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…
Category: creativity
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…
Her crowning moment: a Q+A with artist Asta Kovanen and her Travellers series, now showing at the Ferry Building Gallery
On Thursday, I got to attend the opening for a new art exhibit at the Ferry Building Gallery in West Vancouver, featuring my friend, Whistler-based artist, Asta Kovanen. Asta was paired by the jury with Marlene Lowden, a painter, and the two artists’ works juxtapose beautifully, as a way of pondering our relationship and roles…
Is the City Dreaming You or Are You Dreaming the City? Meeting my 20 year old self in New York City
One of my oldest friends was laid off last May from a firm she’d been working with since we graduated in the late 90s. She decided, after securing commitments from friends to join, to use her severance to splurge on a month-long sabbatical in New York’s Chelsea neighbourhood. I was one of the friends. COVID-19…
Katie Burrell on putting yourself out there
If instead of Barbie, Greta Gerwig had had to spend 2022 remaking Hot Dog… the Movie, after living and working a couple of seasons in a ski town, Weak Layers might be the result. Luckily for us, mountain culture has its own Greta Gerwig and her name is Katie Burrell. Our very own ‘action sports’…
Spotlighting Alex van Zyl and the culture-shaping superpowers of landscape architects and design of place
I’ve worked before with the wonderful Tom Barratt of Tom Barratt Landscape Architecture – he’s a long-time Pique reader and he often has a sense of something that might be a story of interest to me. (This piece on his work in the Chilcotins, which required the long-time road biker to take some mountain bike…
Beyond Treeline – nominated for a Canadian National Magazine Award for Art Direction
I have just received a copy of Dr Suzanne Simard’s much-anticipated book, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. She was deep into the writing of the book when I had the chance to speak with her in 2019, about her work, and the way it had been incorporated into Jordan Manley’s…
Speak the Wild Words
Use your words to conjure the more beautiful world your heart knows is possible. Her name was Brooke. It had been a name chosen carefully for her by her father, so when she read that the word “brook” was being struck from the dictionary, along with a host of other words “redundantly” featuring nature, it…
The Language Your Body Speaks
Befriending your self starts with making small talk with your body My father was a pharmacist, my mother a nurse. In my household, we took stale-dated medicine (because it was still good even if it was illegal for him to sell so why waste it) and we were never indulged a day off school unless…
Garlic Planting as Prayer
The fall garlic planting mission has always been accompanied by a prayer, of sorts. An atheistic kind, largely faithless: “Okay then, do your thing.” I’d brush my hands clean of the moist black soil and feel again the improbability of all this growing business – stick clove in soil, anticipate its budding five or six…
Lisa Richardson Bylines 