23 minute read
Alumni Profiles
BRENDAN QUINN
Bachelor of Arts (Hons)’03 Creative Director
I learned so much from the tutors and professors at King’s... I do think that the foundation was laid in terms of being able create something.
BRENDAN QUINN can’t wait until his new recording studio is ready so he can have his picture taken at the console. A creative director at Vapor Music, one of Toronto’s largest post-production audio facilities, he says the new office and recording studio is not only state of the art, he’s going to have instruments at hand, including his grandfather’s banjo.
As one of the key players on the team that works on animated children’s series, the hours are long and the timelines tight. He says the pandemic didn’t help, adding, “I’ve never experienced that level of intensity.”
What he loves about long-form composition for animation, as compared to composing music for commercials, is that the dialogue and the soundtrack come first. He says they usually drive the visuals. He likes this new configuration of being involved in the earlier stages of a project.
Responsible for entire shows, like the award-winning Netflix kids’ series, Hilda, Quinn isn’t always composing, but he’s still very much a part of the creative process.
Quinn says that music is part of his genetic structure. By way of explanation, he shares the story of how his grandparents met in England, during the Second World War. His grandmother was a nurse and nurses weren’t allowed to socialize with doctors, but she would go to the piano in the hospital and play Für Elise for everyone to hear. Beethoven’s famous piece was the cue for a doctor, the man who became Quinn’s grandfather, to meet her in secret.
Quinn’s musical interests started early. In grade 4, he wasn’t putting much effort into his piano lessons and his mother and piano teacher threatened to call it quits. He says they conspired, knowing how he’d react. “I just had this moment where I realized music was obviously very important to me.” From then on, he became much more respectful of his teacher’s time and effort.
After years of Royal Conservatory piano, Quinn started a band in high school with his best friend Jon Ophek, BA(Hons)’03. Several years later, Ophek joined Quinn at King’s and along with Guy Godfree and Dom Hanlon, ’03, they became a band called PDQ.
The band takes its name from his father’s initials, which became the friends’ vernacular for someone who was getting too intense. There’s no malice intended; Quinn says— this is an endearing quality of his father’s.
“The first gig we got was to play the Wardroom and it was, basically, ‘just make your friends come out and drink beer and suffer,’” Quinn says with a self-effacing grin. Looking back, he says the Wardroom was ‘magical.’ It’s where they learned to set up equipment, get over stage fright and where they started to perform their own music. It’s also where Quinn held the prized position of happy hour bartender.
Wardroom gigs became more frequent, thanks in part to Daniel Shearer, BA’03, who took on the role of unofficial promoter—and PDQ built a following. Eventually, their feel-good, soft rock sound was being sought out by other venues in Halifax, like the Marquee.
When graduation came, PDQ decided to go on the road for a year. “That was an amazing trip,” Quinn says, but adds, “It was just very exhausting. By the end of all of it, we were kind of ragged—not making enough money.” Their last gig was in a tree planting camp in Northern Ontario. The beds, along
with 21 hours of driving to reach the camp, he chuckles, broke their lead singer and guitarist.
After the friendly break-up, Quinn spent a year and a half in Australia taking an audio engineering course. Citizenship complications brought him back to Canada where he launched his career in the post-production sound world. He spent time working for companies like Pirate (now a competitor) and briefly ran his own business.
Quinn’s been with Vapor through almost a decade of big changes, including the acquisition of another company. Even though his current position as creative director means less time composing and more time on business and managing projects, he still loves to problem solve in the studio. Problems like the one he encountered in ‘Donutty Day,’ an episode in a series called Mighty Express. Another Netflix kids’ show, it was constructed with pictures before sound. Because Quinn couldn’t match what he saw—he’d have needed the real sound of construction pipes falling down a mountain—he used tubular bells and the episode became a musical. In the end, he says, the story was more dramatic.
Another bonus of working in the longform composition world is that his kids are in the same age range as the target audience The day he heard his kids singing something he’d been working on, word for word, it all made sense. Reflecting on the path that brought him here, Quinn says he’s grateful for the opportunities that led him to this profession.
LEFT: Brendan Quinn in his home studio RIGHT TOP: L-R: Brendan Quinn, Dom Hanlon, Jon Ophek RIGHT BOTTOM: L-R: Brendan Quinn, Dom Hanlon, Jon Ophek
OLIVIA LARKIN
Bachelor of Arts (Hons)’13 Senior Policy and Programme Manager, City of London Corporation
So many of my generation really do care about social justice and want to find ways they can do something about it.
“BEING A YOUNG PERSON TODAY is hard,” Olivia Larkin says. “The job market is hard. The world is chaotic. It’s hard to know what you want to do. But if you can just try a few things, that helps you figure it out.”
That’s how Larkin made decisions. She says she travelled, introduced herself to different people and was open to all experiences. “But,” she says emphatically, her good fortune has allowed her to do it this way, not everyone can make those choices.
These days, Larkin is senior policy and program manager for the City of London Corporation. Her job—to help bring diversity to the senior levels of financial and professional services in a city where class can still play a prominent role. It is about equality and social justice she adds.
Larkin was always interested in social issues but didn’t know what she wanted professionally when she came to King’s. She chose the Foundation Year Program (FYP) because of the expansive approach to what she describes as a “gap” in her knowledge.
“I like to question things. I like to understand why people do things, why things are the way they are. I think [FYP] gave great insight, at a hundred miles per hour,” adding it was “everything I wanted and more.”
Even though more education was beckoning, after FYP she decided to travel. That’s when she became very fond of India and has returned three times since. Every aspect of life in India is completely different from Canada. She says, “it can completely throw people off, but I found it thrilling.”
After India, she came back to Halifax to study international development at King’s and Dalhousie. “FYP teaches you to understand how others have thought about the world. International Development Studies teaches you what’s going on in the world, how countries work together from both a cultural and economic perspective.” The combination of the two, she adds, set her up for her next challenge.
“I realized there are so many options and so many jobs. I wasn’t sure which one I wanted. So, I talked with as many interesting people as I could. I met one man who had started a corporate social responsibility consulting company. I was totally fascinated.”
The man was Paul Klein, the company, Impakt. Klein asked Larkin to help on a project. She did, and it led to more. Impakt helps clients define and refine their corporate social responsibility programs.
Larkin uses their work with the Home Depot, addressing youth homelessness in Canada, as an example of how companies are managing corporate social responsibility. She says she started in this field “… right around the time when [corporations] started to think maybe there’s more we can do than just hand out cheques.”
One of her projects at Impakt was conducting extensive research for Green Shield Canada. Green Shield wanted to address the fact that one in three Canadians does not have access to affordable dental care. Larkin’s research kick-started Green Shield’s Green Door Project, which addresses the deficiencies in our system from capacity building through to public policy.
Larkin can’t say enough good things about Impakt and Klein. When she got a fivemonth internship with the Clinton Foundation in New York, Klein said to go and then come back to Impakt. When she wanted to travel for six weeks, he said—sure. When she decided to move to Berlin, they figured out how she could work remotely, even before the pandemic made that standard.
After five years Larkin left Impakt, moved to London, and was hired as chief of staff for Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the World Wide Web. Larkin’s position was to support his goal of ensuring the web is a safe and empowering place for everyone. Every day was a balancing act, working on strategic projects, speech writing, acting as Berners-Lee’s representative at meetings, balancing his many roles, and whatever else the day gave—Larkin loved it.
“I had six months of travelling with him for speaking engagements and meetings, Boston, London, Milan—and then the pandemic hit, and I shifted to my dining room table for the next two years. Luckily many of the organizations Berners-Lee worked with, worked remotely already, so it was an easy pivot.”
Today she divides her time between her dining room table and an office housing the City of London Corporation. And she’s not “leaving anytime soon.”
What she loves is that London is made of many villages, and she can’t get over the 40-minute route she cycles a couple of days a week past Buckingham Palace, through Westminster and by Big Ben into her office in the financial district. She says she doesn’t know how it could get any better than this. Pausing just a moment, she adds, “But then, you know, the sky opens up and it’s pouring rain and you’re sliding around and there aren't really enough streetlights on. You’re like, ‘Actually, it could get a bit better.’”
“I like to think of myself as a pretty passionate person,” she says. “The through line throughout my career is my passion for social justice and the need to do things better.” Larkin is grateful for the people she’s met, the teams she worked with, and the time spent with FYP tutors, who she says prepped her for this work.
