“People haven’t heard the last of me—the best is yet to come,” says Sue Medley, at home in Comox.

Photo by Boomer Jerritt

Known for her rich, soaring voice, accomplished guitar playing and natural gift of song-writing, Medley resists tidy classification in a single musical category.  Although she’s sometimes been called a country singer, she sees herself in a broader light.

“Instead of defining what I do by a name of a genre, I’d rather say something like… well, let’s say if you take a bit of Melissa Etheridge, a touch of Sheryl Crow and throw in a handful of Bonnie Raitt, you’d get me,” she says, laughing.

“Just put it all in a blender, mix it up, pour it out and shoot it back!” she adds, sounding like the lyric-writer she is.

In classic rock’n’roll style, Medley’s journey has had its up and downs.  The peak, she says, was singing alongside John Mellencamp at the Bob Dylan tribute in New York in the early 1990s.  “To be up there on stage at Madison Square Gardens and look out and see that crowd—that was hands down the biggest adrenaline rush I’ve ever had!”

The lowest point came about 10 years ago in Los Angeles.  She’d moved there in 1998, after signing on with a new manager who was based there.   Things started out promisingly; Medley released an independent CD, her third, called Velvet Morning, and shot a video, but without the promotional power of a major record company (in a time before Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube), it had met only a modest response.  The 15-year long whirlwind of touring, recording, and performing had lost its momentum, leaving her somewhere she’d never been—among the crowded ranks of underemployed musicians.

“For the first time ever, there were no venues, no record deals, no tours, no money,” she says.

Medley says she went through “quite a few” dark nights of the soul during this period—but she doesn’t regret a thing.  The tough times pushed her inexorably toward transformation, and she emerged from the dark with a new way to use her talent, and a realization that it was time to go home.

“I did a lot of soul searching and reassessing of what was important to me, and realized that what I wanted most was family and community.

“I’d been based in the States 19 years—in Nashville, in Bloomington, Illinois, and in LA.  But my family was here—my parents and both my sisters.  After those many years, I’m now living within walking distance of all of them,” says Medley.

“And Courtenay is such a great community.  People are so supportive of my music.  I’m connected to old friends, and making new ones, and I’m just loving where I live.”

Sitting across from me on an overstuffed couch, leaning back on a pile of comfy pillows, she gestures toward the big picture-frame window that opens onto a stunning ocean view.   “Look.  This is a far cry from my little apartment in LA.  Can it get better than this?”

I get her point.  Although Medley says her move was tough, she seems to have landed on her feet—in paradise tucked away in Comox.  Just a few hundred metres off Comox Avenue, just past the Filberg Park, is a secret driveway that winds down toward the ocean.  At the end there is a property that feels distinctly rural with sun-dappled meadows, aged fruit trees, grazing fawns, and a handful of charming little seaside cottages.  Known as the old Stubbs farm, this acreage has recently been bought by the Town of Comox to be preserved and eventually made into a park.

One of these cottages is Medley’s home base, where she has not only been connecting to her roots but also spreading her branches—in particular, launching her teaching business, Kids Rock.

During her tough times in Los Angeles, Medley’s passion for music stayed as strong as ever, even as the performance opportunities and record deals were dwindling.  Luckily she was able to find a new outlet.

“Just when I was at the point where I was asking myself, ‘Now what am I going to do?’ a friend suggested teaching.  At first I thought, ‘Who, me?’ but I got one student by word of mouth, then two, then more and more, all by word of mouth, until pretty quickly I had 17 kids,” she says.

“It was an interesting clientele—these were the sons of the rich and famous.  I’d be going to these big estates, being let in past the big gates… I even taught Glenn Frey’s son.  But I quickly came to realize that kids are kids regardless of whether they live in mansions or cabins.”

Sue Medley.

Photo by Boomer Jerritt

Rather unexpectedly, Medley found she loved teaching.  She enjoys the relationships she forms with the kids and loves helping them to grow both musically and personally.  “I especially enjoy it when I see the growth in their confidence level, especially with the singing.  What I teach is not just technical.  It’s how to connect the voice to the brain; it’s how to put feel and emotion into it.  It can be tricky getting them to get their real voice out.  But it happens!  At first there’s this wispy, shy little voice, and then all of sudden it emerges—their real voice.  When I can help them find that, it’s incredibly rewarding.”

Teaching music allows Medley to make full use of her career skills and experience.  “My only training as a teacher is my experience—and I have plenty of that,” says Medley.  “For instance, I can offer these kids my years spent on stage.  This isn’t something you can learn at university.  I can teach them how to develop stage presence, microphone technique, how to place your body on stage whether you’re in a coffee shop or a big stadium.”

Because Medley knows just how exciting performance is, she makes sure her students experience the challenge and thrill of playing live on stage as part of a band.

“I organize recitals, with me on guitar and a professional bass player, so the kids get first-hand experience, and the parents get to see how much their kids have learned.

“It’s a blast.  At the end we bring everyone up—imagine 17 kids aged eight to 16, all with their electric guitars plugged in playing a rock classic, something like Bachman Turner Overdrive’s Taking Care of Business.

“It’s a fantastic evening for everyone—myself, the parents, and the kids most of all.”

Medley has no problem relating to the kids—after all, she herself started out as a music-crazy pre-teen.  “Music was always my calling,” she says.

She started out with a drum kit at age 11.  In Grade 7, while attending Courtenay Junior School, she took up guitar.  When she was 16, she joined the Comox band Punch.  “That was a great way to start out, because the other band members were 10 years older and really great musicians—they still are; they still live here.  It was a really great catalyst for me,” says Medley.

“Once I graduated from high school, there was no question for me of what to do next.  It was full tilt music.  I played in a few different versions of Punch around the Island, then moved to Vancouver and ended up singing in a top-40 cover band, Renegade.

“That was definitely a harsh dose of reality.  I learned exactly what it was like to be the ‘chick singer’ in the band, dealing with some of those guys… one in particular”  She rolls her eyes and grins with remembered exasperation… “I put up with a lot of crap, boy oh boy!”

Following that she did a 180 degree turn and played with a jazz quartet for a while.  “And after that I joined a Vancouver band doing a country-style thing, but really rockin’ it up.  It was the early days of KD Lang.  It was a fun time to play around with country.”

It was in that period that Medley started writing her own songs.  “It happened pretty simply.  One day I just thought to myself, ‘I’m tired of singing other people’s stuff.’ So I sat down with my guitar and started writing,” she says.

In 1989, Medley released an independent country single called Cryin’ Over You.  “That was way long ago,” she says now with a laugh.  “Back then you sat down with a stack of your 45s, put ‘em in envelopes, stuck some stamps on and mailed then out to the radio stations.  We actually got quite a lot of airplay that way.”

The single garnered her five West Coast Music Awards, including best vocalist of the year and best country vocalist of the year.  It was followed by Angel Tonight a couple years later.  By then she had made an appearance at the Big Valley Jamboree in Saskatchewan and on television on the Tommy Hunter Show.

She describes 1989 as the year she was “discovered.  I was playing live at the Commodore at the West Coast Music Awards.   Afterwards, an A&R guy from Polygram Records came up and gave me his card, and the rest was history, as they say.”

This “history” comprised a busy and varied musical career.  There was a self-titled debut CD in 1990, co-produced by Medley and John Mellencamp producer Michael Wanchic, which yielded two successful singles, the number one hit Maybe the Next Time and Dangerous Times, and was followed by a North American tour, including dates with Bob Dylan.

She also became national spokesperson for Ride For Sight, a charity to raise funds for the blind, and co-wrote the charity’s theme song, Born To Ride, along with Bryan Adams writer Jim Valance.

As well as purely commercial tours, Medley also toured for the military in Bosnia and Israel.  “Someone invited me, and I thought, ‘yeah’.  Wow—it was life changing.  You go to places like that and it puts things in perspective and makes you really appreciate what we have here.”

Medley’s second CD, Inside Out, was released in 1992 and was followed by a support tour with the likes of Tom Cochrane and 54.40.  The single When The Stars Fall became a hit on album radio and reached #2 on music industry magazine The Record’s chart (being locked out of #1 only by U2).

And on it went—more tours, another single, a video, placing songs on the TV show Dawson’s Creek, more awards, including several SOCAN (the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada) awards and Junos for Most Promising Vocalist and Album Art, playing at Farm Aid in Louisville, Kentucky, on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno backing up John Mellencamp, and at the Junos.

She lived in Nashville, then Bloomington, Indiana.  The move to LA happened in part because of a relationship that broke up.  “It was one of those things… he was a musician,” she says, with a rueful, memory laden laugh, adding, this time with a more cheerful laugh, that breakups provide the best songwriting material.

In that case, it was the catalyst to change locations.  “I did a tour of Australia and then returned to Vancouver to do a telethon.  I met someone there who offered to manage me.  I moved to LA because she was there.”

But a couple of years later, the wonderful ride had slowed right down.  “It was scary and downright depressing,” she says.  “Music was all I’d done since I was 15.   Imagine what it’s like when everything you’ve known and done you can’t do anymore.

“There were some very tough times.  Looking back, I can feel grateful, because it was all part of getting me back home, it was growth, but at the time it didn’t feel good.”

Difficult though this period was Medley knew she had a deep well of inner strength to connect to. “I’m a survivor; I’ve overcome a lot of obstacles.  There’s something in me that doesn’t give up.  No matter how hard it is, no matter how painful life gets, I don’t give up.  Because I know that somehow it’s going to be okay in the end,” she says.

