Lisa Richardson

Culture is a real estate problem

How secret poetry appreciators and others need places to act out their wild imaginings Here’s a sneak peek at tomorrow’s Pique back page. Exclusive to subscribers! (You can read it there at https://www.piquenewsmagazine.com/local-news/opinion-culture-is-a-real-estate-problem-11557490) Kerry Dorey, Jay Molloy and I had this idea. Officially, we’re the Society of Secret Poetry Appreciators, but you should know that…

Tend the Invisible

Jasper, a year after a wildfire burned a third of the town to the ground, felt cauterized, cut off from its own vitality, as though burns had staunched overt bloodshed but left gnarled scar tissue that was hard to look at. It’s impossible as an outsider to know how the fire actually affected the community,…

Influence flows in all directions

The man on the screen has slung a hammock tent between two posts and loaded it up with bags of concrete, to show how much it can hold. He pokes his head above the mountain of mounds, the hammock defiantly taut, while a caption reads “Do not try this at home.” The Kickstarter for the…

This is how we Solstice

I never write about horse camp because it’s hard to touch with words, it’s a “you have to be there” kind of experience. But I did write a caption to go along with some photos I shared on instagram and CCO’s media-savvy marketer, Hailey asked “wanna write a blog post?” and so I tried to…

Ten Ways to Fall in Love with the Future

Future be scary, amirite? It’s hard not to feel trepidation for what lies ahead, which is why I hoovered up Rob Hopkins’ How to Fall in Love with the Future, because who doesn’t want to have a love story awaiting them, just around the bend. Here’s what I learned. 1. You must travel to the…

It’s not your fault that you are not flourishing, Mama.

I’m lying awake at 3am and I can’t stop thinking about “Anonymous member”, the mother of two school-aged kids in our community who has posted on the Parents forum: “I’ve started and stopped this post so many times. But I’m getting to a point where I just don’t know what to do and doing nothing…

100 days of yoga teaching

107 days ago, I started teaching yoga, at the ripe old age of 49 2/3. I had not planned on doing this. In fact, when I was doing yoga teacher training, I was vehement: I’m not doing this to become a teacher. I loved the teacher, and I wanted to do more than a drop-in…

Community on the Rise: Jen Park’s Bread Warehouse is proof of a new beginning

In Station Eleven, the apocalyptic post-pandemic novel by Canadian writer Emily St Mandel, one of the signs that the survivors were starting to rebuild community was when people started baking bread again. When Jen Park opened the Bread Warehouse in the Pemberton Industrial Park, it, too, signalled a rising sense of optimism. “I don’t feel…

Get Engaged

I had a flash of cold clarity: is this the phone call that changes the rest of my life?

Monarchy is weird (pls god save us from any more kings)

As historians of authoritarianism and brave journalists are telling us—your joy matters, community matters, refusing to obey in advance matters, vigilance matters. God save us from kings and king wannabes. Go find true majesty and ordinary courage and proclaim it.