Kultura Rising: Episode 1 Transcript

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Andrew reading an excerpt from Maria Reva’s book Endling, Chapter 13, p 104

Morning. Still dark. 

Then: a great bone-deep crack, as if a truck had crashed into a cement wall. 

They’d been on the road two hours, Nastia squeezed between Yeva and Sol on the vinyl maroon bench seat of the driver’s cabin. 

A flash of light, a whistle, another crash. Yeva pulled over. Nastia watched Yeva look east, where the horizon was paling. 

Silence.

A car accident? Or a gas explosion in an old building in a nearby town. Or, any number of things.

The women waited. Nastia could hear Sol’s breathing, quick and shallow. 

“It’s fireworks,” she decided. “Just fireworks. Right?”

Yeva grabbed her hand.

[MUSIC]

INTRODUCTION

ANDREW KUSHNIR: You’re listening to Kultura Rising. I’m Andrew Kushnir.

I knew this is where I wanted to start this series. In the world-turned-upside-down for Yeva and Nastia and Sol in a novel entitled Endling. Which is to say, in the world of acclaimed author Maria Reva.

My first guest on Kultura Rising is now a juggernaut on the cultural front, becoming lauded for how she, in many ways, saved a novel she’d been working on from being a casualty of this war. The full-scale invasion had sidelined Maria, as it had many. She couldn’t see the way back into writing fiction anymore, let alone finishing a work-in-progress, in a world that had become so senseless. Why bother? And then she did something radical and maybe inevitable: she inserted herself into her own novel and laid bare her own existential crisis alongside her other equally discombobulated characters.

They call it metafiction. I’d call it plain brilliance. Endling by Maria Reva was deservedly long listed for the Booker Prize and it won the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. This wild and wildly Ukrainian Canadian piece of literature even garnered her an appearance on Late Night with Seth Myers. Can you believe it? 

I knew that I wanted to interview Maria if only to thank her. To thank her for how much her writing had resonated with me. How, in a book that is so clever and funny and playful and spicy, there is something rather devastating coursing through it. How it touched my grief. And how it also encouraged me to persist.

Because Maria’s writing about extinction. Or more specifically, what it is to both witness and resist the forever-disappearance of something precious. 

And I don’t know if it’s a solely Ukrainian quality, but it’s certainly one I’d like to claim for Ukrainians: The art of defying extinction.

Here is my conversation with author Maria Reva.

THE CONVERSATION

ANDREW KUSHNIR: I always get curious about when I, I hear a song that has captured everybody’s imagination, like the songs of the summer and, you know, are people in the recording studio going, ‘oh, this is going to be a banger,’ like ‘we’re really going to, we’re going to make it big with this.’ And I’m curious, did you see it coming? 

MARIA REVA: No, no, not at all. And I’m not just trying to sound humble. This book was so difficult to write, you know, for multiple reasons, and I gave up on it multiple times. And then when I had my final editorial deadline, I just was trying to honestly drag myself across that finishing line and I was very grateful for the deadline, of course. But it was just such an arduous process that the only kind of light at the end of the tunnel I could see at that point was just to meet that deadline. 

ANDREW: Wow.

MARIA: And, I didn’t really see, I couldn’t imagine a future for the book beyond that.

ANDREW: Actually, so you were just trying to survive your commitment? 

MARIA: Yes, indeed. And that’s actually, I think, a really good place to be in upon publication because if you start to have expectations, inevitably you do set yourself up for disappointments as well. So, if you have truly zero expectations, anything that comes in is this huge bonus. And yeah, I have been very, very fortunate with the kind of reception this book has received, and I truly did not expect it. 

ANDREW: How about people in your life?

MARIA: Well, my sister did read the book. She’s one of my early readers and that’s always been the case throughout my writing career. My agent, of course, read it before it came out. She was really, really excited about it and excited about the metafictional elements, which I, myself, had kind of taken out in earlier drafts because I got a little bit squeamish about them, and then I started to miss them. 

ANDREW: Metafictional, by that, you mean you insert yourself, or I even think of it as having read the book, it’s like you reveal yourself, actually, at a certain point. And so, are you telling me that a certain version of the script didn’t include that? 

MARIA: Yes, that’s right. So maybe I should go back and give some context for your listeners who have no experience with it at all, to give a sense of what the book was supposed to be.

ANDREW: Sure.

