Learning About Vision from A Blueprint for Dramatic Change

I subscribed to the Crow’s Theatre newsletter in 2019 after watching two performances of Andrew Kushnir’s Towards Youth: A Play on Radical Hope and drinking half a beer too many while watching the Raptors in the lobby. In the fall, after the championship parade, I moved to Halifax to take a job with the HeartWood Centre for Community Youth Development, and thought about unsubscribing. It’s a big deal to unsubscribe right? You’ll never guess what happened next.

I didn’t unsubscribe. That’s not really the hook, I promise.

The moral of this slightly pained opening is that I subscribe to the Crow’s Theatre newsletter and, as a result, discovered a new podcast called “ Soft Revolution” hosted by Ali Momen and Torquil Campbell. My first 42 minutes and 33 seconds of listening got me thinking about the value of involving artists and storytellers in public policy making.

This idea isn’t all that new or particularly revelatory, but it intersects with a question that I’m considering:

Why it is it important to be a creator (have a creative process, be telling stories, be creating, etc.) right now?

As I passively scrolled through Twitter on the weekend I discovered an article by Edward Riche. Riche takes a playfully positive stance on the Atlantic bubble and the possibilities for regional collaboration that it uncovers. He discusses a regional airline, greater regional food security, and even political integration. He imagines things in brighter, more conspiratorial terms than I just did, using the labels of Air Atlantic, Eatlantic, and Bloq Atlantique. When I read those, I can imagine the ideas; they have life.

I’d never heard of Riche before, but a quick click on his author profile with the CBC told me that he “writes for the stage, page, and screen.”

He’s one of those artists that Torquil and Ali had me thinking about.

As I decided to tweet out a link to the article, I thought about why I’d…