Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to Storyteller in depth, a podcast where we go behind the scenes to learn more about the school of communications, media arts and designs, people, places and things. I'm your host, Pat Quigley. Have you ever noticed how the media treats male and female celebrities differently? Why are women in the spotlight often subjected to harsher scrutiny and unfair expectations? Today, we're deep diving into the world of pop culture to explore these questions, the blatant misogyny and double standards that exist, and so much more. Our guest is Lisa Whittington Hill, an instructor in our publishing, book, magazine and electronic program. Lisa has extensive industry background with a range of written pieces spanning several popular online publications.
She is also the publisher of this magazine and has published two books, which we'll get into shortly. Let's get into the interview.
Thank you so much, Lisa, for being on the podcast today.
[00:01:10] Speaker B: Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.
[00:01:12] Speaker A: Yeah, no, it's gonna be an amazing conversation. And, you know, the people that are listening right now in Centennial's publishing, book, magazine and electronic program will know you as one of the instructors of the program. But can you share a little bit more of an overview of how you got into the writing and publishing publishing industries and your incredible career so far?
[00:01:32] Speaker B: Sure. I'll try and do a condensed version.
I've always been interested in writing and publishing. I always tell my students I started my first magazine when I was seven years old and it was called Pets. It was all about the pets in my neighborhood.
It sadly only lasted one issue.
It wasn't a big enterprise. It had one supplement, my mom.
So that was sort of my start in publishing. Sometimes I think about bringing pets back. Maybe it's time to relaunch it decades later. But I won't give my whole history. Starting from age seven, I sort of got really interested in writing and publishing. I grew up in Edmonton and I studied journalism. I did a two year journalism program.
It was Grant McEwan College at the time. I went to it, McEwan University, and it was a great program. And part of that program we did a placement, and I was lucky enough to get a placement at Sea magazine, which was one of two alternative weeklies in Edmonton. Sadly, Sea magazine is not around. Edmonton doesn't have any alternative weeklies. It's very sad.
But I got to do this placement and I sort of started to write about film and music and art and I got to interview bands. I got to interview this, this great all girl japanese pop punk band Shonen knife. And I got to do all this really cool writing and sort of learn about independent media and working at an alt weekly, and it was a really great experience. And then I moved to Trent or moved to Peterborough and went to Trent University, and I did a degree in cultural studies. And so I got to kind of study more about art and film and music while I was at Trent. I got really involved in campus and community media at the radio station at Trent and the campus and community newspaper. I was the editor in chief while I was there. And so really, again, getting to work in publishing and writing in independent media, and it really made me really excited about the possibilities of independent alternative media. This was in the nineties. I graduated from Trent, and I moved to Toronto, and I kind of decided I would try living in Toronto.
You know, people back from, you know, my hometown, Edmonton, thought I was a trader because I'd moved to Toronto, and I was lucky enough to get hired by magazines Canada. I applied for this job as an administrative assistant in magazines Canada, which is a national association of canadian magazines, hired me, and I got to be surrounded by magazines, and I learned all about, you know, biggest consumer magazines and small arts and literary magazines. And it was really exciting for me. And I'd always kind of been interested in magazines growing up, and then getting a chance to kind of be surrounded by magazines and the people that make them every day was really inspiring and interesting to me. And when I was working at magazines Canada, I discovered a magazine called this magazine for listeners who might not be familiar with this. It started in 1966.
It is a progressive magazine of politics, arts, and culture. It's a small magazine, bimonthly print magazine. But I discovered this magazine, and I really fell in love with the magazine. And one day I just decided to email them and see if they needed volunteers. And it was very scary. I crafted the email, and then I hit send, and I was very nervous, you know, would they respond? What would happen? And they got back to me and they were like, you know, please volunteer. Come and join us. And so I started volunteering, and I did copy editing and fact checking, and I would come and eat free pizza whenever they had it during production.
