Poet Kit Pepper’s season in the Highlands of Guatemala
Let Beauty Be: a Season in the Highlands, Guatemala is a cycle of sequential poems distilled from events and impressions Kit Pepper gained while volunteering in the northwestern highlands of Guatemala from February to May, 2006. There she was aligned with Alianza, a project which responded to grassroots requests for education and health care from the local Mam-speaking women and men of Comitancillo and surrounding, rural aldeas.
“This novel long poem journal offers 31 days as runs—at and into—the act of compassion that seeing and hearing clearly can be. Exotic beauty—as stumbling block—trips metaphor—or ignores it.” (Phil Hall) (more…)
The trailer has been viewed over 22,000 times on YouTube…and the DVD is about to be released. For eleven months, a core group of students at Nanaimo’s Wellington Secondary School have been at work on the feature film, “How to Survive the 10th Grade,” with a cast of forty students, ten crew members, and others. The film touches on a range of high school issues, including drug use, violence, rivalry and peer and sexual pressure. 
We share some scenes from two of Charles Dickens’ series of Christmas books, The Chimes and A Christmas Carol along with passages from Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Present in a brief investigation of the portrayal of social justice in 1840s Britain. We ask the question, what does the past have to say to our current present?
Christmas is traditionally a season of joy, family reunions, friendship and generosity. So why do so many people get so tied up in knots about it all? For some, Christmastime can be the most difficult, even the loneliest time of the year. What’s the best approach to use during the holiday season?
A Nanaimo-based advocacy group, the Creative Awareness Collective, is challenging a recent fee attached to the lunches served at The Salvation Army’s New Hope Centre. The Pennies from Heaven campaign aims to stop the fee. The group is also speaking up about practices at Nanaimo’s emergency shelters.
Some organizations seem to “sparkle with life” while others feel “dull and mechanical.” The art of engagement is about creating environments in which people thrive—even when times are tough.*