MARIA: So, I started writing it in 2018. And originally, it was supposed to be about, yes, a snail biologist who’s trying to save snails from the brink of extinction in contemporary Ukraine. And she is alone in her mobile lab. She’s kind of a lone wolf character. And how she’s trying to fund her research and conservation efforts, and, you know, trying to breed these snails in her lab, she takes part in these romance tours that used to take place in Ukraine prior to the full-scale invasion. So, this was a real thing, where men from all over the world would be carted into Ukraine kind of sold on this promise that they would find their perfect docile bride in X number of days. Because there was this kind of perception of Ukrainian women through these, you know, marketed by these agencies that, oh, feminism hasn’t made it into the country yet. So, you know, if you’re sick of Western women, if they seem too ambitious and aggressive for you, well, guess what, you can find the supposed woman of your dreams. 

ANDREW: The perfect woman in Ukraine. 

MARIA: Exactly. And anyone who has been around enough Ukrainian women will just laugh their face off at that. 

ANDREW: I was gonna say, I can’t scan that across any single female figure in my entire upbringing. 

MARIA: Yeah, exactly. So, so yeah, we have the biologist Yeva, and she’s taking part in these tours, pretending to date these men for marriage. But, of course, she has no interest in actually marrying, but thereby funding her research. So that was the book I was working on. It was this kind of comedic, also, you know, kidnapping caper, because there’s also a kidnapping involved of twelve of these men. And then Russia launched its full-scale invasion. And I was about halfway through the book, and at that point I thought I cannot continue working on this. How am I supposed to keep working on a book when its setting is being destroyed in real time? And what is my place as a writer right now, what is the place of fiction when there’s this insane collision of reality into that world? So, I really did give up on the book for a time. But these questions kept obsessing me, and I write from a place of obsession, so I decided that the only way I could keep writing this book was to fold all of that into it. So that’s why I kind of draw back the curtain for the reader, and it becomes a book about, how does the book, how do I keep writing this book in such a time? And yeah, I become a character in it as well. And then all these kinds of experimental elements filter in. And it’s not, it wasn’t me just trying to experiment for the sake of experimentation. It was just really the only way the book could have kept being pulled through. But yeah, at some point I did, I got a little squeamish, I thought, is this a gimmick? Do I really need to do this? Can I just take the narrative straight through? And I tried that and then I started to really miss those elements because they were the most, it’s a strange thing to say, that they were the most playful and joyful parts because I was writing about a war, but those were the parts that felt so energized to me. And so, I gave up on this notion of trying to create a neat narrative. And I thought I’d rather create something more authentic to the experience, even if it’s a bit more messy. 

ANDREW: Yeah. I mean, I’ll say those sections of the book – they’re subversive, they’re unexpected. And I’d also say they’re some of the most intimate parts of the book as we try to process the senselessness. You know, something that really came alive for me, that I related to, is the role of fantasy and how in your writing, and I even wondered about the book itself, how you’re able to play out certain hopes and dreams. There’s this one section, I’m reminded of this line where you said maybe we could just build a big sort of like Chernobyl-style sarcophagus over Russia and keep all of that evil, you know, under one roof. And I really related to that as a Ukrainian Canadian and as an artist. Almost like, it sometimes feels silly, like I’ll do a crossword puzzle and I’ll tell myself if I actually complete this, then maybe Ukraine will gain some territory today. Like these weird sort of bargains in one’s mind, that is a little bit of trauma, it’s a little bit of grief, and it’s a lot of creativity. 

MARIA: Yes, I think, yeah, you say the word grief, and I think that was absolutely my experience. And I think when something really awful happens, we, and something we have no control over, we try to, our minds try to assert some illusion of control over it and hence, hence those kinds of thoughts. Like if, yeah, if I do this one thing, maybe something else will change or if I had done this one thing differently, the outcome would have been different. And I guess it’s more comforting to think that way, right? 

ANDREW: Yeah. 

MARIA: So, yeah, those fantasies, all make their way into the book, of course, and just, also my fantasy of rescuing my grandfather from Kherson as well. That was just a reoccurring scene in my head. And it started to really mimic the process of fictional scene building that I do, right? So, when I do fictional scene building, I have the scene cycle on and on inside my head. And I keep adding details to it, right? But yeah, I found myself doing the same thing, about this fantasy of coming to my grandfather’s door. And yeah, I guess, I don’t know, is that a writer’s brain, just… So, I don’t know. 