The “okay” part of this time began when she started teaching, and culminated with her return to her roots.  Going through this challenging transition has also deepened her playing, singing and song writing, she says.

“When I play and sing now, I’m doing it from a deeper place.  You know that place, way, way deep? I feel I’ve got a direct line to it now.  Before, there was so much pressure.  I needed to sell out the show; I needed to write a certain quota of songs… now when I play, sing or write, I’m doing it because I love it.”

While the decision to move home was liberating, the move itself was challenging.  “The details of it were overwhelming.  And I’d been in the States for 19 years.  It was huge!”

And once she got home, she faced a big shock: for the first time in her life (she’s in her mid-40s) she had to get a day job.

“I’d sure worked hard before, but I’d never had a job.  A job interview?  A resume?  I’d never done any of that.  Never sat behind a desk, or stood behind a counter… no, never done anything like that in my life, ever,” she says.  “But you do what you’ve gotta do, and there’s no shame in that.”

Medley worked in catering for a while and then as administrative assistant at the Filberg Lodge.  “Those were such learning curves,” she says.

Lately, Medley has felt settled enough to put more energy into Kids Rock.  She’s already got a handful of students and recently put up a website.  She finds that in the Comox Valley, as in LA, word of mouth is a powerful marketing tool, and looks forward to a growing roster of students.

“I taught for eight years in LA and it became really clear that this is what I am supposed to be doing now,” she says.  “It was a real transformation.”

However, although Medley did become something new—a music teacher—she never stopped being what she always was—a musician.  Last December she did a three-week cross-Canada Tour, her first in a long time, as part of show called Canadian Country Christmas.  This July she attended and performed at the Vancouver Island Music Conference and then sang a few songs on the big stage at MusicFest.

She’s been writing new music and has plans to release a new CD sometime this year.  She won’t say much about the new material except that it will be more acoustic than most of her previous work, and that the songs reflect the transformation she’s been through.  And that some of what might be the strongest work on it reflects a recent break-up.

“Once I have a new CD I’ll get out there and perform more,” she says.  ”People haven’t heard the last of me—the best is yet to come!”

Her new work also reflects her joy at being home.  Soon after returning she wrote a song called My Town about the Comox Valley.  The video, accessible on YouTube, produced by local company Blue Bamboo, shows beautiful image after beautiful image of the area—eagles soaring over the tree tops, the moon rising over the mountains, the sun setting behind the ocean, children dancing at a festival, snowboarders on the mountain and more.

The song and video speak eloquently: clearly, Sue Medley has come home, and is thrilled about it.

For more information about Sue Medley and the Kids Rock program, go to www.suemedley.ca.

Junior racers Amanda Wakeling and Jordan Duncan get in some practice time on the streets of the Comox Valley.

Photo by Boomer Jerritt

While out and about on the roads and trails around the Comox Valley, you might want to take special note of some of the two-wheeled blurs that flash past—there just might be some champions in that pack of cyclists.

And some of those blurs may very well be members of the Comox Valley Cycle Club (CVCC).  “The Comox Valley Cycle Club is excited to be able to offer programs and support to the cyclists of the Comox Valley,” says CVCC Time Trials Coordinator Andrew Brown, “but we are especially excited about a few of our junior members who are already showing amazing promise.”

“Although Amanda Wakeling, Jordan Duncan and Nigel Ellsay have only been racing for a year, all are regularly competing at the provincial level and winning.  Amanda and Jordan are both are currently the Provincial Time Trial Champions in their age group.”

The Comox Valley Cycle Club is active in road racing and recreation, holding regular group rides, time trials, and an annual series of road races.  Road races are for riders of all ages—the current membership ranges from 10 to 70.  Formal time trials are conducted weekly.  The club also hosts the BC Masters Cycling Association, regional play-downs for the BC Seniors Games, and special events for province-wide junior racers.

Former and current club members include provincial, national and world champions, regular competitors on the international circuit, and Olympians.

The club has been involved formally in competitive cycling since 1986.  “The CVCC has a long history of supporting cycling and bike racing in the Comox Valley,” says Brown.  “Olympians and former National Champions Kiara Bisaro and Geoff Kabush are both past members.”

One of the long standing senior members of the Club, John Bernard, describes the success of the junior training program.  “A couple of years ago John van der Vliet started organizing a training program for juniors—mainly because his son wanted to learn how to race, and his son had some friends who wanted to learn to race.  Amanda Wakeling,  Jordan Duncan and Nigel Ellsay are involved in that—all are about the same age. Altogether there are about six junior riders.”

While the young cyclists are relatively modest about their achievements to date, Bernard says, “John took them to some provincial level races last year, specifically the time trials, and they walked all over everybody else!  They were really impressive.”

Junior members have always been a focus of CVCC, says Bernard, depending on who is organizing the riders, and last year was a particularly good year.  “We did have talent, but not just that—the talent that started it out encouraged other talent to come along too!  And it built on itself.  It was attracting other people, other kids into it.

“We have about 50 members,” adds Bernard, who is also in charge of membership for the CVCC.  “At one point we had more—when we were involved in mountain biking as well, which was a success at that time mainly because we had the parents involved and the grade schools involved.  But when the kids grow older and drop out, the parents drop out, and without the parents it’s extremely difficult to keep going.  Our club is not strictly involved in mountain biking any more—it has started up again under a different organization in Cumberland—though a lot of our riders do mountain biking.”

The CVCC, he says, is basically a road racing club.  “This year we’re doing four race weekends locally—three of those are one-day events, and one is a two-day event with three races in it. The first one is mid-May, then one a month after that ending up in August.”

Bernard considers himself a recreational cyclist.  “I don’t race!” he says, “I can’t keep up with them! Their speed averages in the low 30s I think, for 1-1/2 to 2 hrs.  Right now they are doing a group ride Sundays, and eventually probably three or four organized group rides every week, depending on how keen people are.  They don’t care what the weather is like—they’ll even go out in snow!  Those are basically training rides.”

Most racing in the Valley is on Sunday mornings when the roads are fairly quiet.  “Routes are chosen partly because the traffic is light.  We try to be as careful as we can about the way people race.”

They also offer a “good time trial series,” once a week starting in August. “We have a course that starts at Piercy and Condensory, goes up to the highway, up the highway to Dove Creek Road and back,” says Bernard.  “They do that once or twice around—that’s very popular.”  Bernard notes that some improvements such as road shoulders or smoother pavement would be welcomed by the cycling community.

That community includes the junior members and their families.  “I’ve always liked to ride a bike,” says 15-year-old Jordan Duncan, whose father Kent is vice president of the CVCC.  “But when I first met John van der Vliet, he really got me into cycling as more of a sport rather than just something fun to do.  I was in Grade 6 at the time, about four years ago.  John is the dad of one of my best friends from elementary school, Jake. Jake introduced me to his dad, who grew up here, moved to Australia and turned pro, then raced in Holland, moved back to Australia, married there and then moved back here to the Valley.”

Amanda Wakeling, also 15, got into cycling as a kid to keep up with her brother.  “We ride to school pretty much every morning with my dad,” she says.  “Then a few years ago I got a cyclo-cross bike from Jeff at Trail Bikes, and that just started me road cycling, which got me into the club meeting different people, and got me into racing more.”

Adds Duncan:  “She’s the mountain biker and I’m the road cyclist.”

“But we both do cyclo-cross,” says Wakeling.  “We do all three.”

Cyclo-cross, as a diversion from their other competitive racing, includes all trail surfaces such as pavement, wooded trails, and grass—but notably features steep hills and obstacles, requiring the rider to quickly dismount and carry the bike while navigating the obstruction, then quickly remount.

“Cyclo-cross is kind of crazy,” says Wakeling with a big grin.  “It’s kind of in-between mountain biking—you get up and run over barriers, run up stairs, crazy stuff!”

The bikes, adds Duncan, are similar to road bikes but with wider and more knobby tires for off-road riding.  “You can do it anywhere, that’s the coolest thing about it,” says Wakeling.  “It’s competitive—fast races, like a half hour or 45 minutes.”

Cyclo-cross is what they do when not competing from September to November.  “It’s kind of an off-season, fun thing to do,” says Duncan.  “Keep the fitness level up, but don’t get disappointed if you don’t do well.”

The place in question is—at this point at least—a metaphorical brothel and two locally-connected women ended up having, quite by accident, a connection with that place of business. No—not in a bad way, but in fact in a highly positive way.

One of those women was raised and educated in this community, and the other spent many of her formative professional years honing her craft here.
The first is well-known and equally well-regarded Victoria journalist and community activist, Jody Paterson. The other side of the duo is an astute and talented film director who was once the youngest program manager at Comox Valley Cablenet. She is April Butler-Parry.

The Brothel Project director April Butler-Parry got her start in film-making at Comox Valley Cablenet.

Photo by Photo by Walt Nicholson

Paterson and Butler-Parry are connected via The Brothel Project. This 52-minute film was a feature in the Victoria Film Festival in late January, and is to be shown on Global Television, likely in March. This is where the pairing of Paterson and Butler-Parry takes place, for Paterson is a featured player in the film, which concerns the quest of Paterson and her cohort, Lauren Casey, to establish Canada’s first legal brothel in the sometimes staid BC capital. More about the film and the quest and its reasons later in the story.

Jody Paterson, though born in Saskatchewan, grew up in the Comox Valley and went right through school locally, first at Courtenay elementary, and then Lake Trail. She graduated from GP Vanier in 1974.

“The Comox Valley was a great place to grow up in and I still feel thoroughly connected,” she says. “I even married a Cumberland boy. I still come back because I have kids and grandkids who live here.”

