Lane Changer - Judy Holm, from runways to red carpets to the halls of academe
writing buddies at the 2022 Eden Mills Writers Festival
Judy Holm and I met four years ago in an online memoir writing group. I googled her of course - no-one’s immune from my background research. But while it was her film-producer look complete with white baby-bangs and funky glasses that first grabbed me, the stories she shared with the group about her life kept me in her grip.
When I sat down with Judy this summer on her Stratford, Ontario deck, she was quick to say that while many people change lanes consciously, it’s only her first switch for which she was in control. The rest? Just happenstance. Let’s hear about it.
Judy started university in 1968. Quitting after just a few months allowed her to escape the Toronto suburb of Etobicoke where she’d been raised and head downtown to Yorkville, the epicentre of Canada’s hippie movement. There, she hung out with other disaffected young people and barely-known folkies like Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and Gordon Lightfoot. She immersed herself in the community, working at the iconic Riverboat Coffee House, and living with a musician-boyfriend. She and the BF were soon roomies with the co-inventor of MDA (Methylenedioxyamphetamine), the psychedelic of choice at the time. A drug bust broke up the household and her relationship. She and her female friend, Ricky, literally moved into a lane of traffic as they put out their thumbs and headed west. Judy shared with the writing group many amusing (and alarming!) stories from this time and when she publishes her book, called “These Things I Know,” we’re all going to want to read it.
I didn’t probe when Holm told me too many drugs brought her back to Ontario. Through a family friend, she secured a winter house-sit on Toronto Island (that’s a lane change I could embrace!). Although she claims she’s never really learned how to get a job, she managed to secure another one waitressing at a restaurant at Toronto’s Huron & Harbord. Her self-imposed challenges - how many plates she could carry, for example - foreshadowed the kind of standards she’d expect from herself in later lanes. But that was yet to come. It was during a brief romance that she unexpectedly got pregnant. She was 21. At the same time, she was hit hard by mononucleosis. Her doctor assured her she wasn’t pregnant - he told her some time on the psychiatrist’s couch would resolve the extreme fatigue she experienced from the double-whammy. He was wrong.
As a new mother, Judy lived briefly with her sister and her brother-in-law, but resumed living on Toronto Island with a poet. He exposed her to the world of independent publishing through the press he’d helped found, Coach House Press. A little foreshadowing for her current search for a memoir publisher, 50 years later! During the same time, she approached an agency and spent the next eight years balancing single-parenting and modelling, a career that had been on offer since Judy’s teen years. Her height, at 5’11”, put her out of contention for ‘regular clothes’ but designers loved her for couture runway work.
Her relationship with the poet fizzled after four years, and she was on her own searching for a way to support herself and her young son. As that ran its course for her, she and a friend picked up the early 80s fad of aerobics and opened their own studio, The Sweat Shop. That was short-lived at just four years and Judy was left hunting for another way to earn money.
Through a fashion connection, she met Helga Stephenson, then the Interim Director of what is now called the Toronto International Film Festival. Judy worked in publicity there for the 1986 season, which is where she met her husband, Michael, who would one day be her business partner too. TIFF gave her the intro she needed to get into film distribution. She eventually ended up with the distributor that worked with Miramax, the film company led by the notorious Harvey Weinstein. When I asked Judy whether she had any first-hand #MeToo story, she gestured at her flattish model-worthy chest. Not his type!
Despite all the glitz and glam of her life so far, Judy was still pretty down to earth. She laughs about driving American actor Ned Beatty around Toronto in her Chevette. He preferred that even though he could have commanded a fleet of limos.
That gig gave way to a position at PolyGram Filmed Entertainment. She really just wanted part-time, to allow her and Michael to work on their own creative projects. But Polygram hooked her with a promise they would pump more money into Canadian films. She smiles when she says “best job ever,” although she regrets getting so comfy in business class, a part of the airplane she hasn’t entered since. She worked her way up to VP Distribution, setting up the Canadian operation. In 1998, however, Polygram sold to Seagrams and Judy was packaged out which financed a year of ‘goofing off.’
It was then, however, that she and Michael got serious about film production. They launched Markham Street Films, now in its 23rd year. Early on she did a six month contract at the Documentary Channel to help with household finances, but Markham has been self-sustaining since. Film-making was something Michael had been doing in one capacity or another his whole career. For Judy, though, it was a completely new lane. At age 50, she learned the language of cash flows and cost reports as the partner primarily responsible for the business side.
She got itchy to start exercising her own creative muscles. First, that came as script writing for a number of the docs coming out of Markham Street. After documenting so many others’ lives, it’s maybe no surprise that nearly a decade ago, Judy Holm got interested in writing some stuff about her own life. Like me, she used the pandemic to immerse herself in memoir courses, including the one I took, Memoir Writing Ink, by Alison Wearing, which led to us meeting in that online group. Around the same time, Judy and Michael gave up the house in Toronto’s Annex where they’d lived for decades for one of dozens of riverside mansions in the Ontario bastion of the arts, Stratford. In 2023, Judy started a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Non-Fiction Writing program at Kings College, Halifax. She graduated a year later, with her first degree!
Judy claims to have left the film business now, although she still seems pretty plugged into Markham’s activities, given she’s living with the other partner. Does she anticipate an actual retirement? No, not really. Her career choices haven’t provided a pension, as is the case with so many of us lane-changers. It’s hard, too, to give up a lifetime of working long hours, and in film production, often seven days a week.
As I ask all my lane-changing subjects, I posed the question to Judy - Is there something about the way you were raised that emboldened you to take the steps you’ve taken? She laughed. Definitely not! Her parents’ lives reflected a different time when you picked a lane and stayed in it. It wasn’t until she ended up in modelling that they had any point of reference for Judy’s peripatetic life.
Judy Holm describes her life as like a flat stone being skipped across the water. And it’s because of that kind of artistry with language that Judy’s landed in the writing lane. Will this be the final lane? Likely. But she said that 20 years ago with film production. Regrets? None!
Stay tuned for her book! And then, who knows? The film?
Missed previous Lane Changer profiles?
Peter Chandler, how it all began for me
Cathy Crowe, her lane is the street
Marissa Bastidas, same lane, new direction
Pam Hudak, living on a multi-lane highway
Jennifer, crossing lanes from Phuket to pup-minder
Emma Simpson, from taxiway to writing terminal
Jessica Waraich, changing lanes on the career on-ramp
Michelle Simmons, straddling two lanes in her mid-40s
Sybil Chandler (1928-2025), proud to find life’s off-ramp
Faiv Noelle, solo on a global highway
Karly Wilson, waiting aside life’s highway for the next lane
Marya Williams, when life’s lanes bring you full circle
Carolyn Whitzman, lanes inspired by mother and grandmother
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