Left to right: Danielle Soucie and Deb Borsos in 2024.
An Interview With Deb Borsos
By Kallee Lins
Deb Borsos is a pastel artist and community recovery specialist. Her dual roles reflect a deep commitment to both creative expression and social resilience. As a visual artist, Deb works primarily in pastels, capturing landscapes as they shift and change. Her work in disaster recovery focuses on supporting small, rural and remote communities as they rebuild—a project that became immensely personal after her community of Argenta was severely threatened by fire last summer.
I’m Kallee Lins, Executive Director of the West Kootenay Regional Arts Council. I first met Deb at the Northern Exposure conference in Wells, BC, which was all about the arts and emergency response. She generously shared her skills in hazard identification, the arc of recovery work and the value artists bring to these processes.
We caught up for a conversation about how she currently views the interplay between creative work and the task of community recovery, both within her own life and the communities she serves. I’ve edited our conversation for length and clarity.
After the Wildfire—Deb: “[This is] one I did in the winter of 2024, a few months following the fire here.”
Deb: Sure. Different groups understand recovery differently. Sometimes, the government considers community recovery to be only “the people part.” And there are different sectors in recovery: there’s infrastructure, environmental, economic, people, housing. There may be others, but those are the traditional key groups.
I consider community recovery to encompass all of that—with the community in the middle, beginning with the people, which is the way Indigenous communities seem to approach it and they do it very well. When you see infographics and other visuals of this, you will see a circle with the people in the middle and the offshoots being economic, environmental, etc. as the outer rings—as opposed to silos or boxes, side by side but each isolated. I have always related much better to the people being central, because if you don’t take care of your people first, you don’t need to bother with the rest because the recovery will be a much greater challenge.
K: I’m really curious about that. Where do you tend to see the economic ring? Because I just feel like so much of what we’re dealing with now is prioritizing the economic over some of those other social infrastructures.
D: Yes, I hear that also and it is important. I put the economic and infrastructure and environment rings equally around the central, people circle. Infrastructure is getting the infrastructure in place so people can come home again if they’ve been evacuated: the power, the utilities, the water, what have you. And infrastructure encompasses more than that. Depending on what community you are in, infrastructure can be cemeteries. It can be culturally important sites. It can be friendship centres. It can be a skateboard park. The public infrastructure in a small town can definitely include a community hall where everything happens. So that section is tied to people as well. It is all tied together. We do have to make sure residents are OK as a group, as a community and as individuals. And we’ll be working on many layers that surround them while caring for the human side.
Arts and culture are very much a part of supporting, particularly, the people part, but in every part of recovery, artists and cultural groups can play a part. I know of an artist who built and designed infrastructure in the form of welded guard rails along a new road system. It is beautiful and unique to the town. That didn’t have to be done that way, but the town saw the value in it, thankfully. In the Kootenays, arts and culture are huge economic drivers and involved in other ways economically. Rebuilding homes and other venues should always have artists involved in some way.
K: Now, Deb, you talked a little bit in your intro about specifically working with remote and rural communities. In the West Kootenay, the region is filled with teeny tiny little places and communities. What can you say about the challenges and opportunities of recovery in these areas?
D: Well, challenges may include the distance, isolation from larger centres, which will tie into supply-chain issues, lack of services due to smaller populations (i.e. less tax to draw on for services), lack of capacity, human and otherwise, and governance from a distance as opposed to locally.
K: You mean the distance from decision-making centres like Victoria (for those in BC), regional district offices, those kinds of things?
D: Yes. And that offers opportunities that can include self-directed recovery. A better understanding of local culture will be there. Many times, unique solutions can be found that may not be mainstream and understood by those in distant places providing funds, but they are appropriate and may be what is needed and decided on by the community.
So, for instance, in a small community, they may have had a town hall that burned down. But they have extra land elsewhere in the community, that may be safer, still have access to utilities like power and water, and could also offer things that are important to the community, like a park or playing field for instance.
K: It would be fair to say there’s a little more room to act and then ask for forgiveness later when you’re a little further removed, geographically?
D: Possibly, yes, because you may need to; it may be out of necessity. So, basically, the opportunity is there to allow the community to actually lead its own recovery (preferably with discussions and planning before a disaster happens), as well as to work in collaboration with the agencies who can then support a more self-directed approach.
Larch—soft pastel and water on sanded paper.
K: Where do you tend to see leadership coming from in those communities? Who’s doing the rallying to organize that kind of work?
D: In smaller communities there are often community associations that will be there. There might be local “animators”: individuals who know their community and know how to just “get ‘er done,” so to speak. The community would probably know and turn to those people and say, “What do we do?” and start organizing. These would be, for the most part, unincorporated communities, but not necessarily.