Then, in 1981, she left the community. She had an ambition that she vitally wanted to realize, and that was to be a journalist. She said she’d had a dream of being a journalist when she was a child, and that impulse had never left her.

“It’s quite funny in retrospect, but I was once asked in a questionnaire in high school what my ambition was, and I said I wanted to be a housewife,” she says. And she was that for a few years. She was also a piano teacher for eight years, but the thirst to do more hadn’t left and she knew she had little choice but to act on her childhood dream.

She went to Kamloops to take the journalism program at Cariboo College, and then she stayed on in that interior city for eight more years, plying her newfound trade at the Kamloops Sentinel and Daily News.

Then, wanting a larger paper in a larger community, where she felt her writing would gain more notice, she returned to the coast in 1989 and took a reporting job at the Victoria Times-Colonist. That she did well at that paper would be to state the case mildly. She covered virtually every beat in her early years there and ultimately became managing editor. Starting in 1996 she became a noted columnist, and continues in that realm to this day. But, in 2004 she left her full-time job with the TC and became the executive director of the Prostitute Empowerment Education and Resource Society (PEERS). Therein lies her direct connection to the Brothel Project.

Meanwhile, back in Kamloops there was a young woman who also had journalistic aspirations. That was April Butler-Parry. In one of those little twists of connectedness, or serendipity, if you will, Paterson, near the end of her Kamloops sojourn, was, as an alumna, a guest speaker at Butler-Parry’s journalism class at Cariboo College.

Butler-Parry began a career in community television programming at Kamloops Cablenet. After a brief stay there she moved to the Comox Valley in 1989 where, at age 21, she became the youngest programming manager for Comox Valley Cablenet. She continued with community programming for a number of years in the early 1990s and it was in doing so that she learned many of the skills that were to serve her later in her career, and also enabled her to direct a complex project like the Brothel story.

“I really enjoyed my life in the Valley,” she says, “and Cablenet was a good place to work. I had a home in the Valley and my children were born there. It was good. At the same time I found myself growing increasingly fascinated with the idea of creating documentary films.” More than anything else, Butler-Parry’s experience with Valley Cablenet was a significant learning experience and it granted her skills that still serve her today.

“Cablenet was so volunteer-driven, and that gave me some strong ideas about what people wanted and needed in terms of programming,” she says. “At the same time I pushed volunteers to get involved in directing, and by the time I left we had some excellent volunteer directors. Of course the process sometimes demanded a ton of patience, but it paid off in the end, both for community programming and for my skills as a professional director. For me my job demanded that I be actively involved in the community and it pushed me to up my game. I came to realize in short order that adequate wasn’t good enough.”

It wasn’t all peaches-and-cream in her early days, Butler-Parry confesses. She remembers how late Comox District Free Press columnist and community historian, Isabelle Stubbs wrote a scathing review of her skills behind and in front of the camera shortly after she started in the Valley.

“In those days I wasn’t just behind the camera, but was also in front of it,” she says. “I wasn’t very good in front, let’s say, and that’s what she picked up on. She said I needed to look up more and elocute clearly. It was mainly about my professional poise, which she saw as lacking.”

Not to be deterred by the ‘review’, Butler-Parry took the criticism in the spirit in which it was intended and improved those areas of her bearing.
“I contacted her and we met for coffee,” she says. “She told me I had improved, so that pleased me.”

It was quite by accident that during those years she had the opportunity to create her first documentary. It was a 20-minute documentary that concerned an oil spill that had manifested on the Island’s West Coast, near Ucluelet. She was alerted to the spill by pioneer Valley environmental activist, Ruth Masters. “Doing that resulted in an interesting shift in my thinking,” she says. “I got so much out of it that I realized my goal was to do a real documentary for a larger broadcast TV station. To get what I needed I knew I had to move on. I was reluctant in the sense that I liked my life in the Valley, but I had to go to where there was more opportunity.”

That said, she was to create what she considers her first “real” documentary, and it was one that maintained a Comox Valley theme. That was the Swan Documentary of 1996, which explored the huge proliferation of Trumpeter swans that wintered in the Comox Valley. The documentary ran in conjunction with the then Swan Festival.

The swan documentary was self-financed but she says it was worth the expense because it was a good and “gentle” introduction to the process of making a documentary.

“It was a great learning experience and was very demanding,” she says. “It involved being up at first light when I could access the swans. Now, with the Brothel Project, because it involves sex workers, I have to be available at the other end of the day.”

If the Swan Documentary was the kick-off for Butler-Parry, it has only grown from there. She worked for all the TV networks operating out of Victoria and was also director for VI television news and helped launch that station in 2001. Ultimately she reached the point where she realized she wouldn’t complete her dream unless she left the security-blanket of TV and moved exclusively to directing documentary films. The Brothel Project is the culmination of those efforts to date.

The Force Four production, directed by Butler-Parry and produced by Gillian Hrankowski, is a documentary that vividly captures the quest of Paterson and Casey, and shows dramatically the pitfalls along the way in a thus far vain attempt to change the law of the land regarding love for sale.

“While my connection with The Brothel Project didn’t happen entirely by accident in the sense that Jody let it be known that she and Lauren wanted to make this film, I was just a person who bid on it,” she says. “Fortunately mine was the bid they accepted. Ultimately it proved to be great subject matter, and they were also great people to work with.”

On Paterson’s side of the equation the idea of contracting a documentary seemed like a natural at a certain point in the quest she and Casey had embarked on.
“Lauren and I were considering ways to raise money to help the street sex workers,” Paterson says. “The work we were doing in advocacy was attracting media attention, and that’s a good thing. But the big issue for PEERS is that it’s a non-profit, and like all non-profits, it’s always strapped for cash. Money limitations were keeping us from helping those who desperately needed it.”

Then Casey suggested that she and Paterson should open a brothel, with the irony being that money raised from the escort business could be used to assist those whose lives were pretty wretched. And that was how it all began.

“Lauren said it almost as a joke,” Paterson says, “but there are so many problems for those working in the streets. Most people take jobs out of necessity, and any work can be exploitive, but the streets are more so. It’s a highly dangerous workplace, so I said, ‘What if?’ Maybe we could do that. We could establish a non-profit co-op and have the house fee (the money that goes to the business) funneled back to the outdoor sex workers. We’d be generating revenue and helping the women.”

Two things Paterson and Casey wanted to do were to test the legalities of attempting to establish what would be, by the laws of the land, an illegal business, and secondly to publicize their quest in the hope of getting a sympathetic community ear. So, they decided they must have a documentary to that end.
There were times when Paterson and Casey were caught up in the almost schizoid nature of the project.

“Making the documentary was a pretty rough year for us,” she says. “In a way you feel like you’re actors in somebody else’s story. At the same time, we were suffering no delusions. I had no belief that we’d be able to accomplish anything during that year. I had no thoughts that within a year we’d be able to set up an illegal business.”

So, the question that could be asked of Paterson and Casey would be: Why would you bring in a film crew rather than just going about it quietly.
“It’s designed (The Brothel Project) mainly to promote discussion,” Paterson says. “The Criminal Code has to change to make what we’re trying to do happen. There are bad laws around the sex trade and the current laws harm the people that work in the calling. It’s a thriving industry, yet anytime anyone can be charged, because that’s what’s on the books. So, we wanted to expose some of those legal realities.”

One facet of the year-long process involved those involved with both the project and the film itself, including Paterson, Butler-Parry and Casey going to a country where prostitution has been decriminalized: New Zealand. For the sake of the well-being of those in the trade, this fellow Commonwealth Country decided to move it out of the realm of a criminal activity. The visitors found the results to be commendable for the most part.

“Many things in New Zealand were better for the sex workers,” Paterson says. “For one thing, there was no longer any fear of the police. Under decriminalization, the adult sex trade is considered a workplace and is to be free from harassment. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say New Zealand is a million miles ahead of Canada in its acceptance of a certain reality. Their attitude is that people are buying it, so why are we punishing the people who are selling it?”

In New Zealand there are both brothels and independent escorts. In many cases the women left the brothels and began to work out of their homes, since that was now legal. That was virtually the model Paterson and Casey were seeking in wanting to open their bordello, but that wasn’t etched in stone for them.
“People thought we were trying to promote one particular model, but that wasn’t really the case,” Paterson says. “No blanket statement can be applied to the sex trade.”

In order to understand the business better, about six months into the project Paterson and Casey brought in escort agency booking agent, Harvi, along with escort, Mia. Harvi shared her business acumen—which was astute, Paterson says—and Mia provided the insights stemming from being active in the trade.
Harvi’s perspective was invaluable and she also provided Paterson and Casey with some insights into the reality of the business. She is possessed of an astute business sense, Paterson says, and she was able to indicate the pitfalls they would face. Eventually, however, Harvi would depart from the project when she realized that she was under threat, due to the excessive exposure, of being closed down and losing all she’d gained in her years in the business. She began to question why she was collaborating with the two in their quest.

“I’d love a reason why I need you,” she says of Paterson and Casey in the documentary. She has begun to see it as a case of them needing her more than she needs the Brothel Project team. At the same time, escort Mia begins to question why she needs to be involved in a brothel at all, and tells Harvi she doesn’t want to give a house fee and declares, during a clothes-shopping expedition, that she really likes working as an independent. This leads to Harvi severing the connection between the two.

With support for an indoor brothel seeming to crumble, Paterson also realizes, especially when they were told by both their legal advisor and a spokesman for the Victoria Police Department, that what they were attempting was illegal, and the Criminal Code denies anybody the right to establish what is referred to as “a common bawdy house.”

Escort agencies get around the law quite simply by not suggesting any sexual transaction takes place, and what transpires in an encounter is strictly a contract between the escort and the purchaser of ‘services’, whatever those might be. Escort agencies are governed by local bylaw and they are not established under a roof anywhere.

“I realized that by publicly talking about it we were jeopardizing sex workers and putting escort jobs in jeopardy,” she says. “We were inflaming the issues and that was exactly what we didn’t want. That seems like a pretty lousy win, to me. So, we’ll continue to quietly work with people in the industry, and we’ve come to realize that decriminalization is a bigger conversation. That discussion is just not going anywhere per se. The best bet at some future point would be a constitutional challenge.”

At the same time, Paterson says she wouldn’t have missed spending the time, effort and money to attain what they did—increase public awareness. And on Jan. 31, the showing of The Brothel Project at the Victoria Film Festival gave the ticket-buying public (incidentally, it sold out) a chance to see what it was all about.
“I thought it was a fascinating journey,” Paterson says. “As a journalist I was welcomed into a world that journalists are not normally welcomed into. Now we carry on.”

For Butler-Parry the association with Paterson, Casey, Harvi and Mia has only served to enhance her career as an independent maker of documentaries.
“I hope when people see the documentary they will see it as a group project, and I couldn’t have done it without those individuals being the players,” she says. “They were wonderful.”

In similar context, she is effusive in the praises of producer and scriptwriter Gillian Hrankowski, without whom none of it would have been possible, she says. This was the person, Butler-Parry says, under whose guidance they were able to take 100 hours of footage and reduce it to a powerful 55-minute documentary.
“Gillian was really integral to making a great story,” she says. “And the narration by (actress) Carly Pope couldn’t have been better. We had to have somebody who believed in the project to do the narration, and Carly did.”

The learning experience, she says, was vital to the success of the documentary. There were some basic ground rules to be followed, including making certain they did not show the location of the brothel. In fact, Butler-Parry’s own home does double duty as a stand-in in that regard. Furthermore, she learned as she worked with women in the sex trade that even though they might have had friendly interactions during the filming, it was taboo for her to show any recognition of the escorts if they were to run into each other on the street.

“It was important to the success of the documentary that I didn’t make anybody uncomfortable,” she says. “And it worked out really well. Harvi and Mia were terrific people to work with.”

Meanwhile, she reminds the viewing public that even though they missed the Jan. 31 showing of The Brothel Project, it will be broadcast on Global Television in the spring—likely in March.

“I go home each night knowing I’ve done something good for the world,” says Sarah Sullivan of working for AIDS Vancouver Island.

Photo by Bommer Jerritt

Sarah Sullivan’s bright, cheery and upbeat manner and bearing render it difficult to comprehend that she spends her working days dealing compassionately with some of the most physically distressed people in the Comox Valley community.

On top of that seemingly grim reality, Sullivan, counselor/advocate for the Courtenay office of AIDS Vancouver Island (AVI), loves what she does as much as she cares for her client base. Those factors alone make her a natural for what she does. One thing that any service provider learns, if he or she is to survive without burnout, is to assume a certain objectivity and to not see the world solely through the eyes of the client.

Sullivan, who has been at the helm of the AVI office on Sixth Street in Courtenay for a little over a year, took to her role with enthusiasm. It’s an enthusiasm based on her familiarity with both the philosophy and the protocols of a facility that is virtually unknown to many residents in the community. That it is largely unknown is somewhat by design—this has kept the place, especially with its emotionally-charged (for some) ‘needle exchange’ away from community controversy.

In that, the Comox Valley AVI needle exchange has not been fraught with all the controversies that have faced the Victoria needle exchange. This is by design, Sullivan is quick to observe.

“We’ve been in this location for nine years,” Sullivan says. “Fortunately for us we have a great landlord. But, the essential point is we’re not visible. Access to needle exchange services is via the back door, not the street. Furthermore, what we find here is that the community accepts us as being a part of the public health strategy. Our goal is to promote a healthy community and it’s vital to us to maintain a good relationship with our neighbors.”

So, what’s a nice girl like Sarah doing in a job like this? Well, primarily she does it because she loves it.

“Generally, I like being in the background,” she says. “People who need to know about me, know about me. I’ve been a permanent employee for over a year. (In fact, she is the only full-time employee of the Courtenay facility; there is one part-timer, Jeanette, as well, and all others who work there are strictly volunteers). I came here first in April 2007 as a practicum student for 10 weeks with (her predecessor in the position) Phyllis Wood. After that I worked as a casual here.”

When Wood left last year, Sullivan competed for the position and got it. Prior to coming on board she worked as a suicide prevention trainer at Crossroads Crisis Centre. She still volunteers at Crossroads as a skills trainer.

Her involvement with human services comes to her later in life, she says. Her background is highly eclectic and she has served for extensive periods in other realms. This background, she believes, has enhanced her role today because it has given her ability to look at a number of issues that impact those seeking assistance from AVI.

“I worked for the federal government, for Transport Canada for a number of years,” she says. “Later my husband (her high school sweetheart, she notes) and I ran a home-based publishing business. In that area it really opened my eyes to the challenges faced by people with disabilities.”

In all of this, raising a family intervened, which made the home-based business ideal at that time. But, after her third daughter was born, she decided to go back to school and complete her truncated education. She began in the Women’s Studies program at North Island College and completed her associate degree through Thompson River University. Next year she gets her social work degree from the University of Victoria.

“Some background in finance has really helped me in this role,” she says. “I know what it’s like to live on a low income and can relate to people who are disenfranchised through health problems and challenges. And it’s in overcoming these obstacles that some of the people I work with amaze me. I am astonished at the inner resourcefulness of some people. Believe me, in this job I always take home more than I give.”

Sullivan is a Comox Valley girl to the core. Her mother is vegan author and longtime Comox District Free Press food columnist, Bryanna Clark-Grogan. Furthermore, she met her husband when they were both students at Vanier and the rest, for them, is history. Having spent virtually all her life here, it’s a delight for her to have a meaningful position in her home community.

The work of the AVI facility is multi-faceted, Sullivan says. Primarily it is a combination of three broad elements: education, prevention and support. The needle exchange operates five days a week and is primarily designed to abate the spread of HIV and Hepatitis-C in the community. Of the two afflictions, she notes that Hep-C is a source of greater concern than HIV—despite myths to the contrary—and is much more easily transmitted, especially among IV needle-using addicts.

“Here we need to look at many options,” she says. “Our role is not simply to hand out needles. We have to look realistically not just at the client, but anyone else concerned, like partners and family members. They all need support. With HIV it has changed immeasurably from the horrific early days when HIV almost always led to AIDS, with its often-inevitable lethal consequences. With new medications it is quite possible to live a normal lifespan and be HIV-positive. Fortunately, some of the best doctors in the HIV field are in BC.”

Hep-C, however, is a truly dangerous affliction. Spread by blood-to-blood contact (hence the ‘dirty needle’ connection), it can be asymptomatic for as long as 20 years. In that, she says people truly need to be aware of the risks and to also know there are treatment options. In that realm, AVI Courtenay calls on the expertise of Jeanette Reinhardt, who offers her services in both Courtenay and Campbell River. She is the educator who helps clients deal with the realities of HIV and safer sex, among other things.

AVI Courtenay (there are also offices in Campbell River, Victoria, Nanaimo, and Port Hardy) is a holistic operation wherever possible, Sullivan says, and works in tandem with other service providers in the community.
“We’ve been involved in working with the homeless and those at risk of homelessness,” she says. “We’re especially concerned when the cold weather comes. We’re involved with cold weather outreach in a joint project with Wachiay in which we bring sandwiches, tents, tarps, coats and so forth to the people that need them. The project has been running for five years and has been very successful. We plan to get it going again this year and will run it from November through March.”

Sullivan says that they keep a supply of heavy coats and tents at the facility, but that they always welcome donations of those items should anybody be interested in offering them up.

Other areas of service to the community in need include their hot lunch program, provided (entirely by donated food) every Tuesday.

“If you’d like to join our ‘shopping angels’, please call me,” says Sullivan. “We always welcome all the help we can get. We go on faith that we will get the help we need, and people have never failed us. For example, a local accounting firm donated a number of backpacks for the homeless. We didn’t request them; they just took it upon themselves to do it. Then, every year there is ‘Dining Out for Life’, with the proceeds going to AVI. It’s just amazing and heartwarming how many restaurants take part. This is a very giving community.”

In that context, Sullivan says, her resolute goal is to promote the feeling of community within the facility.

While the presence of individuals with HIV and Hep-C in the greater community is disquieting for some, especially the less well informed, Sullivan is determined to reach out for the sake of AVI and the clientele, as well as for the Comox Valley community. She keeps in close touch with the wants and needs of the greater community by various interactions, including being a member of the City of Courtenay-sponsored Comox Valley Community Drug Strategy Committee.

AVI works actively with other community agencies in the Comox Valley, and that only serves to the advantage of their clients. In terms of health care, AVI gains client access that brings them into contact with the best the community can offer. In the same context, those agencies offer invaluable aid to the AVI clients, including the public health nurse from the Nursing Centre who regularly tests for STDs with clients and gives inoculations as needed.

“The walk-in clinics in the Comox Valley also do amazing work,” Sullivan says. “And in that case, Maggie from the Nursing Centre acts as intermediary to help clients access the services they need. Fortunately, we in the Comox Valley are blessed with fantastic doctors.”

For those seeking alternate therapies, AVI also has an acupuncturist that comes in on a regular basis to help clients wanting that service.

“There’s a lot of stigma attached to HIV or Hep-C, but I want our clients to know that this is a safe place for them,” she says. “If they need assistance they can find it here. We’re here for them. That’s why I really enjoy coming to work every day. I go home each night knowing I’ve done something good for the world. I love to listen to people’s stories and get to share in their lives.”

For more information about AIDS Vancouver Island call Sarah at 250-338-7400 or visit avi.org

Amanda Hale’s third novel could be described as part historical fiction, part contemporary urban romance and part immigrant saga, with a poetic sensibility infusing the prose throughout.

Amanda Hale is not daunted by borders. In fact, this Hornby Island writer, who recently published her third novel, seems to thrive on crossing them.

As a creative person, Hale has travelled back and forth between visual art, theatre and writing, not just crossing borders but also forging paths, bringing ideas and inspiration from one genre to another with prolific ease.

Home, as well, takes her across borders. Hale lives part of the year in her sunny cottage overlooking the beach on Hornby Island, part of the year in Toronto, where she teaches creative writing, and part of the year in Cuba, home to the man she loves and a new-found community of artists and writers.

And on top of that, she’s an avid traveller. When I meet with Hale to talk about her latest novel, she is getting ready to head off to Europe, where she will be writer-in-residence at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic.

This penchant for border crossing shows up in her novels—perhaps even defines them. The new novel, My Sweet Curiosity, published by Thistledown Press, has multiple plot lines located in different parts of the world and different centuries.

If you were forced to identify it by genre, you could say it’s part well-researched historical fiction, part contemporary urban gay romance, and part immigrant saga, with a poetic sensibility infusing the prose throughout. You could also call it a philosophical meditation on science, love, music, the medical profession, and the ways in which our family heritage both does and doesn’t define who we are.

If you found that description a bit overwhelming, don’t worry. The novel is held together beautifully by strongly wrought characters who easily slip under your skin, so you soon feel that you know and care about them.

There’s Talya, a brilliant, charismatic and often maddeningly self-absorbed medical student, who, when we meet her, is falling deeply and passionately in love, while at the same time falling just as profoundly into grief, as her mother lies dying of cancer. There’s Dai Ling, the gifted and dedicated musician Talya falls in love with, who surprises herself—but even more so, her traditional Chinese immigrant parents—by her choice of a woman partner. There are Talya’s glamorous Russian émigré parents and there are Dai Ling’s Chinese parents and grandparents, their stories entwined with China’s complex history.

And there is Andreas Vesalius, the real-life 16-century doctor who revolutionized medicine by being one of the first to dissect the human body. The fictionalized story of his dramatic work and his passionate yet troubled marriage runs alongside the story of the two women. Vesalius shows up in the contemporary section of the book as well: Talya and Dai Ling first meet in the library, where Talya has gone to find Vesalius’ book of anatomical drawings, with which she is obsessed.

It was Vesalius who planted the first seed of the novel for Hale, she says.

“Back in the early 1990s I was on Hornby and I was only doing visual art. I had a book from the library on anatomy drawing, and there was an illustration by Andreas Vesalius—who at the time I’d never heard of—in the book. There was a bit written about him—about his passion to understand the human body, about his clandestine activity and how he used to rob graves, and how he was the father of anatomy.

“He captured my imagination,” she says. “I thought, ‘What a wonderful character.’ I toyed with the idea of writing a play about him, because I’d been trained as a playwright, but didn’t go anywhere with the idea then.”

Through Vesalius, My Sweet Curiosity sheds light on the history of medicine. As well, the novel offers a number of windows into modern medicine, through Talya’s experience as a medical student, her mother’s treatment for cancer, and especially through Talya’s fascination with the reproductive technology that gave her life. This piece of the novel, says Hale, can trace its origin back to her earlier work in politically engaged theatre. “I was living in Toronto in the 1980s and was involved in an agit-prop theatre collective. We did things for conferences, union conventions, schools, women’s centres and so on. There was all this stuff in the press then about reproductive technology, and we were asked to provide some entertainment for a conference of the National Association for Women and the Law. I did a lot of research into repro-tech and we took that and did some really fun, absurd skits. Back then it all seemed like science fiction, but now much of it is just normal,” says Hale.

Hale’s fictionalized character, Vesalius, is obsessed with finding the soul, the very seat of life, as he dissects bodies. He looks for it in the tissues, but in vain. ‘Where is it?’ he wonders, and prays fervently for an answer to be revealed. His obsession steals his attention and energy, so much so that he loses touch with his own heart. Similarly, Hale seems to be saying, modern medical technology seeks to know and control the genesis of life itself, but risks losing touch with its own heart.

“Something that intrigues me is the journey the medical profession has had. Like many people I resent the control the medical professional and the pharmaceutical industry has over us. I try to show that in the book. I didn’t want to rant about it, but rather tried to embed some of those issues in the story. After all, the story is how you engage people,” she says.

My Sweet Curiosity is Hale’s third novel and, although it is entirely unique, it could be called a ‘typical Amanda Hale novel,’ with multiple points of view and intersecting stories.

Hale’s first novel, Sounding the Blood, is set in BC on Haida Gwaii (formerly known as the Queen Charlotte Islands).

“It came about when I went to that place. The history and the feeling of the place just grabbed me. But I was well into it before I realized it was a novel. I had started out to write a travel journal,” she explains.

Her second novel, The Reddening Path, has a similar structure to My Sweet Curiosity. There is a contemporary plot about a woman named Pamela, who has been adopted from Guatemala and brought up by a lesbian couple in Canada. The book centres on her return to Guatemala and her discovery of her own heritage. There is a secondary plot about Cortez and the conquest of the Aztec, focusing on Cortez’ translator, an indigenous woman. “She is a fascinating character,” says Hale. “In a way, she enabled the whole conquest.”

In all three books, Hale takes on the point of view of characters from cultures not her own.

“I seem to always write out of my culture,” says Hale, adding that writing from multiple cultural and historical perspectives is a way of affirming our commonalities as humans, while at the same time exploring the richness of our variety.

“I’ve travelled a lot and I don’t like to acknowledge the boundaries between us. I’ve always felt at home wherever I go,” she says. Not everyone is entirely comfortable with this literary culture crossing, Hale adds.
“In the 80s there was this huge insistence on political correctness,” she says. Part of that was the conviction that it was potentially oppressive for a white woman to write in the voice of someone from another culture.

When Hale published The Reddening Path, where the main character is a Mayan woman adopted into a Canadian family, the Women’s Bookstore refused to stock the book. “I was quite surprised,” she says. “This is where most of my friends would have gone to buy it.” When she asked the management why, they said they had a policy not to sell books about adoptees written by someone outside the culture of that character.

“And yet, they stocked Memoirs of a Geisha, which is written by a man!” says Hale wonderingly.

These sorts of attitudes have never deterred Hale from telling the stories that, to her, call out to be told.
“I understand where those kinds of concerns come from. But Canada is such a multicultural society, and it’s hard to write in a multi-cultural society without including a multiplicity of voices.”

Besides, she says, she doesn’t really choose her characters. They come to her—often, she says, fully complete and with stories to be told. And sometimes, real-life people ask her to tell their stories as well.

“When I was in Guatemala to paint a mural and do art installations we were interviewing women and children from destroyed villages, hiding out in churches. They said please, please go back to your country and tell people what we have told you. They wanted their stories told and had no way to get them out into the world.”

Because she writes outside of her own culture, Hale relies on extensive research in order to create convincing voices and worlds for her characters.

“For instance, my first novel had five voices, including a Chinese Canadian immigrant and a Japanese Canadian immigrant. I had to do lots of research and also to enlist the help of readers from those traditions. There are many things I can’t learn from [book] research; I need to learn from people.

“When I first moved to BC I got to know a Mayan family in Surrey and learned a huge amount from them. I took two trips to Guatemala to stay in my friend`s village. That gave a much stronger sense of place to that book.”

For My Sweet Curiosity, Hale’s biggest challenge was the character of Vesalius. She began by absorbing his anatomical drawings, then read and re-read his autobiography. But that was not enough, so she got on a plane and went to Italy.

“I was able to go to Padua [where Vesalius lived and worked] and to the university where he held the chair of anatomy. To stand in the operating theatre where he did his dissections was absolutely thrilling! To stand there, feeling the same sunlight, seeing the same pillars, knowing that there across the courtyard was where Galileo had lectured, there was the same wooden lectern he’d stood in front of.

“Being there and walking the streets is so important. It gave me a sense of confidence and it re-inspired me, because after that, when I am writing, I feel I am there.”

Hale’s next novel, which she has just sent out to her publisher, is set in Cuba, and she has another one in the works set in Europe during World War II. “I’ve been working on that one intermittently for many years and now that I’m on my way to Europe, it feels very timely. I really want to immerse myself in the European atmosphere and history.”

The Europe trip came about because Hale’s work has a following in academia. Both of her earlier novels show up on university reading lists, even as far away as Brno, Czech Republic.

Hale says she’s very happy with this academic acceptance, not just because it is a marker of literary success, but also because it brings her books to a community of passionate readers—people who read and re-read, discuss, write about and deeply engage with the books. “Who is going to read a book more closely than someone who is going to write an essay on it?” she asks.

Hale didn’t go looking for academic attention, however. “It was something that came out of the blue,” she says. “It happened serendipitously.

“I was doing a reading of Sounding the Blood on Commercial Drive in Vancouver and when I finished, this man came up to me and handed me an envelope and said ‘read this later.’ It turned out he was a professor at Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia. He had reviewed the book for a literary magazine and liked it so much he put it on his reading lists. I was thrilled.” From there it spread to other universities.

The recognition for her work is gratifying, but Hale’s motivation for writing doesn’t hinge on it. Like most writers, Hale writes because she must.

“It’s a passion,” she says simply. “As an artist, running creativity has always been something I needed to do. It hasn’t always been writing for me. I started in my late 20s. As soon as I took a creative writing course it became a way of making sense of my personal existence, and then as I matured it became wider and wider, as I started wanting to make sense of history and the phenomena of the modern world.

“Without going into it much, I would say that I had a pretty bad childhood. The world outside was not acceptable so I went into the world of the imagination. It was essential for my survival. So I’ve always had fantasies, inner dialogues, stories coming from my imagination. Writing is a way of giving voice to all that,” she says.

“As a result, I am a very complex writer. I have all these tangles and all these threads that I’ve been interested in and explored in other realms, and they all coalesce in the novels. I try to keep things simple, and I never can; I just can’t do it,” she says with a laugh.

Shaping the expression of that complex inner world into a finished novel is a long and demanding process. Hale often works on a novel for years, focusing intensely on it for a while, then taking breaks to get distance and work on something else, then returning for re-writing and re-shaping, then more distance, and then another re-write, and so on.

“Typically, I need about nine drafts till a novel is finished,” says Hale.

She keeps to a fairly stringent writing routine, sitting down at her desk at eight or nine in the morning and writing until mid-afternoon. Once she’s immersed in a project, she doesn’t like to take breaks, because she begins to feel disconnected from the characters and story. However, these days she has to take time off to promote My Sweet Curiosity. And then there is travel and teaching.

Hale’s semi-nomadic life evolved naturally out of her passions, and at the same time feeds those passions. In the spring and summer, she is on Hornby, where she loves the peace and beauty, as well as the vibrant community of artists and writers.

In Toronto, where she spends each fall, she enjoys the urban cultural energy and the contact with her creative writing students. And in Cuba, where she lives from Christmastime into spring—well, there is much she enjoys about Cuba.

Hales’ Cuban connection came out of her visual art. She first went there eight years ago when her friend and fellow artist Lynn Hutchinson invited her to come to Havana to paint a mural. During that trip she made contacts in the Havana art world and was invited back a year and a half later to create an art installation about colonialism, slavery and sugar.

“At the end of that I had two weeks on my own and I wanted to see more of Cuba,” she says. She decided to take the 21-hour bus trip down to Baracoa on the Southeastern tip of the island. To explain why she chose Baracoa, she navigates the conversation back to Hornby Island and its renowned summer festival.

“There’s a wonderful Cuban folkloric dance and music troupe called Bara Rumba who has performed at the festival twice now. They are from Baracoa,” she explains, adding that she’d had a chance to meet them on Hornby and talk to them about their home.

Baracoa is a small seaside community filled with musicians and artists, says Hale. “If you’ve been there three months, you start to recognize everyone. It starts to feel very similar to the community here on Hornby, and yet very different.”

On her first night in Baracoa she went to see Bara Rumba perform. A friend introduced her to a man named Victor, a writer who works for the Casa de la Cultura. “I just fell totally in love with this man and have been going back to Cuba to spend as much time as I can with him,” says Hale.

It’s not surprising at all, really, that for Hale, love means crossing borders. In her life, as in her writing, she continues to happily step right past the artificial boundaries humans create, to inhabit a world where it is the connections—not the divisions—that matter.

Luckily for her readers, Hale knows no bounds.

For more information visit amandahale.com

“A friend recently asked me what I’d do if I had a week to live,” says author Susan Ketchen, whose book ‘Born That Way’, a novel for young adults, has recently been published. “I’d be right here!”

Photo by Boomer Jerritt

Driving on Headquarters Road heading northwest out of Courtenay on a spring day, the world reads like a rapturous ode to the ideal of ‘rural.’ Fluffy white lambs frolic alongside their grazing mothers; green fields unfold gently under golden sunlight. The plum and cherry trees are losing the last of their blossoms, releasing pale petals out into the gentle wind where they spiral and eddy like confetti.

Roadside signs advertise eggs, free-range meat, horse rides and bedding plants. The farmhouses and barns suggest lives that follow the rhythms of the earth, rather than the non-stop rush of cyberspace that seems to drive much of the Western world these days.

At the end of a quiet gravel road is a grassy driveway that winds past grazing horses, sunny pastures and a well-kept barn, ending up at a welcoming country home. And in the house and up the stairs is a small room with a desk, computer, well-stocked bookshelf, and a view up the driveway—a writer’s den.

This home—fields, barn, den, all of it—is where Susan Ketchen has done two remarkable things.

One of these is tangible: a book. In her upstairs room-of-her-own, Ketchen produced Born That Way, a young adult novel she wrote in a three-month period and which was picked up by one of the first publishers she sent it to, Oolichan Press. No easy feat these days, when the vast majority of manuscripts submitted end up feeding the publisher’s paper shredder.

The other remarkable thing is not tangible at all, but is perhaps just as rare: Ketchen has realized her childhood dreams.

Pretty much from the moment she was old enough to think about her future, Nanaimo-born Ketchen knew she wanted two things: to ride horses, and to write. Although her life has taken her in a variety of directions, not all of them necessarily leading directly toward these two desires, she somehow ended up just where she wanted to be.

“Miraculously, I now live on a small hobby farm in the Comox Valley with my husband, two cats, two horses and a flock of chickens. I write and I ride,” writes Ketchen on her website.

Riding and writing meet in her book, Born That Way. The 185-page novel tells the story of Sylvia, a 14-year-old self-confessed ‘horse-nut’ who, much to her frustration, has no horses in her life, beyond clandestine visits to a chestnut mare who grazes in a field near Sylvia’s home.

Her mom is an overzealous psychoanalyst who, in spite of good intentions, smothers Sylvia with her psychological theories, seeing Electra complexes, unconscious sexual drives, and potential neuroses in Sylvia’s every thought and deed. Her dad is friendly and easy going, but distracted and unengaged.

On top of all this, Sylvia is abnormally short. Why isn’t she growing? How can she convince her parents to let her ride? How can she take charge of her own life?

The novel answers all these questions in an engaging, wise and often very funny account in which Sylvia gets help from unexpected allies including her pet barnacles, the Internet, a mysterious blond stranger, and a perceptive psychiatrist. But perhaps most important to her journey are her inner resources: a series of vivid and increasingly lucid dreams, and a deep determination that pushes her forward. Once she learns to trust and direct these inner powers, she begins to transform her life.

“I wanted to write something that would be uplifting for me,” explains Ketchen. “It was winter when I was writing it. It was dark and raining. I wanted something light, not oppressive.

“I’d been doing some research on plot. I’m part of a writers’ group and in response to [my earlier work] they kept saying this is all really well written but where’s the plot? I became curious about ‘what is plot?’ I was reading Jack Hodgins’ book, A Passion for Narrative, and he had a quote from someone saying plot is a character struggling toward the light. That really appealed to me.”

Born That Way reflects Ketchen’s interests—horses, psychology and neuroscience—but it is not autobiographical, she says. The characters and events in the book originated in her imagination and were fleshed out with research when necessary.

“You know, writers say things like, ‘Oh the character showed up and was in the room with me the whole time.’ Well that’s nonsense really, they are in our brain,” she says. But not necessarily the rational, logical part of the brain. The work of the imagination is still very much a mystery and Ketchen really doesn’t know quite how she came up with all the vivid and powerful details of her story.

“The book came to me in little pieces. I had the initial idea that begins the book—a girl riding a horse in her dreams. I started with that, and then things came to me. It unfolded itself to me—in my brain and on my computer.”

Writing, she says, has something in common with riding. “Both are tremendous challenges. You need to think of several things at once and also, you need…” She hesitates a long moment before continuing… “not to think.

“Riding, physically, takes a lot of special muscles you don’t use otherwise. But it’s not just strength that you need. It demands a certain relaxation. You need to flow with the movement of the horse.

“In writing, there are rules and conventions of grammar structure, but there is also the creative side. You can’t write good fiction just out of a rule book. Some of it has to come out of your more intuitive side.

“I can have some intentionality—I’m going to come up here and work on Chapter 3 and I have an idea of where I want it to go. But if I plan it out too much, it’s not as good as the times when I let stuff come to me.

“And that’s where the fun is, when the flow happens. Some of this book just came to me out of left field, I don’t know why or from where, and that’s what’s the most fun,” she says.

This balance—keeping a degree of conscious intention while going with the flow—applies to Ketchen’s journey through life. “I very much believe in keeping my wits about me, but going with things as they happen as well,” she says.

By the time she was 20 Ketchen was already competing in equestrian sports and had published a couple of short stories in Miss Chatelaine, a national magazine. She was obviously on track with her two goals, but a practical inner voice was pointing out that she might need to explore other fields if she ever wanted to make a living.

And explore she did. Her university career was marvellously varied: “I studied everything that interested me: psychology, anthropology, sociology, creative writing, philosophy, economics, social theory, law, business. Just one problem: to earn an actual degree, you’re supposed to focus on something. And ideally, you don’t travel around the country sampling one university after another,” she writes.

Well-educated but degree-less, she still knew exactly what she wanted: to have time to write, to have horses, to live on a farm. So she began a career as a financial policy and procedures writer with the provincial government. She invested in property, hoping to make enough to buy a rural acreage, but was stymied by a market crash. She leased a horse for a while, hiked, kayaked and kept at her job.

