When we were putting together our new Relationships Issue, I was thinking about the odd, often dysfunctional working relationship between Spock and Kirk and recalled a trailer from J.J. Abrams’ new Star Trek movie where the two of them meet for the first time.

Just another day at work on the USS Enterprise. What does this have to do with Unlimited’s Relationships Issue? Well, for one thing, I’d be out of a job if I spoke to my co-workers that way. Kirk and Spock have a complex dynamic, and it seems to me that, beyond all its melodrama, the K/S relationship represents the changing dynamic between our working and personal relationships.

This is where The Relationships Issue – our first that you can only find online – comes in. In her Rich by Thirty column, our personal finance expert Lesley Scorgie looks at the people you must have on your financial dream team – your NBA all-star line-up, you might say. Then, in The Family Business, we profile three groups whose personal relationships and working relationships are the same thing, from two generations of architects under the same roof to friends who own a small boutique.

There is also our relationship with places to consider. In City of Jobs, Jeremy Derksen explores how the urban landscape affects employees. And in Rebranding For a Recession, we re-imagine mottos for Canada and a few of the provinces that takes the current economic climate into account.

As our work lives and our personal lives converge – most of the time for the good, sometimes for the not so good – the relationships we have with the people we work with will be more important than ever.

Browse through the website to make all the connections in this issue, then check out our daily blog for more.

_Craille Maguire Gillies, editor, unlimitedmagazine.com

It’s easier to come and go when you are alone. Even easier if all you have fits into boxes, and you don’t quite know who you are.

This was my second major move: loaded up my car and drove like an escaped convict from Vancouver to Saskatoon. My first time was not as simple but even more impulsive: across the country, from Vancouver to university in Charlottetown. But because I was alone and not at all sure of myself, the first two times the excitement of leaving trumped any worry about arriving. In both cases, I decided to go without truly considering the ramifications. That is what it is to be young: to use boldness and bravado to mask insecurity. But at any age, if you are unhappy, you can, by some measure, start over by going to a new place. My first big going was a starting over.

I was 22. I had heard what it was like to go away to college, live in a dorm and make lifelong friends (I had seen The Big Chill). But the isolation hit me as I crossed the Northumberland Strait: I was alone on an island, if not myself an island.

This was the point of moving so far away. I resolved that I was going to make myself into the person I could never be in my hometown. College was easy because we all go there for the same reason: to become.

Coming and going is about that, too – finding a sense of yourself by getting away from all the places and people, those that love you and don’t, who keep you the same. By the time the ferry docked in P.E.I., I decided that childhood would end here.

Going to Saskatoon was different still. I had finished graduate school back in Vancouver and needed to get out of town. A friend told me about an opportunity in the Prairies. I informed the hiring committee I was prepared to move without delay from Vancouver to Saskatoon.

I was offered the editorship of Grain. I accepted the contract so fast we never actually discussed the terms; I accepted before I considered what it would be like to live in Saskatchewan, a place I had only driven through, and fast.

I had an idea of who I was that was not restricted by geography or company, but I was still struggling with who I wanted to be, like everyone else I knew. Jack Kerouac called this time the beat evil days of your late 20s. It’s a time where most of your naivety is gone, but not all your idealism. I was 31.

Coming to Edmonton also happened fast, but it was not like the other times. I sent an email to a magazine that was looking for an editor; I was certain I would hear that the job was taken. I was happy where I was, and who I was. I had just finished my tenure at Grain. I had recently become engaged. The world was full of blissful occupation. But later that evening I heard from the publisher herself: the position was still open.

What are plans anyway? What are they but vague ideas we have of ourselves? For some of us it is clear: attach yourself to a profession like a stamp that addresses the envelope of your existence for the outside world. I am an accountant, one says. An editor, says another.

These are jobs though, not identities; I now understand the difference. I was not going to find myself, this time. Just work.

There would be no more capricious moves. I carefully read the contract. I am part of a relationship; and though that might slightly restrict my ability to move, it buttresses the rest of my existence. All the things I want are not only possible; I can see a way to get them. Commitment has brought freedom and a keener sense of self. I am 37.

You might have guessed this part: I accepted the editorship of unlimited. This time it took a fully loaded trailer and two carloads to pack, but we labelled all our stuff and came to Edmonton.

