Momus: The Podcast

The final episode of season 9 features a live recording from Momus’s To Build and Sustain Publishing Roundtable, held at PHI in Montreal on June 26. Bringing together leaders of independent publishing initiatives across Canada and the US, the conversation asks how platforms for art writing are being shaped, challenged, and sustained in the present moment. Moderated by Tiana Reid (critic and co-editor of Pinko), the roundtable included Dr. Kemi Adeyemi (Director, The Black Embodiments Studio), Sky Goodden (Publisher, Momus), and Molly Kleiman (Director, Triple Canopy) in a wide-ranging discussion of the financial, political, and structural conditions of the field today. They also reflect on the pressures facing independent arts publishing—and the possibilities that persist within them. Together, they consider publishing as both a cultural practice and a form of civic life, and the value of art writing that is vital, rigorous, and accessible.

This roundtable was the culminating public event of the 2026 Momus Convening: To Build and Sustain, a gathering of independent art publishers and editors from across Canada and the US focused on sharing resources, strengthening peer networks, and imagining more sustainable futures for critical art writing. The Convening was supported by Terra Foundation for American Art, Critical Minded, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation.

Momus: The Podcast is edited by Jacob Irish, with production assistance from Chris Andrews.

Thanks to this episode’s sponsors, the Illingworth Kerr Gallery and Esker Foundation, for supporting our work.

The latest episode of Momus: The Podcast features Lisa Robertson speaking about her newest publication, Riverwork (Coach House Books, 2026), in conversation with Lauren Wetmore. Robertson reads from the book and discusses writing as a process of refusal, questioning ideas of artistic "practice" in favor of fracture, explosion, and continual revision. Robertson and Wetmore also discuss late style, feminist labor, and poetry's expansive relationship to the novel. The conversation was recorded in Brussels in front of a live audience at celador, a collective space founded in 2023 by a reading group of ten curators working on the intersection of visual art and writing. 

Robertson’s influential body of work spans poetry and experimental prose. Her first novel, The Baudelaire Fractal, was a finalist for the 2020 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. Riverwork, Robertson’s much-anticipated follow-up novel, follows Lucy Frost (a writer, archivist, flaneuse, and domestic cleaner) as she takes up her disappeared great aunt’s research into the Bièvre, an ancient river under the streets of Paris. Riverwork flows through histories of industry, labor, water, and writing, propelled by Robertson’s extraordinary style. 

Momus: The Podcast is edited by Jacob Irish, with production assistance from Chris Andrews.

This episode features M. Neelika Jayawardane, a writer and scholar  whose work is informed by Southern Africa’s history, and by contemporary artists and their visual worlds. Jayawardane speaks to Sky Goodden about her recent Momus feature on artist Gabrielle Goliath’s Elegy (2015–ongoing), a work of collective mourning that became newly resonant amid the attempts to silence it that played out at this year's Venice Biennale.

Their conversation asks what it means to continue when neither justice nor resolution can be taken for granted. Jayawardane reflects on writing as a form of responsibility—to artists, to readers, and to one's own experience—and on why some stories demand that the writer step fully into the frame.

Together, Jayawardane and Goodden discuss the unfinished work of repair, the obligations and pleasures of being read, and the unexpected role that lap swimming plays in the writing process. Jayawardane talks about using her voice to survive, and finding language for what cannot be neatly resolved.

Momus: The Podcast is edited by Jacob Irish, with production assistance from Chris Andrews.

Thanks to this episode’s sponsor, PHI, for supporting our work.

This episode features Abbas Akhavan, a Tehran-born artist based between Montreal and Berlin, who is representing Canada at this year’s Venice Biennale. In a conversation recorded a few days before the opening, Akhavan discusses art as an ethics of encounter, the limits of language and representation, and the challenge of engaging non-human life without collapsing it into symbol or metaphor. Reflecting on institutional pressure, artistic refusal, and the importance of maintaining balance within one’s practice, he describes art as “a rehearsal, not re-enactment.” Framed by a reading from Charles Siebert’s 2016 New York Times Magazine feature “What Does a Parrot Know About PTSD?,” the conversation explores trauma, presence, and the possibility of holding intimacy without possession. Host Sky Goodden also reflects on attending a strike organized by the Art Not Genocide Alliance during the Biennale’s preview week, during which the Canadian Pavilion was one of many that closed in solidarity. 

Momus: The Podcast is edited by Jacob Irish, with production assistance from Chris Andrews.

Thanks to this episode’s sponsors, Coach House Books and Esker Foundation, for supporting our work.

This episode features Camille Bacon, a Chicago-based writer, editor, and the co-founder of Jupiter Magazine. In a far-ranging conversation with Sky Goodden, Bacon discusses the potential and power of a “criticism in the commons,” the Black feminist constellations she’s participating in more broadly, and, as a publisher, her metrics for success. “ For me, success would be someone coming through the doors of our publication coming out the other side and being more audacious about what they demand.”

Momus: The Podcast is edited by Jacob Irish, with production assistance from Chris Andrews.