Working with many like-minded people—at Impakt, the Clinton Foundation, with Berners-Lee—has given her real hope for the future.
“So many of my generation really do care about social justice and where they can do something about it. As we become the ones in charge, I think you’ll see changes.”
MOIRA DONOVAN
Bachelor of Arts (Hons), 2015 Law Student, Schulich School of Law
I always approach ideas by looking at their historical context: Where does our current treatment of a species, or way of thinking about a problem, come from?
WHEN MOIRA DONOVAN was a teenager, her sister told her she’d make a great journalist. Her casual reply was always “sure, that might work.”
Might work indeed. Today Donovan is a highly respected independent journalist specializing in the environment. Her written work has been published in The Walrus, The Christian Science Monitor, and The National Observer and her documentary work has been featured on CBC’s Ideas, Quirks & Quarks and Atlantic Voice. Topics range from the history of rats, to the threat of sea-level rise, to concerns about liquid natural gas projects.
Her interest in the environment started young. “I grew up spending a lot of time outside with my siblings and family,” says Donovan. “And I volunteered at a group for the protection of animals. Like a lot of children, I cared deeply for animals.”
That caring has grown into a passion. “It’s become clear to me that the greatest challenges we have these days are directly related to our treatment of the environment.” As a journalist, she says her role is “to say that we need to do things differently.”
Donovan looks for the historic and philosophical starting points of issues. She also tries to incorporate more traditional ecological knowledge that comes from Indigenous communities.
“There’s an influential concept that comes from the Mi’kmaq called two-eyed seeing (etuaptmumk). It’s driving a lot of change. It’s been missing from the way western science approaches the natural world.”
She credits King’s as the starting point for developing her approach.
“I did not go to King’s for journalism,” says Donovan. “I went not knowing what I wanted to do.”
What she did know was that she wanted to study something that was completely new to her, in a completely new way. “I hadn’t studied much philosophy,” she continues, “and didn’t know what I was getting into. Right from the start I knew I made the right choice.”
She describes the Foundation Year Program (FYP) as “unrivalled” in terms of a positive and expansive university experience. “I still remember the pleasure of sitting around every day talking about ideas … That was a stark shift for me—school went from something you study because you have to, to something that changed the way you look at the world.”
She admits that open-endedness can be a challenge for people who may be goal-oriented. “Young people are coming into a world with a lot of uncertainty and have anxiety about that. For some, a way of managing is to take a program that is a clear route to a professional career. But I think people are well served by having a grounding in the knowledge systems and conceptual frameworks that structure the world we live in … it may be a cliché to say it, but employers want those qualities. They want people who can look at the big picture … and translate that so other people understand.”
That grounding certainly served Donovan well. After graduating from King’s with First Class Honours and the University Medal in Early Modern Studies, she went on to study at the London School of Economics, earning her master’s degree in philosophy and public policy (2013). From there, she built a career in journalism that allows her to continue developing her expertise and explore topics that have been misunderstood or under-covered.
Donovan’s exceptional approach to her work has earned her awards, accolades, and a prestigious list of publications. But she says her career highlight is much more intangible: trust.
“I (recently) produced a documentary in collaboration with Tracy Marshall, a science student from Potlotek First Nation, about two-eyed seeing. It was really rewarding because we were substantiating the concept of the work, in the work. As much as I am dedicated to serving the public interest in my work, it’s also important to cultivate a relationship of trust and integrity and working with Tracy, it felt like we achieved that … I’ve had big moments, but those little moments give me the sense of being on the right track.”
ANGUS ROSS
Bachelor of Science (Hons)‘07 Co-founder, Escarpment Laboratories
We had this big, fancy molecular biology lab at our disposal. Of course, we were going to use it.
UNIVERSITY STUDENTS ENJOY BEER but not everyone parlays that interest into a career. For Angus Ross it led to the creation of Escarpment Laboratories, a unique Canadian company that supplies liquid yeast to breweries.
Ross graduated from King’s with a combined honours in biochemistry and the History of Science and Technology (HOST). He pursued graduate studies in molecular cell biology at the University of Guelph, where, in 2013, the idea for Escarpment started to grow.