Coming to a new city is like reading a great story for the first time.

In both, you can inhabit a new identity. In a new city, or in a new book, you can untangle what Al Purdy called the “strange and lonely” places of yourself. Be proud of them; give them names that make them part of who you are and how you identify; so that what was weakness is now idiosyncrasy. Where once you were trapped, in a new place or in the midst of a narrative, you can find salvation. Coming and going is the process of discovering who you are and who you could be.

This brings me back to Kerouac, who said that the noble thing his beat generation could do was move. Maybe the millennial generation can find nobility and its identity in coming and going, too. Like finishing that story, when you come and go, you acquire new elements of yourself, and after time and practice, you can enlist them in the building of who you want to be. Wherever you are. U

Remapping entails a reexamination of the assumptions underpinning the political and economic regime embodied in the original map.
_R.A. Clapp, Simon Fraser University

The cover of this issue of unlimited remaps the world to more accurately reflect how we see it. With this map we suggest the new ways we are connected; rethink old connections; and draw new ones. It is meant to convey our new world in a way that approximates the modern trajectories of economics, energy, and finance; and that encompasses new forms of personal mobility in terms of human resources and travel. The transit lines indicate the interdependency that is embedded in globalization. Each country and city are little more than a subway stop away from one another. It is possible to play poker with someone from Ghana, Sweden, California and Regina, all at once. You’ve seen the commercials, you know.

More germane to our mandate, the transit lines also represent the reach and capacity of business across borders, time zones and oceans. The sizes of the countries on the maps, as well as their borders, are malleable and overlapping. They are made to grow and shrink with facility. This is the new reality of the world: where countries and economies grow up and shrink down all the time; where no terra is that firma. Many people in the first world born between 1980 and 2000 have never experienced an economic climate other than prosperity. As the world adjusts to its new economic realities, the transit lines are also reminders that if a country, or a station along the lines, should fall into crisis or disrepair, then that affects all the other stations and countries on the line. Borders are negligible, and negotiable. There are no more stand-alone countries. Except, perhaps, one.

On our cover map, America is an island. This change is made in the light of economic geographer R.A. Clapp’s other assertion: “remapping is the moment in which entrenched power and interests are most likely to be dislodged.” Let’s be clear, though. We are not anti-American. But in the new world we have observed, and then constructed, America has made itself an island. An island whose mass has been shrunken, some what, by the harsh new economic, political and social crises that our closest neighbour faces. We do not believe our map anticipates the dislodging of America from the rest of the world, we believe it reflects what has already happened. But the new world, and those who brave it, would be a far better place if the United States set about reattaching itself to the rest. U

OK, so we lied. On the cover, that is. Our “prescription” for 2009 is more a set of guidelines, suggestions for finding a balance. Because there is no hegemony to health and wellness, no one-size-fits-all approach.

I was reminded of this in early December, when the unlimited crew, including new editor Kent Bruyneel (more on him later) and a diverse group of professionals gathered in Banff for our inaugural Unlisted Summit. Appearing with writer-broadcaster Malcolm Azania and industrial designer Shoko César on a panel about creativity and innovation was Calgary musician Kris Demeanor, who once dressed up as a “pizza cowboy” (whatever that is) to hawk McCain’s International Series Thin Crust Texas Barbecue Chicken Pizza on TV. (He wrote about this gig in our 2008 Travel + Rec Issue.)

Demeanor told summit participants (read more about the event on page 48) about his creative process and his challenge to manage the business side of his career. “It’s easy to let five years pass where you don’t have a plan and you do what you think you should be doing. I find that I have had more fun thinking about those longer term plans, thinking how I can rattle the art form that I feel comfortable in and make it more challenging and exciting.” This means something coming from a guy who has self-professed organizational issues.

César, meanwhile, said that you can’t plan for creativity. “Don’t focus on the outcome. If it doesn’t work, try something else and look at it from a different perspective.” What does any of this have to do with health and wellness? Though their strategies couldn’t have been more different, César and Demeanor had customized their working lives so that it, well, worked for them.

This theme appears in most of the stories in this issue. In “Fire In The Head,” Heather Zwicker offers a personal look at burnout – a dark side of our jobs that many of us can identify with. Which is where the resilience training that Bobbi Barbarich reports about in “unlimited’s Total Work-Life Checkup” comes in. Barbarich, who’s also a trained dietitian, looks at everything you do during the two-thirds of the day you aren’t working that affect the one-third you are. We’re also introducing Project Start-up, a six-part series that follows one innovative company every step of the way.

