My guest on this episode—the first of 2026—is Robert McGill. Robert’s books include three novels, The Mysteries, Once We Had a Country, and A Suitable Companion for the End of Your Life, and two nonfiction books, The Treacherous Imagination and War Is Here. His most recent book is the short fiction collection Simple Creatures, which was published by Coach House Books in 2024, and was a finalist for the Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. CBC Books called the collection \"a hilarious and heartbreaking portrait of the world we live in.\"
Robert and I talk about reading reviews of his own work, about the first short story he ever wrote, which was based on a video game he could only play on his grandmother’s Vic 20—Google that, kids—and about the previously published story he almost dropped from his most recent collection, and only kept in after changing the name of the author it repeatedly references, that author being Alice Munro.
This podcast is produced and hosted by Nathan Whitlock, in partnership with The Walrus.
Music: \"simple-hearted thing\" by Alex Lukashevsky. Used with permission.
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