ANDREW: It’s maybe a Ukrainian’s brain, a Ukrainian Canadian’s brain. It’s maybe anybody who’s, well, we know that our art forms can be a way of processing our wounds, you know, and the things that are weighing us down and keeping us from maximal aliveness sometimes. And so, I was able to just really receive that in your novel writing. It just felt like so brilliantly executed. And so risky and vulnerable, you know, like all those things we want a piece of art to be, you know, and there are no answers. It’s just the labor almost, like feeling your attempts, over and over again, at trying to make sense of the senseless. 

MARIA: Yeah. Thank you. 

ANDREW: Can we talk about extinction because, you know, we’re talking about these snails, and I always say, like a metaphor can be read 100 different ways, but, you know, I certainly was, it was vibrating for me in certain kinds of ways. I’m wondering how you arrived at the snails as a way of talking about extinction and that rabbit hole you went down.

MARIA: Right. So, I should probably define the word ‘endling’, and that’s a, that’s a real word. I did not make that up. It means the last surviving member of a species, so, when that creature dies, that’s the whole evolutionary branch that is snipped off forever. And, of course, we have Yeva with her snail endlings in the mobile lab. And, yeah, how did the snails weave their way into the book? I mean, a lot of people ask this, and my answer is that I just, I had two obsessions at the same time, and I really wanted to fit them together. It’s not a very smart answer. I was already writing the book about the romance tours. So, yeah, the romance tours were some of the first elements of the book, and then, because I wanted to explore the romance tour participants’ motivations for being in the tour, and I didn’t want to write, like, a trope kind of story of, you know, ‘oh, poor, Slavic woman marries a western man, and has all her dreams met,’ which is kind of a cliché, and it’s, you know, it’s not – I don’t think it – but anyway… So I, I was exploring what could be the other motivations of, say, one of the brides. And, at the time, I read this amazing article by Ed Young called The Last of Its Kind. And, just to emphasize how phenomenal this article is, not only did it inspire my book, it inspired another book in Germany, also called Endling. That one is set in a dystopian future in Germany, which I have not read myself, unfortunately, because I don’t speak German. It also inspired a song about one of the snails the article references. So –

ANDREW: It’s remarkable. 

MARIA: – it’s absolutely remarkable. So, it really hits some, some nerve in multiple people, well, many readers and multiple artists. And it’s all about this biologist in Hawaii who is taking care of snail endlings. So, he’s watching extinction happen, right? It’s just running through his own hands. And, the article is not just about the snails, but about the insane, psychological toll that this can take on the humans, right, taking care of these creatures. And I just kept thinking about that article, and it just kept swirling around in my mind. And I found a way to integrate it into my book as well.

ANDREW: You’ve brought up a lot of the imagery of this quote that I wanted to read to you. And I want to set the scene for you. I was in Paris in late August, and I was, I was on a bench at the Palais Royal, and I was reading your book. I felt very grand, you know, being in the middle of Europe and connecting with this story. And I hit this paragraph on page 15, and–I told your publicist this–I started bawling. And what you wrote is: “She did not know how long she’d sat cradling the limp little body in her palm, paralyzed by an indescribable feeling, as if she was swelling and shrinking at the same time. A twinge of awe to be the one to witness an evolutionary branch, millions of years in refinement, be snipped off. A twinge of power to have played a hand in it just by having been born human. But mostly, she felt tiny and dumb and powerless.” And, you know, we’ve talked about grief, and I always feel like grief is this thing that, it’s a kind of a river you’re always standing in, and sometimes that river goes up to your eyeballs, and sometimes it’s just like, you know, just wetting your socks. But I read that, and it made me think of Ukraina, it made me think of Ukraine, in such, again, like, what great artists do is they create these portals or these tethers. And it really activated for me this idea of the things we are at risk of losing forever. And particularly in wartime, the extent to which we know that lives are eradicated, but also culture is eradicated. And I’d just be so curious to know if, did the paragraph live before the full-scale invasion? 

MARIA: Oh, absolutely. I mean, even if I didn’t write exactly that paragraph, that was the feeling of the book, when I was writing that section. I do want to say on the subject of ecological grief, I mean, the book starts off on a pretty low note in that way, right? 

ANDREW: Yeah. 

