to see that beauty, which makes it very rewarding for me personally.

I Want Your Job finds Torontonians who make a living doing exactly what they love to do, in any field, and for any salary, and asks them how they did it.

Colin D’Mello is one of those rare and fortunate souls who made the right post-secondary education decision off the bat.

“When I went to Seneca College for broadcasting, that’s when everything just clicked,” says the 27-year-old weekend anchor at CTV News. “I realized this was exactly what I loved to do.”

After working on a Moncton radio station beginning at age 19, D’Mello got a job at 680 News in Toronto and, after four years, found his way onto CTV. After almost six months there as a reporter, D’Mello got promoted to the newly vacated weekend anchor position. “I didn’t think that I was going to get it,” he recalls, “and it was a very pleasant surprise.”

Our interview with D’Mello about what it takes to hold down a job in broadcast journalism is below.

Torontoist: What attracted you to broadcasting in the first place?

Colin D’Mello: Performance. I’ve always been kind of a performer. It was always about entertaining people. That’s why, when I was graduating high school, I didn’t necessarily know whether or not it was going to be news, specifically, but it was going to be something in broadcasting or performing.

News broadcasting is such a specific type of performance. Was it a natural transition for you?

There is a certain sense of performance in it. It’s very difficult to be able to have the right inflection, the right tone, the right attitude when it comes to certain stories. There is a performance in it. It is a craft. If you watch any other anchor on TV, everyone has their own set of tools and their own style for delivery, and that’s based on a lot of work on their craft. So it was a bit of a natural transition, because you can draw a lot of parallels between performing on a stage and performing in front of a camera. The only difference is that you’re not in front of thousands of people, you’re in front of one thing and then broadcast to thousands—if not millions—of people.

How would you describe your own personal style as a broadcaster?

I love to have fun. I used to say that I really have no shame when it comes to making a fool of myself. I’ll always take risks and I’ll always try to have fun with the story. There was one time when there was research released that a hug can improve your mood, so I was sent out to give random strangers a hug on the street. Those kinds of stories really make you appreciate what you do, because it’s fun. You get to put a smile on people’s faces.

For me, at the end of the day, I’m telling people what’s going on in the world. I’m trying to inform them, I’m trying to educate them, and I’m trying to entertain them.

What are the biggest challenges of the job?

When you’re almost 30 minutes to air and something big breaks, that’s a challenge. All of a sudden, you have to rejig your entire newscast and you may have to learn a lot about something you may not have known a lot about. For instance, last year when the Burlington train derailment happened, we were on the air at 5:00 and that happened around 4:00, so it was a mad scramble.

For me, it’s been a lot of learning how to come out of my shell and be comfortable in situations I wouldn’t normally be comfortable in. I end up doing a lot of sports stories and I know little to nothing about sports. You find yourself becoming an expert on a topic you would normally not be an expert in and converse with people while sounding like you know what you’re talking about.

What are your favourite aspects of the job?

You get to talk to so many people. You get to have so many experiences that you would have never had the opportunity to have otherwise. You’re also welcomed into people’s homes during tragic times, when somebody they know and love has died or been killed, and you get to talk to them and tell their story.

Is there anything about the job that would be surprising to people?

I think people would be surprised to learn how much of what we shoot goes on the cutting room floor. Sometimes for a story that’s a minute and 45 seconds, we would have shot anywhere from a half an hour’s worth of footage to an hour or two hours, and you try to encapsulate the best of it.

Just talking to you, I have to say: you talk like a broadcaster. So, what came first: the chicken or the egg?

When I was about eight, I made a radio program with my brother. I think this was always in my blood. I was never into news as a kid, per se, but I think maybe that was there all along and I didn’t realize it.

I Want Your Job finds Torontonians who make a living doing exactly what they love to do, in any field, and for any salary, and asks them how they did it.

Caroline Macfarlane (left) and Vanessa Nicholas (right).

