Lisa Boudreau’s La Goélette — Art, Culture and the Creative Economy
Beyond its culinary offerings, the café stands as a vibrant community nexus, where local artisans’ works are showcased, and Acadian heritage is preserved and celebrated.
La Goélette a Pépé Café, in the middle of what I think of as Arichat’s downtown on Isle Madame, transcends its role as a simple café. Founded by Lisa Boudreau in 2015, this former auto repair garage now serves fair trade coffee, healthy lunches, and freshly baked pastries, while also providing the only gas on the island’s south side. Beyond its culinary offerings, the café stands as a vibrant community nexus, where local artisans’ works are showcased, Acadian heritage is preserved, and Lisa’s vision of a creative economy—a blend of cultural preservation and economic growth—comes to life.
Heritage and local history are the backdrop
It’s evident that the heritage of the area is the bedrock of her vision. For starters, the café was named to honour her schooner- or goélette-building grandfather. There is a replica of the bow of the J.W. Bridgeman, her grandfather Jean Batiste Girroir’s last vessel, serving as the facade for the front counter.In the corner is an antique wood burning stove cast in the year her mother was born. And then there are the fishing nets suspended from the ceiling. She says, “The netting that we see up there was a gift from my mother on an anniversary which just astounded me as to why she would ever give me a net. But it fits perfectly in this room, back and forth and across [the ceiling].”
On the wall there is a genealogy display with larger-than-life photos of the ancestral families of the Isle Madame area. From the outset Lisa wanted the focus to be on the community’s people: “Instead of places, we put faces.” Outside around the deck, mounted on the posts, are 20 plaques depicting the timeline of the Acadians in the area from before Le Grand Dérangement, which began in 1755, to the present day.
Lisa’s aim in creating the café was and is to preserve the past while sailing toward the future. La Goélette a Pépé is her vessel.
Support for local “makers”
She believes that it’s creativity, above all, that keeps a community vital. And she walks the walk. Before La Goélette, artisans in the area didn’t have a real place to display their work. As an artist, I, for one, have benefitted from her encouragement and the retail space she provides for “makers” in the area.
Jam packed with handmade items like wood-turning, iron work, knitting, stained glass, paintings, ceramics, jewelry, fabric art, jars of honey, as well as locally produced books, the venue has had a positive impact. “We’ve had success in selling pieces that people took back with them to places all over the world,” Lisa says.
Often embedded in these creations is Isle Madame’s natural history. Nature definitely influences you as an artist here, she says. “Some of them use natural elements that were always in the environment… a reminiscence on who we are and where we’re from. So you know, being from a coastal community means that driftwood, rocks, greys, browns, blues definitely make their way into the arts of those who are making it. You can see it in yours, Elaine. I see it in Rena Meyers’s, who, although she’s from Germany, has a place in Janvrin’s Island and she moved here because of the colors. Yeah, she loved the greys. Did she ever tell you that?”
The lingering economic impact of the pandemic
But Covid had a major impact on sales which still lingers. She says, “Everything has changed.” The combination of a decrease in the customer base, erosion of income, and increase in the price of supplies has affected local businesses including artists and artisans and has caused her to change her emphasis in the craft area towards a more focused display of smaller, more affordable items.
Lisa will continue to support the creatives in the area but the need to reduce the stock, however necessary, seems to weigh heavily on her.
Supporting the Creative Economy: Essential to our future
I think it weighs heavily on her because of her belief in the creative economy’s place in any community. She says, “The creative economy needs to be well supported from every level. It has to be recognized as an essential element in the survival of a race, to talk about who they are, where they come from.”
But she takes that thought further. She believes it is creative people who will keep communities vital in the future. “We’re going to need people who actually work with their hands, who actually see visions, and things in a different light than what average people do. If [we’re] not curious or creative, we will not move forward.”
Tourism as an opportunity
The low hanging fruit of developing that creative economy is tourism and Lisa believes now is the time to take the initiative. “There is a trend in the tourism sector for people who want unique experiences in areas that are off the beaten track.” She says, “Those are the type of people that will come looking for unique things from the area. They scour the beach for something that they can take back with them. Or they come looking for artwork of people who are living in the region.”
She said, “They’re explorers. They’re usually a little older in demographic and they’re usually couples or singles. They don’t usually come in with a family.”
She believes Isle Madame is uniquely suited to attract that group because it is off the beaten trail and many don’t even know it’s here until they see that sign on Highway 4. That resonates with me. We didn’t know Isle Madame was here either when we decided to look in Cape Breton for a new place to live and when we did turn off the highway to explore it we were amazed at how perfect a maritime destination it was. So perfect, we decided to move here permanently.
A vision and an impulse
Lisa has been a student of the culture, history and economic development of the Isle Madame region for a long time, a place she has such deep roots, but in the course of our conversation, she shares this vision that somehow express her hopes and fears for the place: “Whenever I drive by an abandoned house, I imagine children and chickens in the yard and clothes on the clothesline blowing in the wind. But then when these places are beyond saving, I stop visualizing and feel sad.” Imagining what has been and the potential of what could be, realizing loss with an urgent impulse to preserve, all in one reverie, that’s pretty much Lisa Boudreau.
Author details
Elaine Mandrona, in addition to being a writer, is a painter and sculptor. She moved to Cape Breton permanently in 2021.
