An author interview with Michel Durand-Wood about his new book, You’ll Pay For This, and how he keeps municipal finance fun
Great Plains Press’ Angeline Javier sat down with author Michel Durand-Wood to talk about his book and why understanding your city’s budget is the first step to building a better city!
Angeline: Can you tell us about The City Project series?
Michel: The city project is a series of books that are all meant to be an introduction to a different aspect of building a sustainable, thriving city.
And so each of the books are about 100 pages and are meant to be read in an afternoon. My book You’ll Pay for This is on municipal finance, and I promise it’s way more fun than it sounds.
It’s also super important because it is the basis for everything else, right? We can’t talk about any of the other things of building a city without knowing how we’re going to pay for it. So, my book is about how we can make sure that we have a financially sustainable city, in a way that’s super readable for just the average person.
It’s easy to have talks about these different subjects that go into a lot of different jargon and become hard to understand for the layperson. It’s a good introduction so that we can all sort of have these discussions about how we want our city to look.
Angeline: Why was it important for you to implement a comedic tone to your writing?
Michel: I have a blog that I’ve been writing for seven years now called Dear Winnipeg, and it is a blog about infrastructure and municipal finance.
And when I first started it, I really put a lot of thought into it. I was actually pretty inspired by people like Jon Stewart and The Daily Show, Bill Nye the Science Guy and Alton Brown with Good Eats. They all had these shows where, you know, they were giving you a lot of useful information, but it was done in a really entertaining way.
And I thought that was pretty important, especially for something like municipal finance, which, you know, people’s eyes glaze over as soon as you say the words.
For me, it was important to make it accessible, fun and engaging, and humor was a good way to do that. That’s also kind of my own personality too. So, it just fits nicely that way.
“People are naturally disarmed when you make them laugh. It makes them more open to receiving what you’re trying to tell them.”
Angeline: You used Winnipeg as a case study, but what do you hope readers from other provinces, states and cities take away from your book?
Michel: Yeah, of course I’m writing about Winnipeg. It’s where I live, and it’s what I know, deeply. But, the reality is, the concepts that I talk about are applicable to basically every city in North America. We’ve been growing our cities, pretty much identically, using the same types of patterns, using the same types of rules.
For the past 70 or 80 years, we just sort of copied off of each other. And so what Winnipeg is facing is not unique at all. Every city in North America is at a different stage of the same financial illness.
I’ve had many people already tell me on my blog that they’re reading about Winnipeg, but it really feels like they’re reading about their own city. I’m hoping that’ll be the same with the book, that people will read it and really pull away the same lessons that are applicable to their own places.
Angeline: What do you hope for with the future of The City Project?
Michel: I’m really hoping to touch on all the different aspects of building a prosperous city. There’s a lot that goes into it. People can get involved in making their city a better place, but they’re interested in different things and have different skill levels.
Angeline: Do you have any writing tips that you’d like to share?
Michel: The biggest one for me is setting deadlines. If I don’t have a deadline, for myself, I just will not get to it a lot. A lot of the time. And the other thing is just when it’s time to sit down and write, and just let it all out. Otherwise, it’s too easy to get locked up on a particular part of it.
But I’m new to this professional writing business, so. So I would say, do what works for you. It’s probably the best.
Angeline: As a first time author, what would you say to your younger self about your career now?
I’ve never considered myself a writer or an author, but, I mean, it’s clear that I am. This is my first book, but obviously I’ve been writing on my blog for a long time. I’ve also had writing published on several other outlets.
I’ve never identified with being a writer. I think my goal has always just been to educate people. So maybe I’m an educator who writes. And so with that, if I had to give my past self some advice, I think, oftentimes you start off with some goals in life or something you’re trying to achieve. Whether that’s helping the people in your city understand certain topics, you may need to pick up some skills that you didn’t have before, in order to achieve that.
The sun is shining, the plants are blooming, and our authors are launching! Yes, spring is officially here.