MARIA: And it really is the sense of hopelessness. And it does change throughout the book. And I had this great interview with Ed Young, who I mentioned before, and Jasmin Schreiber. She’s the other Endling author, the German Endling book, because she’s a biologist. So, I asked them, what is your relationship to ecological grief because you write about such difficult topics. And, they actually, in the end, we left in a much more hopeful place in the conversation. And that, yeah, that we, something Ed Young said was that the future is not a set thing. The future is a collective decision we make. And we can’t really afford nihilism right now. And, actually, the snail rehabilitation efforts in Hawaii are doing better from what I hear. They’re getting more funding. So, hope is not lost. And it’s something we can decide to actively nurture like a muscle. And I hope that my own book, by the end, gives that sense as well. 

As to your question about the metaphor of Endling –  yeah, of course, there’s this existential worry on the part of Ukrainians, right? Like this extinction event happening due to Russian aggression and the kinds of atrocities they have subjected upon our people. So, I, to be honest, I didn’t think of the broader metaphor. When I started writing the book, of course this was before the full-scale invasion – I mean, of course, 2014 had already happened – but I, actually, I really was quite focused on the ecology aspect. But of course, there’s lots of ways to interpret it as you move through the book. And it’s something that the reader can create for themselves, right? Their own interpretation. Absolutely. 

ANDREW: You went to Ukraina to research… You did multiple trips. Is that right? 

MARIA: So, I did a trip in March 2023 with my sister. That was about a year into the full-scale invasion. And we stayed there for over a month. We started out in western Ukraine. And then we progressively went east. Then we went to Kyiv. And then we went as far as Kharkiv. 

ANDREW: Oh, wow! 

MARIA: We stayed just a day there. So, the idea with that trip, of course, it was a family trip to see the family that had stayed in Ukraine at that time. And it was also a research trip as I thought, well, if I’m going to continue writing my book, and if it’s going to be about the war, I want to see things with my own eyes. 

ANDREW: And are there any… be it epiphanies, small or big that came about from… You were born in Ukraine, right? 

MARIA: Yes. 

ANDREW: And had you been back between an early age and 2023? 

MARIA: Yes, I had made several trips back to Ukraine. And I would normally go to Kyiv, and then also to Kherson, where my grandparents were. I mean, I just have one grandparent left and he’s still in Kherson. 

ANDREW: So, your grandfather’s still alive? 

MARIA: Yes, he’s still alive. He has stayed there. And unfortunately, his building got hit by a drone not so long ago. And it burned down a few of the apartments, a few of the suites. But his suite is still untouched. 

ANDREW: Hm. Okay. 

MARIA: Well, I believe the windows got blown out a little while before that. But yeah, so it’s a truly terrible situation in Kherson, but there are people who have stayed. 

ANDREW: And so, going back to this 2023 trip, and of course, you’re traveling there in the shock of a year of full-scale invasion by that point. What are you noticing? 

MARIA: Watching the work from abroad and through media, it really looked like every square inch of the country was on fire and that, of course, made the trip preparations really terrifying. But once you’re there, I mean, to be clear, I was never on the front lines, so I was in the cities. You know, there was no safe place in Ukraine, but I was in cities where life in some measure did continue. And that was the surprising thing for me, is that I don’t know what I was expecting exactly, but it’s not like, people were trying, those who stayed were trying to live their lives as best they could. People were still going to theater performances, the opera was still on. I mean, of course, there would be these announcements before the shows saying, if there’s an air raid siren, here’s what the protocol is. So, I mean, of course… 

ANDREW: A little bit different, yeah. 

MARIA: Yeah, it’s not business as usual, of course, but people were going to beauty salons, right? So, people do cling to certain rituals that seem really mundane to us, and almost frivolous, but that is a key part, I think, of that experience. You cling to the things that make you feel a little bit more normal. 

ANDREW: I always think of Ukrainian humor kind of being a part of that sort of resistance, or that sort of keeping parts of you intact against a threat. You’re very funny. You have a very, you’re very skilled at juxtapositions and there’s a playfulness. You cited it earlier, even your interventions in Endling. It came from a place of mischief and wanting to surprise us, and play jokes on us, even. And I’m wondering about that relationship to humor. Did you grow up in a funny family? 

MARIA: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, my family. I think that’s just the humor that is steeped. We’re all steeped in it in my family. But in the broader sense, there is that kind of eastern European sensibility, of taking a really difficult circumstance, because of course, it’s a very difficult history, and trying to find some humor in it, to take a breath every once in a while. 

Because if you’re sitting there crying the entire time, you’ll just wither away, so you do need to take a breath sometimes. Yeah. And I feel like that’s the role of humor. It’s this survival, coping mechanism. It’s a breath. Yeah. 

