text: The initial idea for Woman of a Certain Rage came to me in the same way my first foray into fiction, French Relations, began in the early 90s when I couldn’t find any twenty-something heroines to relate to, so I made one up. Now twice that age, I’ve set out to show a stage of womanhood seldom depicted in fiction, let alone with humour and empathy: the menopause years. We’re bolder and wiser, ready to turn up the heat, and we have secrets to share.
  I’m enormously proud of this book, although I don’t want to mislead readers into expecting a big-cast Walker romp, which is why Georgie Hall’s name is on the cover. While we share the same sense of humour and love of creating unforgettable characters – as well as sharing the same publisher – writing as Georgie allows me to focus on just one central voice which offers readers something different: Eliza’s unswervingly honest, sharp and occasionally opinionated take on life as a ‘midult’.
  Rest assured I’m still busy writing as Fiona Walker, with the third Compton novel on its way and my passion for plotlines crammed with villagers, horses, dogs and love affairs as ebullient as ever. Nothing will stop me country romping for years to come, and I hope my two writing sides will complement one another.
  To save confusion, Georgie Hall has her own website www.georgie-hall.com and social media streams @georgiehalluk, and I’ll post lots more about Woman of a Certain Rage there over coming weeks and months, along with an extract and news of further books. I really hope you find the time to visit, follow and share. This is unchartered territory for me, and having the support of readers who already enjoy my Fiona Walker novels would mean the world.
  
  This project questions Vancouver’s cultural relationship with the forest, pushing it beyond the realm of recreation, management, extraction, and industry – towards a coexistence. Today, Vancouver is obsessed with looking at the forests recovering from industrial extractive logging on the North Shore Mountains. Consumption of this visual backdrop of nature, its views protected in bylaw and commodified in advertising, sustains the exploitation of the greater forest landscape which began with prioritizing the value of timber over all else in the woods.
  On the site of the Lower Seymour Conservation Reserve, the Seymour River is condemned to be dammed a second time, by mid-century, for an additional drinking water reservoir. Ancient groves and monoculture tree plantations alike will be removed or inundated, and recreational access likely limited. The following proposal, of a Seymour Forest College, is positioned as a counter-narrative to the plans in place for this continual extraction. Instead, students can live, interact, participate, and learn experientially through applying local knowledge and their labour towards a respectful relationship with and within the landscape of the forest.
  
  Cannabis stocks are all the rage. IPOs valued at billions of dollars are popping up on Wall Street and the Canadian Stock Exchange, and private equity funds are investing multiple millions in cannabis companies.
  If you’re watching all this from the sidelines, wondering if you’re missing out on a golden opportunity but not sure what to do about it, you’re not alone. Many potential investors believe they don’t have the cash to get in the game, and in some instances they’re correct. Due to regulations, many funds are not even permitted to accept investments for less than $200,000.
  On this week’s Green Entrepreneur podcast, we talk to Codie Sanchez, a partner at Cresco Capital Partners, about how to invest in cannabis companies even if you don’t have a lot of cash. This is a full transcript of our interview.
  You started your career with lots of spreadsheets and more traditional investing, and have now transitioned to the cannabis industry and business. I’m curious to know why you made that change.
  I think there might be some parallels to a lot of people’s story in this space in that once you figure out investing, and particularly if you’re trained to do it, once you figure out how to find dislocations in markets – something where everything just doesn’t fit together perfectly so that people smarter than you and who have more money than you do can take advantage of it – when you see those dislocations, you learn to jump on them quickly. In investing we call this arbitrage. That’s when something typically costs less than it should or costs more, and you can take advantage of those things happening.
  So I saw that happening in this space. I’m certainly no genius or clairvoyant in it; it really just came down to the math and looking at math in this space as an investor and saying there’s a real, tangible generation of wealth creation event happening here.
  But I have to say that probably math would not have been enough if I was going to call my mom and tell her I was going to go into the cannabis game. [laughs] It was a little bit deeper than that.
  I started off my career, even before I was traditionally investing at firms like Goldman or State Street or Vanguard or doing some of the venture stuff, I was actually an investigative journalist. I don’t know if we talked about this before, but I worked at the U.S.-Mexico border. We were writing stories about human trafficking and drug smuggling.