This Is Your Strange and Beautiful Life

Sandra Taylor is a wildly talented painter, singer-songwriter, and pianist. Her watercolours bring us exquisite explorations of nature, ( shout-out to the birds ), and truly unique abstract designs. In 2024, Sandra launched her album “Life Beautiful Life,” which combines down-to-earth, whimsical lyrics with her soothing voice and impressive musicality. Sandra was also my first-year university room...

Erica and Jahon are two artsy, nerdy, anglophone Montrealers. And today, we’re coming together for our special episode, Unhinged Ways to Learn French in Quebec. Join us for adventures in French stand-up comedy, cringe slam poetry , and becoming a Quebec Grey’s Anatomy superfan. We talk education, French immersion in Perth Ontario , reading in French, dating in French, hobbies in French, and more....

For our first-ever encore episode, we have Mary Adamson Owen, otherwise known as the best grandma in the world. Grandma was my inaugural podcast guest and reason for starting T his Is Your Strange and Beautiful Life . After a long, strange, and beautiful life, Grandma died on November 14, 2025. She was 99. To honour her memory, I am reposting the extra special interview we did back in March of 202...

Today we have a writer’s writer’s talk with the accomplished author and poet Rebecca Păpucaru . Rebecca has published an impressive variety of poetry and fiction, and she is someone who works very hard and long on her creative projects. Legend has it that some of her published poems and her recent novel have taken years (and even a decade or so) to make them what they are today. So,if you’re someo...

“An artist is someone who is celebrated for being themselves. A professional artist is someone who is paid for being themselves.” “It takes as much creativity to make it work as it does to make the work.” —Gretchen Andrew Gretchen Andrew is a viral painter, hacker, and creator of the award-winning FaceTune Portraits, a series of oil paintings that “reveal the hidden scars of social media filters.”...

Jessica O’Reilly is a hilariously unconventional writer, digital nomad, YouTuber, and workout queen. Her YouTube channel, Comfort Is For Wimps dives deep into her life as a digital nomad—couch-surfing in Afghanistan, checking out Medellin’s love hotels , and babysitting rich people’s pets in lieu of rent. Along the way, she examines the disparities in the cost of living between countries , passes...

There is more than one famous Anita Anand, but this Anita Anand is the best. She is a Montreal-based author, literary translator, language teacher, and cherished guest at Erica’s ukulele parties. All the while, she yearns for peace on earth and a free Palestine! You must read her books! Her novel, A Convergence of Solitudes was a finalist for the 2022 Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction. A...

It was my honour to welcome Luke Anderson to This Is Your Strange and Beautiful Life ! Luke Anderson is a s peaker, singer, dancer, harmonica player, accessibility advocate, and athlete of the body turned athlete of the spirit. He is relatively famous for co-founding the revolutionary StopGap Foundation , a registered charity that builds bright and beautiful ramps across Toronto and North America....

Today my guest is my super cool, ultra fit, deeply compassionate and hilarious friend and creative genius Kyle Stevenson. I met Kyle during my year one playwriting class in which he played the leading man, The Vegan Life Coach in the staged reading of my debut play, She Is Not Catholic, She Is Vegetarian. And he nailed it. For years, Kyle and I ate lentils and kale and piles of impossibly healthy...

An interview with Nisha Coleman —I have only been dreaming of this since I started the podcast. At long last, we welcome Nisha to This Is Your Strange and Beautiful Life. Nisha is a superstar in the Montreal artist and storytelling community. We all know and love her as an accomplished author, actor, translator, storyteller, and master of the one-woman show. It all started on a swamp in rural Onta...

Today’s guest is the bright light, podcast host, historian, athlete, and disability advocate, Hollis Peirce. With Hollis, disability is neither a tragedy nor a motivational speech. He offers a refreshing, real, and uplifting take on living with muscular dystrophy. Early on, a doctor told Hollis’s mother that her child would suffer from an “inability to thrive.” Instead, he developed what the exper...

The cherished Alexia Côté is back for another ever-popular all-advice episode. Why do weddings make everyone regress to five years old? What is the difference between reasonable boundaries and Bridezilla territory? Does it make any sense to have children when the planet is melting and your favourite thing to do is read books and travel? Alexia and Erica can’t fix it. But we have thoughts. Tune in...

If you follow my life’s great mythology, you know that I’m a gifted child, which means I’ve had more therapists than most people. I’m 39, and I’m currently seeing my 14th and 15th therapists. Their names are Chad and Claude. Chad as in ChatGPT and Claude being Claude.ai . 2025 is a ride and all over the world, people are trying to cope with the wild chaos that is happening everywhere. Maybe they’r...

