His first stage play, "The Initiation," which he wrote and directed while a UBC student, is the subject of his comic memoir "Free Magic Secrets Revealed."
[1] Leiren-Young's first feature film, The Green Chain (2007), which he wrote, directed and produced, explores the issues facing dying logging communities in British Columbia.
His love of comic books inspired his work on a number of animated series, including a ReBoot episode parodying The X-Files (details of which were featured in Entertainment Weekly) and Beast Wars: Transformers.
Twenty years after his stint at The Williams Lake Tribune, Leiren-Young turned his experiences into a comic memoir, Never Shoot A Stampede Queen (Heritage House, 2009), which won the 2009 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour.
Leiren-Young's news and feature writing, humour pieces, reviews, and columns have appeared in a host of publications in Canada and the United States, including Time, Maclean's, and The Utne Reader.
[8] Leiren-Young also became the University of Victoria's 2014 Harvey Stevenson Southam Lecturer in Journalism and Nonfiction for the Department of Writing, the first alumnus to hold this position.
He hosts the Skaana podcast where he interviews experts like Paul Watson, David Suzuki and Elizabeth May about orcas, oceans and the environment.
[10] He has written and spoken about how Canada's Trans Mountain Pipeline could lead to the extinction of the endangered Southern resident killer whales.
[11] He hosted a podcast for Vancouver's independent online news site The Tyee, where he often addressed issues facing British Columbia's old growth forests.
His Tyee interviews provided the content for his book, The Green Chain: Nothing Is Ever Clear Cut (Heritage House, 2009), which examines the logging industry.
As half of the comedy duo, "Local Anxiety" with Kevin Crofton, Leiren-Young wrote and co-starred in the EarthVision award-winning TV special, Greenpieces: The World's First Eco-Comedy.
He also coauthored This Crazy Time: Living our Environmental Challenge (Knopf Canada, 2012) with controversial Canadian environmentalist, Tzeporah Berman.
The Walrus feature tells the story of the first killer whale displayed in captivity, Moby Doll, who was harpooned in the summer of 1964 off the coast of British Columbia's Saturna Island.