# Lara St. John on Empowerment and the Making of Dear Lara Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/conversations-with-musicians-with-leah-roseman-4108951/lara-st-john-on-empowerment-and-the-making-of-dear-lara Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/conversations-with-musicians-with-leah-roseman-4108951/lara-st-john-on-empowerment-and-the-making-of-dear-lara.md Podcast: [Conversations with Musicians, with Leah Roseman](https://stenobird.com/podcast/conversations-with-musicians-with-leah-roseman-4108951) Published: 2025-12-06T05:00:10+00:00 Episode link: https://rss.com/podcasts/conversations-with-musicians-with-leah-roseman/2365066 Audio file: https://content.rss.com/episodes/323337/2365066/conversations-with-musicians-with-leah-roseman/2025_12_02_19_37_43_e7b8dd79-c2ac-4fe1-ab90-5781a0655377.mp3 Processing state: not_requested JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/conversations-with-musicians-with-leah-roseman-4108951/episodes/lara-st-john-on-empowerment-and-the-making-of-dear-lara Duration seconds: 3762 ## Resource Violinist Lara St. John joins me to discuss her upcoming documentary Dear Lara , her remarkable career, and her ongoing work to ensure a safe and inclusive music community . Lara’s creativity, warmth, humour and brilliance come through in this wide-ranging interview and you’ll hear about her decision to become the first classical soloist to start her own record label, her formative year in the former USSR, advice about learning music and the violin, and a tribute to one of her main mentors, Joey Corpus. In fact Joey’s amazing story wasn’t one I was familiar with and since this conversation I’ve learned more about this inspiring pedagogue. We talked about two of her many albums, and you’ll hear a couple of clips from Shiksa and She/Her/Hers ; track names are in the timestamps and everything is linked to Lara’s website in the show notes. Lara is also known for her love for iguanas, and at the very beginning of this episode you’ll get to meet Baby Octavius! Trigger warning: Please note that there are detailed timestamps below, so you can go to specific parts of this interview; there are mentions of both sexual assault and a suicide attempt Complete Show Notes with linked episodes, newsletter, podcast merch and more! Lara St. John Website Varaiuni Bar Fight video on Lara's channel . Timestamps: (00:00) Intro with mention of sexual abuse (trigger warning) (03:10) meeting the Caribbean iguana Baby Octavius (04:59) Order of Canada, meeting other celebrities for Canadian Thanksgiving (06:28) the story of Moishe the violin, klezmer (09:48) about album Shiksa with clip from The Pain Will Find Us (14:17) “Dear Lara” film, trigger warning mention of rape (27:16) changing perspectives on her career (32:27) other linked episodes and supporting this podcast (33:16) perspectives on ch… ## Actions - request_transcript: `POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/conversations-with-musicians-with-leah-roseman-4108951/episodes/lara-st-john-on-empowerment-and-the-making-of-dear-lara/transcription-requests` — Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode. - read_markdown: `GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/conversations-with-musicians-with-leah-roseman-4108951/lara-st-john-on-empowerment-and-the-making-of-dear-lara.md` — Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource. A page view does not enqueue transcription. Agents should invoke `request_transcript` explicitly when they need this episode processed. ## Transcript Full transcripts are not published on public pages unless there is a clear rights basis.