Coming soon

Another amazing event. We were honoured to listen to Craig Martell talk about his life with HONESTY.

The morning of October 19, we sat in the beautifully sunny City Room at Lougheed College, looking over our favourite Edmonton landmark, the river valley. We feasted on Ace Roaster’s coffee and deserts by LEVA Cafe.

Photos by the talented powerhouse, Leroy Schulz.

Thank-you to Craig Martell for giving us an amazing high of energy, for you truly helped create a special morning for everyone who attended. 

Big love to Courtenay Badran at Lougheed Hall for making this event run so smoothly. THANK-YOU for being a boss lady!

Join us next month for our 6th Birthday! What?! Come on, give us a hug or high-five upon entry!

What? HONESTLY though, you want to get a ticket to October’s event at Peter Lougheed Leadership College. 

Craig Martell is a story teller at heart. Just take him out for brunch and you’ll understand why. Ultimately, he is a community connector who provides space for creatives to showcase their work through various ventures. From booking talent at Rec Room in South Edmonton to running his record label, Double Lunch Productions, Martell’s presence is felt throughout the city. 

He ran the infamous and late Wunderbar, and brought programming to the Buckingham (who personally took pies in the face for the notorious event series, Rockin’ for Dollars).

Make sure you have an alarm set for October 15 for 9 AM when our tickets will be released, free of charge—remember we release a limited quantity! Our summer events sold out in less than 24 hours. BE PREPARED.

Check Craig Martell on Twitter, which explains why we think he’s perfect for this month’s theme of HONESTY (@thecraigiest).

See you in a couple of weeks, friends.

Last month we talked about CHAOS inside Edmonton’s City Hall. This bright expansive space combated the freak snow storm we had (yes, it was still summer). Additionally, we decided that the audience should be taking the photos for our event. We had film camera’s tied to balloons and were passed from audience member to audience member. We loved getting to process the batch!

Our CHAOS speaker, Dr. Gregory Sivakoff (UofA), drew connections between his studies in space and creativity, while confronting notions of adversity. We especially loved when he would emphasize twirling matter while spinning in a circle himself.

We were happy to partner with United Nations Association of Canada, Edmonton’s Chapter, for our event which fell on International Peace Day. It was a great conversation of how conflict often leads to some of the best policies put forth in society, like connection, peace and collaboration. We grow stronger.

Stay tuned for October’s event! We’ll be talking with Craig Martell on October 19 in Peter Lougheed Hall on the University of Alberta’s campus. The view will be just as spectacular as our speaker. 

“We are in the connection economy” —Seth Godin

Last week CreativeMornings Edmonton traveled to upstate New York to camp with 89 CreativeMornings chapters from around the world. Some 300 of us were sharing meals, ideas, inspiration, talent, creativity, friendship and a shoulder to lean on. This beautiful experience of global sharing truly showed the power of the connection economy, like our keynote speaker, Seth Godin admitted to in CreativeMornings NYC talk back in 2013.

We’ll be taking the experiences had at camp and weaving them into our events. If we can connect globally, we can connect municipally. Not everyone was a creative. But everyone is welcome to experience creativity, to sit next to it, to learn from it.

And bring it to your profession and home. 

We love looking back on our events over this past summer and to see all the curious faces engaging with one another. Face-to-face, with inquiry and smiles.

Our next event is on September 21 at City Hall and with Dr. Gregory Sivakoff. Let’s talk CHAOS. Don’t be scared, be prepared!

All photos taken by a wonderful human and creator, Rona-Marie at Pause Photo

Looking over the photo spread from last Friday’s engaging conversation fills us with great joy. Bringing accessible community events that welcome everyone and encourages bravery, honesty and creativity is an honour.

July’s theme was INTENTION. Our speaker was the hypnotic, Ahmed Knowmadic Ali. Our venue was the welcoming DevFacto who in partnership with Alberta Podcast Network, helped feed our morning conversation with coffee and pastries. Always a win-win.

All photos courtesy of the talented and generous, Leroy Schulz (@leroyschulz), who we are forever grateful to.

Check out the entire set at CreativeMornings Edmonton’s July Flickr album

Next Friday we will be listening to Ahmed Knowmadic Ali’s connection to this month’s theme: INTENTION. As a professional speaker, writer and activist, Ahmed has a lot of inspirational nuggets to share with us during our breakfast lecture. 