It’s been an ambitious year for OCADU Student Gallery programs co-ordinators Caroline Macfarlane and Vanessa Nicholas. Since kicking off the academic calendar with a multimedia show co-produced with the Music Gallery, they’ve overseen exhibitions of anonymous portraiture, furniture design, digital culture, and symbology. The gallery’s current exhibition, “Period Piece: The Gynolandscape,” subverts the male gaze by depicting the female body in its messy, unapologetic corporeality.

“We’re really excited to have that come together, since we’re both really interested in emerging feminist voices and this new wave of celebratory girl culture that’s happening right now,” says Nicholas.

The two have a history of merging the gallery space with outside culture: in 2011, they established the Good Bike Project, a public art initiative that plunked brightly painted abandoned bicycles in highly visible spots across the city. Later this spring, the two will launch an online magazine.

Macfarlane and Nicholas spoke with us about how they landed their OCADU positions, and what it means to be part of Toronto’s creative landscape.

Torontoist: Did you go to OCADU?

Vanessa Nicholas: No, neither one of us went to OCADU. We met as students at Queen’s. I was in fine arts and Caroline was doing an art history undergrad there. Then we both went and did our masters in art history separately and then I got hired on as an assistant. Then I was in the position to bring on a partner and hired Caroline. Because of strange circumstances and luck, it became a permanent position.

What got you into curation?

VN: When I was at Queen’s, I was a fine art student, but my extracurricular life was taken up working at the student gallery and then the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston. I found I was more excited and productive in my extracurricular work in gallery spaces than I was in the studio space, so I switched to do my masters in art history so that I could be more on the curating and programming end of things rather than producing. I found my strengths were more in bringing artists together and supporting artists than actually producing work, so I shifted gears.

Caroline Macfarlane: I’ve always been passionate about art. My mom is a designer, so without even really being aware of it, at an early age I was aware of the importance of space and art within space. In university, I didn’t start out majoring in art history, but all my electives were art history and it became clear that I should just make that my major. I decided that I wasn’t going to go into a curating program, but just continue learning about art and get curation work experience in galleries, and that worked out well for me.

What’s your favourite part of the job?

VN: Oh, so much. I love everything about this job. I love meeting creative people at the beginning of their careers. I love getting them to do things for the first time. I love the community aspect of our job, bringing people together and getting them excited about OCADU and their practices, and also the way that we’re able to expand people’s practices by connecting them with other people or connecting them with people in the larger community. It’s a lot of fun.

CM: I’d say too, what makes this job unique is that Vanessa and I both have a lot of different interests and passions, and we’re not very limited in what we do here. We’re throwing parties, we’re running events, we’re running workshops, we’re getting other artists to come in and run workshops, we’re doing curating and teaching students how to curate and install their own shows, and we do some curating off-site. It’s a job that allows us to explore a lot of different passions and interests. And because it’s a design and fine arts university, it’s also great because we’re dealing with environmental designers, industrial designers, graphic designers, painters, sculptors. It’s all over the place in a way that suits me, because I’m interested in so many different things.

VN: Being at OCADU is a limitless environment because you have the design and fine art aspects, so anything you want to do, you can bring a group of students together and make it happen.

How do the two of you work together?

CM: It’s kind of crazy. We work together but we’re also best friends, so we hang out together and party together. But it works. Vanessa has some skills that are stronger than mine and I’ve learned a lot from her, and vice versa.

VN: We both have very similar parallel interests and get excited about the same things, but we also expand each other because we also have separate interests that we can both take on together.

What are some of the issues concerning art in Toronto right now?

CM: I feel like we’ve been inserted into this community that comes through or out of OCADU that’s really exciting. I feel now, more than ever, like I’m a part of this exciting group of people doing amazing creative projects and who are also very dedicated to supporting one another and getting excited about what each other are doing.

VN: We’re excited about the Toronto community and its growth. But we’re also wary about the way the city is developing as well.

CM: Even this building is owned by a condo developer.

VN: Yeah, it’s gonna get torn down. So it’s kind of scary thinking about what’s going to happen next, because in the next two years Toronto’s going to change a lot.

CM: It’s becoming a harder city for artists to live in and thrive in, and it’s happening really fast. That’s scary. It’ll be unfortunate if Toronto artists have to move to Hamilton to make their art.

