Magazine writing gives me the opportunity to break away from stodgy old marketing writing and actually exhibit some style. Which is great, because marketing isn't nearly as stodgy as it used to be. In fact, good marketing writing must... no, no, I'll leave that for a blog post.

My good friend Scott Gardner did a stint as editor of LifeStyle Canada, a quarterly magazine published in four different editions across Canada. I'm not sure what the distribution is like now, but at the time the magazine was included free with the National Post in many markets. Scott was kind enough to give me a chance to write some articles. 

Reflections

That first article, called "Cabin Fever", was really more of a personal essay, just a one-off end piece. He liked it so much (and the sales guys liked it too, which sometimes counts as much) that he had me do two more in that vein. The choice of clip-art on that first piece dictated that the column would be called "Reflections". I was OK with that.

The second Reflections column, called "The Cottage Photo", was another cottage-themed piece. The titular photo hangs on a wall in a friend's cottage, and I have some fun speculating about the people in it. I was quite pleased with this column - rather poetic, dammit! Also, check out this particular issue - I have four articles in it, all very different.

The third column, called "Diner Dash", proved to be my swan song - Scott moved on, and I no connection with the new regime. Ah well - I don't know if I had any whimsy left in me after all that. I mean, after you've devoted 500 words to the joys of eggs, what is left to accomplish in life?

Musician Profiles

When my first Reflections piece proved a hit (in the office at least - hard to tell what readers thought of it), I was given a bigger assignment - a profile of Bryan Adams on the occasion of his eleventh studio release. No interview was possible, so this was one of those fun deals where I find quotes from other publications and recycle them, with attribution of course. I had a difficult time at first, thinking what I could possibly say about Adams, given that he was not exactly considered very hip in my circle of friends. But after I dug into his current goings-on, I decided that this lack of appreciation was unfair, and that became my story angle. With a dollop of Canadian patriotism tossed in, for good measure.

Again, the article was well-received, so I got two more similar assignments. The first was another reappraisal-style article, this time of Sarah McLachlan on the occasion of her greatest hits album. This time there really wasn't any public opinion backlash against Sarah, and I didn't want to recycle that angle in any case. So this was more of an appreciation. Other publications would probably gag on two uncritical profiles like these, but LifeStyle is not really read by the hipper-than-thou crowd, and you have to serve the audience and the market. I'm not proud.

My final celebrity profile was a really good one, because I got to actually interview my subject, on Thanksgiving Monday, 2008. Measha Brueggergosman is an opera and cabaret singer of immense talent, and she's also a pretty interesting person to chat with. This was my first ever interview, and I'm fairly sure I made a complete hash of it. Thank God it was for a magazine article, and not recorded for broadcast. Actually, now that I think about it, that wasn't my first interview. About 18 years ago, I interviewed Big Rude Jake and his Gentleman Players for the University of Waterloo student radio station, CKMS, and that one did get broadcast. Fortunately, in both cases my subjects were friendly helpful forgiving Canadians, and I was not shamed for my ineptitude.

Sundry Other Articles

Of course, not every magazine assignment can be a lyrical personal essay or profile of a world famous musician. There's also real estate porn.

Magazines survive on advertising, and advertising sales require sales people, and sales people are wont to make promises to advertisers. LifeStyle Magazine, with its four regional editions, was a natural for real estate advertising and editorial content. Thus I was assigned two articles about extravagant homes on the west coast. 

One home was a 43,000 square foot mansion in Abbotsford, British Columbia. This place is magnificent, but not yet fully-baked - the owner died before he could complete it. The house is amazing, but the human dimension is the heart of the article. Another property is a dream home in Whistler, overlooking the finish line of the Winter Olympic downhill events. This article is an exercise in seeing how purple the prose can get without descending absolutely into self-parody.

The final article was a bit on which cities in Canada are best for retirement. The best part was the all-expenses paid tour of the internet to find material to drop in. Many thanks to Warren Bland and Wikipedia for doing so much of the leg work for me.