In Focus is our gift to the community. A way for us to help show our recognition for the people, businesses and organizations that help make our city great. The team at KelownaNow.com is passionate about this community and the people that make it amazing. We want to show our friends, neighbours, family and colleagues that we notice them and the fabulous things that they do.
What is your name?
Nancy Holmes
What do you always find yourself saying?
“This looks important/ good/ interesting/ fun; let’s do it.” Then all my partners, team members, collaborators and family groan and say “Oh no, not something else! You’ve got to learn to say no!”
If you could spend one whole day with anyone in the world who is currently alive, who would you select?
Jenny, my seven-year-old step-granddaughter in Toronto. She is a delightful, wonderful child and she makes me happy.
If you were to receive any existing public award, what award would you like to win?
Any best garden award would be my dream. Not a lush rose garden sort of award, but say an eco-dazzler garden award or something like that. Though I am far, far from winning any such award.
If you could spend a day with any historical figure, who would you choose and why?
I’d like to spend a day chatting with Jane Austen to see if she is as witty and fun as her novels, though my dark side chooses Lord Byron.
Who inspires you?
My mother, Rosalie Holmes. She’s amazing. She’s in her late 80s and is still curious, funny, emotional, smart, and interesting.
What are three things on your bucket list?
Costa Rica to see hummingbirds with ridiculously long tails.
The Burgess Shale and Lake O’Hara
Santorini
If you had an enormous yacht, what would you name it?
Moneysink
If you could foresee a single day of your future in its entirety, what date would you select?
The day all farms in the world are organic again.
What are you passionate about?
Nature, books, food, and wine.
What has been your favourite day of your life, up to this point?
The three wonderful days when each of my three sons was born.
What has been your proudest accomplishment?
Well, I can now text and my kids answer me. I also can download "apps" onto my Smartphone. Wow!
Where is your favourite place to dine in Kelowna? What do you like about it?
My own home, to tell you the truth! I love to cook and make fabulous meals that my husband pairs with perfect wines. Hard to beat. Lately, I’ve been taking guests to the BNA pub because I adore their roasted vegetable quinoa salad.
What is your favourite activity or event in Kelowna? Why?
One event I never miss is Seedy Saturday, the amazing seed show and seed exchange run by Kelowna’s Master Gardeners. You can get ALL the seeds you need for your garden and there is even a terrific used cookbook table.
What is the name of your business/organization?
The Department of Creative Studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan.
What does your business/organization do?
We teach and do research in the areas of Creative Writing, Performance and Visual Arts, Within Creative Studies; I am a teacher of poetry, creative writing, and community-based eco art.
Where can people find you or your business online?
The Eco Art Incubator
Where can people find your business on Facebook?
Pollinator Pasture
How do people connect with you on Linkedin?
Nancy Holmes
What is your mission?
I want all my students to get the chance to create something really valuable for themselves and their world, in whatever way they define that. My personal mission is to learn how to belong to this place, the Okanagan valley, and make art out of this.
If you could achieve one thing within your field, what would it be?
To write a really good poem or novel- I think that is always a writer’s goal.
Where do you want your business/organization to be in five years?
I’d like the Department of Creative Studies to be the best and most innovative place in Canada to study creative writing. And have an eco-art centre!
Who do you consider to be a forerunner within your field?
For those working in place-based thinking and art in the Okanagan, the most significant leader is probably Jeannette Armstrong, a Syilx elder, philosopher, scholar, plant lover, and artist who teaches and does research at UBCO and at the En’Owkin Centre.
What three qualities do you feel that your business/organization exemplifies?
Creativity, community, education.
What would you like to say to your employees/volunteers?
I have learned that the very best work happens when we do “slow research.” We’re familiar with the Slow Food movement, and other “Slow” methods of practice and engagement. Community-based research also has to be a “Slow” practice.
How does your business/organization impact the community?
The Department of Creative Studies is one of the main cultural engines of the Central Okanagan. In our eco art projects, we create local art to engage people with this fragile and beautiful environment we live in.
If you were trapped in an elevator with several wealthy investors from any field, which field would you want them to be experts in? What would say to them/talk about?
Okay, I want a handful of trapped wealthy art and nature loving people. I’d talk about how wonderful it would be to have a zero-impact eco art residency – where eco artists can live and work for weeks or months in collaboration with each other and the Okanagan habitats around them. A sort of Banff Centre for place-based, ecological art making! Can you imagine the amazing envisioning we could do about what that might look like? Wow, wouldn’t our students be lucky? Wouldn’t the Okanagan get on the map? Think of how your Wealthy Names will look on those buildings! Wouldn’t I be a great director of the centre?
If I could change one thing about Kelowna, it would be:
Get over its real estate binge. Let’s develop only where development has already happened- no more building on any indigenous habitats or ALR land.
What do you think makes Kelowna great?
It has the potential to be a remarkable and innovative 21st century city- with 35 per cent of its land base in the ALR or in parks, it could be an amazingly sustainable city, growing its own food, returning wildlife to every corridor and alongside us (birds and fish and bees as well as the bigger guys). We have potential to be something truly unique if we have the will and vision to do it. It’s a test. Will we pass or fail?
My nomination for the In Focus spotlight is:
Renee Burgess who just opened up a SCENAR therapy office in Kelowna and my wonderful massage therapist, Elaine Rudd at Third Space Wellness—these amazing people keep me functioning as I work way too much on the computer and at my desk!
Some general comments I would like to share are:
Nancy Holmes has published five collections of poetry, most recently The Flicker Tree: Okanagan Poems (Ronsdale 2012). This book is a collection of poems about the place, people, plants and animals of the Okanagan valley in the southern interior of British Columbia where she has lived for the past 20 years. Her other books are Valancy and the New World (Kalamalka Press, 1988), Down to the Golden Chersonese: Victorian Lady Travellers (Sono Nis, 1991), The Adultery Poems (Ronsdale, 2002) and Mandorla (Ronsdale Press, 2005). She is also the editor of Open Wide a Wilderness: Canadian Nature Poems (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009),. Nancy is Associate Professor in Creative Writing in the Department of Creative Studies at The University of British Columbia in Kelowna, British Columbia. Place, community, and artistic collaboration have become her latest interests, joining her commitment to the writing and teaching of poetry and fiction. Over the past few years, she has become increasingly active in creating, supporting and curating eco-themed community-based art projects with her students and other artists. These projects include the Woodhaven Eco Art Project and with her colleague Denise Kenney in Interdisciplinary Performance, several initiatives of the Eco Art Incubator. Currently, she is a co-investigator on a SSHRC Partnership Development Grant with Emily Carr University on a project called The Public Art Pollinator Project which is harnessing the power of art to raise awareness and to develop initiatives to protect native pollinators, especially bees, in both the lower mainland of British Columbia and the Okanagan. Nancy won the 2015 Robert Kroetsch National Teaching Award in Creative Writing for her innovative student project, Dig Your Neighbourhood.
We encourage you to leave your comments and words of support below, and submit your own nomination by clicking HERE. You are also welcome to submit a form of your own by clicking HERE. Thank you, Kelowna!
