William Roberts had asked me to talk about the writer who had most profoundly shaped my understanding of the environment. But I couldn’t stop thinking about loss. I had just finished reading Brian Brett’s Trauma Farm. A farm is both theory and worms. But his essay Tasting My Father kept shuffling its way to the…
Category: lisa richardson
Home-remedies from a viral life and nature-deficit disorder
I meet a colleague who refuses to shake my hand or kiss me hello. She has been body-checked by the dreaded lurgy… falling victim to the massive human petri dish that is the PNE. “But it’s okay, I’m not contagious anymore,” she assures me. My immune response is less assured. In a feverish sleep the next…
You’re never too old to paraglide…
I celebrated turning thirty by throwing myself off a cliff. I was in good company – Pemberton paraglide guru, Jim Orava, was strapped to my back. Photographer MC Bourgie shared the thermals to my left, shooting so intently through her lens that she landed with a nasty bout of motion sickness. I wrote a story…
Revealing the secret ingredients of Pemberton’s Slow Food Cycle
Why was it so successful, people asked, when 400 cyclists wheeled into Pemberton in 2005 for the first Slow Food Cycle. They asked again the next year, when 1000 people came. And the third, when the event had begun to spawn spin-offs, into other valleys, like the first Slow Food Cycle Agassiz. The ingredients are…
Through the looking glass : manifesting Whistler’s many faces
This video, produced by Lilli Clark and Thomas Balzer, got a lot of airplay at the TELUS World Ski and Snowboard Festival in April. It was built around a manifesto I wrote for the Festival the previous year, and was a chance to turn the spotlight on some of the people who make up the…
Blueberry bribes
The blueberries are just coming in at North Arm Farm. My friends braved the “little flies” with their fiendish blood-sucking ways, to pick and pose last night for the final shoot in our Choose Pemberton campaign. They were more intent on picking than posing, so the photographer had to keep yelling at them to stop…
Scripting Pemberton’s siren-song – a Choose Pemberton story
Which is better? The bike-ride? Or the post bike-ride beer? Two epic rides are well-rooted in my memory of last summer – same collaborators, same formula – a grinding hike-a-bike up sandy, rarely-used trails that disintegrated beneath each foot-fall and sloughed into socks and shoes. Bike-frame pressing against knobby little verterbrae… Skittery thoughts, (what the…?),…
Chasing the light – shooting the Economic Development Commission campaign
Spent Monday night chasing the light, working with photographer Robin O’Neill, to capture the second “story” for a campaign for the Pemberton & District Economic Development Commission. This shot of our kick-ass local models was eliminated from the final cut, mostly because of the vertical orientation, but it sure fit the branding requirements of showcasing…
Working from home – alone but in good company
Settling into my studio in a new house has meant hunkering down amidst piles of boxes, side-stepping a warehouse of yet-to-be-installed kitchen cabinets in the living room, cooking up dinners on a borrowed camping stove, taking scenery breaks at local cafes, and generally making order out of chaos. The usual. It’s nice to know, as…
What happens when a vegetarian goes to the gunclub
A hippie-minded vegetarian goes to the local gun-club. Sounds like the opening line to a bad joke… or fodder for a limerick… but it was a Boxing Day deadline to write about the Pemberton Wildlife Association‘s shooting range. PWA members Clarke Gatehouse and Al McEwan were a little nervous when a city-bred vegetarian female journalist called…
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