And I worked as the arts editor and the circulation manager, and I really just fell in love with the magazine and with small magazines and with independent media, and this magazine is small. There's only two full time staff. So in 2004, the publisher job came open. There's only two full time staff, a publisher and an editor. And I applied for the publisher job, and I got it. So in 2005, I became the publisher of this magazine, and I'm very, very lucky. I think it's a great job and I'm lucky that because it is a small magazine, I get to, I'm the publisher, so I work on the business side, but I get to do a bit of editorial as well, which is really, really exciting.
And sort of through this, I, you know, I worked on the business side as publisher, but I started doing writing for publications for magazines, both in Canada and the US, printed online publications, and I've done some newspaper writing and, yeah, so I sort of, this magazine sort of led me to a whole bunch of other things. I started teaching at Centennial.
I started teaching part time in 2017, teaching magazine marketing, and then I became a full time faculty in January of this year. So teaching more of the magazine courses. So that is a bit of the history. And like I say, still, maybe one day I will revive pets. I don't know.
[00:06:27] Speaker A: We'll see. One of these days, I'm sure.
[00:06:30] Speaker B: One of these days. Yeah.
[00:06:32] Speaker A: So one of the things, one of the many accomplishments that you have, and I want to talk about this is the topic of your latest book, Girls Interrupted, how pop Culture is Failing Women, which features a collection of 13 articles that explore different aspects of pop culture's treatment of women. Now, before we get into the specifics of this, can you first share a bit about what inspired you to publish this book?
[00:06:51] Speaker B: Sure.
I'd always been interested in pop culture. I'm obsessed with pop culture. And I really started sort of writing more about pop culture. And one of the things I really started focusing on and researching and writing about was gender bias in pop culture. And I became really, really interested in it. It sort of started in 2019.
I wrote a piece for long reads, which is an online publication based in the States. I wrote a piece about Courtney Love. For decades, I have been defending Courtney Love.
It's one of my hobbies. And I wrote this piece about how, you know, how she treated so unfairly by, you know, by everyone from the media to Nirvana fans and really wrote this defense of Courtney Love. And then I wrote another piece for long reads in, I think, probably summer of 2021, I wrote a piece about gender bias in celebrity memoir coverage. I'd been reading a lot of celebrity memoirs. There had been ones that had come out. There was, you know, I had read Debbie Harry's and Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Demi Moore and Jessica Simpson and Elton John. All these memoirs had come out. And I really noticed there was kind of this, you know, this, this difference in how memoirs by women were reviewed and received and the things that women were expected to write about in their memoirs. And I really noticed this really distinct gender bias, and I wrote a piece about it for long reads. That was a lot of, you know, a lot of fun to research and write. And I. That piece was published, and an editor, Carmen Starnino, who is an editor, he's the editor of the Walrus, but he's also the editor at Vehicle Press, reached out to me and was like, you know, I read this celebrity memoir piece, and I really liked it. And he said, you know, you know, you should think about a collection of essays. And he said, maybe you're already working on it, so sorry to bother you if you are. And I'm like, no, I'm not working. You know, I'm not already working on it. Let's do it. So I was very lucky that Carmen read this piece and reached out to me, and that sort of got the ball rolling. But it's something that I really became interested in and just started writing and researching, was looking at this issue of how pop culture is failing women. And every day brings new examples, sadly.
[00:09:07] Speaker A: Yeah, unfortunately, for sure. So when you first sat down to write this book, did you have a list of topics or themes that you, without a doubt, wanted to highlight, and were there any that popped up along the way as you were putting the book together?
[00:09:20] Speaker B: Definitely. So there's the. Of the essays in the book. Some of them are previously published pieces. So that, you know, the piece I talked about, the long reads piece about celebrity memoirs is in there, and the Courtney love piece is in there. There are a lot of mentions of Courtney love in the book, as one reviewer pointed out.
So, you know, there were some previously published pieces that I sort of reworked a little bit and to publish them in the book. And then there are definitely some new essays. You know, when I was sitting down and looking at a list of topics, you know, I definitely, I was like, I want to write something about redemption and who gets it, unlikable women. You know, I was like, I definitely want to write something about Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears and how they were treated in the two thousands.
