Lisa Richardson Bylines

I posted this 3 months ago at the Origin Design and Communications’ blog, but I’m still marinating in this easy 5 step process on how to make something awesome, as gleaned for a feature I wrote for SBC Skier from a one-on-one with Sherpas Cinema’s  Dave Mossop.

All.I.Can. Official Teaser from Sherpas Cinema on Vimeo.

1. Don’t be afraid of a big idea.

Creating a ski film with a theme has been one of the hugest challenges of my life.  The chapters and segments in All.I.Can are loosely based on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs – his theory provides quite a palatable explanation of the building blocks and stages necessary for a person to reach “self-actualization” or reach their full potential.  In the case of our environment, we are interested in humanity as a whole reaching actualization, and in turn, a balanced sustainable existence.

2. Commit yourself, boldly and publicly.

Dropping the trailer for All.I.Can last summer was kind of like Evil Knievel holding a press conference and saying, “Next year, I’m going to jump 150 cars in my underwear”. Half a million people have seen it. It’s being studied in film school. It’s a piece of art, in and of itself. But it’s also a promise and a contract with 500,000 people, to deliver. You can’t get more accountable than that.

It’s been the most intense year of my life, and though I signed up for this epic quest, I never dreamed there would be such an enormous following.  It’s awesome, but yes, the pressure can often be overwhelming – we are just regular dudes after all.

3. Give yourself a deadline. That you must meet. Or suffer public humiliation.

That would be the September 15 screening in Montreal at IF3 – the International Freeski Film Festival, followed by the world premiere in Whistleron September 23.

4. Trust your obsessions. (That would be time–lapse, I’m guessing?)

5. Make the process as fun as possible. Explore a question you are passionate and curious about. Take the dream trips for your research and shooting. Work with people you love and admire and have a blast hanging out with.

Single best moment of the past 2 years? That’s impossible to say, but my birthday party at 10,000ft on the Freshfields Icefields pops to mind.  Next day, not so much.

6. Be disciplined and dig in for the hard yards.

As Scott Belsky, founder of Behance says, great work is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.

And perspiration looks like this:

Mitchell Scott, (June 13): So how many hours of work left until we get to that day, September 23?

Dave Mossop: Whatever the days are between now and then, times 24 hours a day, plus about 300 hours, that we’ll manage to squeeze in there somehow.

You can order the film on DVD or Blu-Ray, here. Or download it on iTunes, here.

A few years ago, as a New Year’s resolution, I decided to write one poem a day.

I was inspired by my grandfather, who, at 92, would jot down a few notes every day in his dayplanner about what had happened that day, even though from where anybody else was sitting not much was happening at all.

Still, it was a practice that helped him differentiate one day from the next.

The motivation was cured further over dinner with my partner’s grandmother. In her late 80s, she confessed that she regretted not keeping a journal. “You forget so much,” she said. The days all blur into one, she said, unless you make an effort to identify one true thing that makes today different from yesterday. “They just slip away so quickly.”

And in a way, that’s what the poem-a-day was. A word-Polaroid. A dated snapshot. An attempt to harness the velocity of this life, and if not to actually slow it down, to keep pace.

Some days, some weeks, I was swept up in the current of life and the notebook didn’t float. But I kept returning to it.

This year, I recommitted to the poem-a-day project. I dropped $55 on an A4 Moleksine notebook, so the dated page (and the audaciously expensive paper) would hold me accountable.

Today is December 31, and I close the book. I have written 365 ordinary poems.

I might have to write a thousand, in order to write one truly brilliant one (like strange and shining poets I stumble upon.)

But even if I never manage to write a poem that shines, and even if I never sit down at the age of 80-something and follow the trail of crumbs that leads back through all my days, to this new 2012 notebook, all fresh pages and promise, the exercise has allowed me to look at each day of my life as if there is something brilliant worth plucking out, burnishing down to a handful of words and holding up to the light.

I get the new hygienist at my 6 monthly check-up.