K: Right. Yeah, and I imagine last summer you were probably one of those people in Argenta.
D: Well, I am on the fire crew. I’ve been one of the dispatchers since 2004. It was an amazing opportunity to be inside the community as part of the crew, working with BC Wildfire Service when everybody was evacuated. It allowed me to send out emails to everyone who was evacuated saying, “Yes, all your houses are okay,” or other accurate and timely information that hopefully helped the evacuees stay up to date on what was going on.
One neighbour said, “You know, we had no idea. We thought we were leaving and never seeing our house again.” So, to be able to clarify information like that felt like it was of value to those evacuated who had no idea how things were going at home.
K: Man, what a rough summer.
D: Yes—this summer (2025) has been an absolute gem, following 2024.
K: Well, you’re a visual artist working in pastels as well. I love that you’re a pastelist as well as a community recovery specialist. Are there ways in which these two roles inform each other?
D: Yes, several ways. Due to the willingness and malleability of creative minds like artists and cultural workers, this sector is well positioned to help a community rebuild and repair and get their independence back through different projects and through encouraging them to take on various things they can do themselves.
Artists are similar in some of their characteristics to community recovery managers. Generally, they have empathy. They think outside the box. They think laterally and they understand the need for patience. They’re good at listening, mostly, which are all characteristics that you need as a recovery manager. So, they tend to understand people better and engage people well.
Emotional or traumatic distress can be helped in many, many creative ways. Listening, engaging, helping people understand what happened so they can move on through a mural project, or through history, or through storytelling, songwriting, poetry—the list is long.
K: So, it’s that processing of the experience that the artist can help facilitate.
D: Yes. Timing, of course, is very important; whoever is supporting needs to understand when a community is ready to engage. It may be an ongoing process. Weekly live music in the park is a good way to bring people together, or community murals on newly repaired buildings or new buildings. Arts in schools is an excellent place, particularly the grade schools, for helping kids understand what happened. The caveat being, I’m guessing, there are not a high percentage of artists who are trained professional trauma counsellors. That is a point to make transparent: there are times when trained professional supports are needed. Artists and cultural workers can be trained, but they can also offer creative ideas and events to those affected. They can be passive participants in recovery or have the chance to participate actively in various ways. All of these things can help a community to regain/rebuild identity, particularly following a disaster that has altered the known landscape.
In terms of my own practice, I work in pastel creating landscapes. Last winter, I spent a lot of time creating images of the new skyline behind our house. I did image after image after image, which was one of the ways I worked through the whole event. I also realized, when we were home permanently after evacuation, it was sunny in our kitchen. I was standing there and thought, “What’s different?” Previously we had never had that because the forest rises up right behind our house, and now we have sun in the morning due to the loss of trees taken out for a fireguard.
And watching as they were putting the fireguard in on part of our property just before evacuation allowed us to see the skyline changing as the trees went down, because they had to create the fireguard quickly. But we were glad to have it. The guard stopped the fire.
When I’ve been off working in different communities, from the far northwest of BC to Vancouver Island, I take a lot of photos. I have, over the years, created a lot of pastels from the reference pictures and from my memories of what it was like to be there. And I’ve been working on a series for a show in 2026 at the Langham Cultural Centre in Kaslo called Beauty Follows Rage. It is about how nature repairs post-disaster, and what that looks like depending on the severity of the event, the kind of event, etc. Flooding and wildfire create very different situations for growth, regrowth and change in the natural environment, for instance, which are topics my pastel images reference.
Examples I’m drawing on (no pun intended!) come from the pandemic, flooding, wildfire, landslide, etc. There are many examples of how nature will pragmatically rebuild and regrow—some that we collectively rarely consider but are beautiful, too.
K: Yeah, that’s so interesting. I was watching the BC Wildfire Service documentary on the Knowledge Network.
D: So were we. We watched every episode. It was interesting.
K: It was so well done and I was so surprised to learn of, you know, some of the flowers and things that come up, like fireweed.
D: Yes, that’s my title image for Beauty Follows Rage. The aptly named fireweed comes in after a wildfire. It comes in a group, usually, and it leaves behind more than it came with. It enriches the soil. It’s very interesting. I love that flower, and these same characteristics can be found in community recovery. Groups and individual recovery workers will show up after a disaster; usually they leave behind more than they came with, in terms of helping the community as a whole to recovery, and recovery as an inclusive process can certainly enrich the community it is happening in, in the best circumstances.
K: Fireweed also makes a good tea.
D: It makes good honey, too.