Judy Norbury recounts her upbringing, her relationship with her mother, Mary, and her return trip to her birthplace in the recently published ‘Come Back, Judy Baba: Memoirs of India.’

Photo by Boomer Jerritt

Our relationship wasn’t always plain sailing by any means,” says the vivacious curly-haired woman from her wheelchair. The speaker is Judy Norbury, a well-known local singer-songwriter, and she is speaking of her mother, Mary Hargreaves Norbury.

“My mom was of the old school, you might say,” she continues. “Appearances and ‘what will people think’ were high on her agenda concerning all she did, and as her children, she felt what we did was a reflection on her.”

Judy recently found herself in a unique position, exploring her intimate relationship with her mother in a deep way. She decided to add her portion to the story her mother had written documenting their family life in India, where Judy was born. These joint memoirs have recently been published as Come Back, Judy Baba: Memoirs of India.

In 1948, Mary Hargreaves Norbury moved from Vancouver, to a small village near Mirzapur in northern India to marry an English carpet manufacturer. The book is her fascinating account of life as a post-Raj Memsahib. Mary gave birth to two daughters at the Mussoorie hill station. But the privileged, pampered life the Norburys’ led in India came to an abrupt halt when Judy contracted polio at the age of four. Soon after, Mary, Judy and her younger sister, Rosamund, moved back to Vancouver. But India had imbued the young child with its mysterious magic, however, and Judy felt the emotional pull to return all her adult life.

“It was a huge loss to me, I think,” says Judy, now 59. “I had been cared for by a devoted servant—Dukharan—and I was wrenched from him without the chance to say goodbye. He remained in my emotional makeup forever. I had known of the existence of my mom’s story for most of my life, of course, but I hadn’t really read it with intent until I decided to go back to India. Then, I was reading everything I could about India, and so I dug out the story and spent some time putting it onto computer, from my mom’s original typewritten manuscript. Reading about Dukharan brought up huge amounts of tears and sorrow—he had been my best friend and constant companion for the first four years of my life. Once I left, he just vanished out of my life and I often experienced a great feeling of loss as a child which I couldn’t explain. I believe it was that first loss of someone I loved that caused it.”

That trip in 1997 was a watershed in Judy’s life—literally as well as figuratively. “I cried copious amounts of tears,” she says with a rueful grin. “When I arrived in the train station in Mirzapur it was all so painfully familiar; we would have taken the train from there many times, and I felt an immediate connection. Even before we arrived, my tears were triggered by hearing a woman on the train with us speaking Hindi to her child. I burst into floods of tears when we pulled into Mirzapur. The achingly familiar landscape of mud huts, buffaloes, boys and men on huge Hero bicycles was blurred by weeping. What I wrote in my story was that the recognition I felt for these scenes was shocking and profound.”

Mary Norbury, like almost all the European women living in India at that time—the 1940s—escaped the heat of the south for cooler northern climes. Judy would have left and arrived at the Mirzapur train station many times in her life.

When Judy visited in 1997, the stately bungalow that had been the family home had not been lived in for some time and was a ruin. Intense baking heat and torrential monsoon rains quickly destroy buildings, and as part of the roof had collapsed, the rooms showed water stained walls with rotted woodwork. Judy was carried through the house on the back of her own daughter, Belinda, then a strapping 12-year-old. Judy was travelling with Belinda and their roommate, Ross.

“I felt glad my mother hadn’t seen the bungalow she so loved in such a ruined state; it would have broken her heart,” says Judy. The gardens felt more familiar to Judy and she knew she would have spent many hours there with Dukharan. “I can remember Dukharan squatting down to pee and severely wagging his finger at me not to look— which of course, I did!”

She laughs. “Indian men pee anywhere and everywhere as I discovered on my journey there as an adult, so it wouldn’t have been unusual.”
Dukharan was dead by the time Judy and her daughter returned, but she did meet up with another servant, Laloo, who was by then in his 60s. Laloo was 19 years old when Judy last saw him as a child.

Judy was able to fulfill her father’s wish of having his ashes cast into the Ganges on this trip. “The mighty Ganga, or Ganges, is one of India’s most holy rivers, and it ran right past the bungalow. I wasn’t able to get down the steep bank, but Laloo rented a boat and scattered my dad’s ashes on the river. I knew they would float downstream through the ancient, holy city of Benares, not far from Mirzapur. Many Indians come to Benares when they feel close to death as it’s considered the special city of Lord Shiva. They believe that if they die in Benares, they go straight to Shiva, stepping off the wheel of reincarnation. My dad lived in India for 23 years, having moved there to work for a carpet manufacturing company when he was 18.” Judy smiles, and adds simply. “He loved India.”

In some ways, Judy’s account of her return to India brings her mother’s story to a conclusion. “Mom tried to have [her memoirs] published, I believe,” says Judy, “however it was perceived as too sad. Mom’s story ends when she returned to Vancouver with me unable to walk; I picked it up from there.”

Judy may not have been able to walk due to the polio, but it didn’t deter her in the slightest from fulfilling her creative and inquisitive urges. “My parents never allowed me any special concessions because of my inability to walk, and I had to pull my weight. My mom was fierce in not treating me any differently than a fully-abled child.”

Judy recounts how her mother sang in the house while doing housework, and it seems Judy did likewise. “I think I sang most of the time as a child and in fact can remember my dad asking me for a bit of quiet, on one occasion.”

Music has been a constant in Judy’s life. She learned to play the guitar while living in a communal house with five friends in her late teens. Flower power was in full blossom and Judy embraced it wholeheartedly. “We had great fun in that house,” she recalls “Gourmet dinners, parties and constant music—rock, folk, Indian, we sucked it all in.”

Hypnotherapy isn’t about being out of control—it is about being more in control than you have ever been,” says Jeannie Spencer, who offers seminars designed to get clients to invision they lives they want to lead.

As a clinical hypnotherapist and certified master hypnotherapist, Spencer has helped hundreds of people overcome unhealthy behaviors and negative thought patterns by utilizing the power of their own minds.  The Invision Your Life seminars are a culmination of the most powerful tools and techniques she has used in her private practice.  Spencer has designed the seminars for “people who are committed to their own personal development.  It is for those who are ready to connect with themselves in a very powerful and meaningful way,” she says.

Spencer’s seminar is not your typical self help experience.  Her enthusiasm for her work is evident from the moment she steps into the room; her infectious smile and soothing voice are the perfect motivators for a day of deep, introspective work.  And it is work.  She is not there to simply boost confidence or lecture about goal setting.  Her seminar is more like a self defence class in which participants examine their weaknesses. But instead of despairing over them, Spencer teaches how to address these weaknesses using our most powerful tool—our mind.

A few days before the seminar, Spencer’s sister and business partner, Laura McGregor, sent each of the participants a short questionnaire in order to determine participants’ goals and assess each individual’s suggestibility.  Suggestibility traits are important because they influence how people consciously take in messages and how their bodies respond to those messages, Spencer says.  This knowledge of the participants is one of the things that makes this seminar so exceptional—she is able to gear her hypnotherapy scripts to the different types of personalities in the room, and when addressing questions or talking to participants one on one, she is careful to work with their specific personalities.  Spencer says that this is important for making the seminars interactive and for “teaching people how to communicate with their partners, their children and the people they work with.”

Spencer’s website (www.invisionyourlife.com) highlights her teachings and the personal and professional values that are the cornerstone of her practice.  Although Spencer is the face of the business, she is the first to admit that McGregor makes things happen—from 4,000 miles away in her home in Edinburgh, Scotland.  “My clients would probably be sitting on the floor in my basement if it weren’t for Laura,” Spencer says with a laugh.  This cross-Atlantic office is where the day-to-day administration of Invision Your Life is conducted.  “We joke that we are working 24 hours a day due to the time difference.”

Spencer knows how rare it is for people to take time for themselves and when they do, they deserve a lot more than instant coffee, a cucumber sandwich, and a badly organized event.  “Laura ensures that our clients get to experience the true luxury that introspection and time for yourself brings.

“It constantly amazes me,” Spencer adds, “how people give so much to others, but when asked to give one day to themselves they hesitate.  It just goes to show how giving we are as people.  People in that place of hesitation should consider how that giving can make them feel, if they do it without the stability of looking inward and replenishing their own energy first.”

I took a time out from my 60-hour work week and my two-year-old daughter to attend the seminar because I needed to make some important decisions in my own life.  Because they were so important, I wanted to be sure I explored all my choices and made a decision based on thorough contemplation and understanding of my own needs.  I also wanted to feel the energy of a group setting and take tools away with me that I could use every day. I am a firm believer that the mind needs exercise as much as the body, and hypnosis is a great way to ‘work’ the lesser used areas of the brain.

According to the Canadian Hypnotherapy Association, “hypnosis, when used in the therapeutic context, is a comfortable state of mind which permits one to focus attention on the healing of body and/or mind.”  This state of deep relaxation enables you to access your subconscious mind —home to your inner thoughts, fears and deepest emotions. Hypnotherapy is the process of using hypnosis to achieve a beneficial result, such as pain relief, removal of negative behavior patterns or freedom from phobias.

Spencer has helped people overcome chronic pain, negative behavior patterns and even freedom from phobias by helping them tune into their minds and bodies in this way.

Betty Boyle, whose late husband was a client of Spencer’s, discovered that hypnotherapy was a great comfort to both her and her husband.  “He was dying of throat cancer and Jeannie’s skills gave him times of peace,” Boyle says.  “When he died I realized I could benefit from her gentleness and skills as well.  There were times when I simply needed to purge myself by talking about him and then we ended these sessions with the relaxation of hypnotherapy.  She helped me through a terribly traumatic time.”