After ten years as a ski-bum, finally having dental benefits means I vaguely dread these appointments – there’s belated penance to be paid for sins of omission and neglect. And the new hygienist, though young and capable, is brusque enough to be a little Scary. Not to mention the sharp instruments she wields.

“Do you scrub when you brush your teeth?” she asks.

“Ummm…” (Is there any point in denying this?)

“Imagine scrubbing the skin on the back of your hand really hard.  You’d scrub it raw. That’s what you’re doing to do your teeth.”

“So you’re telling me I can’t brush twice as hard for half as long?”

“No shortcuts,” she smiles. “Sing Happy Birthday. Brush for the whole song. Gently.”

Be gentle with yourself. Take the time it takes. 

This has been the story of my 2011. Repeated so often and coming at me in so many different ways (in yoga class, in the dentist chair, in the garden, on my bike, building a trail, at the shooting range, in bed with the flu) that I expect they’re going to take my “gifted” card back. *Sorry, we didn’t realise how dense you would turn out to be when we gave this to six-year-old-You.

My constitutional density has turned me into an advocate for a Daily Practice.

It is why I love my friend, the Manifestly Un-Dense Julia McCabe for her Art of Discipline yoga immersions - for not only committing to a personal 6am practice of 2 hours of yoga a day, but for cajoling a class full of sleepy-eyed students to the mat with her.

And it is why I keep checking in on my (also Not Dense) friend Rory Tucker with his Photo a Day project. His curiosity to discover his recurring themes and obsessions has taught me that it is okay to revisit the same things over and over, that sometimes, that return is what it takes for things to sink really deep.

Year Forty One. Photos by Rory Tucker

On Friday night, I ducked away early from a Christmas cocktail party, sucked my breath in at the cold, and hiked over to Muni Hall to present a seminar on media relations to the last ever class of interns to take LUNA’s remarkable Community Event Coordination training certificate program.

LUNA’s CEC certificate is a perfect case study in sustainable operations and innovative social programing.  A $55,000 municipal budget line-item is stretched like a magic bean into incredible low-cost programming offered all year long to Whistler’s most under-served population, the seasonal young adult workers that staff the town’s engine-rooms. It works thanks to a core group of ‘interns’ who are accepted into the program each year to learn events management in the most hands-on way, graduating from the program only once they have produced their own event. Given the economic importance of events to Whistler, it’s an incredible in-community training program braintrusted and run by the quiet creative talent, Kiran Pal-Pross.

Over the 7 years the program has run, that annual investment has yielded 51 graduates, 6000 volunteer hours, and over 250 events (including the iconic LUNAFliks), attended by 15,000 young adults. According to LUNA’s website, the program has contributed to a 20% reduction in alcohol-related calls to the RCMP. That’s a pretty good ROI.

“We proudly advertise and promote LUNA as a best practice.”  
Norm McPhail, Officer In Charge, Sea to Sky Regional Police Services for the RCMP

After attending my first LUNAflik this summer, and connecting with the smart dedicated women who are LUNA’s last ever interns, I have come to believe that LUNA’s Community Event Coordination program is one of the most remarkable innovations to have come out of Whistler in the last decade. It also offers a wealth of talent and creative thinking that Whistler’s tired [sic]-and-true events sector desperately needs a dose of.

Alas, bureacratic bean-counters don’t share my enthusiasm. They have identified LUNA (as well as the under-attended Youth Centre) as programs that are beyond the core services of a municipality. I’m guessing that the cost of hiring one single By-Law officer, should additional policing of the muni’s liquor laws be needed as this programming disappears, would be approximately $55,000, so the “savings” seems like dodgy math to me.

$127,500 will be saved in 2012 by reducing youth services from the youth centre and LUNA, according to the report.

That means 10% of the $1.2 million cuts recommended come from reducing services to the young (non-voting) residents of the community, the ones, let’s face it, least likely to call up their elected representatives and say, don’t take our programming away!

This year’s class of LUNA interns has shrunk down to just three keeners, hanging on despite the fact that municipal budget cuts will end the program prematurely, so that there’s no chance for them to graduate with the certificate.