In this back-to-life episode, Montréal’s favourite self-deprecating Russian interviews Erica. Riveting questions include: Erica, why did you decide to start a podcast? How’d you come up with the name, This Is Your Strange and Beautiful Life? Tell us all about your creative angst and writer’s block! Have you ever been diagnosed with autism? (Vad told me to cut that part out but I decided to keep it...

What the world needs now is today’s guest, the radiant and revolutionary Shosho Abotouk! Shosho is a generous and talented stand-up comic, crochet artist, entrepreneur, and activist . When I consider the terrifying atrocities that are happening all over our planet, I feel deeply soothed and heartened people like Shosho exists. Behind her sweet and adorable persona, Shosho brings us edgy and import...

Today we have a special episode with my dear pals Jimmy and Isabelle. I met Jimmy and Isabelle at L’Arche , a worldwide network of communities for people with intellectual disabilities. When I was 19, I moved to L’Arche in search of a transformed heart. For two years, I lived and worked with Jimmy, Isabelle, and three other people with wildly different intellectual disabilities. There’s so much I...

“ The privilege of just having the capacity to physically do the art or the music, that’s a huge gift. Because I meet people all the time who have a lot of responsibilities and a lot of setbacks, because I’m in the public health system. So, I get to see people that really are struggling and suffering. And I don’t think all of our suffering is equal. I think there are some people who have to suffer...

This Is Your Strange and Beautiful Life welcomes marvellous community builder, multi-disciplinary sound artist, and relative social butterfly Kathy Kennedy.   I met Kathy at one of the 17 Christmas parties she was invited to in 2022. Before that I knew her from when she directed the extraordinary women’s choir Choeur Maha. A conversation and a half with Kathy and I soon discovered that Kathy...

I had my first conversation with Aloe Azimov during my two-star summer of wretched mental health. Before that I knew Aloe from her candid and hilarious stand-up sets at queer-friendly venues across the city. If you’ve been at the same shows as Aloe, you’ll recognize her unmistakeable and uproarious laughter that reverberates the venue walls and vodka bottles. In the throes of my break-up grief (an...

Back due to wild popularity, we have the exuberant and life-enhancing, Alexia Côté , here for yet another all-advice episode . Tune in as we tackle a fascinating round of puzzling-to-devastating listener questions. Quandaries/Train Wrecks come from: The Best Friend Fadeaway: She’s drifting apart from her ostensibly draining and judgy BFF. Should she just let the friendship fizzle? Is a mature and...

Today my guest is the Montreal Fringe and Canadian Heartthrob Al Lafrance. I caught Al during this year’s Fringe and it was a dream come true.  Over iced tea and zero air conditioning, we reminisce about Al’s prolific Fringe and haiku career, his cringey and champion insomnia, how not sleeping and other mental health adventures help and don’t help creativity, how Al’s brain’s doing now, thrif...

I met Iris Bahr at the 2024 Montreal Fringe Festival where she premiered her spectacular one-woman show, “Stories From the Brink.” I laughed endlessly! Afterwards, I was super smooth and awkwardly asked Iris if she would like to be the most famous person to ever appear on This Is Your Strange and Beautiful Life. And Iris very generously said yes. What a thrill! Iris and I recorded outside on Avenu...

“If you have a body, you are a dancer.” -Lynne Adams Lynne Adams is a vibrant and enthusiastic actor, dancer, chocoholic and certified 5Rhythms® teacher. Lynne discovered the practice of 5Rhythms® after a total hip replacement left her depressed and grappling with chronic pain. Over a decade later, Lynne shares this powerful practice with hundreds of devoted students who come to dance each week wh...

Content Warning: Drugs, meditation, and naked cleaning. Also, mention of mental health challenges, self-abuse, and suicidal ideation. It remains a blast of an episode! James Paterson has been contemplating the Universe since he was four years old when he would stay up all night listening to Jean-Michel Jarred’s new age synthesizer cassette on his Fischer Price tape deck. Growing up in the 80s and...

Lou Laurence is a singer, songwriter, playwright, and siren. She left her home at the bottom of the ocean to become part of that world, our world, Montréal and across Canada, where she takes to the stage with her ukulele, spectacular hair and fashion sense. There she combines her musical and lyrical genius, bringing us clever and hilarious songs in her signature soulful voice. Her performances uni...