And then, you know, some things popped up. I, you know, I became obsessed, you know, like everyone, I think, in 2022 with Anna Delby and Elizabeth Holmes and the female grifters. So I wanted to write something about that. So sort of new topics would pop up. I think the challenge was that every day, new topics and new things I wanted to write about you know, there are definitely, sadly, no shortage of examples of how pop culture is failing women. And like I said, each day seemed to be to bring a new example or something new I could write about. So I think the challenge was sort of telling myself, okay, like, we have to kind of cap this and at a certain point, we have to stop writing. So. But there was definitely some, some themes that I wanted to explore. And I think it's a book that could be written every year.
[00:10:53] Speaker A: Almost like you need to create it in volumes or something like that, where here's volume one, but then here's the continuation of story ABC with brand new stories, DFG or whatever.
[00:11:03] Speaker B: Yeah, it's like, you know, volume two, the Britney years or the kind of thing. Yeah. So, but it was great because it is, you know, there are some previously published pieces, but some new pieces as well. And I think it was really important to have that, to not just have it all be material that was previously published, but to have some new essays as well.
[00:11:21] Speaker A: In what ways did writing and researching for this book change or strengthen your perception of how women are treated and represented in pop culture today?
[00:11:30] Speaker B: It certainly made me see just really, really how prevalent it is and how, you know, I think I talk about this in the book, but I think, you know, over the past decade, we've sort of seen a rise in podcasts and memoirs and documentaries that sort of revisit the legacy of women wronged by pop culture. And I think we see that, you know, we see things like free Britney and we think everything's better. You know, we had the cultural reckoning of me, too, and we think everything is, is better for women in the media and in pop culture, and it's certainly not. So I think for me, it was really realizing this is really, really prevalent and still happening. I was just reading before we started this interview I was reading over the weekend. It was sort of making the rounds on social media, but I hadn't had the time to read it. This male journalist for Newsweek had written a piece about Taylor Swift and talking about how Taylor Swift is a bad role model for young women because she is unmarried and she doesn't have a child, and she's had a lot of boyfriends, you know, a lot of boyfriends by kind of, by his judgment, you know, so kind of reading this in every day just really brings new examples. And I think one of the challenges with writing the book was to try not to get really overwhelmed by these examples and how really depressing it is and to look at really sometimes how little change we have made. You know, we, I remember, you know, when Britney Spears, you know, there were the two documentaries that came out about Britney Spears. There was free Britney that Britney's memoir came out and everyone acknowledged how badly we had treated Britney. And, you know, magazines were apologizing, late night talk show hosts were apologizing for how they treated her. And I remember, you know, taking this all in and thinking how great it was that people were finally acknowledging how badly Britney had treated it and then going to the newsstand and seeing us, we weekly, you know, with a cover, Britney's downward spiral, you know, drugs, you know, mental health issues and, you know, it's like, have we learned nothing? Have we learned nothing? So I think, you know, really seeing just how much this happens and how much I think maybe we think, oh, this doesn't happen. You know, we're treating Britney better now, but, you know, are we really?
[00:13:41] Speaker A: Oh, for sure. For sure. I mean, it's, it's funny. Every now and then I think back to the time when I think I heard it on the radio when it first kind of appeared. And then I, all the unconscious biases that you have right towards everything that's happening and not thinking about the other side of it, not going to that other side and understanding what's happening. So the way that media can kind of construe things in a certain way to sell their narrative. Right?
[00:14:08] Speaker B: Yeah, and, yeah, for sure.
And I think it just, you know, I mean, I think just for me, just seeing these examples every day, you know, I talk about the Britney Spears Newsweek thing, but then I was reading, you know, Dave Grohl made a dig at Britney Spears or made a, I was talking about the Newsweek piece about Taylor Swift. But, you know, I was, then I was reading, you know, Dave Grohl took a, took a dig at Taylor Swift for not playing, you know, for, he's saying she doesn't play live. So all this stuff that kind of keeps happening and I think we think it doesn't happen or doesn't happen as much as it does.
[00:14:43] Speaker A: You know, if I played a concert for over 4 hours, I would maybe need a little bit of help too. So.
[00:14:48] Speaker B: Yeah, Dave, girl, you're okay. Stay in your lane.
[00:14:56] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:14:57] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:14:58] Speaker A: So you did a Q and a featured in the storyteller or, sorry, story art center's newsletter, the Storyteller, which mentioned that, which mentioned that one word to describe the book is timely, which is such an accurate depiction of this topic. Not only are there a variety of examples in pop culture, that demonstrate exactly what you're communicating in your book, but in something, but it's something that unfortunately remains. Can you share your thoughts on what you hope readers come to understand about misogyny and pop culture after reading your book and how it's something that still remains despite bringing more people to the topic at light?
[00:15:35] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I think it's a bit of what I would said before, like, I hope breeders will see how prevalent it is, how it is happening, how it is still happening every day. And I hope that they will, you know, look at, you know, will call it out when they see it. You know, I was, I discovered this newsweek piece about Taylor Swift on social media and went and read it, but, you know, people were really calling it out and pointing out how, how awful it was. You know, people are coming after Dave Grohl for his awful comments. So I think seeing people seeing how much this is still happening, how much still needs to change, you know, how awful it is that, you know, we had this whole conversation about how awful pop culture and the media had had treated Britney Spears, but it is still happening. You know, we are still seeing these magazine covers that are awful to Britney.
So I think just calling it out, people calling it at it when they see it, seeing just how much it happens. And I think social media, you know, for all the problems I have with social media, I think it is a great tool for calling this kind of stuff out for, you know, pulling up, you know, when Justin Timberlake was arrested for DUI, thank God he did not kill or injure anyone. But, you know, it was, I'm still living for all the memes and it was great to see, you know, people pulling up interviews of Justin Timberlake where he was shaming Britney for drinking and kind of calling her out for her behavior. And, you know, Britney Spears has never been arrested for DUI. She doesn't have a mug shot. So I think, you know, one of the good things about social media is it can be used to kind of, you know, you see female celebrities using it to tell their own story, to tell their side of things. You know, Britney Spears, you know, during the kind of, you know, when she was really being pulled apart by the media in the mid two thousands, you know, she didn't have social media, wasn't able to tell her side of things. And now celebrities are, and now we have these ways that we can call out these injustices that are happening to women, to female celebrities.
[00:17:45] Speaker A: Around the same time as girls Interrupted was published, your entry for Bloomsburg's 33 3rd book series, which included short books about popular music, came out titled the Go Go's Beauty and the Beat in the same Q and A in storyteller. You shared that the album beauty and the beat changed your life when you first started at eleven years old. Now writing about the sexism and misogyny the band experienced for that book, while simultaneously, simultaneously writing girls interrupted, detailing how sexism and misogyny remain in the pop culture industry. It must have been interesting exploring the parallels of how women are treated in the eighties when the album came out to examples in more recent times. Can you share what the experience was like writing for both books and how each compliments the other in a way?
[00:18:30] Speaker B: Sure. I was nervous to write two books at the same time. I was worried about how I was going to pull that off, and they came out within a month of each other. So the 33 and a third about the go go for Bloomsbury came out in September and girls interrupted. Came out in October.
But it was great that they were very similar subject matter and they did overlap and they did complement each other. So, you know, I would always say to people, you know, I've spent the last two years writing about how pop culture is awful to women. And it was really depressing at times. I think one of the most depressing things was to see how little things had changed. So I would be writing, you know, the go gos, which were an all female bandaid in the eighties. Their album Beauty and the Beat, probably their most famous album, came out in 81. So I would be looking at these Rolling Stone interviews from 1982 with the go goes and seeing.