This Health And Wellness Issue has a few ideas to get you started, from profiles of people who’ve found their own kind of balance. It all comes back to something else César said: “Plan your career around life not the other way around.” Everything, he implied, will flow naturally from there. This might not be a philosophy to share with your financial planner, but it is one idea of many that will help you get started as you enter a fresh New Year of possibilities.
Craille Maguire Gillies

News Flash
Speaking of new beginnings, Kent Bruyneel will join us for the March/April Comings And Goings Issue. By the way, he fits into the former category: Kent was born in Vancouver, studied business in Charlottetown and has spent the past five years in Saskatoon as the editor of the literary magazine Grain. He’s also finishing up a PhD in literature, so he knows from balance. You can reach him at kbruyneel@unlimitedmagazine.com.

I don’t recall exactly how the idea of doing a “night” issue came about. It was prompted, most likely, by our marketing and sales departments – the business side of our operation. (The ones who keep this ship afloat while us editors deal with life’s larger questions, such as, “Do we use a colon or an m-dash in that sentence? Let’s debate it for an hour!”) The conversation would have gone something like this.

Business side: We need to develop an editorial calendar for 2008.

Editorial team: Dudes, relax. It’s still 2007 for, like, a couple of months.

BS: No, we need to develop an editorial lineup now, please, so we can finalize the media kit and tell potential advertisers our plans for next year. By being proactive, we’ll leverage some synergies and maximize buy-in. [1]

ET: Uh?

BS: So we can sell ads! So you’ll have jobs! [2]

ET: Oh.

A few days later, there was a meeting. A brainstorming session, during which we made as many random suggestions for issue themes as possible. The love issue? The hate issue? The love and hate issue? The blank issue? Somewhere in this barrage, the themes that unlimited has explored throughout 2008 emerged. One of them was night.

We figured – without doing much long-range figurin’ – that it’d be fun to focus on work and business that’s nocturnal in nature. We thought about sleep strategies for people who do shift work, about folks who reverse their circadian rhythms because they need to stay on top of the Tokyo stock market. Admittedly, we didn’t dig too deeply into the subject. We had our editorial lineup, and plenty of time to map out a night issue.

Turns out, fortunately, there was a wealth of material to mine for stories. The security industry, for instance, which Peter Norman investigates in “Private Eyes Are Watching You,” on page 44. It’s a booming business, what with our culture of fear and all, but also one in transition. Speaking of booming, we dispatched Toronto writer Christopher Frey to Fort McMurray and asked him to stay up really late to see if Canada’s globally-integrated oil capital really runs all night and all day (“Burning The Midnight Oil,” page 26). And as with previous theme issues, patterns emerged. Alcohol, for instance. We’ve got stories on a bar owner and young craft brewers. Sex, too. Susan Hagan flirts with office romance in “Your Cubicle Or Mine?” (page 50); Scott Messenger takes a trip down mammary lane with a strip club impresario (page 74); and Lindsey Norris asks a sex researcher intimate questions (page 17).

This windfall proves two things. You never know what you’re going to find until you look. And it’s good to peer into the shadows.

In the 1976 sci-fi film Logan’s Run, it’s the 23rd century and the earth as we know it has been destroyed. All remaining humans live inside a domed city. Until they turn 30, that is. Then they are killed.

When we initially conceived of unlimited, we imagined a business and work culture magazine for readers in the 20- to 35-year-old demographic. Our reach has widened over the past year and a half – people in their 40s, 50s and even, gasp, 60s have told us they like the magazine. But I turned 35 this past summer and, like the characters in Logan’s Run, my time has come. I’m moving on to another magazine and new challenges, but still passionately believe that 20- and 30-something entrepreneurs and employees have an opportunity to change the world by taking thoughtful, holistic approaches to their working lives. Readers, you’re in good hands with unlimited’s new senior editor, Craille Maguire Gillies, who comes to us from enRoute magazine in Montreal (and, I’m happy to report, has a few years left in the demographic).