We are happy to have the people at DevFacto give us their community space to hold the event, complete with river valley views for a (hopeful) sunny morning.

CreativeMornings Edmonton has been the result of the community’s generosity to share stories, ideas, resources, space, media and the like. For the past year, Alberta Podcast Network has partnered with CM to make these events inspirational and delicious (got to love that breakfast spread). We are a community of story-tellers and eager listeners, and apparently, morning people! 

We know there is something unique about Edmonton because we keep finding reasons to celebrate our city through it’s inhabitants, businesses and venues. CreativeMornings Edmonton welcomes new partnerships to strengthen our series and the community it serves. We hope to inspire new connections in an accessible manner: everyone is welcome.

See you on July 27 at DevFacto in Scotia Place, doors at 8:30 AM. 

*Tickets are released on July 23 at 9:00 AM!

Highlights from last Friday’s event at Roundhouse, featuring Lourdes the Merry Virgin. Event sponsored by Taproot Edmonton, a curiousity driven story hive. All photos by the amazing Leroy Schulz, who scales mountains in his free time: check out his Instagram to see for yourself.

See all the photos on our Flickr account: go ahead, tag yourself and share with credit to our friend, Leroy Schulz.

Next event is July 27 with Ahmed Knowmadic! Stay tuned … .

This month we are exploring our craft. Craft is what we make, what we continually cultivate, and what drives us towards mastering our discipline. We are serving you up a speaker who delivers laughs, music, dance and looks. This June 8, CreativeMornings Edmonton is proudly presenting Jonathan Busch, AKA Lourdes the Merry Virgin, drag queen extraordinaire and fiercely talented digital artist.

When you were a child, what was your favourite thing to create?

JB: I mostly stuck to drawing pictures and writing little plays that I forced family and friends to perform.

How has Edmonton influenced your craft?

JB: The sense of community in Edmonton has influenced me a great deal. Most audiences here seem to walk into shows of any kind with an open mind and are open to the challenge of embracing whatever sort of weirdness is thrown at them. I think it’s largely due to a shared sense of curiosity over the different sorts of creativity that take place in their city and also a willingness to validate with their attention.

[Drag] allowed me to experiment with many elements of the craft with visuals, storytelling and new concepts – to step outside the typical formulas and trust that it will at some point connect with people.

What is something most people don’t know about drag culture in Edmonton?

JB: Its frigging HUGE! I can easily name fifty queens without needing to consult an online source to remind me. There’s also a great space on YouTube called Dragging Our Heels which posts many of the performances that go on in the city. And not to mention there are shows happening everywhere all the time.

Who or what is your creative inspiration?

JB: I have a lot of those – too many to name. A few are Sandra Bernhard, Robert Altman, Madonna, David Lynch, of course Rupaul and the countless queens from Drag Race.

How has your craft changed over the years?

JB: I depend less on needing to buy things for drag and love to try to find a way to make things myself, or at least reconstruct things so they can be perceived as original. This goes for a lot my drag look, obviously, but also appropriating music and spoken dialogue tracks into the mixes for my performances.

I’ve found that making my own stuff, whatever it might be, offers many opportunities to recognize an individual sense of creativity.

What surfaces are all of these unseen goals, priorities, limitations, challenges etc, and they tell me a lot about myself and my relationship to the community with whom I get to share the work.

All images courtesy of Jonathan Busch.

Can’t get enough? Check our Busch/Lourdes on Instagram!

April may have the weather temperament of a toddler, but we’re still giving you reasons to get out of your house/office and into some beloved community spaces to share some breakfast and get creatively inspired.

This month we are exploring the theme GAME, chosen by our Belgium chapter friends in Liège. Our team started brainstorming the perfect person to talk about GAME, and we ended up contacting the trio who run Secret Meat Club and the much anticipated Meuwly’s.

Glendon Tan, Peter Keith and Will Kotowicz started their meat subscription service in 2016 and have garnered an extensive waiting list of hungry Edmontonians waiting to get a taste of their high-quality local product. They for-see opening their full scale market operation, Meuwlys, in the summer of 2018: we got to preview the space, and all we can say is “WOW.” We’re already talking about making a CreativeMornings field trip to Meuwly’s after they open to get a feast for the eyes and mouth!

Join us this Friday morning at Latitude 53 to hear what the trio found to be the successful elements that made their dreams become a reality within Edmonton, and how you can take away valuable lessons on what it means to create community, create conversations and learn from feedback.