Winter Contributors

Jim Stewart

Jim Stewart is a critically acclaimed artist, known for his colourful, kinetic figurative and abstract drawings and paintings. When he appeared in our Artist in Residence feature, the Caledon artist told us, “I experience life as a spectrum of energy from essence through to the visible and tangible … I allow my creative side (right brain) to have free rein to express this life energy as I am living it in the moment.”

Jim always travels with a sketchbook in hand, ready to capture local scenes of daily life, kids at play and rural landscapes. His illustrations have appeared in several international magazines, and we’ve been fortunate to have his whimsical pen and ink drawings enliven our calendar of events pages since our first year of publication in 1994.

He spends part of his year living and painting on Maui, Hawaii, where he is an active part of the art community.

Liz Beatty

Liz Beatty is a self-described travelling homebody. She loves to hit the road, covering stories for the likes of Lonely Planet and National Geographic. She’s unearthed surprising tales linking Americans and Canadians in her award-winning podcast North Americana.

She also has a new travel podcast about to drop for Canadian Geographic. Still, Liz insists she loves most the way travel makes her feel when she gets home – that bigger sense of our beloved hills amid this vast, gloriously diverse world.

Whether learning about the Northern Labrador Inuit reclaiming their Torngat Mountains homeland or watching villagers of Bedoin, France gathering to glimpse the Tour de France, Liz’s stories boil down to what home means, in Headwaters and around the world. In this issue, she digs into some surprising and important connections between the homegrown farm-to-table bounty of Dufferin and Caledon and the deceptively barren tundra of Canada’s storied North.

Elaine Li

Orangeville food photographer and food scientist Elaine Li has been contributing to In The Hills for just over a year, and in that time has been busy snapping decadent local holiday chocolate, vibrant Caribbean cuisine and lip-smacking barbecue.

For other features she’s also prepared the dishes being photographed. She baked, styled and photographed mouth-watering apple pies for our fall 2023 cover story.

In this issue, Elaine taps into her Chinese heritage to create and photograph a Lunar New Year menu for home cooks. She also shares with writer Emily Dickson fond memories of holiday celebrations from her childhood in the southern city of Guangzhou. And the recipes? Elaine says she wishes she had a family manual, but that cooks in her family never follow recipes. “I would say I taught myself cooking. I wish my family kept written-down family recipes!”