My Personal and Professional Life
My name is Roseanne and this is my eportfolio for Athabasca University’s Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies (MA-IS) program. I was born in Kamloops, BC and grew up on land that had been in my family for four generations in a village called Westwold. Despite growing up in the country, by the time I finished high school I was ready for urban life. I completed my undergrad degree (BFA in creative writing, University of Victoria). After finishing my degree, I spent a decade travelling, working casual jobs and writing. In my late 20s, I moved to an ashram in the southeast Kootenays of BC, where I ended up editing books and doing marketing and communications work for the spiritual community. I also developed a deep yoga practice, learned to teach yoga and applied a sharp critical lens to everything I saw within yoga culture.
After two years in the community, I relocated to Montreal to work as editor of a yoga magazine. When the magazine went out of business three years later, I fired up a feisty blog about yoga and culture, which was well received and formed a vibrant community around it. My blogging work centred around the intersection of yoga, social justice and community.
I put considerable time and energy into the blog over five years, while doing freelance writing and social media work to pay the bills. In 2014, I left Montreal and returned home to BC. I settled in Victoria where I found a 9-5 communications job in the public sector. This gave me financial stability and an actual career, but left me with less time and engergy for blogging. I also watched the online yoga community (and the internet in general) change, becoming more angry and aggressive. What was once fun online banter became mean-spirited and anxiety-inducing, and I became less interested in spending my limited free time online.
The blog as creative project fizzled out, and I focused on being a worker and caregiver, spending time with my aging relatives and my parents. In recent years, there have been tectonic shifts in my life as my mom passed away in 2020, just after the beginning of the pandemic, and my dad in 2022 (three weeks before I started grad school).
With these shifts come a newfound freedom, as I’m no longer in a position of caring for my elders and now have more time for myself. I’m taking this time to reconnect with my intellectual and creative sides and to finally achieve a personal goal of going to grad school. This is what motivated me to apply to Athabasca’s MA-IS program.
Roseanne Harvey 