Interview with Michael Zarathus-Cook
Kelsey Gao, 2T7 MAM
Q: Tell us about yourself, where you come from, and your journey thus far. How have you been involved in the arts before medical school?
The very short story is that I’m a sort of “UofT lifer”. Academically, I started my undergraduate in Philosophy and eventually migrated to Human Biology, in which I completed my undergraduate and a master’s degree. But in the middle of that migration, I had a multi-year detour in the arts. I initially started working at the Canadian Opera Company as a teenager, then got into the performing arts as a hobby, and eventually ended up working for the Toronto Symphony as their Managing Editor. I also started a magazine—called Cannopy—that still exists today, and I write reviews of opera and classical music for The Globe and Mail. Now, I’m completing my medical degree at UofT as well.
Q: Could you tell us more about Cannopy, the magazine you created and still run?
A few years ago, during my undergrad, I started collecting vinyl records of classical music, which was my way of getting introduced to the genre.
I started writing reviews about these records online, and someone at the Toronto Symphony got a hold of my blog—and they loved it so much that they invited me to write reviews for them. That led to my first publications.
Later, a Toronto-based production company also found my blog and invited me to create a publication for them, which I called smART Magazine. I then had the opportunity to run smART for a few years, but when this production company was going bankrupt during the pandemic, I had the option to close down the publication but I took it on as an independent publication and changed the magazine’s name to Cannopy.
The whole idea behind Cannopy is to create a “big tent” for all forms of art. In Canadian arts publishing, we have many great but highly specialized publications. In medical terms, there are many surgeons in the field, but not too many general internists or family doctors. So Cannopy magazine is like the general internist or the family doctor of arts publications, covering everything from visual and performing arts, to dance and opera. We’ve interviewed graffiti artists, tattoo artists, pop artists, and some of the world’s biggest composers, like John Adams and Steve Reich. And we’ve interviewed artists from all over the world, from Japan to Ghana to anywhere that you can think of. I think what sets us apart is the amount of variety we cover. We try to package that variety in a way that feels appropriately digestible, that has editorial clarity, and an aesthetic identity.
Anyone in Toronto that takes the TTC could have access to our broad sheet, which is like an old-fashioned New York Times newspaper, and copies of our magazine version are distributed in retail stores such as Indigo, Loblaws, Walmart, and any place that has a magazine stand for sale. Most of our readership comes from the GTA, with about 140,000 subscribers, but we also have around 4,000 international readers.
Q: It sounds like you’re taking different types of artwork from all parts of the globe into an accessible sort of format for people in the GTA to get exposed to and learn about?
Yes, that’s a really good way to put it. The GTA is especially unique because of how diverse our population is. For example, we interviewed Arooj Aftab—an American Pakistani artist—who is incredibly prolific and an amazing singer. What’s incredible is when you interview someone like that, who has Pakistani and American roots, there’s a good chance that you’re introducing that artist to fellow Pakistanis that live in Toronto. So, building an international publication and then marketing it to a local population works when you live in an inherently international city.
Q: What kind of impact do you think your work on Cannopy has had on others – and yourself?
That’s one of the most important things we consider. I think publications contend with the idea of being a bridge between an artist, a potential audience, and the artwork that they consume. Over the last 10 to 15 years, both of those parties have relied heavily on social media to connect them, so having a publication that could do that for you—which has always been the case since the printing press was invented—was suddenly not as pressing or urgent. But what we’ve seen over the last decade is that these algorithms are not designed to connect; they’re designed to keep you on Instagram, on Twitter, and on Facebook. So, the purpose of a publication like Cannopy is to connect the reader with the art that we find inspiring.
For me, It’s incredibly worth it. Over the summer, I was in a bar listening to an experimental band when the Indigenous artist Jeremy Dutcher walked in. We started talking about art in Toronto and at one point I blurted out the realization that: art is true north. He paused the conversation to write that down and encouraged me to continue to meditate on that phrase.
“There are many distractions in life, and it’s easy for people to get into sort of divisive conversations about identity, but my background in Toronto has just shown me that one of the few places where you get people to all just focus in the same direction—sometimes literally sit side-by-side—is in the arts. So yes, it is a true north.”
Q: How do you think your identity as a lifelong artist writer/arts editor has influenced your decision to pursue medicine?
First of all, it’s very challenging. When I think of this pairing, I admit that it is an unusual pairing, and with that sort of atypical pairing, there’s a great deal of challenge in balancing it, but at the end of the day, it is possible—other people have done versions of it. I don’t see a lot of chief editors and medical students out there, but I’m sure people have done even more impressive things than that. Aside from the challenges, it’s also really inspiring, and just deeply fulfilling. Because, one of the things I think we might appreciate about medicine is that it’s a very, very, textual experience.
By textual, I mean, text is everywhere: in our paperwork for patient encounters, in our textbooks and research papers, memorization of texts, and applying text to tests. So, in that sense, it helps that the other life that I’m living is also a very textual life. Most of what I do editorially is textual, from writing emails to reading submissions to commissioning them, and planning—lots and lots of planning.
I started Cannopy complete from scratch in 2020, so it’ll be five years this August, and we ended up being distributed in over 2000 stores across North America. We were nominated for Best Arts and Culture magazine by the Canadian Magazine Awards in 2023. Most of these achievements were made possible by connecting with artists at a deeper level. There’s a lot of artistic knowledge that’s needed, and in order to speak to artists and interview them, you need to think like an artist, and so I’ve spent a lot of effort cultivating that. Similarly, in order to speak to patients, you kind of have to think from the patient’s perspective.
