ARTISTS AMONG US
/RAY McGINNIS
A Writer’s Calling
Ray mCINNIS.
By Carlos Daez
(click images to enlarge)
Ask Ray McGinnis what he does, and he doesn’t reach for a long introduction. “I’m an author and a writer,” he told The West End Journal. “I write about serious nonfiction topics in the world… teach people to write through personal growth and creativity…and I also write pop culture for fun.”
Those three lanes - the spiritual, the civic, and the musical - can sound unrelated at first. In McGinnis’s case, they share a common thread: paying attention to what gets missed, and putting it into language people can actually live with.
Long before his work showed up in book form, that instinct took root in community settings. In 1999, McGinnis founded his workshop program, “Write to the Heart”, offering creative writing sessions in places where writing becomes more than a hobby: seniors’ centres, grief support groups, and nature walks. People came to write memoir snapshots for their grandchildren, to journal their way through loss, or to put language to experiences they had never fully voiced.
“It was very practical and creative, depending on the setting,” McGinnis recalled. His role, as he saw it, was to offer a structure people could use - whether they were facing a creative block or something far more personal.
Over time, that work expanded into publishing. An earlier book, Writing the Sacred (2005), explores poetic devices and themes in the Blical Psalms and invites readers to write their own contemporary sacred poetry. Yet even then, the point was not to impress; it was to help people write honestly.
FINDING THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY
One question sat at the centre of our interview: what draws a writer to move between poetry, teaching, nonfiction, and cultural commentary - rather than staying in one form? McGinnis’s answer was less about genre and more about a recurring pattern he has learned to trust: “When I decide something’s worth my attention, it’s because there seems to be a gap in an important story that isn’t being addressed,” he explained.
That instinct has led him into subjects that tend to polarize people quickly, including government decision-making and public inquiries. McGinnis has written about the families of September 11 victims and the questions they argued were left unanswered in Unanswered Questions, focusing on what families asked of the official process.
In 2024, he published Unjustified, a book focused on testimony presented at Canada’s Public Order Emergency Commission and the federal government’s invocation of the Emergencies Act during the 2022 Freedom Convoy protests in Ottawa. In our interview, McGinnis described travelling to Ottawa to sit through the hearings himself, driven by a sense that what he was hearing was not always reflected in the coverage.
Still, McGinnis does not try to force conclusions onto the reader. His aim, as he put it, was to present what he found and let people decide what it means.
A LIFELONG RELATIONSHIP WITH MUSIC
If the public-inquiry work is McGinnis at his most investigative, Vancouver Signature Sounds shows him at his most personal - and, in its own way, just as archival.
The project traces back to childhood, when allowance money went not to candy but to vinyl. Over decades, he collected weekly chart surveys from Vancouver AM stations and held onto them - a private archive of what the city was listening to.
After his father’s death in 2014, the archive changed shape. McGinnis began comparing Vancouver charts with U.S. rankings and noticed how many songs “made noise here without ever becoming big elsewhere.”
That research became Vancouver Signature Sounds, an online archive that counts down Top 20 hits from Vancouver AM pop radio from 1956 to 1993, with additional reviews included alongside the main countdown. McGinnis describes it as a long commitment, averaging four reviews weekly. But the tone is not academic or investigative - the entries read like the work of someone who still appreciates the warm sound of vinyl, and who wants the city’s musical memory to remain accessible.
ON WRITING IN THE WEST END
McGinnis still lives and writes in Vancouver’s West End, and he talks about the neighbourhood as a place that keeps the mind moving. When clarity is needed, he will get on his shoes and coat and head outside, letting a walk along the seawall, the side streets west of Denman, or Stanley Park do its work. He is drawn to the older houses that remain, and to the low-rise apartment buildings whose architecture still rewards anyone willing to look carefully.
Since retiring from an impactful teaching career in 2022, McGinnis continues publishing through VancouverSignatureSounds.com. Pick a song you already know, and start there - and if you keep going, you may find yourself reading Vancouver’s musical past the way Ray does: one small entry at a time.
