Eleanor Wachtel in Conversation with Winterset Award Non-Fiction Winners Lisa Moore and Jack Whalen

Eleanor Wachtel loves books and their authors and has managed to gagner her vie by sharing that passion.  Five books of her interviews have been published, including Random Illuminations, a collection of reflections, correspondence, and conversations with Carol Shields; Original Minds; and for the show’s twenty-fifth anniversary, The Best of Writers & Company.  Last year she chaired the jury of the International Booker Prize.

Jack Whalen is the son, brother, husband, and father whose story became this book. He divides his time between family homes in Oshawa, Ontario, and St.John’s, Newfoundland. Recently, he can sometimes be found crossing the country in a truck carrying a replica of the cell in which he was once imprisoned, seeking justice for those who endured solitary confinement as children.

Lisa Moore is a writer of the short story collections Degrees of Nakedness, Open, and Something for Everyone. She has written the novels Alligator, February, Caught, This Is How We Love and the young adult novel Flannery.  She is the co-author with Jack Whalen of the creative non-fiction book Invisible Prisons. Her novels and story collections have each been translated into at least one, or most of these languages: German, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Greek, and Turkish. And she is the co-librettist, with Laura Kaminsky, of the opera February adapted from her novel by the same name, and has recently written five opera arias for a film adaptation based on the true story of Marguerite de la Roque. She has selected, edited and introduced five anthologies of short stories including Racket, (Breakwater, St. John’s 2015), Us, Now (Breakwater, St. John’s 2021), Hard Ticket ( Breakwater, St. John’s, 2022), Best Canadian Stories (Biblioasis, 2024) and she is the co-editor with Sheena Wilson of the collection We Were In It: very short stories about energy transition (Memorial Press 2025). Lisa teaches Creative Writing at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador.