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Rockburn Presents

with Ken Rockburn
Sunday 8pm ET / 5pm PT

Award-winning host Ken Rockburn returns to CPAC this summer with a series of interviews with people of influence from the worlds of politics, arts and culture. Tune in on Sunday nights as Ken meets with trailblazing personalities behind a number of public policy and cultural issues. And check this site for Ken's own unique, irreverent take on each interview.

Coming Up

Friday, September 10 at 11 AM ET / 8 AM PT

Joel Cohen
Joel Cohen is an Emmy Award winning writer for "The Simpsons", the longest running American comedy in television history. Armed with a BSc from the University of Alberta and an MBA from York, Cohen found some work, in Toronto, as a writer but not enough to make a living. Cohen did what so many before him have done and moved to Los Angeles. The Calgary native's first job in Hollywood was anything but glamorous, selling advertising for CNN in Latin America. His first break came when comedian Kathy Griffin hired him to write for the comedy series "Suddenly Susan". Joel used that as a launching pad to the become a writer for The Simpsons, where he has spent the last ten years as a writer and now co-executive producer. When not writing about antics of Springfield's most famous family, Cohen works as a motivational speaker for corporations and business groups. Ken Rockburn spoke to Joel Cohen in Ottawa.

Saturday, September 11 at 12 AM ET / Friday, September 10 at 9 PM PT

St. Catharines native Edward Burtynsky has developed an international following for his photographs of industrial landscapes. Environmentalists have lauded his work as illustrations of the brutality of human enterprise on the planet. Ed Burtynsky grew up in St. Catharines, Ontario where his father, who worked at the local GM plant, taught him how to take pictures and develop film. Burtynsky graduated with a BA in Photography from Ryerson and became a landscape photographer after he stumbled upon on an old coal mine in Pennsylvania and was struck by the beauty of white birch saplings growing on a landscape of barren rock and slag. From photographing mines, Burtynsky then began photographing oil fields and other industrial sites, travelling around the world, from China to Bangladesh to Australia. His photographs of industrial landscapes are included in the collections of over fifty major museums around the world, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Bibliotèque Nationale in Paris and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Most recently, his photographs of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico appeared on the front page of the Globe and Mail. Ken Rockburn spoke to Edward Burtynsky at his studio in Toronto.

Sunday, September 12 at 8 PM ET / 5 PM PT

Tomson Highway
Tomson Highway was born in a snowbank near Maria Lake, Manitoba, close to the border with Nunavut. Tomson was the 11th of 12 children who grew up in a home without TV or radio and instead relied on the great oral traditions of storytelling for entertainment. His father, Joe Highway was a champion dogsled racer and caribou hunter of some note. His mother, Pelagie Highway was a legendary quilt maker. Tomson went to a residential school when he was six and there he learnt how to speak English and French and play the piano. Tomson played the piano so well in fact, that he travelled to London, England to pursue his dream of becoming a concert pianist. When that failed to transpire, Tomson, after earning a BA in music from the University of Western Ontario, worked as a social worker for seven years until he began getting critical acclaim for his writing. His first two plays "The Rez Sisters" and "Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing" made Tomson Highway a household name throughout Canada. His novel "Kiss of the Fur Queen" was a national bestseller. Tomson's most recent work "Kisageetin: A Cabaret" was performed in Toronto in June. Ken Rockburn spoke to Tomson Highway on the stage of the Berkeley Theatre in Toronto.

Ken’s Personal Interview Anecdotes

We were to interview playwright and novelist Tomson Highway just 24 hours before the start of the G20 in downtown Toronto. The security fences were up and the streets were empty. We had arranged to do the interview on stage at the Canadian Stage, where Tomson was performing a cabaret with a singer and sax player.

The interview was due to start at 3 pm. At 3:10 we called the publicist to find out where he was. She didn't know. Apparently she wasn't bringing him to the theatre. At 3:15 we called the other publicist (yes, that's right, it takes two sometimes, believe it or not) and she didn't know where he was either but wanted to know why we were blaming publicist #1 (?). Go figure.

We were just about ready to pull up stakes and go home when Tomson climbed out of a cab, came in apologizing for his lateness and (this is something you always want to hear from a guest you're about to interview) asking what the interview was for, that he'd never heard of CPAC and that he was tired from doing interviews about the cabaret all week long. Yes, I thought, this is going to be really good.

Well, it turns out it was really good. He is a very thoughtful and intelligent man with plenty to say about the theatre and music.

But there was one bit of weirdness right off the top of the interview that I'm still trying to figure out.

Tomson and his brother, Rene - who died of AIDS in the 1990s - were taken away from their family home when Tomson was six and placed in a Roman Catholic residential school in The Pas. By all accounts the brothers were abused there and it affected the rest of their lives. In 1998 Tomson wrote The Kiss of the Fur Queen, described as a semi-autobiographical novel about two brothers and their experiences of abuse in a residential school. In an interview in the literary journal Quill and Quire, Tomson said: "I didn't have a choice, I had to write this book. It came screaming out because this story needed desperately to be told. Writing it hit me hard in terms of my health. So I went to a medicine man, who helped me defeat the monster. We lanced the boil and cured the illness." In another article, by journalist Judy Steed, Tomson's partner is quoted as saying Tomson is so anti-Catholic he's almost anti-morality.

So it came as some surprise to me when I began the interview by asking him about how his early years, the good and the bad, informed his later life and he responded immediately and quite strongly by saying people had it all wrong, that his experience at residential school was a wonderful one and that's where he was first introduced to the piano.

He said it with such force and conviction that I dared not press him on all the evidence to the contrary for fear of ending the interview right then and there. Later, when I spoke to a long-time acquaintance of his and related this rather odd situation, she expressed shock and amazement. "He wrote a whole book about it!" she said.

So I can offer no explanation for this, other than to just point it out. The interview, though, is pretty damn fascinating.

Host

Host - Ken Rockburn

Ken Rockburn returns to TV as host of Rockburn Presents, a series of interviews with people of influence from the worlds of politics, arts and culture. Since 2009, Ken has authored The Rockburn Files, an online blog at CPAC.ca about contemporary fiction and non-fiction literature. Ken previously hosted Talk Politics on CPAC from 2001 through 2008.

A veteran journalist and broadcaster widely recognized for his irreverent and entertaining interview and presentation style, Ken is an award-winning journalist with almost 40 years of experience on radio and television. Prior to joining CPAC, Ken was host of All In A Day on CBC Radio One in Ottawa, a program that held the number one position in the marketplace throughout his five-year tenure. He also previously hosted Rockburn and Company on CBC Television Ottawa, and was news director at CHEZ-FM in Ottawa, where he became one of only two broadcasters from private radio ever to have been awarded three National Radio Awards.

Ken is the author of Rockburn: The CPAC Interviews (Penumbra, 2007) and Medium Rare – Jamming With Culture (Stoddart, 1994). He has taught journalism at his alma mater, Carleton University, and continues to live in Ottawa with his wife and two children.

Please note that regularly scheduled programming may be pre-empted due to live CPAC programming. Please check listings for rebroadcast dates and times.

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