Welcome to Atlantic Canada Mondays, a regular feature of How About This where we interview interesting residents of the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador. This week I’m very pleased to feature K. M. Cooper, The Practical Escapist (The Practical Escapist on Twitter).
What Atlantic Province do you live in? How long have you lived there?
I was born and raised in New Brunswick--specifically in unceded Mi'kmaq land. I've been here my whole life.
How long have you been a creative director? Any examples of your work that we might have seen?
I have been working as The Practical Escapist for nearly 4 years now. Before, I was doing all of my work--online and offline--under separate names and titles. I decided, in September 2018, to bring them all together under one umbrella. Part of the fun of what I do is that I now allow all projects to be a part of my portfolio.
That sounds really vague, so I'll narrow it down a bit. I am a writer, food creator, recipe writer, content creator, forager, nature lover, gamer, and more. A lot of creators are told to find a niche, but I would rather go from project to project and let those projects be a part of everything else I do. My Twitch presence kind of ties everything together and is the source for what often becomes individual content projects.
I wrote and self-published a short novella, based on a zombie apocalypse in Moncton, called Hub City Survival, back in 2010. While I have been working in the background on other long-form writing projects--including Mushroom and Anchovy, which was crowdfunded on writing platform Inkshares back in 2017 and is currently awaiting publication--I am focusing on short-form cooking and photography projects at the moment. I write (sporadically, for now) on my blog and take freelance on work both as a writer and editor as well.
The Practical Escapist blog's About page has this phrase that sums up your online presence: The Practical Escapist serves to bring meaning, reflection, and use to escapist tendencies of all kinds. There's a lot to unpack there, could you elaborate a bit on what this means?
So, to summarize The Practical Escapist in a less vague way: I bring practical use to escapist tendencies. A lot of people use escapism to hide from reality, but I propose an alternative: to use escapism practically as a means to enhance reality. Playing video games or watching movies is great fun--and what if we could do that while bringing to life a favourite dish from a video game, or using the messages in movies to contribute to and love our community more?
some Escapist cooking!
You have a presence on a number of social platforms including YouTube and TikTok. Do you have a preferred platform or do you create and share different content on each one? Also, how do you feel about social media these days?
Yes, I try to be very present on social media as it provides me with a number of different avenues for my content! My favourite is Twitch as it's taken center-stage for my content production. I love Twitch because I get to be myself and create content in a live and interactive way while creating something I want to create. It's an interactive cooking show. After the Twitch stream is over, I photograph and film what was made so I can upload photos and videos to Instagram and Tiktok.
I haven't used my YouTube channel properly in a while and do plan to re-film my old recipe videos as, since I started making them, I have had a very significant equipment upgrade. Originally, I had started streaming on Twitch to promote my YouTube channel, but I absolutely fell in love with streaming and with directly interacting with my community--as a result, my YouTube channel actually became a bit of a pivot and I started using it to promote my Twitch channel instead!
It is always a solo event, yes! But I have definitely toyed with the idea of doing group retreats and events at some point in the future!
The path to the Unicorn Cave?
How has the COVID-19 experience affected you?
COVID has honestly changed how I've done and how I look at everything--from friendships and community to my family. My husband and I welcomed our second daughter into the world approximately 10 days before our first lockdown and it's been a roller coaster since.
Would you consider your current home province to be a great place to live? Why or why not?
I think my home province has a lot of potential and a lot of good qualities. In terms of nature, I think we're a stunningly beautiful province, home to gorgeous natural sights, and the fact that we are the only officially bilingual province in Canada is something to celebrate. We have wonderful people and beautiful sights. I'm not sure, however, the good would outweigh the bad for somebody new entering the province for a long list of reasons.
Yet another pursuit!
Pretend you wake up one morning and the Internet has been destroyed? What's the first thing that you do?
Funnily enough, that was how that Rogers outage felt a few weeks back...!
EDITOR’S NOTE: there was a Canada wide outage of Rogers telecommunications services in July 2022. In addition to disrupting Internet, wireless and telephone services for all Rogers customers, Interac (Canada’s debit payments processor), disrupting commerce across Canada for at least a day).
In all seriousness, I would likely go to my Mom's to catch the news (since we don't have cable) and try to figure out what the next steps would be for someone like me; the bulk of my creative work has a home online and it would be such a monumental change that I would have to restructure how I do a lot of things in life. I would also have to find ways to keep in contact with my closest friends who aren't local.
Thanks to the Practical Escapist for doing this interview! Learn about the span of her online empire here!
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Thanks so much for having me!