They will rally for LUNA’s grand finale event, Hockey 101, on December 30. And then, an incredible social experiment will come to an end.

JP Auclair Street Segment (from All.I.Can.) from Sherpas Cinema on Vimeo.

Sherpas Cinema’s All.I.Can has been winning serious props since its premiere in the fall, but one segment of the film is making a profound impression. JP Auclair’s urban skiing sequence, shot in Rossland, Trail and Nelson BC, received more than 200,000 hits in 48 hours when it was released online.

Which makes me wonder about instant karma. Here’s a few things I discovered when I interviewed JP for  this story on the Sherpas for SBC Skier magazine that suggest guy has a pretty solid credit rating with the bank of Good Attitude.

1. He taught himself to edit, so he’d have better control over his stuff. He didn’t want to be that athlete walking out of the screening, bitter, because the segment that he had put his heart, soul and body on the line for, was disappointing.

It’s really hard for the production company to keep track of everyone, especially in a 2 year project, things get lost. So one year, 2003, I think, I decided, ‘I am going to go edit my part.’ I learned the software so I’d understand the whole editing part and wouldn’t annoy the editors knowing nothing, and then I asked Poor Bpyz to send me all my footage for editing to learn on. Next thing I knew, I had a finished product, because it’s super fun to edit.  My philosophy has always been, don’t bitch if you didn’t work hard.

2. He got his part because he lived next door to the Sherpas in Whistler one summer. (Casting call happened in the backyard.)

I met the Sherpas last year on this cat ski trip with Fresh Sports Calgary. Mica had hired Dave to shoot it. One night we all started talking about the environment and the movie and I just thought it was a great project. By coincidence, we met again in Alaska. I was still shooting for PoorBoyz, but all my crew had burned out and left, so I was by myself. Chad Sayers got hurt on their first day, they were looking to fill a seat on the helicopter and I was looking for people to ski with and film, so we agreed to trade. Then, last summer I was working on a PoorBoyz segment, next door to Dave’s house. He was cutting the teaser for All.I.Can and wanted to revist the dialogue we’d had at Mica, the whole “do more, not less” thing that I’m pretty passionate about. It had resonated for Dave and he wanted to include it in the trailer.

3. He can’t fake it.

I’ve had to find new ways to get inspired, because ‘ski-porn’ can get old. I don’t really work until I find something that drives me, and this film, I was like, oh my god, I’ve got to be part of this. Dave had seen my urban segment for Revolver and was like, you’ve got to be that guy for my movie. I was like, no way. I didn’t have the drive to do that. No way, I’m finished with that. But I thought about it later on, and thought, if it’s Dave, he probably has got some insane thing in mind and I can’t pass on that. He wants to do what I do, so I was like, okay, let’s try and do something.

4. Complete strangers trust him.

We’d knock on people’s doors because we were in their backyards, jumpbing over their cars. We’d feel like little kids, “uh, can we build a jump in your backyward?” One lady, we asked, “Can we jump on your driveway?” Dave was like, “I swear, he’s really good, he won’t land on the car.”

5. He starts things, because risk-taking and passion are part of the make-up of mountain people.

Auclair helped launch the 1080 ski for Salomon in 1998, founded Armada skis in 2002, and founded Alpine Initiatives in 2008.

Our whole take at Alpine Initiatives is you can’t really have a healthy environment without having healthy commmunities, and vice versa. It’s about trying to make the snowsport community stronger, so we can reach out and embrace the global community and people who are wanting to uplift their own community, no matter where in the world they are. We call ourselves mountain lovers, winter enthusiasts, people who love to explore, have drive and passion, risk taking people, and that can make a community really dynamic. We all get our inspiration pretty much from being in the mountains and hanging out with beauty, basically. If we had the resources we wanted, we’d be all around the world. But we’re super committed to doing every project really well and not having loose ends.

All of which makes me think, JP Auclair deserves every “like” he gets.

Skiing The Edge is now available for download on amazon.com and via iTunes.