I Want Your Job finds Torontonians who make a living doing exactly what they love to do, in any field, and for any salary, and asks them how they did it.

The burlesque revival of the past couple decades has received mixed criticism from feminist thinkers, who have made convincing arguments both for it and against. But for sex educator and burlesque performer Lorraine Hewitt (aka CoCo LaCreme), burlesque was an awakening.

“I had received messages my whole life that that it was not my right as a woman who looks the way I do—who is short and not thin and a woman of colour—to claim a place in the spotlight and be adored,” says Hewitt, who now teaches burlesque workshops (in addition to pleasure-centric sex education workshops targeted primarily at women) at universities, conferences, and the Good for Her women’s sex shop on Harbord Street.

Our conversation with Hewitt is below.

Torontoist: What led to your becoming a sex educator?

Lorraine Hewitt: I was not somebody who received a lot of sex education from my parents. I think the school did its best, but my folks did not talk to me about sex at all. When I asked my mother what an orgasm was when I was like 12 years old, she said, “Don’t say that word ever again.”

When I started having sex, I had no idea about what I was supposed to do or whether it was supposed to feel good, or if it was all about pleasing somebody else. It led to me having not-so-great sexual experiences. I was lucky that the people I became friends with were very sex-positive, sex-radical people who encouraged me to try lots of different things. So I decided I really wanted to explore as much as I could and see what I could apply to my life, and educating myself made a really big difference.

I got a job offer at a sex shop and started working there, and I found that I was very comfortable talking about sexuality. And then a few years later I decided that I wanted to teach workshops as well. I started teaching workshops [at Good for Her] about nine years ago.

When did the burlesque begin?

That probably began around the year 2000. I started out as an accidental go-go dancer when my really good friend Will Munro started the Vazaleen party at the El Mocambo, and my friend John and I got onto a table and started dancing. We ended up being the official Vazaleen go-go dancers for years, which caught the attention of Skin Tight Outta Sight, the burlesque troupe I’ve been with since the beginning. Those girls were at the forefront at the burlesque revival in Canada, and now they’re the longest-running burlesque troupe in Canada. I joined up with them, and they kind of educated me on what burlesque was. I had some knowledge about it already from vintage [clothing and magazines], but I didn’t have a lot of knowledge about the burgeoning revival. It was terrifying at first, but I quickly grew to love it, exhibitionist that I am [laughs].

Do you see parallels between the burlesque and sex-ed components of your career?

Definitely. Being able to go out there [as a burlesque dancer] and confirm that I can occupy that space [in the spotlight], and also open up people’s eyes to differences in beauty—or at least affirm to people that if their desires are counter to what’s presented in mainstream media and magazines, that that’s okay—is really empowering. And of course I’ve found sex education really personally empowering, in terms of raising my confidence and putting me out there. Both of those things really help people out, and they both really helped me out.

What are the biggest barriers you think women face to having positive relationships with sex and their bodies?

I think the biggest barrier is the idea that [sexuality] is not a woman’s right to claim, that our main goal is to please others and to make other people happy and that only people who are “allowed” or who have some kind of privilege are entitled to happiness or sexual pleasure. I feel like women are living in a state where they’re made to feel constantly inadequate, maybe so we can be sold more mascara or whatever it is to make us somehow “right” or “okay.” Also, we don’t really prioritize female sexuality, which is why I work on the Feminist Porn Awards—because it promotes movies that put women’s sexuality and desires at the forefront.

What do you suggest for women who want to overcome these culturally imposed, socialized barriers that we’re born into?

I think education goes a really long way. The more you can diversify the types of media you’re exposed to and the opinions you get, the better. I think we have to almost install little mental checkpoints where we have to question what we see and how it actually applies to us and whether it’s something we want to give a lot of weight to. And women need to be kind to themselves and give themselves a chance to learn to like themselves. It’s about checking in with those negative voices. Connecting with likeminded women, diversifying your perspective, opening yourself up to education, I think the more you’re able to consume things that feed a different point of view the better off you are.