Reading the sexist questions they were asked. Interviewers would ask them what it was like to be a girl in a band or if they had boyfriends, or comment on their appearance of read these interviews and be like, okay, this is the go go. This is the eighties. And then I would be working on girls interrupted and reading an interview from 2000, you know, with Billie Eilish, or, you know, reading an interview from 2005 with Lindsay Lohan, and seeing the same kind of questions and the same kind of sexist attitudes. And after a while I would kind of like, have this thing where I would be like, what? What decade am I in? Am I in the eighties? Am I? You know, because it was interesting to see how little had changed in how the media treats female celebrities, how pop culture treats these women. So it was a nice compliment, but it was sometimes really quite a bummer to see how little things, things have changed and how much work we still.
[00:20:26] Speaker A: Have to do for sure. I know there's been interviews that I watch on YouTube or stuff like that. And it's always the same sort of questions that they give the female celebrities opposed to male celebrities, right, where it's for the males, it's very much pointed towards, you know, what do you think about the role? Blah, blah, blah, blah. But as soon as it comes to the females, you know, what was it like to do this? Or what are you, why are you wearing this? And it's like, well, what does that have to do with how I acted? Or, you know, it's, it's not a true indication of their performance or their, their work, but just of who they are and their almost like to objectify in a sense.
[00:21:04] Speaker B: Yeah, it's really, you know, and I talk about this in girls interrupted, but I watched this documentary and, you know, they were, journalists were interviewing the Strokes. It was when the Strokes were very, very big and, you know, the strokes were asked questions about their artistic practice and the recording of their album. And, and then they cut to journalists interviewing Karen, the lead singer of the IAS, what is her name? Karen O.
They were interviewing her and they were asking, have you ever had received death threats? Have you ever had a same sex experience? Nothing sort of about her artistic process, which is what they had been talking to the Stokes about.
So the books were nice compliments to each other, but in a way it was really, I certainly thought that things had improved much more since the eighties, since the go Gos released beauty and the beat in 1981. I thought we had got, and in some ways we have gotten better. But it was interesting to see how little has changed.
[00:22:05] Speaker A: Well, I was going to ask you that. Have you seen through your research and through everything, has there been a slight change? Has there been a beginning of a change to this?
[00:22:15] Speaker B: I think there has definitely, you know, we do see, you know, female celebrities writing their memoirs. We see documentaries about female celebrities podcasts. You know, we do see this kind of challenging of traditional, traditional narratives, this revisiting the legacies of women wronged by pop culture. We sort of see that. And I think that's really great to see. And, you know, we were talking earlier about social media. I think social media really helps in that respect. But I think it's a bit, you know, talking about the Britney Spears example. You know, we talked and talked so much about how Britney was mistreated. But, you know, a week later, us Weekly is still back to their typical, you know, Britney's downward spiral cover. So I think sometimes it's like, we talk about it and then we don't think, well, how can we kind of change this going forward?
You know, it's really great to see magazines come out and apologize for how they treated Britney Spears or apologize for how they treated Lindsay Lohan. But I think the step is thinking about, like, how do we change that going forward?
You know, and, you know, admitting. Admitting, you know, we acknowledge there's a problem. So how do we kind of change this going forward and make it better?
[00:23:27] Speaker A: What are the initial steps you recommend for someone with a passion for a particular topic who wants to start writing about it, possibly with the goal of getting their writing published?
[00:23:37] Speaker B: Sure. I would say, you know, kind of. I always encourage students and to kind of find their niche, find that thing you really want to write about. For me, it's pop culture, particularly gender bias and pop culture, but find that thing that you really want to write about and really research it and become kind of the expert on that. You know, I'm certainly not the only person writing about pop culture or writing about how pop culture is failing women, but, you know, become kind of an expert on this. You know, girls, interrupted. Came out the same week as Britney Spears memoir. It was a great week to have a book come out about how pop culture is failing women. I got to go and talk about Britney's memoir, but kind of start to, you know, research it, write it. You know, I kept, you know, I have huge files on my laptop of examples of pop culture failing women. It's a depressing file to go through, but start to kind of put this together, see who else is writing about it. You know, are there other podcasts out there? Are there other books? But kind of start to become an expert in your field, kind of, you know, find your niche and start to develop it and explore it.
