VeXXed was co-created by Nicolle Wahl and Carla DeMarco, both women of a certain age.
Nicolle Wahl
Nicolle studied journalism, and spent several years as a science and medical journalist before moving into higher ed communications. She is fiercely loyal, stubborn, and a terrible dancer. Her dream superpower is flight, and she will eat crème brûlée whenever possible.
Her favourite movie is Aliens, her favourite books are (fiction) The World According to Garp and (non-fiction) A Short History of Nearly Everything, and her theme song is either Pour Some Sugar on Me by Def Leppard or anything by Kathleen Edwards. When she’s not working, you can find her with my husband and two children, plus her dog and two cats. She’s that woman singing very loudly in her car.
Carla DeMarco
In her teens, Carla had ambitions to be a full-time writer or the lead singer of a ska band (it was the 80s, after all!), but she settled in for an undergrad degree in Cinema Studies and English, with a minor in French Literature, becoming a lifelong fan of the films of French auteur François Truffaut, and eventually earning a Master’s in Information Studies. Embarrassing herself on the dance floor--any dance floor--is where she truly excels.
Feet held to a fire and she had to pick a favourite flick, it would be Truffaut’s Les 400 coups. One of her recent favourite reads is Five Little Indians by Michelle Good, but the publication she keeps around her during the day for inspiration is Lynda Barry’s graphic book What It Is. (Secretly, she wishes that her favourite book was The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, but that is currently sitting on her crammed bookshelf gathering dust, with approximately four chapters left to read.*)
A self-professed podcast junkie for over a decade, in her spare time Carla invests a lot of listening and interiority, engaged by smart people, funny people, storytellers, and mediators in various podcast genres while walking around a range of environments or making dinner for her family, a spirited group made up of two young women plus her high school crush. If you ever need a suggestion or want to talk podcasts, count her in.
*NB: There are only five chapters in this book.