ANDREW: There’s this section in Endling, where you write this, I don’t know if it was a real letter to Elron McKinley of the Northwest Beacon. It’s a letter where you explain how humor works in wartime, and you’re getting all this kind of pushback against exploring that. And you write, “If we don’t laugh, we will drown.” And have you met that in your career as a writer? ‘Why are you making a joke out of this, Maria? Like, this is really serious…’

MARIA: I mean, yes, that… I mean, that correspondence in my book that you’re referring to between myself and an editor for a media outlet, it is fictionalized, things I wish I would have written back to him or to them. But it is based on a real thing where I was commissioned to write a piece about the experience of being a diaspora member at the onset of the full-scale invasion. And I chose to write about wartime humor because I was, I mean I, too, was surprised honestly by all the wartime humor coming out. Because there were so many memes flying out of Ukraine about the war and our family friends even, as they were sheltering in basements, they were still cracking these dark, dark, dry jokes. And I, so I wanted to write about that… 

ANDREW: Yeah. 

MARIA: …and the editors thought, ‘Oh it’s too soon. You can’t write about that. It’s going to offend the sensibilities of our readers here in North America.’ And I was very polite…

ANDREW: Which you should be worried about of course, right? 

MARIA: Yeah, of course, right. So, I was very polite in my responses to them, but I kept thinking about all the things I wish I had said. But it did spur me to, I’m actually really glad for the experience because it emboldened me to keep using humor in my book as I kept writing it. 

ANDREW: Yeah, humor’s defiance and again fantasy. You know you got to, I mean it’s maybe a bit harsh to say, so you got to stick it to that editor. But ultimately, you won. 

Can I ask you about – this is a concept that comes up in the book – but, what it is to be useful as an artist in wartime? And maybe I’m looking for some wisdom here, maybe I’m looking for some advice, maybe I’m looking for how you’ve navigated that question and maybe how it falls away, the answer, and then you find a new answer. But how do you stay useful or how do you contend with staying useful? 

MARIA: Well, that’s a great question. I think that’s one I’m still trying to answer for myself. I definitely felt a lot of guilt at the onset of the invasion, thinking that I wasn’t doing enough. I mean I was going to rallies, I was writing, you know, nonfiction pieces about my family to try to kind of, you know, put real people behind the headlines. And none of it felt like it was enough. It felt like other people in the community were always doing more, they were doing, you know, more concrete things, like things that felt to me much more concrete, like sending humanitarian aid, like organizing care packages, etcetera, organizing funding for weapons, deliveries, etcetera. And like drones, for example. And then I, yeah, it was this feeling that okay, to do the thing that I do best, I kind of need to retreat. So, to write a book, if that’s slow – that is a slow, slow process, right – and I was going to say, is it a slow help? I don’t even purport to say it’s a help. I don’t know, but it’s just, I knew I had to keep writing about it and that does feel like a form of retreat. And to see any result from it is, you know, a years-long process, years, that takes years. And you don’t even know if there will be any benefit to it, as I didn’t want to, I didn’t want to have kind of grandiose notions that it would be of benefit. So, there was a lot of guilt, and a lot of questioning about what is the usefulness, should an artist be useful, etcetera. Are they? Yeah. But what has been interesting for me to see is the reactions from readers, and those who have affiliation with Ukraine and those who do not, and the kinds of things that have resonated with them as well. And again, if I can, I suppose, if some outcome of this is that I can put, you know, real people behind the kind of faceless headlines that we see in the media, then I will have done something. 

ANDREW: I’m moved by this concept of slow help. or even the ways in which people talk about the soft power of culture, I mean, I feel like you’re doing an extraordinary thing on the cultural front of this war. And if nothing else, and this would be like a grand achievement, if it was the only thing, and there’s so much more than this about this book. But for non-Ukrainians, we sometimes need to find the sort of Trojan horse or this way to sneak in some more airtime and attention around Ukraine. So many people are fatigued by the headlines, so many people – actually, I love what you said about the future is sort of, it’s unwritten, right. And you’re speaking to ecologists who are seeing the worst of our climate catastrophe and they’re still saying we can do something. We can do something. But I find there are a lot of non-Ukrainians that, they have to turn away. They feel like they’ve taken in too much or they feel too helpless and your book is this Trojan horse because through, like the pleasures of it, the absurdities of it, the game of it, you manage to make us feel into Ukraine and Ukrainians, and so I really want to thank you for that. I hope you can do more of that. I’m curious about whether this is the stuff of your life’s work or whether you, as an artist, need a breather and need to work on different kind of stuff. What is your writing practice right now? 