Another component of it is, at the end of the day, it’s a small business. So, I’ve had to learn on the job how to run a business, how to start from scratch, how to build distribution networks, how to hire people, and unfortunately, sometimes fire people, how to build alliances, how to write proposals (there’s a lot of advocacy of the brand involved in this work as well). I’m hoping that all of this translates to my medical career, when I have to encounter cases where either there are administrative hurdles, or when I have to step out of the caregiving role, into an advocacy or entrepreneurial one.
Q: How do you think your identity as a lifelong artist writer/arts editor has influenced your decision to pursue medicine?
More often than not when you meet a med student in our cohort, there’s like an ampersand to their identity: they are a med student plus something else, or maybe they have been something outside of medicine in the past.
But it is interesting to consider: does the healthcare industry make space or value someone as a staff physician when they also bring something else to the table? Do they see it as less of a burden and more of an opportunity if one of their doctors is also a pilot, for example? (I think someone in our cohort is actually a pilot and is now studying to become a doctor!) One of my early mentors was Dr Michael Hutcheon, who is a retired respirologist, but I actually know him from the opera world! We both worked for an opera company called Against the Grain Theatre—me as a Media Manager and he as a Board Director, a role I’ve recently entered. One of the things I learned from Dr Hutcheon is that you can do both. Obviously, medicine will always, always take the center field, but if you are dedicated enough, work hard enough, and care enough, it is possible to have a dual life as a very serious and very dedicated doctor, but also a similarly serious and dedicated artist or editor or pilot or whatever that other thing may be that you do.
I think that if you add art to any other aspect in life, art makes it better, and it makes the person who’s consuming it better. Applying art to medicine is actually quite simple. As a patient, I would want to interact with doctors who can contextualize my pathology or disease processes beyond merely being a system of organs, and into my whole experience as a human being. I’d want a doctor who interacts with my human story as well as my biology. As well, I would want a doctor who is capable of doing that, but also zooming out and looking at the organism of society. And in the same way that an abstract summarizes a complex paper, art is like the abstract of our social state and social health. So engaging frequently with art, I think good doctors are able to “read the abstract” of what is happening outside of the hospital. And just as a good abstract tells you basically what the research project has achieved, good art also reveals to you where society is, where it’s going, what it’s leaving behind.
But the really difficult question is, does art make us better doctors? One way to think of that question is, would it be weird or wrong to think that anyone would become religious, or start a family, just so that they can be a better doctor? Yes, that would be weird. You’re religious because that’s your True North. That’s what matters to you the most. And if that makes you a better doctor, that’s fantastic. But you wouldn’t want to say one goes to church so that one can become a better doctor. By the same logic, art is art. Art is an end in and of itself, and not a tool or means by which to become better at something else.
Yet it seems that’s how we tend to think in medicine when we think about art: how can art make me become a better doctor? How can it refine my practice? So, as powerful and as interesting as that question is, I think what’s even more interesting is realizing that we can engage in art separately from medicine, in the same way that we engage with religion or the desire to start a family—because it can make us better humans, and by extension, better doctors. But in order for it to work, you can’t use art as a means to an end. You just have to go to art and use it as a destination, rather than a road.
Q: Are you still finding ways to be creative in medical school, now?
Yes, when I find the time. I participated in a program called the Interprofessional Health, Arts & Humanities Certificate Program. The program brings together med students, occupational therapists, physiotherapists, nurses, and other players in the healthcare industry, and we establish and challenge narratives about care. For example, narratives of Indigenous healing—how do the narratives interact with how we provide care? And it’s been very creatively stimulating. The last couple of weeks have been our theatre block, and we’ve been working on improvisational theatre, which is powerful for helping to navigate real-life clinical situations.
One game we played is: let’s say there are 20 people in a room, and we’re all just walking
around in a room. I walk up to you, and I say a word, and then you say a word to me. I have to take your word, say it to someone else, and we do that continuously. Then, at the end, we pause, and then we all go around and we say the last word that we got. In a perfect world where communication is flawless, everyone’s word gets said. But, of course, because communication is a difficult art, there will be like half the group’s words missing.
You can think back to an operating room situation, where someone says something—maybe it’s the surgeon, the scrub nurse, or the medical student—and either an instruction is given or received. Because of the chaos of the OR, that line of communication isn’t always delivered accurately. We’ve learned that very simple tasks can become challenging because communication lines are broken. My hats off to that program; it’s been incredible. Perhaps the best thing it’s done for me is provide an opportunity to work with non-medical students as collaborators.
Q: What goals do you have for your future, both in medicine and art?
I’m going to spend the next two years before clerkship being the best medical student that I can be. And, my way of showing gratitude for being given this opportunity is trying as hard as I can to absorb as much material that I can in medical school. That’s my number one priority.
As for art, it sounds somewhat dire to say, but I want Cannopy to have a life of its own— I want it to go on without my leadership as I disappear into the hospitals. So I’m going to spend the next two years building it up, and hopefully, in the future, after a busy week in clerkship, I can briefly tune in during the week and see what cool work the team has done and read stories that I didn’t commission myself. I’m hoping that the team after me can innovate on what I’ve started. I think that would be really cool—to be a doctor somewhere in the future, with a magazine that is both what I created, but also much more than I intended.
We all have that medicine “plus one” thing that we do. I think we just need to keep on doing whatever it is—it could be art, or sports, or being a pilot. Whatever it is, we just need to keep on fighting the good fight of making sure that we keep our “plus one” and we bring it to the day. If we keep something outside of medicine with us, I think the industry may eventually have to appreciate and make room for that, and become comfortable with doctors who maybe do other things once in a while—with the understanding that it makes them better humans, which, thankfully, makes them better doctors.
