I rode a quick lap of No Err the other morning. It was 10 days since the Nimby Fifty bike race had sent 230 riders that way, and I assume that four of those racers were responsible for the discarded energy gel packets I picked up along my ride. A few scraps of litter doesn’t…

Her name was Kellie Daanen. We were seven, eight years old. She was one of my best friends. We sat together at lunch every day. One day, she said, “I’m an Aborigine.” “No, you’re not,” I told her. “How could you be? You have blue eyes.” She had incredible blue eyes, as arresting as the…

On Friday, March 10, at 10:30am, a new black box appeared in the entry to the Pemberton Valley Supermarket. It had a boomerang stenciled on the front, and more than 400 reusable cloth grocery bags dropped inside until it was almost overflowing. A minute later, a woman was grabbing a small bag of groceries at…

I have neutralized my despair since the inauguration of Donald Trump with this single thought: we are at the beginning of creating a better world. The dream of it has been brewing for some time — inequity, greed, climate disaster, ecological collapse — the balance is tilted so far out, that we’ve been propelled to…

I’ve only ever had two magazine stories killed – one of my very first, and one last year. It was just a sidebar. The magazine paid me for it. They ran something else in its place – something that fit alongside my feature story better. It made sense, on an editorial level. I wasn’t mad….

I can tell you within 10 seconds of meeting you whether you’re someone I want to spend more time with. Don’t be too impressed. You can do it too, and according to Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, you do it all the time. We all do – make instant judgments – based on how people smell, what…

I tend to approach Christmas with squinty-eyed suspicion. I’ve resisted sharing Krista Tippett’s blog post Why I Don’t Do Christmas, or re-posting last year’s Christmas column about wanting a compliment instead of a pile of planet-destroying stuff, or even this thoughtful post from the Huffington Post on what not to say to people grieving at…

My town was flooding, the rain had finally relented, and we were all core-shaken and gut-checked by the US election results. The boy and I went outside to patrol our creek, and snuggled on my back, his body went suspiciously slack. I bent over like a Sherpa, piggybacking him home to nap. Awesome, I thought, I can write….

There were a lot of years at the Canada Day parade that Shannon Paul marched up front, holding the sign, as the rest of the Growing Great Children tribe walked behind her, wrangling their kids. She was the only one without any, so her hands were free – for the organizing. And supporting. And upholding….