Deploy today’s coffee budget in favour of story! Just $3.99.

In July, Dave Fonda invited me to judge awards recognising the best feature ski writing of the year.

I said yes because:

1. he promised me a coffee mug,
2. he also promised there would be no more than ten entries,
3. finally, he promised to buy me several fine microbrews if I go skiing in Quebec and I like being owed beer by quality people in groovy locations around the world.

(I subsequently found out he’s in advertising. Tread carefully when being seduced by a professional copywriter.)

I also agreed because:

4. my ego voted YEA, inflating immediately at the prospect, and

5. it seemed like the perfect way to settle in with a glass of wine and the best published ski writing of the year, to learn a thing or two about the craft of narrative, ski and lifestyle journalism, which is kinda my thing.

As it turned out, the best ski writing isn’t getting published.

Whatever is happening out there in Media Land is shrivelling up the market for long form work, and the world of ski storytelling is no different. So what began as a full body immersion in the best ski writing of the year became a glimpse at the declining opportunities for ski writers to tell stories beyond schilling resorts in buffed up service pieces masquerading as features.

Chapter Two. Fast forward to October. Another email pings into the in-box. Jules Older, my one-time editor of the now defunct Ski Press has an idea. (The four most thrilling and dangerous words in the English language: I have an idea.)

Jules has not taken the demise of print lightly. He took to hanging around the Apple store in San Fran, taking free seminars in shooting and editing video, he wrote an app reviewing San Francisco restaurants, and began to maintain an informal e-newsletter connecting an A-list of writers and journalists. Still a reliable arbiter of topnotch work, Jules was receiving (in addition to the bad jokes and tales of woe from his circle of Jokers) the occasional long-form email, outpourings and ventings from long-form journalists with no real forum left.

The trigger event: an email from Gerry Wingenbach, author of the 100 Best Ski Resorts in the World, veteran journalist and disenchanted correspondent with Outside magazine’s Away blog, about spending a night in the Whistler jailhouse.

Jules now had 3 killer stories cooking up his in-box – stories that hadn’t otherwise seen the light of day and had no real prospect of airing.

So he embraced the first tenet of the e-revolution: DO IT YOURSELF.

“Thinkin’ bout an ebook,” went his email. “Are you in?”

20 writers, whose names you’d recognise if you’ve picked up a ski magazine any time in the last decade, said yes.

Leslie Anthony, Michel Beaudry, Michael Finkel, Dave Fonda, David Goodman, Beth Jahnigen, Lori Knowles, Steven Kotler, Skip King, GD Maxwell, Moira McCarthy, Roger Moss, Effin Older, Peggy Shinn, Roger Toll, Kristen Ulmer, Jenn Weede, Gerry Wingenbach, and me.

Skiing The Edge, the collection of tall tales and true does for ski writing what #longreads is doing for long form journalism, what Utne Reader is doing for the alternative press, what Dave Eggers is doing for contemporary writing with his annual Best American Non Required Reading – it culls through all the bullshit and hands you the good stuff on a silver platter. Compiled and edited by a pro, it compiles the best stuff you’ll be glad to sit down with, sometime this winter, with a steaming mug of cocoa/gluhwein/french-pressed coffee in one hand, and your e-reader in the other. (Which I am about to do. With a special sneak preview. To finally immerse myself in the best ski feature writing of 2011.)

Skiing The Edge will be available on 1 December, for less than the price of a ski magazine (or a latte in a ski town.) $3.99. But it will be juicier. Way way juicier. So plan to take a bite. And rediscover what you’ve been missing.

It’s not quite as weird as David Lynch (but then, who is?), but Choose Pemberton, which launched 18 months ago, was my own version of The Interview Project.

Officially, it was the content command centre for a summer campaign geared at promoting Pemberton.

Unofficially, it was a chance to ask local people, the ones who don’t sit on the sidelines and rattle their fists, but who roll up their sleeves and jump into the business of growing, making, moving and shaking, what inspires them.