I Want Your Job finds Torontonians who make a living doing exactly what they love to do, in any field, and for any salary, and asks them how they did it.

Fiona Crean is no shrinking violet. As Toronto’s first Ombudsman (which, by the way, is a gender-neutral Swedish word), her job is to make sure the City is run fairly. As one might imagine, that can get messy. When Crean found herself in the mayor’s crosshairs last fall after reporting that his office had compromised the public-appointments process, she stood her ground, weathering accusations from Ford’s allies with grace and conviction. Ultimately, she won the whole of Council to her side.

Being a watchdog isn’t easy, but Crean’s compulsion to look out for the little guy runs deep.

“I grew up all over the world, and part of what brought me to this job was precisely growing up all over the place,” she says. “Every four years we would go to a new country and I would not understand the language, the culture, anything. I would be the outsider and have to live with a sense of discomfort until I made new friends. So that led me to an understanding of what it feels like to be an outsider.”

Our interview with Crean is below.

Torontoist: What set you on your path to the Ombudsman’s office?

Fiona Crean: Serendipity. I went to the University of Manchester, in the birthplace of the industrial revolution, at the exact time of the mine closures. I was watching just scads of people go into unemployment with no possibility of other kinds of work. It was a young social-justice awakening.

Though I’d always carried a Canadian passport, I didn’t know it. I’d never lived here; I was born here [in Ottawa], but left at around six months. So I decided at the age of 23 to come to Canada.

I started teaching because I didn’t know what to do, and immediately didn’t like Toronto. This was the old Hogtown, where you couldn’t have a drink on Sundays. So I went up to the Arctic, which was a phenomenal experience. I was in Tuktoyaktuk and then later lived in James Bay and taught in Attawapiskat. At that point in time, I became incensed by what was going on—this was the period of the White Paper and assimilation—so I wanted to go somewhere bigger than the classroom. I was interested in what the federal government was doing in terms of First Nations people. So one job led to another.

This job [of Ombudsman] quite frankly came up. I applied and was incredibly excited because I love to start new things and fail or succeed based on your own merits as opposed to assuming somebody else’s office and stamp on it. We have started with an impossibly silly amount of money to fulfill the mandate that we have, but it’s exciting. I think we’re doing some neat work, some important work.

Does the average person who needs the Ombudsman’s office know about it?

Those who tend to come into contact with government the most frequently are the people that know least about it, and are also often the people who are more marginalized. If they’re going to complain, it takes gobs of courage to be able to do that, because there’s no reason to trust this thing called the Ombudsman. People don’t know what it is.

Can you discuss any particular investigations of note?

One example is an insurance investigation we did on potholes. We reviewed 12,000 files because people were complaining about how they got automatically denied their insurance plan. They break their car axle because they hit a pothole, or a tree limb falls down and damages your baby’s stroller—all of those kinds of things that they call high-volume, low-liability because the damage is less than $10,000. The result of that is that we put a whole bunch of new systems in place. You can say, ‘ho-hum, who cares?’ but it really impacted people like hot dog vendors who drive their cart out every day. You get dinged by car damage and have to pay out-of-pocket, and that’s a lot of money for a person like that. So it did a kind of service to people across the board.

You have a background in international development work, too. Are there any parallels between the work you did in the developing world and the issues you encounter here in Toronto?

We don’t have the overt corruption that you might encounter in a developing democracy, but on the other hand, just because we’re more sophisticated doesn’t mean it doesn’t go on. I will always remember, I was doing some training of ombudsman investigators in South Africa and I was on the plane there feeling like such a fraud. I sat thinking to myself, “What is this woman of white-skinned privilege from North America doing going over to teach investigators from ombudsman offices anything?” By the time I had landed in Jo’berg, I had come up with three cases of corruption that came from real stories in Canada—and that was before the Gomery Inquiry.

In terms of maladministration, we all deal with the same stuff. I deal with delay all the time. The Peru ombudsman deals with delay all the time. Those are the same kinds of things.
It’s all about trying to understand people. We have an extraordinarily complicated city. We have 140 languages, people from all walks of life. So doing work in those countries has assisted me in understanding culture by what’s going on. It’s been invaluable, actually.