Ross and a Guelph classmate, Richard Preiss, had taken up homebrewing as a hobby and were using the university’s lab to save and reuse yeast from batch to batch. “We got to thinking,” says Ross, “where are Canadian brewers getting their yeast?” Breweries that prided themselves on producing a local beer were using local hops, local water, and local malt—but had to bring in yeast from as far away as California.
Yeast plays a vital role in beer making. It eats up the sugar and turns it into alcohol. It also produces carbonation and has an influence on the aroma and taste of the product. Just as the landscape and climate creates a local terroir for wine, all the ingredients in beer—including the yeast—create one too.
Local brewing had turned into a booming market. “Every small town in Canada was getting a new brewery every year,” says Ross. “Throw a stone in any small town and you’ll either hit a brewery, or one in the planning. This was an opportunity to use our yeast expertise in a productive way.”
Today, located in one of Guelph’s industrial parks, Escarpment Laboratories is an important supplier to the Canadian brewing industry with over 30 employees. The company has banked over 400 strains of yeast that produce everything from fruity, hazy IPAs, to big, imperial stouts.
“We not only supply this key ingredient,” says Ross, “we act as a knowledge base, as a source of research. We put a lot of effort into developing new products and contributing to the research that helps breweries make the best beer possible.”
And it doesn’t stop at beer. “Everyone who works at Escarpment is a bit of a foodie,” says Ross, “and most of us make our own sourdough bread. So it made sense to release a sourdough product.”
They also have a kombucha ‘SCOBY’ (an acronym that stands for ‘symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast’) and are exploring the world of non-alcoholic beers, a category that has been growing in popularity post-pandemic. While some stats showed Canadians’ alcohol consumption rose during Covid-19, that shifted in 2021. “We saw a drop in home consumption that wasn’t compensated by an increase in bar consumption,” says Ross. “The market trend is toward non-alcoholic products. I think every brewer wants to have at least one non-alcoholic product on their tap list now.”
Looking back on his time as a student, he credits the Foundation Year Program (FYP) and HOST programs for helping him understand “where we came from and how we’ve come to know what we know,” as well as “how science is an ever-changing body of knowledge.”
Of FYP in particular, he adds, “a lot of scientists go through undergrad never having to write a humanities essay. FYP helped me with that. Learning how to deal with deadlines, and that kind of critical analysis sets someone up to be able to thrive in whatever industry they go into.”
So what’s his favourite beer? Just like science, that answer has evolved. “I started out liking the big, bold beers. In-your-face hops. As much alcohol as possible. Flavour explosions. But today I’ve mellowed out and have come to appreciate the more subtle things. I like something very traditional; I would go for the freshest, crispest lager I can find that’s been made as close to where I am as possible.” And that’s what Escarpment’s efforts are all about.
SARAH FULFORD
Bachelor of Arts (Hons)'96
One of the things I found at King’s was a sense of belonging and that’s a really powerful thing in a person's life.
SARAH FULFORD LIKES TO really figure things out.
It’s part of why she’s recently been asked to manage Maclean’s, one of Canada’s most widely circulated news magazines. It also explains her decision to attend the University of King’s College.
King’s caught Fulford’s attention when she read Linda Frum’s Guide to Canadian Universities, which made campus life sound “cinematic, literary, high minded.” Then, Fulford says, a cool older friend from high school came to King’s, “And I wanted to follow in her footsteps.” She then read the King’s viewbook and “The [Foundation Year Program] sounded fantastic, exciting and ambitious.” She says that’s how she knew “King's was a place where people had real ambitions for their lives and took themselves and their futures quite seriously.”
It's similar to how Fulford feels being the new editor-in-chief of Maclean’s. Over the past 100 years, Maclean’s, she believes, has helped Canadians to understand who they are and where they fit globally. She adds, “Playing a role in the country’s self-understanding, in the biggest conversations of the nation, that’s exciting to me.”
For 14 years, Fulford’s been at Toronto Life, helping to bring the publication into the digital age. At times, it required experimentation. “There was no roadmap for publishing digitally and none of us had experience. We just tried stuff and measured our efforts and eventually we learned the rules of digital storytelling,” she explains. At first, the perfectionist in her was cautious, but in time she found it a “marvellously creative space” to work.
The digital age helped Fulford to answer questions with metrics. She says, “One of the happy surprises of my career is discovering your best work often resonates.”