K: Going out with you on a hazard identification walk in Wells, BC, really opened my mind to how easy it is to become complacent in our surroundings and not see the situations that could become dangerous in the face of an emergency. This feels like a leading question, but I’m genuinely curious: do you find that artists and creative producers have an easier time imagining risky scenarios and then identifying hazards? The safety planning process takes a dose of creativity, so do you find that artists are beneficial players in the assessment and planning processes?
D: Yes, designing a scenario is almost like writing a story. When you’re designing exercises for a particular community or group, it has to be realistic enough so that the players will “suspend disbelief” and play it out. When you’re presenting the scenario you say, “Well, first, this is what happened,” and then you can add in all sorts of things. I had so much fun doing my certification in that because it’s like, “Well, we could have this happen and we could have a farmer with animals over here and the river floods. And then over here there’s a road that’s cut off and it’s happening during the pandemic.” Each piece of complexity adds a potential conversation and opportunity to collaborate amongst the participants. It’s a very creative process designing exercises and I think artists would be very well suited to it.
Deb: “Morning Walk is pastel on sanded paper, and it is the new view I see each morning of the ridge and skyline behind our house, where the fire came down the mountain nearest to our property in 2024.”
K: That tabletop exercise we did in Wells really did feel like a game. (Note: A tabletop exercise in emergency planning is a discussion-based session where team members are assigned roles in a simulated emergency scenario and walk through it. In the case of the Northern Exposure conference, the scenario was a music festival with an encroaching wildfire.)
D: I know. And if you make it like a game, it’s not threatening and people then can get more out of it. I heard great comments about it all through the day at the conference.
In terms of the safety processes, it’s another part of the brain and there are certain things that professional responders train for and understand and know about. As opposed to three proven ways to put out a fire safely in response, there could be 100+ ways to rebuild a house in recovery. One other difference is how much time there is. Responses need to be well practiced and done quickly (usually), and recovery needs more conversation and discussion and time to work out the best path forward.
K: Yes, you’re saying more creativity is beneficial on the recovery side, generally.
D: Yes, which is probably why I’m more drawn to it. The incident command system, used in response, works very well when everybody knows their part in it. It works really well and I totally agree with it, but it offers “A types and B types.” The A types are the responders and they usually say, “Get out of the way; we’re here to save you.” And the B types say, “Come back; we need to know what you want.” That is, of course, a vast generalization and it’s not true of everyone, but it kind of describes it. When I think of it visually, I think of response as pillars and I think of recovery as a circle, as mentioned before.
There are several points I wanted to make about changing the language in emergency management. There are already phrases that visually divide people: “from the top down” and “from the ground up” are used. “From the ground up” is the community and “top down” is the incident command system. The schematic of the incident command system is literally drawn this way and defines the hierarchy of each event in terms of who is in control of each part of the response to the event. That’s the way it’s structured and works in response, but it also perpetuates the idea of, “Oh, there are two levels.”
The response side is well trained and they’re professional and they need to be there. The community has all the local knowledge and many skills and many abilities. And it’s not, “This is better than that.” They’re equal and different and the more they work together and build trust and relationships (before, during and after an event), the easier it will be for all when the next disaster happens.
K: Yeah, you want arrows in both directions.
D: You need the response side to understand the value of what’s in a community that they should be saving, and you want the community to appreciate the skill and training of the responders in helping to keep the community members (and what they have identified as valuable) safe. And many do this, on both sides of the equation, but we still have work ahead of us to improve the relationships and communications for future events.
We all know, particularly people who have been through disasters recently, that it’s not going to stop. It’s going to get worse. That’s why I started doing recovery planning work with non-profit groups (arts groups and others) and rural communities.
I’ve recently worked with groups in the Kootenays affected by recent disasters and there is nothing like having it happen in your own backyard to encourage thoughts of planning ahead. They are enthused about it.
K: It’s amazing that groups affected last summer are already at that point where they can plan for the next fire.
D: For sure.
Deb: “Another lucky chance to capture the views from Osoyoos to Rock Creek, over Anarchist Summit, in the early morning.” [From Deb’s Instagram: @debborsos.art]
K: I do want to ask you a bit about the Creative Recovery Network that has been started in Australia. It’s been doing such great work and they’ve particularly been advocating for the role of the arts in community resilience and recovery. I was curious if you had a favourite artistic intervention to share from some of the recovery work that you’ve done, or anything that you’ve seen that has worked well here in Canada.
D: There is one image I have still—and I have a literal photograph of it—from the one-year anniversary of the landslide in Johnsons Landing. Usually at the one-year anniversary, there may be an event that happens within a community to acknowledge the disaster. A community might continue that tradition or not, but the first year is an important marker to help people move on. And for that event, the community in Johnsons Landing got together at one of their community gathering places; in their case it was the beach where everybody used to gather for many events. And they collectively built a beautiful little raft with driftwood and flowers and botanicals and things and set it out on the lake in a community ceremony.