I Want Your Job finds Torontonians who make a living doing exactly what they love to do, in any field, and for any salary, and asks them how they did it.

Photo courtesy of Vicki Essex.

“‘Bodice-rippers.’ We hate that term! It’s a throwback from the ’70s and ’80s, when historicals were the big thing,” she says. “But today, romance—and contemporary romance especially—isn’t like that. There are so many genres and sub-genres.”

Essex is part of a new generation of young, smart, romance writers who are using the medium to tell compelling, well-written stories that just happen to feature boy-meets-girl scenarios with fleshly pursuits. She stresses that these books are hardly recycled, drop-in-the-detail plot scenarios.

“Another thing people hate is the idea that there are formulas in romance writing,” she says. “If you have to use an ‘F’ word, use ‘framework.’ All stories use a framework.”

Essex’s road to romance wasn’t so straightforward. She attended Ryerson University’s School of Journalism because she wanted to write, but realized over the course of her education that her love for words didn’t necessarily translate to a passion for reportage. Eventually she found herself working full-time for Harlequin, the Toronto-based Big Mama of romance publishing, as a proofreader. The writing came later.

Her second title, Back to the Good Fortune Diner, gets released later this month; it was selected as a January pick for the Smart Bitches, Trashy Books Sizzling Book Club (“…which probably doesn’t mean a lot to your readers, but it’s like being an Oprah pick in the romance world”).

Our interview with Essex is below.

Torontoist: What got you into actually writing for Harlequin?

Vicki Essex: Back in 2005 or 2006 I started writing fan-fiction about Avatar: The Last Airbender. I got a lot of good response from that, so I knew I had some skills and that I had the ability to write a project from start to finish. A few months into working at Harlequin, I’d read quite a few of the books and I decided I should try.

I had these crazy ideas—and you’ll hear this a lot, like, “Writing for Harlequin is so easy. They use all these formulas.” These are things you hear from people, but it’s absolutely untrue. It was the most difficult and gruelling thing I’d ever done in my life.

I wrote one book and submitted it to Harlequin Desire, and it got rejected. Then I sent it to another publisher, then another one of the Harlequin lines after it got some revisions, and it got rejected. So then I realized, “Oh. This is not easy.” It wasn’t until I submitted my third book that I actually got published. It’s called Her Son’s Hero.

By that point I’d written five or six books, that are still sitting in my computer, finished. I know now that they aren’t books worth pursuing at this stage.

What’s the difference between books that are and aren’t worth pursuing? How do you know?

Well, there’s a lot more to the story than just boy meets girl, some stuff happens, happily ever after. There’s a lot that you have to build in order to get a really good, juicy, meaty story. Every book has to be like this. You need to know your stuff. By the time I got to the third book, I knew it would be the one that would sell because it had the things that made it a story worth reading. Namely, romantic conflict. That’s one of the big things that people look for in romance novels.

Were you a reader of romance before working at Harlequin?

No. Not at all! But when I had my job interview lined up, I picked up a handful from the library and thought, “Oh wow. These are really easy to read.” Easy to read does not mean they’re dumb; it means they’re well written. Working there helped me realize the importance of simplicity and economy of words.

What’s your favourite part about writing romance?

I love thinking about the interactions between different kinds of characters. Heroes and heroines, they come in all shapes and sizes. There are certain archetypes people like to follow, but I like to try and go off-archetype and think about what will make two characters fall in love. What will a couple come together on, and what will drive them apart? That’s the foundation of romantic conflict, as well.

What about writing sex scenes? Fun, or awkward?

I have an unfortunate habit of writing a lot on my commute to and from work on the bus. For whatever reason, I always end up writing and/or editing the sex scenes while I’m on the bus. I’ll be looking around and notice a little old lady peering over my shoulder and realize that she’s been reading the entire time.

