People who don’t know me well think I’m chill. Easy-going. Relaxed. As people move into my inner circle, that turns on its head. Thoroughbred. I’ve been called that twice in the last year. It sounds like a compliment… but high-strung and hot-blooded isn’t usually. I think that’s why I’m so drawn to the Slow Movement….
Category: lisa richardson
Why I’m about to pay $65 for a lunch for the Kathy Barnett Memorial Fund
I cried most of the trip back from SIA in 2008. I had just heard that Kathy Barnett was dead, and was imagining the long and lonely flight her husband, my editor, must have been making home from their holiday in New Zealand, without his partner. Not the plan. Rob Montgomery, The People You Love…
Taking the “bah, humbug” out of Christmas
“Christmas is here, the magic of Christmas, filling our hearts with glee…” I kill the radio before I can burst my eardrums with sharpened chopsticks to prevent having to listen to another second of sentimental drivel. Explaining why I hate Christmas in the middle of December is too much like honestly answering what motivated me…
Down the rabbithole – SBC SKIER magazine turns 10
A ski mag was my rabbithole… How else does a girl from Brisbane wind up in Whistler? I took the direct route, falling through a copy of some neon-flecked Australian ski magazine with Glen Plake on the cover, circa July 1994, to land in Whistler five months later into what would become a completely different…
Revisiting Revelstoke’s Boulder Mountain avalanche
“Why go over it again?” people asked, when I told them I was writing an article for KMC mag about the second biggest avalanche disaster in Canadian history. People died. There’d been enough finger-pointing. And there was enough media coverage at the time to wear everyone raw. But I’ve lived in a (distinctly non-morbid) house…
PR is dead. Long live the storytellers.
I didn’t decide to wrap up my 4 year tenure as the Communications Director of the TELUS World Ski and Snowboard Festival because PR is dead. (Although Mat Wilcox closing down her firm rang like a bell from the heart of Vancouver : ding, dong, the the game is forever changed. Start over. Start over.)…
Writer, unplugged
Three weeks just spent reconnecting with my inner feral at Yosemite’s historic Camp 4 helped me pinpoint the three most important ingredients for a happy life: 1. shelter from the storm, 2. good company, 3. quality coffee to ease the morning into its groove. Added bonus? A down puffy jacket and hot running water. Those…
Me! Me! Me! Stoking social media savvy at the Whistler Writers Festival
Honest. I’m not an egomaniac. That’s why I thought it was so funny to tell Stella Harvey, the Whistler Writers Festival director that I would present a session called “Me! Me! Me! How to build your social media savvy for wanton self-promotion.” But now the gig is imminent, (and even has a presenting sponsor in Street…
How to collaborate (or My Secret Crush on Graphic Designers)
I’m a word-nerd. Words are my fancy and my fetish… but working with illustrators, art directors and graphic designers over the years continues to supersize my respect for their ability to turn words (be it a tagline, a 2 page creative brief, or a 2000 word story) into pictures. I’m not sure if the 1000…
Buyers Guide for alternative ski-freaks – a resurgence of hand-made skis?
In the corner of a house in Pemberton stands a 250cm tall pair of wooden skis. Naheed Henderson pulled them out of a burn pile in the Altai mountains – where people have been skiing as far back as memory goes, where skiing may, in fact, have originated, where skis are chopped from spruce in the…
Lisa Richardson Bylines 