At almost 15,000 hits, 74 posts and more than 30 profiles, the end of the year and the onset of winter seemed a good time to wander back through the archives and revisit the 5 most popular interviews so far.

1. Handcrafted food for the People! Western Promises Food Promises A Revolution of Taste.

Western Promises celebrated its one year anniversary this November as quietly as it opened, but its fans aren’t known to be too shy about shouting their praises for the funky little restaurant. One lunch, a customer left with a shout-out to the kitchen, “Thanks, Michael. My mouth just had an orgasm.”

Michael Guy’s passion for hard-working food shines through in every bite. But I loved his commitment to his adopted home the most:

“Why Pemberton?  There is no place I would rather be…in 50 years I hope to have my last breath somewhere here staring at the mountains and thinking about what a decent life I’ve had.”

2. Laying hands at Kula Wellness Centre.

When Percy Abraham and Corinne Von Dehn set up a home massage studio last summer, named “Kula” for “community” I got a sneak peak into their philosophy on wellness and work-life balance, and got the chance to ask Percy something that had long been on my mind, “How much does it weird people out to have a male massage therapist?”

A reasonably large percentage of female massage recipients are not entirely comfortable being touched by a man and a probably even bigger percentage of male recipients are the same. While respecting everyone’s choices, I try not to let gender interfere with what’s really at stake here : healing.

3. How to become a potter with Sunna Studio’s Amy Hazeldine.

Before Amy Hazeldine was the feature artist in Mountain Life magazine, she was the feature artist on Choose Pemberton, revealing her perfectionist tendencies, her Icelandic inspiration, how much she geeks out on glazes, and how, after plenty of creative trial and error, she’s finally found her path.

I’ve worked as an environmental educator, spent four summers in Nunavut in diamond exploration camps as the cook, worked on the assembly line making tire parts, and I’ve done my Whistler time as a bartender and server. Out of all the hats I’ve worn, the potter’s hat is my favourite fit.

4. Spotlighting Pemberton’s most prolific graphic designer, Sumire Design.

Lisa Komuro Ankeny does so much work behind the scenes to make Pemberton a better-looking place, it was great to spin the karmic wheel back in her direction. Her enthusiasm for Pemberton is inspiring (“Pemberton is amazing,” she told Choose Pemberton, “It seems like this little town is bubbling over with creatives. It’s as if everyone here makes something, has a garden and is an incredible athlete. It’s a beautiful place to be.”) but I most loved her insight on how to juggle life as a graphic designer, a mother, and an artist:

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. I’ve never been able to juggle – not even the scarves back in P.E.

3 days a week of daycare, coffee and some late nights do the trick. I wouldn’t change a thing.

5. Time for a new set of skis? Think Tyfoon.

What do legendary ski mountaineers do when they grow up and have a family? Why, they keep skiing, attend the Youtube School of Artisan Ski-Making and begin handcrafting wood skis from the Coast Mountains’ forests. Is there a top secret formula?

No, no secrecy in the process. Just a crazy old ski bum with his head down in the basement, breathing sawdust and trying to come up with a ski that will suit.

And that’s just a sampling of the amazing growers, makers, movers and shakers of Pemberton.

My passion for the project was fuelled by a conviction that if you want to live somewhere amazing, then you have to support the people who are trying to do amazing things.

But the project also reiterated for me that my favourite writing projects are often pure portraiture, simply letting people tell their stories, in their own words. It helped me to discover that the art of great storytelling really grows out of the art of listening. And it reinforced, without a doubt, that when I landed in Pemberton, I had truly come home.

No, really. Take me seriously. I’m a serious journalist.

Actually, yes, I do tend to bite off more than I can chew.

Thank you Feet Banks. I can always count on you to keep me company out in WeirdoLand.

A tidal wave of one million ideas is crashing on my shore, which is what happens when there’s one project, one assignment, demanding all your attention. Be quiet, darlings. You’ll get your turn.

Hence, this quick tutorial from Miranda July: a handy guide for the easily distracted. (Anyone got some giant mixing bowls they can lend me?)

Hold that thought.