It can be fun, but it’s challenging as well. All writers will treat sex scenes differently, and it depends on the line you write for. There are different levels of sensuality. I write contemporary romance, so my sex scenes don’t tend to be super super hot, but they’re not using a lot of four-letter words either. And I try not to use too many euphemisms. It’s a big challenge, like “How do I sexually talk about tab A into slot B?”

Cover image courtesy of Harlequin.

I Want Your Job finds Torontonians who make a living doing exactly what they love to do, in any field, and for any salary, and asks them how they did it.

In her work as conservator of contemporary and Inuit art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Sherry Phillips is part MacGyver and part…well, let’s just say that right now she’s working on touching up a giant hamburger.

“This was the first [public art] intervention of significance,” explains Phillips, whose restoration of Claus Oldenburg’s 1962 Floor Burger sculpture is currently taking place on the gallery floor, where attendees can see it as it happens. The burger—which, for copyright reasons, can only be seen in public and not in a photo at the top of this here edition of I Want Your Job—will be heading off to New York’s Museum of Modern Art in the spring.

But art conservation, according to Phillips, is a lot more than just restoration. And, unlike the AGO’s current live-restoration burger exhibit, it usually happens behind closed doors, in a laboratory hidden within the belly of the museum. We got a look at all of it.

Our interview with Phillips is below.

Torontoist: So, the age-old question: how did you get into art conservation?

Sherry Phillips: I was doing my undergraduate in science and I fully expected to go on to a career in research. Then I had a summer job actually doing research and I really didn’t like it. I hated it. So I had to rethink everything that I was doing. I went through one of the government-sponsored programs for recent graduates—like career-counselling stuff—and I came across this little information packet about art conservation.

All of a sudden, I started putting things together in my head, like, “Oh, that’s why I always skipped genetics labs to go to the ROM or the AGO!” I always took art courses to go along with the science, but I never put two and two together.

I talked to a whole bunch of conservators. The painting conservator at the ROM at the time gave me a break. She took me for six weeks or something, and I fell in love with it. Then I went back to school and did art history and art studio for a year, and then they accepted me into the program.

What do you do from day to day?

It’s different every day. In this institution, it tends to be driven by loans or exhibitions. So, getting artwork ready for those. Something like the burger, for instance. We’re lending it to MOMA, so there was more incentive to bring it out of storage and get it on display because of that loan we agreed to.

Part of having conservation on display is the promotion of what we do, and [our] preservation efforts. I’m pleasantly surprised by how popular it has been. Usually, we’re behind the scenes.

Some tools of the trade.

What’s the actual process of restoring artwork like?

We approach each artwork as an individual piece. The treatment of an artwork is always an individualized plan. Nothing is ever the same.

So, you have to research each piece?

You research the artwork, and you research the materials. There’s lots to consider with each artwork, and even some paint layers. I sent some paint samples [from the burger] to the Canadian Conservation Institute and they did analysis on them for me to determine exactly what kind of paint the artist used, the pigments used, the binding mediums that were there, and so on.

You do contemporary conservation. I imagine your experience is very different from that of those who focus on older works.

In a way. I find with contemporary, I tend to borrow techniques and ideas from all the different disciplines. Because I might have something that has paper, metal, paint, and all these different things on it. Then there’s time-based media, which is a whole other discipline in itself.

It’s more than just restoration. It’s the preservation of artwork. We promote, we advocate, and we safeguard the artwork. Every aspect of how this artwork is stored, or exhibited, or handled in transportation, we have say and involvement in that. So, if I can use the burger for example, yes, I’m treating it so that the paint layers will be stable to travel. But I’m also intervening in the stuffing, to redistribute it slightly so that it looks better as a burger. But I don’t want it to be too perfect because it’s a 50-year-old burger. That just wouldn’t look right.

How do you know where to draw the line?

I work with a curator. The two of us stand there and we have images from the ’60s, and we go back to those images.

So, you’re trying to make it consistent with how it’s always looked?

We’re trying to make it consistent with how it should look. It’s a soft sculpture, so it’s always shifting. But some of that movement has gone to an extreme, so we have to reverse that.