K: That’s lovely, wow—using the materials of the community as well.
D: In terms of other things, for years I have been collecting a list of songs that were written about disasters. “Cold Missouri Water” is a song by James Keelaghan and it’s about smokejumpers in 1949 and what happened to the crew during a wildfire.
Jim does a really good job of describing that, but there are closer-to-home examples as well. There is As the Crow Flies from Cranbrook. In 2005 they released their album One Small Acre, and on that is “Firestorm,” from 2003, I believe. There is a heartfelt song from Annie, the lead singer, about experiencing fire in their own community.
There’s also Janey Weeks from the Robson Valley. She did an album about the McLure fire in 2003 and that’s a really descriptive one about place, and it’s really good.
Amanda Bath wrote the book Disaster in Paradise, and that she did about the Johnsons Landing slide because she was very much a part of it. They lived right at the bottom of it when it happened. And she did it for her own emotional recovery.
Recording these types of historic events is really important because, if you don’t know where you came from, how do you know where you’re going? Witnessing through various creative ways is important. So, I wish more people would do it. I wish I could find the people who are doing it and make a more robust collection of songs, in particular, to share. But it’s not just songs and books; it’s many things.
In terms of Creative Recovery Network, I was looking at the site this morning and there are so many great projects; I would suggest taking time just to go through the various projects and other information listed.
One often-mentioned arts and emergency resilience project is Refuge, which was a six-year project. It was fantastic. There was another multi-year project called Hard Place, Good Place. In the Yarrow Ranges, Australia, I think in 2021, there was an enormous windstorm that created havoc and ruined millions of trees and houses. Hard Place, Good Place was a youth project with two or three years’ worth of multimedia. They taught the kids how to use video cameras and they just did their own thing. At the end of it, you were loaned an iPad as a visitor and you walked through the exhibit and you stopped at each place, and it would click in and tell you about it and say, “Here’s what happened.” All done by wonderfully creative teenagers who had been through the event themselves.
The other is in Capertee, involving the Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation and Captertee Valley Landcare. It’s in New South Wales. That was a response to long-term drought. It had community projects, including building a fence out of driftwood or dead branches. They mapped all the waterways in the valley and then attached this to stories that people had about what the waterways used to be like, or what they were like now, or why they were suffering from drought. Again, an example of tying art to other sectors such as water (infrastructure) and the land (environment).
K: Excellent. I love those examples that you shared where there’s artistic processes that help the individual artist process the experience and, at the same time, can offer that to the community.
D: Yeah, exactly. And Refuge—please go look at the Refuge project. It is always being referenced there as one of the key projects that has been done. Jen Rae is Canadian, but she’s lived in Australia for a long time and she was one of the creators of that project.
K: I think that’s a bit what Petra Hekkenberg is working on, too, over in Slocan (with her Art of Safe Keeping project). Some excellent work there for sure.
I want to end on something a little practical and tangible for folks. For anyone reading who produces events or is responsible for the safety of an audience, but may not have thought much about emergency planning or recovery, what would you recommend as a first step?
D: If people wanted to go through that process of a tabletop first to better understand all the things that could happen, and then go on to build a plan for their own non-profit society, it might work better than building a plan and then doing a tabletop, which is usually what you do: you build a plan and then you test it with a tabletop to see. So that is something to consider. I would be delighted to work with non-profit groups to do things like that.
Non-profits (particularly arts-based) really need to understand how they have to remain sustainable through long-term recovery because they’re a huge part of the network that keeps their community together.
One other thing I was going to mention is the British Columbia Major Planned Events Guidelines by Ryan Wainwright. He wrote a guide that over and over I’ve suggested to people. There are a few things that are different now because of the regulations, but it’s a really good overview for safely putting on a festival.
There’s also a more urban template for an emergency plan from Guelph for festival events, and how to work with a city with a larger population, that I’ve suggested to people.
Just being aware of the safety topics that you have to think of, and then collectively planning through discussion, is the process. I have worked previously with Tiny Lights on how to build a safety plan for their music festival. They also have a fantastic safety guy that they have worked with for years, which is a big advantage, but with or without someone like that, a plan can be designed that works in each case.
K: Tiny Lights would have that. They’re very proactive people.
D: Yes! I guess those would be the things I’d say to look at. I’m happy to talk to people if they want to do either a plan or a tabletop or both. If future tabletops can be as fun and inclusive as the Wells conference example, it would be worth it just for that!
Deb Borsos can be reached at communitydisasterrecovery@gmail.com. Find her art and more at debborsosart.com.
Deb’s one-day show on December 6, 2025:
