InFocus Magazine

For three days Isobel Springett had been hearing the cries coming from the dense forest behind her Dove Creek farm.  The wailing sounded eerily like a human baby in distress, but Springett knew it was a young fawn.  For three days and three nights the calls had played like a heartrending soundtrack in the background of Springett’s daily life.

As someone who had spent her life caring for, training, and observing animals, Springett was fully aware of the advice given by wildlife experts: never touch an apparently abandoned fawn. But during that third day, the fawn’s cries were becoming weaker by the hour.  As the early June afternoon waned, the temperature started dropping.  Springett fully agreed with the wildlife experts, but she also knew that this fawn was in real danger.

As Springett wondered whether or not to intervene, she knew that sentiment should have no place in her decision.  Of course, the idea of saving a baby deer was heart-warming, but the real questions were pragmatic.  What were the chances that the mother would return?  How much longer could the fawn last?  And did Springett have the knowledge and expertise to provide the appropriate care, so that the fawn could return to the wild successfully?

As the shadows lengthened on that third day, Springett made her choice.  She walked into the forest and scooped the fawn up.  It was surprisingly light, and alarmingly bony, and hardly struggled at all.

The fawn felt like a bag of bones in Springett’s arms as she carried it back to her house and lay it down beside her pet Great Dane, Kate, on Kate’s bed.

Thus began an extraordinary cross-species friendship that continues to this day, and has inspired people all over the world.  It has also changed Springett’s life, putting her and her 35-acre hobby farm in the international media spotlight and connecting her to people from just about every country on the globe.

None of this was in Springett’s mind that June afternoon when she unceremoniously introduced the two animals.  She was thinking the fawn needed to warm up, and she wanted to do that in a way that was as close to nature as possible.

“I knew I had to treat her like a deer, not a pet,” Springett says now, five years later.  “I never cuddled her, never put her on my lap, never invited her onto my bed.  I provided the basics but otherwise I was simply a chaperone.”  The only concession she made to the human urge to turn animals into pets was to give the fawn a name, Pippin.

Springett brought a lifetime of experience with animals to her “chaperone” role.  She was born with Asperger’s Syndrome, a condition on the autism spectrum.  Like many others with Asperger’s, Springett often felt distanced from people, but found she had an unusual ability to understand and work with animals.

As well as being an accomplished equestrian and trainer of horses, Springett has worked for feed and farm outlets, held positions as a veterinary technician and animal control officer, been involved with animal rescue, and made numerous trips to the Brazilian rain forest to observe and photograph the wildlife there.

“I’d say I’m better with animals than with people,” says Springett.

But of course it is Kate, the dog, who deserves credit for the relationship with the deer, Springett hastens to point out. A sleek black Great Dane who stands three feet tall at the withers, weighs in at 112 pounds, and radiates calm dignity, Kate has a “100 per cent reliable” disposition, says Springett.

“She is an extraordinary dog and I knew she would not hurt the fawn.”

Instead, she began to nurture it, and the fawn responded.  Kate began grooming Pippin, and staying close by, keeping a motherly eye on the orphan.  She even let the fawn nurse on her milk-less teats, providing emotional nourishment (Springett provided the physical nourishment by bottle).  The two animals slept in a cozy heap.  And once Pippin gained strength, the two animals started playing—chasing games, hide and seek, and all kinds of goofy, bouncy fun.

It wasn’t purely dog play and wasn’t purely fawn play, explains Springett.  “It was like they worked out their very own language—Kate-and-Pippin language.”

At first Pippin slept in the house, but one evening about two weeks after she’d been brought in, she headed back out to the forest to sleep.  She returned the next morning for food and companionship, but from then on she slept in the forest every night.

“Animals’ instincts are so strong,” says Springett.  “They know what to do.  Pip knew she needed to be in the forest.  She knew how to hide there—boy, did she know how to hide!”

Watching Kate and Pippin reunite every morning was the highlight of Springett’s days—an ecstatic frenzy of bounding, leaping, running, face-licking, tail-wagging and nuzzling that clearly proclaimed “I love you” in Kate and Pippin language.

Over the next few months, Springett watched with satisfaction as Pippin connected with other wild deer and became part of a herd.  Her goal had always been for Pippin to return to the wild and live with her own kind.  At the same time, she and Kate still enjoyed Pip’s daily visits.  And the next spring, they were thrilled when Pip showed up with a fawn of her own, to introduce it to the extended family.

Springett felt deeply grateful for the opportunity to be a chaperone of, and a witness to, such a unique and beautiful relationship.  But she was soon to find that the Kate and Pippin relationship held yet more gifts for her—and for many others.

Springett, a professional photographer, had been documenting the evolving friendship from the beginning in stills and videos.  Rather like a proud grandparent, she shyly but enthusiastically shared these with friends and family, many of whom urged her to put the videos out on YouTube, undoubtedly the world’s best medium for cute animal footage.

“And then of course people urged me to create a Facebook page.  I basically gave myself a crash course in social media,” says Springett.

It didn’t take long for the internet exposure to take effect.  Soon the videos were getting thousands of views and long threads of positive comments, and Springett began to feel that she, Kate and Pippin were connected to, well… a worldwide web.

Then US talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres found the videos, and played some of them on her show.   “At that point everything just took off,” says Springett.  Thousands of hits turned to tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands and then millions (currently 2.5 million).  Emails poured in from around the world.

Newspapers and TV networks from all over featured the story.  “It’s out there in Arabic and Swedish, and a bunch of other languages.  It’s in Africa and Australia,” says Springett.

National Geographic devoted an episode of their series, Unlikely Animal Friends to Kate and Pippin.  PBS sent out a television crew who spent a week on Springett’s farm, with the resulting footage becoming part of a one-hour documentary, Animal Odd Couples, part of the PBS Nature series.

In that documentary, Kate and Pippin’s story is the final instalment in a series of vignettes that include a giant tortoise and a protective goose, a coyote and a lion, and a goat who voluntarily becomes a seeing-eye guide for an elderly horse losing its vision.

“It was a great experience working with the PBS crew,” says Springett.  “I actually became great friends with the camera woman and we are still in touch.”

Indeed, Springett has made many connections thanks to Kate and Pippin’s friendship.  Some of these are people she has never and will never meet, but nonetheless they have a meaningful bond.

“I get emails from shut-ins, from people with chronic illness, from caregivers telling me how this story has touched their patients, from children and the elderly.  They all say that hearing about this friendship and watching these videos makes them feel better.  It keeps people going.  I feel like I have a huge extended family.  This story clearly hit a chord,” she says.

It’s not just Kate and Pippin hitting that chord.  Over the past few years, cross-species relationships have become a popular cultural theme, says Springett.  As well as countless touching/funny/cute YouTube videos, the National Geographic Unlikely Friendships series, and the PBS documentary, a number of books have been published for both kids and adults.

“The popularity of these stories is a sign of the times,” she says.  “People are worried about the future.  The news is all bad, but this is good news.

“We are getting so crowded here on earth, we need to learn to co-exist.  Animals can be great teachers of tolerance and acceptance.  Animals don’t murder each other; they only fight for food and territory.  On the other hand, we shouldn’t be too idealistic.  Animals can be vicious, too.”

The interest in cross-species friendships isn’t just a pop-culture phenomenon.  Scientists also are taking note, as they seek to understand the emotional life of animals.  The PBS nature documentary includes a number of animal behavior experts, one of whom points out that until about a decade ago, scientists wouldn’t even use the term “friendship” in talking about animals.  That is changing as more and more scientists accept that animals have deep and meaningful emotional lives.

“People say animals don’t have feelings,” says Springett.   “But they do. After all, we do.”

Now in its fifth year, the Kate and Pippin friendship remains strong.  Pippin still visits every day, bringing her fawns and other members of her herd.  And Springett continues to document the relationship.  Last year she collaborated with her brother, a writer, to create a children’s book called Kate and Pippin: An Unlikely Love Story, which was published by Penguin.  This year she published a wall calendar, which sold out two days after being posted on Facebook.  All this activity has boosted her photography career, she points out gratefully.

But her deepest satisfaction comes from Kate and Pippin—from watching their dance of greeting each day, from seeing Pippin successfully moving into the matriarch role in her herd, from watching her fawns grow up and have babies of their own.

“Our relationships with animals can be very, very meaningful,” she says.  “They speak to that communication instinct we all have.  I’ve seen it with therapeutic riding.  There is this different level of communication going on where no words are needed.”

For more information about the story of Kate and Pippin go to www.kateandpippin.com.

Springett’s story may be heart-warming, but if you see a fawn lying alone, don’t intervene! 

Fawns are taught to lie very still, usually in the forest or in tall grass.  The mother will leave her fawn for up to 24 hours to go feed, but will usually stay close by.  The fawn’s stillness, which people can misinterpret as weakness, is a defence mechanism to protect it from detection by predators. 

“The best thing we can do is leave it alone,” says Maj Birch, manager and founder of Mountainaire Avian Rescue Society (MARS).  “People may not realize that they are moving the fawn away from its mother.”

Like Springett, Birch warns against making a pet out of a deer.  “There was a recent case where some people took in a fawn and raised it.  When it got older it became a pest.  It wouldn’t go away.  It would jump up on people and knock them over.  It didn’t seem to know it was an animal.  We have to let wild animals be wild.

“If you are worried about a baby deer, call us before you do anything!” 

For more info contact MARS at 250-337-2021 or www.wingtips.org.

For more information on how to respond to a fawn in distress, see the North Island Wildlife Recovery Association website at www.niwra.com.

For three days Isobel Springett had been hearing the cries coming from the dense forest behind her Dove Creek farm.  The wailing sounded eerily like a human baby in distress, but Springett knew it was a young fawn.  For three days and three nights the calls had played like a heartrending soundtrack in the background of Springett’s daily life.

As someone who had spent her life caring for, training, and observing animals, Springett was fully aware of the advice given by wildlife experts: never touch an apparently abandoned fawn. But during that third day, the fawn’s cries were becoming weaker by the hour.  As the early June afternoon waned, the temperature started dropping.  Springett fully agreed with the wildlife experts, but she also knew that this fawn was in real danger.

As Springett wondered whether or not to intervene, she knew that sentiment should have no place in her decision.  Of course, the idea of saving a baby deer was heart-warming, but the real questions were pragmatic.  What were the chances that the mother would return?  How much longer could the fawn last?  And did Springett have the knowledge and expertise to provide the appropriate care, so that the fawn could return to the wild successfully?

As the shadows lengthened on that third day, Springett made her choice.  She walked into the forest and scooped the fawn up.  It was surprisingly light, and alarmingly bony, and hardly struggled at all.

The fawn felt like a bag of bones in Springett’s arms as she carried it back to her house and lay it down beside her pet Great Dane, Kate, on Kate’s bed.

Thus began an extraordinary cross-species friendship that continues to this day, and has inspired people all over the world.  It has also changed Springett’s life, putting her and her 35-acre hobby farm in the international media spotlight and connecting her to people from just about every country on the globe.

None of this was in Springett’s mind that June afternoon when she unceremoniously introduced the two animals.  She was thinking the fawn needed to warm up, and she wanted to do that in a way that was as close to nature as possible.

“I knew I had to treat her like a deer, not a pet,” Springett says now, five years later.  “I never cuddled her, never put her on my lap, never invited her onto my bed.  I provided the basics but otherwise I was simply a chaperone.”  The only concession she made to the human urge to turn animals into pets was to give the fawn a name, Pippin.

Springett brought a lifetime of experience with animals to her “chaperone” role.  She was born with Asperger’s Syndrome, a condition on the autism spectrum.  Like many others with Asperger’s, Springett often felt distanced from people, but found she had an unusual ability to understand and work with animals.

As well as being an accomplished equestrian and trainer of horses, Springett has worked for feed and farm outlets, held positions as a veterinary technician and animal control officer, been involved with animal rescue, and made numerous trips to the Brazilian rain forest to observe and photograph the wildlife there.

“I’d say I’m better with animals than with people,” says Springett.

But of course it is Kate, the dog, who deserves credit for the relationship with the deer, Springett hastens to point out. A sleek black Great Dane who stands three feet tall at the withers, weighs in at 112 pounds, and radiates calm dignity, Kate has a “100 per cent reliable” disposition, says Springett.

“She is an extraordinary dog and I knew she would not hurt the fawn.”

Instead, she began to nurture it, and the fawn responded.  Kate began grooming Pippin, and staying close by, keeping a motherly eye on the orphan.  She even let the fawn nurse on her milk-less teats, providing emotional nourishment (Springett provided the physical nourishment by bottle).  The two animals slept in a cozy heap.  And once Pippin gained strength, the two animals started playing—chasing games, hide and seek, and all kinds of goofy, bouncy fun.

It wasn’t purely dog play and wasn’t purely fawn play, explains Springett.  “It was like they worked out their very own language—Kate-and-Pippin language.”

At first Pippin slept in the house, but one evening about two weeks after she’d been brought in, she headed back out to the forest to sleep.  She returned the next morning for food and companionship, but from then on she slept in the forest every night.

“Animals’ instincts are so strong,” says Springett.  “They know what to do.  Pip knew she needed to be in the forest.  She knew how to hide there—boy, did she know how to hide!”

Watching Kate and Pippin reunite every morning was the highlight of Springett’s days—an ecstatic frenzy of bounding, leaping, running, face-licking, tail-wagging and nuzzling that clearly proclaimed “I love you” in Kate and Pippin language.

Over the next few months, Springett watched with satisfaction as Pippin connected with other wild deer and became part of a herd.  Her goal had always been for Pippin to return to the wild and live with her own kind.  At the same time, she and Kate still enjoyed Pip’s daily visits.  And the next spring, they were thrilled when Pip showed up with a fawn of her own, to introduce it to the extended family.

Springett felt deeply grateful for the opportunity to be a chaperone of, and a witness to, such a unique and beautiful relationship.  But she was soon to find that the Kate and Pippin relationship held yet more gifts for her—and for many others.

Springett, a professional photographer, had been documenting the evolving friendship from the beginning in stills and videos.  Rather like a proud grandparent, she shyly but enthusiastically shared these with friends and family, many of whom urged her to put the videos out on YouTube, undoubtedly the world’s best medium for cute animal footage.

“And then of course people urged me to create a Facebook page.  I basically gave myself a crash course in social media,” says Springett.

It didn’t take long for the internet exposure to take effect.  Soon the videos were getting thousands of views and long threads of positive comments, and Springett began to feel that she, Kate and Pippin were connected to, well… a worldwide web.

Then US talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres found the videos, and played some of them on her show.   “At that point everything just took off,” says Springett.  Thousands of hits turned to tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands and then millions (currently 2.5 million).  Emails poured in from around the world.

Newspapers and TV networks from all over featured the story.  “It’s out there in Arabic and Swedish, and a bunch of other languages.  It’s in Africa and Australia,” says Springett.

National Geographic devoted an episode of their series, Unlikely Animal Friends to Kate and Pippin.  PBS sent out a television crew who spent a week on Springett’s farm, with the resulting footage becoming part of a one-hour documentary, Animal Odd Couples, part of the PBS Nature series.

In that documentary, Kate and Pippin’s story is the final instalment in a series of vignettes that include a giant tortoise and a protective goose, a coyote and a lion, and a goat who voluntarily becomes a seeing-eye guide for an elderly horse losing its vision.

“It was a great experience working with the PBS crew,” says Springett.  “I actually became great friends with the camera woman and we are still in touch.”

Indeed, Springett has made many connections thanks to Kate and Pippin’s friendship.  Some of these are people she has never and will never meet, but nonetheless they have a meaningful bond.

“I get emails from shut-ins, from people with chronic illness, from caregivers telling me how this story has touched their patients, from children and the elderly.  They all say that hearing about this friendship and watching these videos makes them feel better.  It keeps people going.  I feel like I have a huge extended family.  This story clearly hit a chord,” she says.

It’s not just Kate and Pippin hitting that chord.  Over the past few years, cross-species relationships have become a popular cultural theme, says Springett.  As well as countless touching/funny/cute YouTube videos, the National Geographic Unlikely Friendships series, and the PBS documentary, a number of books have been published for both kids and adults.

“The popularity of these stories is a sign of the times,” she says.  “People are worried about the future.  The news is all bad, but this is good news.

“We are getting so crowded here on earth, we need to learn to co-exist.  Animals can be great teachers of tolerance and acceptance.  Animals don’t murder each other; they only fight for food and territory.  On the other hand, we shouldn’t be too idealistic.  Animals can be vicious, too.”

The interest in cross-species friendships isn’t just a pop-culture phenomenon.  Scientists also are taking note, as they seek to understand the emotional life of animals.  The PBS nature documentary includes a number of animal behavior experts, one of whom points out that until about a decade ago, scientists wouldn’t even use the term “friendship” in talking about animals.  That is changing as more and more scientists accept that animals have deep and meaningful emotional lives.

“People say animals don’t have feelings,” says Springett.   “But they do. After all, we do.”

Now in its fifth year, the Kate and Pippin friendship remains strong.  Pippin still visits every day, bringing her fawns and other members of her herd.  And Springett continues to document the relationship.  Last year she collaborated with her brother, a writer, to create a children’s book called Kate and Pippin: An Unlikely Love Story, which was published by Penguin.  This year she published a wall calendar, which sold out two days after being posted on Facebook.  All this activity has boosted her photography career, she points out gratefully.

But her deepest satisfaction comes from Kate and Pippin—from watching their dance of greeting each day, from seeing Pippin successfully moving into the matriarch role in her herd, from watching her fawns grow up and have babies of their own.

“Our relationships with animals can be very, very meaningful,” she says.  “They speak to that communication instinct we all have.  I’ve seen it with therapeutic riding.  There is this different level of communication going on where no words are needed.”

For more information about the story of Kate and Pippin go to www.kateandpippin.com.

Springett’s story may be heart-warming, but if you see a fawn lying alone, don’t intervene! 

Fawns are taught to lie very still, usually in the forest or in tall grass.  The mother will leave her fawn for up to 24 hours to go feed, but will usually stay close by.  The fawn’s stillness, which people can misinterpret as weakness, is a defence mechanism to protect it from detection by predators. 

“The best thing we can do is leave it alone,” says Maj Birch, manager and founder of Mountainaire Avian Rescue Society (MARS).  “People may not realize that they are moving the fawn away from its mother.”

Like Springett, Birch warns against making a pet out of a deer.  “There was a recent case where some people took in a fawn and raised it.  When it got older it became a pest.  It wouldn’t go away.  It would jump up on people and knock them over.  It didn’t seem to know it was an animal.  We have to let wild animals be wild.

“If you are worried about a baby deer, call us before you do anything!” 

For more info contact MARS at 250-337-2021 or www.wingtips.org.

For more information on how to respond to a fawn in distress, see the North Island Wildlife Recovery Association website at www.niwra.com.

Blackmail hardly seems the best way to start a career.  But that seems to be how it all started for 23-year-old musical theatre instructor, business owner, and recording artist Joey Clarkson.  That, and the admission she was a very loud child.

The result has been a remarkable young artist with a keen sense of community and a commitment to bringing out the best in everyone around her.  She was recently recognized by the Comox Valley Chamber of Commerce with its annual Youth Leadership Award.

“My mom put me in choir—a children’s choir—when I was five because I used to have a voice that was like ‘Rar! Rar! Rar!’ when I was speaking,” says Clarkson with a laugh. “She hoped it would fix my talking voice because I yelled a lot and growled everything. And then I ended up loving it and fell in love with singing.

“She forced me to audition for musical theatre when I was nine,” she continues.  “I was involved with St. John Ambulance brigade and if I didn’t audition then I wouldn’t be allowed to go to choir or St. John Ambulance.  I didn’t have to do the show.  I just had to audition.  Of course I did it and just fell in love with the audition.  It was so much fun, and I met a bunch of new kids and then I wanted to do the show.”

Her first show was Anne of Green Gables with the Rainbow Youth Theatre. From that point on, Clarkson involved herself in all aspect of musical theatre—whether it was on stage, back stage or behind the scenes.