Julia - I left something at the studio tonight after your class, but I don’t want it back.

It’s my self-loathing.

I don’t think you’ll have to sweep it up. I suspect it will spontaneously combust without me there to feed it.

Yeah, you really kicked my ass tonight.

That was a tough session. The toughest part was turning up. It’s hard coming back to yoga after two years of no practice, especially in Whistler where every body is sculpted and lean.

But I have known you for ten years now and I don’t think I’ve ever been your student. So I sucked up my trepidation and your shining face and big embrace were a good welcome. And once I tiptoed into the studio, I saw all those ripped bodies and perfectly cut arms and just vowed to avoid the wall-to-wall mirrors for the next 90 minutes.

You might be the nicest sadist I know. Steel and sugar all rolled up in one. A core workout? Right off the bat. I’m in over my head, here, I was thinking. Julia’s class is a bit too advanced for me. Whistler is too advanced for me. All these fucking hardcore intense people are too advanced, and a little too comfortable in their semi-naked posing, for me.

But at some point in that 90 minutes, I stopped thinking that I wasn’t good enough, and I began to feel this jubilation in the effort, in the pure physicality, in the slow openings, in the sweat coming off my forehead in actual droplets. Something shifted. And by the time I was lying in Savasana, with more of my body’s salt water leaking to the bamboo floor, this time out my eyes, I almost felt light. The last time that yoga made me cry, it was frog pose that undid me. I’ve left some stuff in this room, I thought, thinking about whatever it was that I left behind when I opened my hips up that tiny little bit in frog pose. What now?

And then I had this weird conversation with myself.

Leave your self-loathing.

Okay. Good one.

No, seriously. Leave it behind.

Okay. Yes. I will. I have. There, done.

Yesterday, I watched Brene Brown’s TED talk on vulnerability and wholeheartedness and when she said, “you are not perfect, but you are wired for struggle, and you are worthy of love and belonging,” something snagged in me. My breath in my chest.

It came back to me, tonight:

You are not perfect, but you are wired for struggle. You’re body is not perfect but it is wired for struggle. You are worthy. You know that you have to practice compassion towards yourself, first, right?

Yes.

So you’re leaving it?

Yes.

No, seriously, Lis, have you left it? Or are you going to sneak back in and pick it up, out of habit, because you’ll feel naked without it?

I’ll leave it.

For good?

Yes.

Okay.

I think I have resolved this, composed myself, when we roll out of savasana and into lotus, and I get ready to OM and Namaste and wrap up the session. I think I’ve made my peace and had a nice little moment with myself and the tears are done, just part of the saltwater residue of mostly sweat at my feet.

We didn’t get to start with Oms, you say, so let’s make a sea of Oms. Let’s finish with eight. But instead of all together, Om on your own breath, purposely, so there’s a sea of them. It’s really pretty.

You tell us not to worry if we’ve never Omed before, that we don’t have to, that it means many things, but the meaning you like is connected to a discovery that the sound made at the core of the earth is a deep vibrational Om.

And so we Om.

I cannot explain the wave of sound that washes over me, through me, around me. 20 voices, all different pitches, all resonating. I feel as if the earth has wrapped me up in a roil of sound and is humming-thrumming to me, humming some deep ancient multitonal song that my very cells recognise, a sound that contains whalesong and bee-buzz and a million other things I can’t pull out of it.

And the emotion of it shocks me. And it doesn’t stop.

The great wave of love and bliss and relief and grief that we are making washes over me, floods through me, bowls me over, buoys me up.

I disappear straight after class because I do not quite know how to express all these things to you. I slip through the long wet grass across the train tracks and back to my car where I pull out my notebook and write:

Dear Julia,

I left something in the corner of your studio tonight – my self-loathing. Just want to let you know, I won’t be coming back for it.

In that great rising sea of oms, I heard that I am beloved of the earth.

I am not perfect, but I am wired for struggle, and I embrace the physical pleasure of that struggle, that my body is capable of it, and I embrace all of our worthiness, our deep cellular wave-riding worthiness of being loved.