Faith, bees and neighbourhood have inspired a Chestermere resident to write a book about how to create beautiful caring neighbourhoods.
“[It’s] a story about Chestermere but it’s a universal story that anybody who lives in a neighbourhood can learn how to care for their neighbourhood,” said Author and Rainbow Falls resident Dr. Preston Pouteaux.
Through his book, titled The Bees of Rainbow Falls, Finding Faith, Imagination and Delight in your Neighbourhood, He hopes to provide both inspiration and a road map to readers on how they can engage their neighbourhood in a meaningful way.
Pouteaux said his book is about how people can grow to love their neighbourhoods.
“What it means for us to have a fresh imagination for the places where we live,” he said.
He writes about different ways to engage with one’s neighbourhood.
“I unpack a number of different ways of…how we find beauty and awe, how we rethink what security means in our neighbourhood, how we overlook what it is to live in a boring neighbourhood,” he said.
“I wrestle with all these different themes,” said Pouteaux.
The book takes on these themes in a fun and creative way by taking the reader along on Pouteaux’s journey of discovery of his community of Rainbow Falls as he became an urban beekeeper.
“It is a book that kind of tracks with my own journey as somebody who kind of discovered his neighbourhood through the lens of a beekeeper,” he said.
Pouteaux draws the reader into these concepts by writing about the role bees have played in helping people see the neighbourhoods around them through history.
“It’s kind of a creative look back over the history of beekeeping but it always brings us back, over and over again, to how are we playing a role in making our neighbourhoods beautiful too,” he said.
He explained that using bees as the guide to his themes of neighbourhood, growth and beauty was a natural fit.
“Bees, of course, they travel around they pollinate, they make things beautiful, they make things grow,” he said.
“And so I kind of draw this parallel and say how are we as neighbours doing the same thing,” said Pouteaux, “how are we getting into our neighbourhoods and making things grow, how are we making things beautiful?”
This interplay of bees, beekeeping and neighbourhood made for a great experience writing the book.
Pouteaux is also a Pastor with Lakeridge Community Church in Chestermere and has interwoven his faith into the writing process and story.
Writing The Bees of Rainbow Falls has helped Pouteaux grow in his faith an love of his neighbourhood.
“My neighbourhood has helped me grow in faith helped me become somebody who trusts deeper, who actually cares for and loves the people around me,” he said.
He was inspired not only by his neighbourhood but also by strangers after he was asked to speak at a university in Vancouver about his experience of neighbourhood.
“I was asked to speak and I only had a little sheet…with a bunch of words on it that were…me working out what it is to care for my neighbourhood,” he said.
That jumbled list of words eventually became the chapter titles for The Bees of Rainbow Falls.
His talk was well received by the crowd at the university.
“They all were inspired by it,” he said.
“They were the ones who said, ‘you need to turn this into a book we would love to read this’,” said Pouteaux.
The hard part when getting started was believing that he had something worth saying.
“People around me were saying ‘your story’s amazing’ and me I’m saying it’s just me and my neighbourhood with bees in Chestermere,” he said, “who wants to hear about the story here.”
Eventually he was convinced and the two-year project got started.
Although he writes a regular column, this is the first time he has tried writing anything as long as this. The Bees of Rainbow Falls is 192 pages and about 50,000 words.
“It takes a long time to write and rewrite and throw pieces out and try to create something,” he said.
Pouteaux believes that the first book one writes needs to be good.
“Or else you might not consider writing a second book,” he said.
This whole process, although a challenge, has given him the courage to write another book.
“I have a couple books that I’m chewing over, following similar themes,” said Pouteaux.
Now that his writing project is complete, he hopes that that experience will transfer over to his readers.
“My hope is that after people read this that they’ll look around in their place and go I never noticed that all these little things happening around me have meaning,” he said.
Pouteaux believes that his book will appeal to a large audience.
First and foremost, since it is set in Chestermere he hopes residents will enjoy his work.
Branching out he believes that his book will appeal to those with a Christian or faith perspective.
“It’s also written with my next door neighbour in mind,” he said, “it is written for the people on my street.”
Published out of the United States, The Bees of Rainbow Falls is available across North America from Amazon.
Pouteaux believes that across both Canada and the States there is a growing isolation and loneliness in communities.
“There’s a lot of people who live very transactional lives, meaning they buy a house, they pay their taxes and they think somehow they’re supposed to get a neighbourhood community that cares,” he said.
Interconnected engaged neighbourhoods take effort from the people living in them. The people living there need to take an active role in caring for the neighbourhood and for each other.
“This book was written to really address that,” he said.
For this reason, he believes that there is a need for his book across the country, not just in Chestermere.
While he hopes that his book will have an impact in neighbourhoods far and wide, his focus is still local and he hopes to have an official book launch here in the community.
Nothing has, as yet, been planned but Pouteaux is hoping to be able to announce something in the coming weeks.
“This is just freshly available,” he said, “the publisher is getting all their ducks in a row…for how the book gets rolled out,” he said.
The Bees of Rainbow Falls, Finding Faith, Imagination and Delight in your Neighbourhood is available on amazon.ca for $18.95.
