As Tapestry ends, host Mary Hynes reflects on how show captured the human experience
Hynes, who hosted Tapestry for 20 years, is set to retire as the show concludes Dec. 31
When Mary Hynes announced that CBC Radio's Tapestry would be coming to an end, she put a callout to listeners to share their favourite memories of the program.
She didn't expect to end up with dozens of heartfelt voicemails from fans — and even less so that many of them were speaking through tears. Several also ended their messages by singing.
"It was astonishing," said Hynes, who has hosted Tapestry for 20 years.
That mixture of sorrow and joy displayed "the full schmear" of the human experience, she said — which is exactly what she set out to do with Tapestry.
Tapestry debuted on CBC Radio in 1994, then hosted by Peter Downie. In November, Hynes announced on air that she plans to retire at the end of this season, which will also be the show's last. The final episode, co-hosted by CBC's Chris Howden, was recorded with a live studio audience in Toronto.
Hynes' career includes highlights on radio and television covering news, sports and other topics. She's covered three Olympic Games, reported from 23 countries, and is a former sports reporter for the Globe and Mail.
Her first CBC Radio hosting gig was for the sports program The Inside Track. She remembers getting a call from CBC, saying their then-host was leaving the program.
She came in for an audition, and fell in love with radio.
"I was in the studio, put the headphones on, and theme music just came loud and clear and melodic and beautiful through the headphones. I just thought, 'Oh, this is a way to work,'" she said.
"It was like going from a flat chess set to three-dimensional chess all of a sudden, because the addition of audio just was something electric."
Your 'real person' talking to our 'real person'
The jump from sports to spirituality and religion with Tapestry might seem like a stretch. But to Hynes, her journalistic approach made sense whether it was about the players in a dugout or worshippers in church pews.
In its early years, the show was more explicitly focused on religion. "An old tagline of the show was, 'faith as a force in the world,'" Hynes recalled.
Today, CBC Radio describes Tapestry as "your guide through the messy business of being human." It's a place for long-form discussions about philosophy, psychology and spirituality.
Just like her sports writing sought to capture readers whether they followed sports and knew its inside language, Hynes sought to entice Tapestry listeners whether you were an agnostic, atheist — or a priest.
WATCH: Singer-songwriter Molly Johnson talks to Mary Hynes about her new album, spirituality and saying goodbye to Tapestry
"We're certainly going to touch on religion because there are not a lot of spaces in journalism that do that — apart from proselytizing, which we don't do. And it's a really deeply meaningful part of life for a lot of people," she said.
"But it did feel that there would be huge swaths of the population that was never going to speak to you. Whereas if you do broaden it out to philosophy, psychology, what it means to be human, then you can then you can scoop up anybody."
Hynes, a self-described Star Trek enthusiast, says her work on Tapestry follows a number of prime directives — named after the philosophical guiding principles of Star Trek's United Federation of Planets, a fictional interstellar government.
One of those is that it's a conversation without artifice or a constructed version of the self; rather it's your real person talking to her real person — a phrase she learned from a conversation with Canadian Olympic medallist Silken Laumann.
"I thought, what a beautiful way to describe the thing that we try to do," Hynes said. "Guests really met us more than halfway in that, because it is a challenge."
Retirement plans
Heading now into retirement, Hynes says in a way, her fully real person may not have seen the light of day throughout her career at Tapestry and more widely in journalism.
"Not that I've been insincere or phony, but I've been very professional. And I'm getting the impression that the goofiness is coming as a surprise to some senior colleagues, and some listeners," she said.
Hynes said she suspects some may guess her retirement plans include a monastery visit, or a meditation course.
She's actually hoping to polish her skills on the electric bass guitar, and brush up on her Italian with a course at the Italian Cultural Institute in Toronto.
But she might be most excited about making a visit to Groton, Conn., a town she frequently passes by on the train, and is otherwise known as the submarine capital of the world.
(Her favourite submarine movie, by the way? 1957's The Enemy Below, starring Robert Mitchum and Curd Jürgens.)
To Hynes, Tapestry's legacy isn't easy to fit into a short headline or a snappy list of five tips on what it means to be human. Through its discussions of primordial questions that are as relevant today as they ever were, she said the show should be remembered for having conversations that pushed back on the desire for quick or easy answers.
"There's space in serious journalism to explore matters that are not tied to the news cycle, [and] to explore matters that are not pulled from that day's headlines," she said.