Hypnotherapy is nothing like the hypnosis people see on stage, and the challenge for many hypnotherapists is educating people about the differences between the two. “We don’t turn people into chickens, we turn chickens into people,” Spencer says with a laugh.

“Hypnotherapy isn’t about being out of control, it is about being more in control than you have ever been,” she explains.  “People who succumb to hypnosis on stage will never do anything that goes against their integrity.  They will snap back into their conscious mind if the stage hypnotist takes it too far, which is why stage hypnotists excuse people from the stage as the show goes on.”

Because of the unique processes Spencer learned at the Coastal Academy of Hypnotherapy she is able to teach people “how their mind accepts or rejects suggestions by communicating directly with each person’s unique subconscious mind.”

There are four hypnosis ‘sessions’ woven into her seminars, and you come out of each one more invigorated and confident than before.  You are aware of everything around you in the room but your mind is amazingly focused on the words Spencer is wrapping around you.  Her voice becomes a balm and you begin to see simplicity in the complexities of life.  I have always struggled with meditation, yoga or activities that require me to quiet my mind, but I slipped easily into hypnosis and was able to sit quietly with my thoughts and Spencer’s empowering suggestions.

Interspersed throughout the day are the success stories that inspire Spencer to do what she does.  One such story is about a client who was embarrassed about his hands and the nails that were bitten to the quick.  Spencer met him and his wife not long ago and he proudly displayed his perfect nails—a sign that the deeper anxieties were also healing.  Another is of a client who had just ended yet another dysfunctional relationship and found, through ‘hypno-journaling’ and ‘intentioning,’ that everything she needed in a partner could be listed on paper, and that person could even knock on her door.  She is now happily married with two children.

Spencer also teaches hypnobirthing, a unique method of relaxed, natural childbirth education, enhanced by self-hypnosis techniques.”  Hypnobirthing works with a woman’s natural instincts and empowers her to make decisions that are not based on fear,” Spencer explains, adding that “fear creates tension and tension creates pain.”  By eliminating the fear/tension/pain cycle, women are able to work with their bodies and their babies.”

Phebe May, a mother of three girls, decided to take a hypnobirthing class with Spencer before having her second baby.  “I was slightly traumatized by my first labor,” May admits.  “I was reading books on how to birth a child without fear, but felt that I needed more.  My husband and I attended four hypnobirthing classes that gave us the tools to manage the stages of labor without fear.  As a result, birthing my second baby was an amazing experience. It wasn’t painless, but my mind actively helped my body manage the pain, rather than surrender to it.  Because of hypnobirthing, my fears and anxieties around childbirth dissipated to the point that when I went into labor with my third baby, there was a smile on my face.”  (Spencer’s next hypnobirthing class takes place March 1—call Spencer at 250-702-4769 to sign up or for more information.)

Women having trouble conceiving can also benefit from Spencer’s skills.  She works with women that for some unknown, non-medical reason are not able to have children. Her voice fills with emotion and excitement as she relates that “each time I have helped a woman release what is blocking them, they have conceived within one or two months!”

Spencer’s other achievements include a guided hypnosis CD, which will be available for purchase on her website in mid February.  “The CD has been designed specifically for those who are always fighting against having enough time.  It’s based on the theory that everyone can manage 20 minutes of their day for self reflection,” says Spencer, “even if it’s just as they are falling asleep.”

Rita Picard, a former client of Spencer’s, agrees.  “As someone who has lived most of her life in a state of high anxiety, I found Jeannie’s hypnotherapy sessions to be the most calming, centering and relaxing experiences I have had in decades.”

This sentiment was visible throughout the room that winter day at the Kingfisher. All participants left feeling stronger, more focused and better equipped to handle the challenging situations and suggestions we encounter every day.

For more information visit:

www.invisionyourlife.com

or call 250-702-4769.

Local photographer Karen McKinnon looks on as her stepdaughter Maggie—the inspiration for A Fighting Spirit—displays a photo of herself that McKinnon took during her battle with leukemia.

Photo by Boomer Jerritt

McKinnon, who parents five children as well as running her own business, McKinnon Photography, doesn’t downplay the immense practical and emotional burdens she and her family have faced, but she’s got plenty to say about the gifts that accompany the challenges.

Dealing with illness as a family, she says, makes you grateful for every day you have together, grateful for all the help and support that keep on coming, grateful for the strength and resiliency of the human spirit—and out of that gratitude comes a natural desire to give back.

None of this, however, cancels out the difficulties.  “It’s impossible to imagine just how complicated life gets with a critically ill child.  Never mind the emotional stuff—the logistical stuff is overwhelming!  There are huge financial stresses.  You have so much you have to learn—about your child’s illness; about how to get the forms [for discounted travel] for BC Ferries; about making the appointments; about the health considerations the rest of the family now has to have; about how to work with the school system in a different way.  Meanwhile, one parent is probably busy applying for EI because they had to leave their job in order to be a caregiver.

“But what stood out for our family during this time is the support we received.  We were going to have to spend a lot of time in Vancouver for treatment—and we were handed the keys to an apartment there by YANA [You Are Not Alone, a Comox Valley organization that provides housing in Vancouver for the families of children needing medical treatment].

“I was so touched by being helped by YANA.  I was touched by the kids in the school who picked strawberries and brought them to our door.  I was touched by my clients who brought us food baskets.  And this wasn’t just impacting Maggie, but also her siblings.  They were overwhelmed by the kindness they were shown.  They asked us, ‘Why are people being so nice to us?’  One of the strongest things they are taking away from the experience of their sister having leukemia is the knowledge that people are good.

“So it was natural for me to think, what can we do to contribute to others?”

Maggie had been sick for about a year when McKinnon began to form the idea that blossomed into A Fighting Spirit.  McKinnon had, quite naturally, been photographing Maggie’s journey the whole time (she says photography is her passion, not just her business), and had made a slide show, set to music, using some of these images.

“I was blown away by how meaningful it was to have these images,” McKinnon says.  “What we’ve gone through has changed our family.  Looking at those photographs helped us all digest our experience.  When we look at them, we feel our strength—wow, we did that!  Maggie is so beautiful in all of them, no matter what treatment she is going through.

“And for Maggie, the photographs are something that she can look back on and share with her friends or her own children.”

Inspired by the power of photography, McKinnon began volunteering her photographic services to YANA.  She created a series of portraits of the children helped by YANA’s services, which the organization used to publicize its work.  “A lot of people have heard of YANA, but this helped to put a face on it.  People could see the pictures and say, ‘Oh I know that kid,’” says McKinnon.

Her experience with YANA only strengthened McKinnon’s desire to continue contributing through photography.  “I was really impacted by the kids I photographed, who had survived so many things adults haven’t had to face.”

“It’s been an amazing, amazing, amazing life for me so far” says Dave Hay, on the slopes at Mount Washington.

Photo by Boomer Jerritt

Dave Hay sits in his living room, straining to recall the complicated itinerary of his upcoming business trip. First he’s skiing with a group of Swedes in Whistler for three nights, then he’s meeting an old Scottish friend in Frankfurt to ski the French Alps, although they’ll probably hit the slopes in Switzerland as well. Then it’s back to Canada for stints at Kicking Horse, Revelstoke and Lake Louise—he rattles them off with all the enthusiasm of a housewife dictating her grocery list—then a week or so in Telluride, Colorado before heading back north for some heli-skiing in Whistler.

No, Dave Hay generally isn’t one to grumble about his job.  He sips fine wines, dines on gourmet meals, stays in the best hotels the world has to offer and—oh yeah—spends his days skiing the best terrain on the planet.  For the humble owner and sole employee of Skiing on the Edge, it’s all in a day’s work.

Skiing on the Edge is a bit of an enigma.  It’s not really a ski school, although it does involve an element of coaching, nor is it a vacation company, although it definitely takes skiers on some fabulous trips.  Its precise definition lies somewhere in between.

From its roots as a boutique high performance ski school offering athletes the opportunity to prepare for extreme terrain, Skiing on the Edge has evolved into a more personalized program that takes advanced, and generally wealthy, skiers all over the world on skiing holidays.  Although coaching is still a part of it, the real magic of Skiing on the Edge, says Hay, is much more transcendental.

“Clients have come up to me over the years and have said ‘It’s not about the skiing is it?’  Well, it’s not really.  We happen to be skiing, but it’s kind of a metaphor for life.  You sort of learn skiing through these experiences and comparisons in life, and we try to battle skiing as we would battle any challenge.  We just have more fun skiing.”

Hay has established many strong friendships with repeat clients during the 18 years he has been in business, and these connections ensure the fun isn’t just confined to the slopes.

“People don’t really feel sorry for me when I drive out of the driveway to go to work,” says Hay.  “Sometimes I’m staying in the finest hotels around and dining in the finest places that countries have to offer.  And the wines, oh my gosh!  These guys are on a holiday and it’s like a celebration.”  It’s not uncommon, he says, to enjoy a $700 bottle of wine with dinner, “or three or four,” or even a $4,000 bottle of champagne.

“I’m there to enjoy it with them,” he says, with characteristic modesty.  “And no, I can’t tell the difference between a $1,200 bottle of fine red wine and one we can buy here at the liquor store for $50, but I do appreciate the stories and I do really appreciate my involvement in their enjoyment of it.  It’s a cool job.”

While Hay realizes that many people would love to do what he does—and in fact people from all over the world have contacted him for a job—it’s his unique character and experience set that he believes are the secret to his company’s success.