“I started doing the volunteer back stage work with Rainbow Youth Theatre and I shadow directed some shows.  So I was working as a student shadow director for some youth shows as well as stage-managing.  Then I had the opportunity to start teaching with Theatre Works when I was 13 years old.  I was shadowed into teaching through a very talented lady in the Comox Valley, Kymme Patrick.  She shadow instructed me into a teaching position to teach some younger classes for her.”

“She played a big part in the leadership of how I stepped into being so comfortable with who I am,” says Clarkson.  “Then when I was 15, I was allowed to teach for her on my own.”

Apparently that wasn’t enough to keep the active teenager busy.  She started a volunteer organization fundraising for disaster relief programs called KATALIST—Kids Acting Together to Assist Lives in Suffering Times

“We started doing work for disaster relief, specifically in response to the Tsunami disaster in 2005,” says Clarkson.  Once fundraising efforts for that wrapped up, Clarkson and the group of friends she started the organization with kept working together to raise funds for disaster relief programs as they came up, “because there is always something,” says Clarkson.

Wanting to do more than the drama classes she was teaching for Patrick, Clarkson started her own business teaching musical theatre.  The business, though, didn’t really take off until her Grade 12 year when she made the decision to delay early graduation (she had enough credits to graduate early) and teach in order to graduate in June with her friends.

“And then it developed into this niche I have now—musical theatre for home school students,” explains Clarkson.  “Now I’m teaching across the Island, in the Lower Mainland and Alberta and next month I’m off to Abu Dhabi to teach a class there.”

And just how did that happen—Abu Dhabi, that is?  Well, it was a student in one of her classes whose family was living in Dubai, another city in the United Arab Emirates.  The student ended up in Clarkson’s class during a visit to extended family in the Comox Valley.

“At the end of the class she came up to me and said, ‘I wish we had classes in Dubai like this.  We don’t have anything like this’, and that was the first time I thought about it,” says Clarkson.  “I thought that was so cool, I wish I could go to Dubai.

“I’ve always believed unless you try for something it’s never going to happen,” says Clarkson.  “That’s always been my philosophy.  A lot of people don’t try and aren’t successful because they automatically deem themselves incapable of doing so before they even give it a proper chance.  Going to Dubai is probably one of the only things in my life where I said it’s never going to happen.  That’s too far away.  I sat on that for three years.”

Then, in September of 2011, something clicked.  Rather than dream about Dubai, Clarkson decided she was going to go.  The United Arab Emirates is an oil-rich country and utilizes foreign labor.  That means the country is home to a large ex-pat community, many of whom are following westernized curriculums for their children.  Clarkson contacted several home schooling groups and offered them the opportunity of musical theatre classes for their kids.  By January of 2012 Clarkson had a deposit to teach, and two and a half weeks later she left.  She’s returning this year, and is excited to learn that 17 of her original 20 students will also be returning to class.

“It’s a really cool class,” says Clarkson.  “It’s one of the only places you get to meet so many students from so many different areas.  There are a whole bunch of nationalities, so the accents are hilarious and insane to try and understand them all.”

So what does Clarkson do in her workshops?  In a place like Abu Dhabi, she’s obviously teaching kids from many different backgrounds, even if they share a common westernized curriculum.  For that matter, home school kids are often home schooled for many different reasons.  Diversity is the name of the game with her clientele.

“The main goal of the workshop is to build the self-esteem of the students.  It’s never about the polished, finished product,” says Clarkson.  “It’s about the journey of how they’re expanding as performers and students and people.

“A big part of my workshops is I have older students mixed with younger students.  I never have just a five-year-old class.  My classes range from five years to 15 years old and I do that because I find the older students are less likely to act out and more likely to take on a leadership role and try things more heartedly,” she says.

“I also find with the younger students, they’re more likely to try really hard and keep their focus if there are older kids in the class.  They see the older kids doing it and they want to be like the older kids.”

Clarkson obviously knows what makes her students tick, and clearly loves her work.

“I never want to stop teaching musical theatre classes.  I never want that to leave completely,” says Clarkson.  “You start to build a relationship with these kids.  You meet them when they’re five and now they’re 11 and you’ve seen these kids really grow up. I would like a more set schedule, though!”