[00:24:38] Speaker A: And while we're on the topic of writing and publishing, as mentioned at the beginning of this episode, you're an instructor for the publishing, book, magazine, and electronic program. Your experience is undoubtedly fitting in with this program because of your experience writing for online publications and the books we just discussed. What do you think are some of the benefits of taking such a program and having instructors with this industry experience?
[00:25:01] Speaker B: I encourage everyone to come and take the program. Come. We'd love to have you there. Our program is really unique in the, you know, it's a one year postgraduate program, and students get to learn book and magazine publishing. You know, a lot of programs may be focused just on books or just on magazines. Ours focuses on books and magazines, and I always tell students to really keep an open mind. You know, a lot of students come in the first week of class and they're very interested in books. And I, you know, I hope they'll become interested in magazines too by the end of the year, but they get to learn both. And I think having instructors with industry experience is important in terms of knowing what the issues are, what the challenges are, what the opportunities are of the industry, and bringing that experience to the classroom. You know, we really want to prepare of students. It's a one year program. They do a placement as part of the program and we really want them to be aware of what is happening in the industry. So what are the trends? What skills do they have to have? Being able to use our industry connections to help the students however we can. So I think it's really important to have instructors that are aware of what is going on in the industry and can bring that to the students.
[00:26:10] Speaker A: Wow. Yeah.
It's interesting to learn through doing this podcast how many different programs there are at the story arts center. And all the different niches and the postgraduate programs are such an amazing added skill to your, to anybody's experience. Right? So getting to go into that tract, into that, that sect of that world is so cool, especially for people who would be taking the program.
[00:26:37] Speaker B: It is really, you know, it's students, it's one year program. Students get to do a placement. They also, you know, our program, they get to work on a magazine. So the students work on the Danforth magazine, so they're actually taking what they're learning in their classes and they get to practically apply it. Making a magazine that people, that people read. And one of the things I really love as an instructor is seeing how excited oftentimes if students are writing for on the Danforth, it's the first time they're having a byline and they're really excited to see their pieces in print. And I really love sharing that excitement with them. You know, seeing them when they open up the box and they get to hold the magazine for the first time. You know, I've been working in magazines for, you know, I've been at this magazine for 20 years. I still get excited when a new issue comes.
So getting to kind of share that excitement with the students and I think it's really important that, you know, they're learning in the classroom. You know, we're learning about magazines, but they get to take that and apply it and, you know, they get to go and sell ads and design the magazine and right for it. It's you know, really from start to finish, working on a magazine which I think is really unique and really exciting. I think magazines are exciting.
[00:27:43] Speaker A: So looking ahead into your future, do you have any other topics you'd love to explore?
[00:27:50] Speaker B: I think I'm starting to think about something maybe to do with culture, which is something I've been thinking about a lot lately.
So kind of the initial stages of that and doing. I've been working on another long reads piece about female musicians in the eighties, so I'm trying to do some writing and getting excited for September for.
[00:28:16] Speaker A: Awesome. Well, Lisa, I'm sure we could talk for the rest of the day about so many different topics, but, you know, you know, we've got to wrap it up somewhere. So I want to thank you so much for being on the podcast today.
[00:28:28] Speaker B: Thank you. Yes, thank you so much. I won't take any more time talking about Justin Timberlake or anything like that, but thank you so much for having me. It really was a pleasure.
[00:28:43] Speaker A: Thank you so much, Lisa, for being on the podcast. Lisa's books, girls, how pop culture is failing women and the Go go's beauty and the beat are available to purchase. If you're interested in exploring more about the topics discussed in this episode, we'd love to know your thoughts about this episode. So be sure to leave a comment on our instagram and share this episode with a friend to see their thoughts as well. Until next time, I'm your host, Pat Quigley, and this is storyteller in depth.