It sounds like very nuanced work.

In many ways, it is! There’s a huge aesthetic component to it as well as the mechanical stabilizing aspect. You kind of do the mechanical first, knowing that the aesthetic component will come. But your treatment plan is always multifaceted. It’s never very simple.

I Want Your Job finds Torontonians who make a living doing exactly what they love to do, in any field, and for any salary, and asks them how they did it.

Photo courtesy of Kimberley Fernandez

Kimberley Fernandez describes the process of delivering her third child as “an Abbott-and-Costello comedy of errors.” Discussing it, she laughs the way people tend to when recalling deep unpleasantness.

“I just thought, there had to be something different. And so I did a little bit of research and kind of accidentally fell across doula.”

Fernandez has spent the last seven years working as a doula—essentially, a labour and prenatal coach whose job is to provide physical and emotional support for expectant mothers. She also heads up a collective of Toronto-based birth and post-partum professionals across the GTA. She spoke to Torontoist about what it all entails.

Torontoist: What does a doula do, from day to day?

Kimberley Fernandez: There are a couple of different types of doulas. I’m primarily a birth doula. So, right now, for example, I have a client who’s overdue. About two weeks prior to her due date I go on call, and then am on call until her baby’s born. If she goes two weeks over, I’m still on call until she has her baby. So, for the past couple weeks, I’ve been staying close to home, not doing a whole lot of stuff, always being at the ready and waiting for the phone call. I spend the rest of my time going on interviews, reading, trying to stay on top of what’s going on in the birth world. Part of my job also involves education; I’m a doula trainer now, so I organize training across Ontario.

What’s the training process like?

The main bulk of it is a workshop done over a weekend or several weeks, and afterward you’re considered a doula-in-training going toward your certification. The certification process includes having births that you attend, evaluated by not only the parents and families that you support but also the nurses that are there, the doctors that are there, or the midwives that are there. There’s also a lot of reading to do. You have about two years until you complete your certification process.

It sounds like the education process is ongoing.

Yes. I really like the education part of it. Also educating parents and families, that they have choice and there are options out there. You don’t have to have that cookie-cutter birth that you saw in private practice; you can actually have something that’s beautiful and amazing, and this is how you can achieve it. It amazes people that [childbirth] doesn’t have to be this horrible, terrifying, nightmarish thing that they see on A Baby Story or Grey’s Anatomy, or some other media hype that you see.

Do you mostly work with midwives?

No, actually. Not all that much! There are doulas that work primarily with midwives, but I have a tendency to work more with clients who are going the hospital O.B. route. I also tend to work with clients who have an epidural on the table—that’s sort of what their plan involves. Doulas aren’t necessarily just there for natural birth, or unmedicated birth. And it is a huge misconception. We definitely are great for that, but there’s so much that we do, not just with helping with the discomfort of birth, but offering the emotional support. Because it can be kind of scary, giving birth. And we’ve seen so much, we can say to both mom and her partner, “It’s okay. This is normal. This is what you can expect to happen next. What decisions would you like to make? Here are your options.” And also making sure that they have all the information to make informed consent, to make the best decision possible.

So you guys are essentially advocates for a delivering mother?

Yeah. We don’t speak for them, but we help them find their voice.

What do you love about it?

When you see that first baby born, you’re hooked. There’s nothing more amazing than that, to see a woman bring forth life. It’s like, holy cow. It’s so incredible, to see the strength of women and what they’re capable of doing. It’s awesome.

I Want Your Job finds Torontonians who make a living doing exactly what they love to do, in any field, and for any salary, and asks them how they did it.

Peter Birkemoe’s daily grind is a comic geek’s dream: every day, he oversees the operations of Toronto’s finest comic shop, which occasionally sees him hobnobbing with some of the industry’s nimblest minds and, more often than not, keeps him surrounded by books. We asked the owner of The Beguiling what it takes.