The internet, she says, has helped do away with an old-style, cold and clinical journalism, adding readers want stories that are intimate and emotional. “You can do really important journalism that changes policy and reframes the conversation and delves into hugely pressing issues, as long as it's told really well, has a very good story and is compelling.”
Fulford credits King’s with showing her the rudimentary elements of good writing. “I believe strongly that having to write an essay every two weeks in the Foundation Year Program taught me how to read, write and think. Full-stop.”
And King’s made an impact in other ways.
Fulford observed the seriousness with which some of the students, students who she says were colloquially known as the ‘God Squad,’ responded to the Chapel. A secular Jew from a large multicultural city, Fulford was inspired by “their intensity and inquisitiveness about tradition.” Further, studying ancient civilizations alerted her to her deficit of knowledge about the Jewish tradition. She says it propelled her to a Yeshiva in Jerusalem where for one year, she says, “I had a very intense encounter with ancient Jewish texts in order to fill the gap that I hadn’t even recognized was there until I went to King’s.”
There’s one more thing she found at King’s.
Not long after a fellow student gave the play she directed a negative review in The Watch, she encountered him at a cocktail party. She was at the party to play the cello and yet found herself in conversation with her critic. His disposition toward her changed. Her critic was Stephen Marche, BA(Hons)’97, who has gone on to become a recognized Canadian novelist, essayist, and cultural commentator. Fulford and Marche have been married for 20 years now.
SHERYL GRANT
Bachelor of Journalism (Hons)’80 Journalist
The thing that really attracted me to the digital side was data, the audience data. Being able to know what people were reading. That is the thing people sometimes don’t want to know. You have to accept that you’re writing for an audience one way or the other.
SHERYL GRANT doesn’t always follow others’ advice—and that’s worked out well for her.
After completing a BA in English, Grant had a summer job working the front desk of the police station in Dartmouth; she took accident reports and checked in parolees. Before long “I just decided, I couldn’t do that job.” But Grant needed to work, and her next idea was to study journalism at King’s.
“My parents thought it was a really terrible idea,” she says. Grant was brought up in Halifax’s North End, the daughter of a mechanic and a schoolteacher. Her parents were regular consumers of newspapers and TV reporting and when she told them her plan, they responded “who do you see, who looks like you in journalism? This is not going to work.” But Grant knew she was a good writer. She persisted and with their eventual support, applied and was accepted. Two years later, Grant was proudly among the first cohort of King’s School of Journalism graduates.
After a short stint at a community paper, she was offered a job at the Chronicle Herald, one of Halifax’s two daily newspapers. It was “a different time,” she remembers. “A lot of the people who worked there, they had parents who were lawyers and I felt like a bit of a fish out of water.” As with all new reporters, she was moved to evenings and obituaries. Grant says nights were, “A really good training ground. You had to be fast and get it done.”
“When I first arrived, my plan was to stay for two years. In the nineties, I decided I needed to do something different. I started to look for jobs in the US and then my mom got sick and I really didn’t want it to be that far away. I just decided that local news was really what I wanted to do and I would find a way to make it work for me.”
In 2000, Grant was assistant managing editor, when she heard about a New Media Fellowship being offered by the Poynter Institute in Florida. The non-profit research institute chose her to spend a year studying digital journalism. When she returned to the Herald, she knew exactly where she wanted to be—in the basement with the web developers. “People didn't really see why I was doing that,” she says. “I left the newsroom position and people really thought that I was crazy … Why would you want to work with the computer geeks?”
Grant became a “translator,” working between the newsroom and the web developers to build a website, a web presence and help the two groups understand one another. “It’s a role I think is or should be obsolete at this point,” but in that role she says she found a place she really belonged.
The significance of finding a place where she belonged was something she discovered at King’s. She says the university “cultivated” it. A small and intimate place where you build strong relationships, she says, is powerful. It’s why she’s served on the Alumni Association Executive and the Board of Governors. “I don’t think that I would have my career without Kings,” she says, adding, “it’s a testament to their ability to take somebody like me from a completely different background and say, well, you know, we think you belong here too.”
After more than 40 years in the newspaper business, Grant is now retired. And while she’s planning to take more time for herself, largely to paint and garden, she’s already begun work on a film about her mother.
