By Cari Kilmartin
Jess is a former journalist and onetime editor of the Camrose Canadian weekly newspaper who now works on Newo’s communications and marketing.
life story so far
The responsible eldest of four siblings, Jess grew up in Cochrane, Alberta, where she was homeschooled from Grade 3 onward (after she made her Grade 2 classmates sit through a reading of her 16-page novella about kittens in Narnia).
“I may not have ended up doing as much math and science as I might have had I gone to school, but I got to read all the books I wanted to read,” Jess says, smiling at the memory of habitually hitting the 20-book limit at the library check out.
The introverted bibliophile grew up with an appreciation for the likes of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and C.S. Lewis, and supplemented her reading with sports, in particular volleyball and soccer.
After she finished high school, Jess’s father took a coaching position at Montana State University Northern, so Jess opted to move with her family down south. She pursued a liberal arts degree while playing volleyball under her father, until he accepted a new role as athletic director at the University of Alberta Augustana Campus in Camrose.
“I had to decide whether I wanted to finish university in Havre [Montana] or come here, and there were just more choices through the U of A, more courses that aligned with what I was interested in.”
So back to Alberta she went, majoring in English and minoring in philosophy until receiving her undergraduate degree from Augustana in 2010.
Finding it challenging to obtain work in the aftermath of the financial crisis, Jess pursued a one-year journalism certificate at Mount Royal University. She then secured a summer student position at the Camrose Canadian, which translated to a fulltime job reporting, and eventually editing.
“I wouldn’t say I had enough skill or mentorship to be a really good investigative reporter or anything like that, but I did try and find the things that people in the community would want to know about.”
But absent someone to learn from to help her improve her craft, and increasingly unimpressed with the business practices of the Canadian’s parent company, Postmedia, Jess left the paper in 2017. She went WWOOFing in BC, then solo road tripped across the country to Ottawa, before taking a job as a copyeditor in Calgary, where she lived with her grandparents.
“My step-grandmother had a cancer diagnosis and was dying over the first months that I was there, and then passed away in the fall,” she shares. “She so clearly wanted to keep living but it just wasn’t in the cards.”
It was a difficult time, compounded by the fact that city life didn’t agree with Jess, and the strain manifested physically.
“I developed a kind of neck problem. It wasn’t something that was structurally wrong, I think it was a combination of stress and living in the city…which was not feeding my soul,” she says. “It got quite bad. I could barely walk 10 minutes to the train station and I had to cut back my work hours. More than half my income was going towards chiropractors and massage therapists and all that, and I was not in a healthy frame of mind.”

Ryan family

Mary Ryan and her grandkids in hospice
turning points
Around that time, Newo was contemplating bringing someone on in a communications capacity, and a chance encounter at the Augustana fitness centre between Jess’s mom, Alyson, and Newo founder Raj’s mom, Margaret, brought the two worlds together. Through the power of mothers, the ultimate community connectors, Jess ended up on the phone with Raj.
“I got off the call being really excited. I wanted to work for Newo, though I wasn’t entirely sure I had a job,” she says. Jess elected to make a bold move. “I just thought, OK, I’ll send in my notice, quit and hope I do have a job. And it worked out really well.”
Jess had first come into contact with Raj and the Newo ethos while covering Spirit of the Land for the Canadian. The conferences left a lasting impression, and one speaker in particular, Dr. James Makokis, really shook things up for her.
“It definitely completely changed my thinking on reconciliation, I’ll put it that way. Before that, I hadn’t made an effort to learn much about Indigenous history and culture, and whatever I had learned in school had been told from the colonial perspective,” she says.
“It was one of those experiences where you go a different way in life because your thinking has changed so much.”

Enjoying lemonade with Lisa

Running to catch up
core values
When it comes to guiding principles, Jess keeps it simple.
“I kind of boil it down to one basic core value,” she says: Immanuel Kant’s “kingdom of ends.”
In Jess’s words, it’s “the idea that rational creatures possess intrinsic value. They’re worthwhile in and of themselves. And in that case, we should never treat others as means to an end, but as ends in and of themselves.
“As soon as I learned about it in an ethics course at Augustana, I immediately began to synthesize it into how I thought about what I was doing,” she shares. “I think it would surprise people that you’d come out of a philosophy minor with really practical knowledge. But this, to me, is the kind of thing I apply all the time in my life. It determines how I decide what to do, how I view the ethical implications of actions.”
Kantian concepts have informed how Jess operates in the world, but she’s also integrated how she understands the kingdom of ends theory with wahkohtowin, the Cree principle denoting the interconnected relationships between the denizens of Earth, and the responsibility we have to these kinship ties.
“I definitely try to live in a way that doesn’t treat my relations — people and animals and trees and the natural world — as means to an end, but valuable in and of themselves,” she says.

Newo team retreat in 2022
rooted in people or place
For Jess, the question of rootedness is an ongoing topic of contemplation.
“I would say I’ve been trying to put down roots in Camrose specifically. And initially, that would have been more because my mom grew up near Hay Lakes. I had lots of family in the area, and my uncles and my grandfather and great grandfather farmed a particular piece of land until just recently.
“There’s an aspect of being in a line of people who have literally put effort and blood and sweat into the land that made me feel quite connected to it,” she says, sharing how she spent summers mowing her uncle’s extensive acreage lawn and watering her aunt’s garden.
But after the Spirit of the Land conferences, Jess’s sense of groundedness and connection to place became more tenuous.
“My shift in perspective about the settler history of this area really challenged that, so I’ve been trying to reconcile that history of moving in and being newcomers, and taking up space that wasn’t necessarily given. And can you move past that by developing a relationship with the land?
“I haven’t really settled on how I would define being rooted, and whether I have that is something I think about a lot, but I do hope to engage with the place I live in good ways.”
Good to see you have started on your Memoir, Jessica.
Thank you so much for helping us with book editing and illustration!