I’m grateful to so many people for sharing their stories in the pages of unlimited – stories that inform and inspire. I’m grateful to our readers, especially those who’ve taken the time to comment on what they like – and don’t like – in the magazine. I’m grateful to our contributors, for the perspectives they’ve offered and for being dedicated to their craft. And lastly, I’m grateful to my colleagues, who have abided my strange habits (and frequent lack of footwear in the office) and helped make a magazine that shows anything is possible.

Dan Rubinstein

[1] OK, I might have made up that “proactive, synergies” thing. My memory is a little fuzzy.
[2] This part, too. But it’s true. U

issue 8

It’s hard to be creative on deadline. Especially on a Monday morning. The holiday Monday of a long weekend. You’re in the office – alone – ensnared in a staring contest against a blank screen. The screen is winning. You’ve got a lot of work to do, but that triple Americano is long gone and the inspiration isn’t flowing. You check your email again (both accounts); you check the Environment Canada weather site again (forecast hasn’t changed); you check your coffee mug (still empty). You begin to type, tentatively. Then you erase everything. You get up. Get a glass of water. Go to the bathroom. Stretch. Sit down. Adjust your chair. Then you check the forecast again.

We urban Canadians – statistically, that’s what most of us are – live on the cusp of something called the “creative economy.” Writer Sophie Lees defines the term in her essay (“Arrested Development”) about what Alberta needs to do to give its economy a much needed evolutionary shove. She describes the creative economy as a section of the information economy wherein “the exchange of information from one pattern to another,” information that’s “derived from arts and culture,” holds value. One of the best examples of a creative industry is advertising, which “shifts the production of wealth from manufacturing to creativity through brand creation and management.” The ability of creative industries to generate economic growth, diversity, innovation and job creation is now accepted as fact. There’s even a whopping 357-page United Nations report on the subject. This is big-picture economic thinking. It’s a little too heady for a Monday morning.

Yet in a sense, the creative economy boils down to you – or me – sitting in front of our computers, staring at blank screens, attempting to develop ideas that can grow and intermingle into something significant, something tangible, something of value to someone, somewhere. Yes, it can be a very painstaking process. But it’s also kinda simple: that kernel, that seed of beauty, exists within each of us. And fret not: moments of divine inspiration are the exception, not the rule. In the mass majority of cases, for the vast majority of us, creative thought – and the resulting flow of ideas – stems from countless hours of plain old unsung hard work.

Ruth DyckFehderau took a week-long creative leadership course at the Banff Centre on our behalf. The story she wrote (“It’s Loony At The Top”) reads as a how-to guide. DyckFehderau discovered how to encourage innovative thinking both in individuals and within organizations. Among her many observations lies the conclusion that the more often you fail, the sooner you’re likely to succeed. “Spend as much time as possible in the discomfort zone where you’re not the expert, where the experiences are new and where you have to take intelligent risks,” she writes. “Embrace rut-defying wide-spectrum and cross-disciplinary thought. And, since creativity is seldom spontaneous and is usually the result of a ton of effort, practise, practise, practise.”

This issue of unlimited is essentially about creative approaches to work. It’s about the fact that one needn’t do things the same way they’ve always been done, because that leads to stagnation and disengagement and, ultimately, to a lack of passion and productivity. We’ve also tried to raise the bar in this, our first anniversary issue. We’re launching our first reader submission photo contest and are publishing our first mini graphic novel. The subject of this illustrated story, award-winning experimental poet Christian Bök, shows us the limitless possibilities of his work. And after going to the beyond and coming back, he tells us – with astounding clarity – what creativity means to him. “I do not think that creativity arises from any transcendent, metaphysical desire to be expressive or to be liberating,” Bök says in Unlisted, page 80. “Instead, I think that any act of creativity responds to a vexatious, aesthetic shortcoming in the world – a shortcoming that no one else seems to be redressing on our behalf, and consequently we must redress this shortcoming for ourselves.”

Staring at that blank screen today might not lead anywhere, but do it often enough and who knows what secrets you’ll unlock.

U

issue7

The first time I went to Fort McMurray, in the fall of 2002, I was working on a magazine feature about the human impact of the pace of growth. For a week, I slept in my tent in a highwayside campground. My neighbours were three young drywallers from Vancouver Island; there was no work at home, so they left girlfriends and children behind and moved to Alberta. They planned to spend the winter in their tents.