MARIA: Yes, the funny thing is with the book doing quite well, I haven’t actually had time to do any new writing. 

ANDREW: You’re doing podcasts!

MARIA: Which I’m very happy to do. I actually quite like the public part of being an author. I know a lot of others don’t and that’s totally understandable because we tend to be creatures who sit alone in rooms for long periods of time. But I, actually, I find it ultimately very isolating and I do like to engage with humans, and so, I am enjoying it. But I’m, of course, I am missing the actual desk time and I hope to get back to that soon. 

ANDREW: Can I get nerdy about one section in the book? 

MARIA: Sure! 

ANDREW: It’s towards the end. I don’t give anything away by sharing this, but it just really leapt out at me. 

“Culture is the thinnest layer of moss on the body of human existence. It was shaved off with a bulldozer, now there’s an enormous wound.” And this is invoking Kherson Visual Artist Constantine Tereshchenko. And I want to just ask you, why did you presence that quote in the book? 

MARIA: Because… culture is one of the first things that is targeted in this kind of aggression. Which is what makes it so important. And at the same time, it’s fragile. Because if you bomb one art gallery, if you bomb an archive center, if you bomb a building of importance, it’s gone forever. So, there’s a certain fragility to culture, but at the same time, there is this… I mean, it’s never going to be wiped out fully. The culture is also carried by people. And so long as the people are around, they will continue making culture. 

ANDREW: I was struck by… because I don’t know much about moss, but again, because you got me interested in snails, I was, like, ‘What about moss?’ And it’s incredibly important. You know, it’s these things that we take for granted. And I guess what I’m hearing in your book, and I’m hearing in, again, the metaphors you draw on is that things can come back, things can be renewed. The story is unfinished. We can interrupt the story in ways that may surprise us and delight us, and create new possibilities and new opportunities. I feel like Endling, and your style of writing, feels like a real invitation to imagine. You know, imagine better, imagine wholeness, again. And maybe my earliest point, less aloneness, which is, you know, a great gift, especially in these times. 

MARIA: That’s beautiful. Thank you. 

ANDREW: Thank you, Maria. This has been brilliant. I’m so grateful. 

MARIA: Oh, it’s such a pleasure. Thank you so much for this conversation. 

[MUSIC]

MARIA REVA’S CULTURAL RECOMMENDATION

ANDREW: I asked one final question of Maria after the interview. It has become something of a ritual, something I’ll be asking each guest in this series. I want to know what Ukrainian Canadian artists are into. And by extension, what we can all seek out and get to know better, as we support Ukraine on the cultural front. Here’s what Maria Reva had to say.

MARIA: Well, I would say, so a story that I’ve read recently that just rings so true even now, it was written in the 1800s, but it’s by Olha Kobylianska and it’s called Valse mélancolique. And it’s about these three women who are trying to make their way in the world as artists. And they’re working against rising rents. Right? And they’re trying to live together and make it work, and be their own people. And it’s just, it’s this incredible modern story. The author, there are interpretations that she might have been queer. And just the way, if you look at it through that lens, you could definitely see some signs of that in the story, just the way the author describes women. 

ANDREW: That’s Maria Reva’s cultural recommendation – Valse mélancolique written by Olha Kobylianska. 

[MUSIC]

CREDITS

Kultura Rising is written and hosted by yours truly Andrew Kushnir.
Alison Broverman is our senior producer.
Pippa Johnstone is our executive producer.
Mixing and sound design by Mark Angly.
Original music by Daughters of Donbas (feat. Marichka).
Podcast graphics by Nicholas Luchak.

This has been an original podcast from The Shevchenko Foundation, Canada’s premier, national, charitable foundation for Ukrainian Canadian arts, heritage and culture since 1963. Here’s a little bit more about it.

BORIS BALAN: Hi, my name is Boris Balan. I am currently the president of The Taras Shevchenko Foundation, having served on the Board since about 2008 in various capacities. I think The Shevchenko Foundation is, without doubt, the most important institution that we have in Canada to support our community life here, to support cultural endeavours, and to really help preserve our presence here in Canada, share it with others, and develop our culture and our identity here. 

[MUSIC]

ANDREW: I hope you’ll join us next time and that you’ll keep showing up on the cultural front. 

Slava Ukraini!