Back in June, I interviewed my talented friend Jenny Hawkinson for an article with Cordella Magazine, an online quarterly featuring women artists and writers,  and the piece has just been published today. Jenny is a visual artist in the downtown east side of Vancouver, the same neighborhood where Andy and I lived in an intentional community for the first few months after we moved to Canada.

In the past, I never had much appreciation of art for its own sake–art sometimes struck me as irrelevant or elitist; an impractical luxury when there are so many “real” issues going on in the world. But I’ve learned a lot from Jenny about the importance of art in cultivating hope, building community, and imagining the kind of world we want to work toward. Her life is a beautiful example of what it looks like to share life with people on the margins of society, and to engage with the brokenness of the world through art.

Click on over to read the interview and see some of Jenny’s beautiful work!