The next time I went to Fort McMurray, in early 2006, I flew in from Edmonton for a day and got a behind-the-scenes tour of an oilsands plant. It was a very different assignment, for a very different type of publication. Drywallers living in campgrounds weren’t part of the storyline, which focused on industry getting bigger and better (and, naturally, cleaner and more socially-conscious).

The truth, as usual, is somewhere in the middle. My first article didn’t delve deeply into the complex economics – locally, provincially, nationally and internationally – behind oilsands development. Nor the livelihoods it supports, the innovation it funds. Conversely, my second trip wasn’t intended to expose the social and environmental costs of such intensive development. Alberta’s oilsands are the province’s main economic driver and its biggest eco-pickle. And while it may seem an omission for unlimited’s inaugural green issue to not dig into the oilsands, the challenge facing the industry is the same as the challenge facing everybody featured in this issue: to truly change how they work, or what their work produces, in a manner that considers both the environmental and economic impacts. As a growing chorus of voices is saying, we can’t have one (quality of life, comfort) without the other (a sustainable planet).

So, the ducks.

The 500 (or so) dead ducks.

The ducks that landed on a toxic tailings pond at the Syncrude mine site north of Fort McMurray this past spring.

That they died is not the most important fact. We know those ponds are poison, we know that new-and-improved dry tailings (if the technology gets us there) will help alleviate the problem; we even know that pollution getting into the Athabasca River and flowing downstream is a more dangerous prospect than a few hundred dead ducks. But the ducks landed on that pond right when Ron Stevens, Alberta’s deputy premier and minister of international and intergovernmental relations, was in Washington, D.C. on a mission to reinforce to Americans the province’s “commitment to environmentally sustainable development” of the oilsands. And like my neighbours at that campground in Fort McMurray, the ducks are a powerful symbol: They show the world that there’s a huge gap between what we’re saying and what we’re doing, and that we urgently need to address this disparity.

The stories that populate this issue show people working to close this gap. Whether they’re retailers, lawyers, engineers, home builders, environmental consultants or energy company managers, they’re committed to the type of incremental, long-term change that will be necessary to turn this ship around in increasingly tumultuous seas. As Jeff Gailus writes in the introduction to the profiles he compiled for our eco-leaders package, the real transformation we’re (hopefully) on the brink of “will be neither technological nor economic – it will be cultural.” It will be a shift of consciousness, a growing awareness that, for instance, we will enjoy lives of greater fulfillment once we begin in earnest the conversion to renewable energies such as wind and solar power that seem so destined to be our future.

For now, though, the oilsands remain part of the equation. And they really should’ve been my first stop after checking into that highwayside campground back in 2002. Because we have to look at the whole picture to see where we’re going. As Preston Manning says on the back page of this issue, the environment and economy should be viewed as two sides of the same coin. I might not have listened to him with an open mind in years past. But if it’s truly a time for action now, then first it must be a time to listen.

Dan Rubinstein

issue 6

In basketball, it’s called going hard to the hoop. You spot a seam in the defence and dart through it towards the basket. You don’t completely forget about your teammates, the score, the clock – when opposing players collapse around you, a last-second pass could lead to a very easy, game-winning layup just before the buzzer. But you’ve identified the target and made a decision to go for it.

Sports metaphors are a tricky business. They often fall flat or wallow in the world of meaningless clichés. Describing a politician’s attempt to “deliver a knockout blow” to a rival candidate in the lead up to an election, for instance, hardly captures the many nuances of campaigning. Likewise, “the home stretch” is fine for horses galloping all out in the final lengths of a race, but have you ever seen a businessperson attempting to complete a report in all-consuming overdrive, neck muscles bulging? Their work is less frenzied, a series of measured actions; they don’t often give 110 per cent the same way an athlete might. The phrase “going hard to the hoop,” on the other hand, transcends the hardwood. It describes a spur-of-the-moment move which can change the momentum of a game, yet it’s an action one can still reevaluate and make adjustments to on the fly.

People who go hard to the hoop are a common thread in the stories we’ve corralled together in this, our travel and recreation issue. Making your living in a field that others typically tread in for fun – whether it’s in a foreign culture or in the great outdoors – often entails taking a leap of faith. There’s a huge risk, sure, but the payoff can be priceless.

