Hilary Henegar’s Canadian spelling is so flawless you’d never know she’s a Hoosier, not a hoser like the rest of us. She’s a film-geek-turned-writer and the intrepid digital editor of Granville and GardenWise magazines, but she’s probably best known for her array of amazing vegan sauces, and for the fact that, even after a number of years in Vancouver, she still delightedly refers to our temperate rainforest as “exotic.”
—Krista Eide
The Proof
1. I spend a lot of time with a camera in my hand spying on my boyfriend and my cats. I probably have thousands of pics of them. I love spying generally—spying and documenting—snapping random people and objects I find along the way, but Brad and Yuki (and Arlo) are my favourite subjects.
Yuki was our first cat. Her full name is Ms. Yuki Shanghai, and in a former life, she danced the hostess bars of Shinjuku in a burlesque revival cabaret. That was before she became a stray in Abbotsford.
2. I do a lot of vegan cooking and baking. These are some yummy vegan scones I made last year with berries from Richmond.
My goal is to eat as close to home and with as little interaction with the industrial food system as possible. Cooking vegan and from scratch makes it easy. And delicious. And living off Commercial Drive is a big part of it. I never have to step foot in a supermarket; instead, I have a huge variety of local, seasonal and specialty foods available to me in the indie shops along the Drive. I love my neighbourhood!
3. I started riding my bike to work last year during Bike to Work Week. I loved it immediately and was hooked. Taking the Central Valley Greenway every day, I get to watch as the city transforms the bikeway with wildflowers, flowering bushes and interesting grasses. One day, I came across this dead bird on the pavement. Someone had gathered some of the wildflowers that were in bloom and laid them out in respect. I found this really touching and felt an overwhelming urge to hug someone. But no one was around, so I took this picture instead.
4. This is my desk. We're knee-deep in a site redesign for Granville mag, which will make it tons easier to access the huge breadth of content on the site and also emphasize our sharp hyperlocal focus, which had been overshadowed by our "green" content in the past. I'm using this chart to help me plot all the different topics we cover on the site into neat little categories for our new menu bar.
My hope with Granville mag is to really highlight how easy, fulfilling and addictive it is to live consciously, creatively and sustainably. There's both an art and existential imperative to it that make for a curious, almost revelatory journey. It's heady stuff, but it's also just fun. And there's never any lack for inspiring stories.
5. That’s my grandmother Jo Anna Nix Henegar. She grew up in the Texas hill country and has a touch of the Southern belle in her. My grandmother is one of the most influential people in my life. She has an engineer's brain and is able to solve basically any problem you can think of. She's also an artist, and I spent much of my childhood painting and drawing with her. Her smile is dazzling.
6. I think Nardwuar is pretty much the greatest music interviewer of our time. And one of Vancouver's best performers. What a showman. What always strikes me though is how different he is on stage or on camera versus one-on-one. When he's performing, he's larger than life; in conversation, he's humble, soft spoken and introverted. On stage or off, he's always incredibly gracious and probably says “thank you” more than he needs to.
7. Because my job is basically to tell Vancouver's story—from neat urban agriculture projects to that great little-hole-in-the wall Jamaican spot that serves the best vegan pizza in town—I find it hard to relax sometimes; my brain is always working, always planning new content for the sites. So getting away from the city every once in a while is important. BC is such an amazing part of the world, especially down here where you can drive in almost any direction for 3 or 4 hours and suddenly find yourself in a completely different terrain. Here, I'm in the Interior, a place I'd one day like to live some day.
8. The East Side Culture Crawl is one of Vancouver's best annual events. A couple years ago, I saw this piece in Richard Tetrault's studio and was transfixed. I can't say why exactly, but in my gut I knew it was something I had to keep looking at.
The Questions
What neighborhood do you live in?
Commercial Drive. Boom.
What do you do and where?
I have the best job ever! I'm the digital editor of two awesome magazines:
Granville mag, a hyperlocal city living online magazine devoted to promoting the many wonderful, delicious, inspiring, community-minded, sustainable aspects of Vancouver and empowering Vancouverites to support the local indie scene; and GardenWise mag, an organic gardening magazine for Western Canada with a focus on both edible and ornamental gardens.
Being a digital editor entails: writing, editing, social media, SEO, multimedia and planning as well as meeting for lots of chai with people from different industries, disciplines, neighbourhoods and perspectives. It's a lot of fun.
My office is on the Vancouver-Burnaby border, only a 20-minute bike ride from where I live.
What are you working on?
Lots of fun stuff. Most immediately, the Granville mag site redesign. And a bunch of video and photo essays.
This week, we're shooting a video at Body Politic, a lovely boutique just off Main and 12th that sells really nice, high quality, Vancouver and Canadian designers who employ ethical materials and manufacturing practices. The inventory is well edited and impressively drawn, and without even a whiff of patchouli.
I'm also working hard to be a gardener. GardenWise mag is a real inspiration and wealth of knowledge. I especially appreciate blogger Sharon Hanna's matter of fact, "I don't have time for preciousness" approach to gardening.
Oh and I'm also in the process of getting a new bike! New to me, anyway. A buddy's friend builds bikes so I'm going to get him to walk me through the process so I know how to fix everything myself.
Where can we find your work?
Granville mag is at http://www.granvilleonline.ca/, GardenWise mag is at http://www.gardenwiseonline.ca/, and I tweet at @granvillemag and @gardenwise, as well as on my personal account @myloverarlo.