However, she is also keen to put her musical career into high gear.

“I started taking the singer-songwriter lifestyle more seriously when I was 15,” says Clarkson, who wrote her first song in Grade 9, and eventually signed a production contract with Highland Music Multi-Media, under Susie McGregor and Andrew Lorimer.

“They became my producers,” says Clarkson. “I spent a couple of years learning from them and attending conferences and then doing studio time here and there.  And in 2010 I released my first album with my own material.”

This year her hope is to break into the festival circuit.  “I want to keep performing and get to a point with my music where I’m making money off my music and I’m not having to pay to play music,” she says.

A new album, expected in the spring of 2013, should help.

“The idea of the album is it’s all material I’ve written over the last couple of years since I’ve been on the road, because I’ve been travelling a lot,” explains Clarkson. “It’s called See You, Love You, Behave Yourself—that’s what my grandma says to me when I leave the country!”

And a new appreciation of what it takes to grow a music career is adding focus to the process.

“There are lots of different levels to it,” she says.  “Being able to write the music is one of them.  Being able to produce the music is a huge level.  And then being able to promote it is something a lot of artists overlook, including myself.”

In 2010 Clarkson focused on getting the album done, but once she had the final product she was at something of a loss as to what to do with it.  “You have to promote it to magazines and radio and take it on the road.”

For her, the touring part is easy, at least in the United Kingdom where she has performed four times in the past two years.  A trip last year was even turned into a documentary giving an insider’s look at an independently organized international tour.  It screened at the BBC film festival in Norfolk in September of last year.

“It’s easier to get a gig in the U.K. because when you are there you’re someone that is different,” says Clarkson.  The accent alone gets peoples’ interest.  In contrast, the Comox Valley is full of talented musicians, and a musical career is often seen just as a hobby.  “A lot of people just say ‘You’re another artist from the Valley’.”  That situation makes it more challenging to build up the kind of hometown base and support that many festivals are looking for when booking new and emerging artists.

Clarkson, though, isn’t deterred.  Her plan is to tour with a full band this year, and she is applying for various grants to help make that happen.  And she is drumming up the Facebook support many festivals are using to decide who they will invite to play.

In the meantime, she’s filling her time with a fundraising project for Habitat for Humanity, called The House the Kids Built.

“We’re trying to encourage the students of School District 71 to fundraise enough to sponsor a house build next year,” explains Clarkson.  She’s been busy giving presentations as various district schools alongside Habitat for Humanity fundraising coordinator Tim Roth.  At the same time, Clarkson been scouting the schools for singers to make up a back-up chorus on a charity single she wrote for Habitat for Humanity. However, it isn’t just the fundraising or the single that are Clarkson’s biggest hope for the project.

“In the end, the kids will look at this as something they’ve done as a community together, and not just as a school,” says Clarkson.  “And that is something we need.”

In fact, it’s that sense of community that drives Clarkson in much of what she does—whether it’s teaching musical theatre or creating music.

“The programs that developed me into the person I am today were community programs,” says Clarkson simply. “Giving back just feels right and feels like it’s supposed to happen.  I never thought about why, I just do it!”

Clarkson pauses to think for a moment, before adding:  “I see a lot of what kids can do and how kids can get passionate and how much they can accomplish.  It’s another thing I always try and emphasize teaching the kids is they can do a lot more than they think they can.  We have five days of working together.  We have four hours a day.  So you have 20 hours with these kids over the course of a week, and at the end of the week they have a half hour presentation of singing and acting and dancing, which is completely run by them.  They can accomplish so much.  They can be inspiring.

“I encourage them to use their strengths and their passions positively in a way that will help others,” continues Clarkson.  “It’s a feeling you don’t really get in anything else, and if I can pass that on…”

And in the end, that’s what makes Clarkson so impressive. She lives what she teaches, models what she believes in, and is having fun doing it.

To learn about Clarkson’s musical theatre classes, listen to her music or like her on Facebook (and help her make it onto the festival circuit), visit www.joeyclarkson.ca and follow the links.