

Henry Adam Svec plays with norms of songwriting & storytelling, urging us to plug in & pick a team
Jul 29, 2021
01:11:09
Henry Adam Svec is an author, musician and an assistant professor of communication arts at the University of Waterloo. He’s produced two extraordinary albums (http://www.folksingularity.com/download.html). His album The CFL Sessions (http://www.thecflsessions.ca/songs.html) is perhaps most relevant to this conversation. This album, along with a series of live shows that Svec did to support it, forms the basis of his new novel, Life is Like Canadian Football and Other Authentic Folk Songs (https://invisiblepublishing.com/product/life-is-like-canadian-football/). The book, in fact, builds out from the stage banter that brought The CFL Sessions to life as a performance.
I related most to the ways that Svec’s book can both blithely shrug off and bitterly contest the normative constraints of academia. As it stands, Svec doesn’t feel as though his most recent writing should be required to present a unified theory of authenticity, it’s main object of analysis. It’s enough for the book to simply “offer ideas” about it. In this sense, I think Svec’s work in many ways models how we can inject more joy, satire and self-reflexivity into scholarly writing.
(Just a quick note: you might notice that there are some keyboard and mouse noises [clicking and scrolling, not squeaking] throughout the episode. My apologies if this is distracting!)