Planning this issue in the early months of a prairie winter in Edmonton, two destinations leapt out at us: far-flung countries and the Rocky Mountains. The former because visions of tropical sunsets and wearing shorts in January helps us get through those cold months; the latter because come spring, we pack the car on Thursday nights to help us beat traffic on the way out of town after work on Friday. The anticipation is palpable: the snow has melted (mostly), there’s still sun in the sky when you leave the office, and anything is possible this weekend, this holiday, this life.

But what if these fantasies were your day job? Does real life drain away the sense of adventure?

In her story about how to get that dream job overseas, unlimited assistant editor Lindsey Norris talks to normal people (people just like you and me!) who have managed to parlay their love of travel into honest work. One of them is even an accountant; doesn’t get more “normal” than that. Writer Christopher Frey’s companion (and counterbalance) article, on the ethics of travel, explores whether you might be better off just staying home. This from a guy who used to edit a magazine about adventure travel.

On the rec front, Bobbi Barbarich finds career clarity after a few laps around the roller derby oval, and Bruce Kirkby takes a trip into the backcountry with one of Canada’s top mountain guides. “Having spent 20 years guiding rafts in the Canadian Arctic, it was good to be back in familiar surroundings,” he writes. “It was jarring, too. It had been two years since my last guided trip, and somehow I’d forgotten about the enthusiasm and pride. The camaraderie. I’d forgotten that some folks wake up each morning and simply can’t wait to go to work.”

My name is Dan and I am a luddite. I “text” people on Post-it notes. I instant message by hollering across the office. Last month, I rented a movie on videocassette. (We do have a digital video disk machine, but those menus are so complicated.) When I borrow friends’ cellular telephones – why bother buying my own? – I dial the way your grandmother presses buttons on a remote control: methodically, as if a little apprehensive about who, or what, I’m about to summon. Whenever my computer crashes, I can’t help but think of a former newspaper colleague’s announcement to the IT guy: “Light go out in workie box.” But I’m getting better, I swear. I recently learned how to check messages on my land line from remote with minimal cursing. And on a good day, I can use the automatic car starter without locking myself out.

It’s not that I’m afraid of technology and new media*. It’s mostly that I don’t have time to catch up to the flow. I reached the end of the on-ramp but just couldn’t figure out how to merge. So I got out and walked in the ditch instead. And now I’m stuck here. Watching.

Intellectually, of course, I know that a car would’ve got me there quicker. (Wherever there is. Whatever intellectually means.) I know that technology, at its most effective, at its most profound, is a tool that can enhance the quality of life for people (even poor people!) throughout the world.

I’ve read, for instance, about the evolution of humanitarian aid; satellite imaging and computer algorithms can help anticipate outbreaks of disease among refugees. Remarkable. I know that the massive infrastructure requirements make conventional telephone systems prohibitively expensive in far-flung places, but wireless networks will eventually connect everybody, everywhere. That’s a good thing. And I know that jogging with an MP3 player would be a lot more relaxing than enduring incessant skipping on the compact disc player I bought at a pawn shop.

But that’s about the extent of my knowledge about the intersection of technology and media circa 2008. Fortunately, I happen to know some folks who aren’t trapped in the early 1990s. Like, everybody. They’re on Facespace and MyBook. They don’t spend hours every week searching for public payphones. And they probably don’t watch helplessly as their DVDs play in Portuguese. (Educational, sure, but a tad confundir.)

In this issue, with invaluable help from these savvy freelancers and my fellow editors, we document the emergence of an Alberta tech community, centred in Calgary, that’s not rooted to the oil-and-gas sector. We take a crash course in distance learning, and we learn what it’s like to work inside the video game biz. We ask award-winning writer Chris Turner, who has authored books about both sustainable living and The Simpsons, to explore the world-changing possibility of a renewable energy industry that’s as much about the marketing as the know-how. We argue that cultural cornerstones such as radio, libraries, television, books and magazines are adapting, not dying. We look at how the shirt on your back is changing, too. And, why not, we surf a little porn.

Putting this package together has forced me to confront my fears. I’ve got no excuse any more: it’s time to tune in to what the kids are saying. New technologies and media are powerful forces. They are the message. Still, I can’t help but smile whenever the BlackBerry network blacks out. Just say the word and I’ll text somebody for you. U