Vancouver Magazine
Flaky, Fluffy and Freaking Delicious: Vancouver’s Top Fry Bread and Bannock
The Best Gelato in Canada Was Made in a Hotel Room (and You Can Get it Now in Kitsilano)
Purdys Put a Real Bunny in a Mini Chocolate Factory for Their 2023 Easter Campaign
Naked Malt Blended Malt Scotch Whisky Celebrates Versatility and Spirit
A $13 Wine You Can Age in Your Cellar
A Radical Idea: Celebrate Robbie Burns With These 3 Made-in-BC Single Malts
5 Things to Do in Vancouver This Week (March 13-19)
Looking for a Hobby? Here’s 8 Places in Vancouver You Can Pick Up a New Skill
Extra, Extra! The Let’s Hear It Music Festival Is Here
What It’s Like to Get Lost on a Run With a Pro Trail Runner
8 Things to Do in Abbotsford (Even If It’s Pouring Rain)
Explore the Rockies by Rail with Rocky Mountaineer
The Future of Beauty: How One Medical Aesthetics Clinic is Changing the Game
Before Hibernation Season Ends: A Round-Up of the Coziest Shopping Picks
On the Rise: Adhere To’s Puffer Jackets Are Designed With the Future in Mind
Journalism demands curiosity, rewards attention, and gives you licence to ask people just about anything. Most of us, if questioned about our lives and listened to carefully, speak openly and at length—perhaps because, in the normal course of events, nobody bothers to really ask us about ourselves.
Case in point: Darrin Sjoberg, 40, this month’s Q&A subject, who talks with enlightening, at times alarming, candour about the addiction that’s gripped him since his teens. Before going into detox a year ago, then moving into a recovery house in New Westminster to embark on a 12-step program, he spent virtually all he could earn, con, or steal on shooting crystal meth into his veins—a $1,500-a-week habit that cost him his health, his family, and very nearly his life. “I’d probably be dead today if I hadn’t hit bottom after a four-day bender and said to my roommate’s cousin, a nurse, ‘I can’t keep going.’ I’ll never forget what she said: ‘You don’t have to live like this, you know’—the right words at the right moment. In my daze, I thought to myself, ‘I don’t?’” So began Sjoberg’s brave, perilous journey back to a world of accountability and human connection. Most recovering addicts protect their anonymity, but he’s happy to tell his story, he says, “if it makes a single addict realize that no matter how isolated and walled-off you are, you’re not alone and you can get help. There’s a phrase we use in the program that you really come to understand: ‘The therapeutic value of one addict helping another.’ I’m clean today because other guys who’ve been in my shoes are helping me.”
This month we’re introducing a new element in the magazine, “First Person,” that also relies on people’s willingness to speak frankly about their lives. We asked Vancouverites to describe rare personal experiences—from a kidney recipient to an adoptee who found his birth mother after years of searching. What does it feel like to climb the Grouse Grind 14 times in one day? In an upcoming issue Sebastian Albrecht, who did it in June, will tell you—in stomach-churning detail. In addition, Mandy-Rae Cruickshank, the record-holding free diver (who appeared in the documentary The Cove), describes what it’s like to descend 288 feet, then swim up again, on a single breath.