I think I’m ready to express myself again. I stopped for a while, my confidence shot and anxieties off the charts in recent months. Yesterday, I started working on a podcast about B.C. fisheries. It hurt my body and I was exhausted afterward but it lifted my spirits. I was nervous, messed up a recording,…
After five years of mushroom picking I have finally realized just how little I know about the “sport.” I can identify about a dozen edible species and have enjoyed countless meals made better by foraging, including chanterelle risotto, cauliflower mushroom stuffed quail and creamy morel pastas. But no meal is worth the pain I endured…
About 15 per cent of Canadians currently identify as having a disability and as Canada’s age pyramid is shifting and the population aging, that number could grow. Multiple studies and surveys show that people with disabilities are more prone to experiencing abuse (financial, neglect, physical, sexual, bullying). People with disabilities are also less likely to report…
Part one of “In Dignity: Disabilities, Freedom and the Fight for Security aired on CBC’s On the Coast, All Points West and Radio West on Oct. 13, 2015” From CBC online: Laurette Yelle felt her privacy was violated when two staff members of the group home she lived in barged into her room while she…
This article originally appeared in The Globe and Mail on September 25, 2015. See the original here. When eight-year-old Sophie Skogster fell behind her Canadian classmates, her parents, try as they might, could not convince school administrators to “fail” their daughter. In 2009, the Skogster family moved to Finland, home to one of the highest-ranked…
(Excerpt from an article I wrote for The Doable City Reader) A bubblegum pink trailer hawking a saccharine rainbow of Hawaiian shaved ice sits perched just off a sidewalk in southeast Portland, Oregon, inviting passersby into a 15,000-square-foot urban culinary experiment—theTidbit Food Farm and Garden, a food cart pod. A phenomenon Portland is now famous for,…
(Excerpt from an article I wrote for The Doable City Reader) In 1940, the small farming community of San Jose, California, sat nestled between sloping hillsides and the rugged Pacific Ocean. Back then, its humble downtown core was surrounded by walkable neighbourhoods. But when the post-war boom came in the 1960s and 70s, San Jose was…
(Excerpt from an article I wrote for The Doable City Reader @ http://www.880cities.org/doablecity/business-case/) Multiple dump trucks running eight hours a day for ten days, and more than $50,000 in dirt. That’s what it will take to fill a massive hole in Wichita’s downtown business district. Once the dirt is in, it will become a temporary park with…
(Excerpt from an article I wrote for The Doable City Reader @ http://www.880cities.org/doablecity/business-case/ ) “The more successfully a city mingles everyday diversity of uses and users in its everyday streets, the more successfully, casually (and economically) its people thereby enliven and support well-located parks that can thus give back grace and delight to their neighbourhoods instead of…
As a millennial, my most recent interaction with vinyl dates back to early childhood. I have fond memories of playing Alvin and the Chipmunk’s version of “Leader of the Pack” on a 78” (is that how you call it?) The high-pitched notes rang through the cheap speakers of my bright-yellow Big Bird shaped turntable. So,…
This article was originally published in the 2015 Langara Journalism Review. Accessible Media Inc. reporter Gary Steeves stands precariously close to the edge of a dock on Vancouver’s False Creek. He is rehearsing his lines while his guide dog, a six-year-old standard poodle named Bogart, stares distractedly at reflections on the water. “Vancouver is a…
This article was originally published in the 2015 Langara Journalism Review. The wind carried the smell of death. Bodies lined sidewalks of the Filipino city of Tacloban and filled the beds of cargo trucks while others, still trapped under the rubble, awaited recovery. “It’s the worst smell in the world, partly because you know what…
Ash Kelly Reports 