Torontoist: When did you get into comics?
Peter Birkemoe: I guess I collected comics only modestly through my preteen years and caught the real bug probably around age 14 or 15. I was able to get a job at a shop in Kitchener called Now and Then Books, which was Canada’s oldest comics shop at the time but it closed very recently. So, I was a comic collector and started shopping at The Beguiling also, as a teen, shortly after it opened. I did not open the store but I bought it in 1998.

What prompted you to purchase the store?
I had worked at the store very occasionally, mostly just picking up a shift when someone needed a day off to feed my comic book habit. But when the store was going to be sold, I got it together to purchase the store mostly because I was afraid that what was then one of the very few places you could buy this type of comic was going to fall into hands where they would no longer continue carrying the interesting kinds of comics. So I wanted to have the kind of place where I would be able to buy my kind of comics.

The Beguiling is celebrating its 25th anniversary in a couple of weeks, which is a tremendous feat for an indie bookstore, and you’ve been in charge of the place for more than half of that run. What’s your secret?
One of the things that we have going for us, as do most of the indie bookstores that have survived, is that we have a highly knowledgeable staff that cares about what they do and can do that kind of hand-selling that can’t be replicated online. And we’re very lucky to have a loyal clientele. Having been around for 25 years, that’s something that’s grown along with us. This very store, transplanted into any other like-sized city, wouldn’t necessarily survive because, for the type of esoteric material and engaged comic culture we have here, you would’ve had to have a place to obtain those kinds of comics over the years in order to have that size of audience.

How has the audience been built?
It’s built very gradually. There have been times over the life of the store where the viability of the comics market, or particularly the market for interesting literary comics or small-press materials that The Beguiling has been associated with so much, has really been fragile or the future has been very uncertain—and we may even be in one of those times now—but we’ve persevered and built that audience year-by-year.

What are some personal highlights for you from over the years?
Over the course of running the store and particularly with the number of events we do I’ve managed to meet just about every cartoonist whose work I admired or collected as a young person or came to admire as an adult reader of comics. And one of the things we’ve accomplished is the starting of the Toronto Comic Arts Festival. Myself and one of our managers here started this festival and now I don’t have to travel to any international comic events, and I don’t want to, because the best that the world has to offer in terms of comics comes here. And that in itself is very rewarding, but it’s also great that every time it happens, people come from around the world for this festival and tell me what a great shop this is, which reinforces the pride we have in the work we do.

Your job sounds kind of dreamy; you’re constantly surrounded by the newest and most exciting work in the comics biz and have hosted some of the industry’s most groundbreaking figures. That said, what are some of the less glamorous aspects of your job?
Doing any sort of book retail involves a lot of lifting heavy boxes of books from one place to another. That’s an enormous amount of this job, just moving this product through space. Sometimes that has its high points, when you discover a box that has been lost for 10 years and you’re like, ‘Oh! Here’s a case of an out-of-print book we could really use!’ But most of it tends to lean towards drudgery.

Your dad is a well-known engineering prof at the University of Toronto (and happens to also be named Peter Birkemoe). Was he weirded out when you decided to take over a comic shop instead of, say, following in his sciencey footsteps?
I did, myself, do an engineering degree. So I followed at least the educational path. However, my father paid me one of the greatest compliments ever. It was not directly to me, but someone else told me he had said it, that his son is the only person he knew who every day is doing exactly what he wants. So I thought, well, that sounds like an endorsement.

What’s your vision for the future of The Beguiling?
I think bookselling is going to change a lot. I don’t see it disappearing within my lifetime, but I’ve played the last-man-standing game in many aspects of this before and I have a certain confidence that I can continue to make a living within comics as long as I choose to but that the form of that will have to change with time. Some of that is going to have to relate to the festival we produce; some of that may shift from being new product as perhaps publishers stop producing new comics as a physical form and shift to an antiquarian [function]. We also act as art dealers and if physical comics cease to be a new thing, people will probably still be producing artwork. And, we’ve even published a book, so there are all sorts of things we will continue to do to continue to have a physical retail engagement of the public. But we’re just slowly adjusting our course as we go.

The Beguiling will be celebrating its 25th anniversary on November 12 with readings by Charles Burns, Adrian Tomine, and Chris Ware.