On the cover: an elegant ikebana featuring seven-spired leaves. In “news”: 2,400-year-old bongs (“paraphernalia for Scythian royalty”) and Sigur Rós’s collaboration on THC-infused gumdrops. In features: trippy Mexican candles and a “hallucinated odyssey for the armchair traveler.”

You are reading Broccoli, a new Portland-headquartered magazine dedicated to women in cannabis. On its bright, airy pages and in its wonderfully wiggy story selection, a roomy editorial sensibility emerges.

“We see such creativity in cannabis on the product and marketing side, especially in Portland,” says founder Anja Charbonneau. “The gap was on the media side. There wasn’t anything forward-thinking and design driven.”

The 34-year-old British Columbia native comes well-prepared—for three years, she art-directed Kinfolk, the indie-magazine movement’s hygge-powered mothership. Broccoli, however, operates with more zany, open-hearted generosity than that tightly controlled lifestyle icon. Typical cannabis coverage’s zonked-out bro vibes give way to gently odd, meditative stories. Lush photography and coverage of obscure Japanese ambient composers share space with passionate advocacy. “We’re elevating women’s voices,” Charbonneau says. “And access to cannabis for health care reasons is just another dimension of the battle over women’s health care, period.”

 

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The fall launch issue found its audience. “They’re gone—totally sold out,” Charbonneau says. “It’s been nuts.” With the second issue due this spring, she harbors international expansion plans. But Broccoli, she says, will remain rooted in an earnest mission.

“We thought it would be more out there—even weirder, basically,” she says. “But we kept hearing there was such a need for education. So we ended up trying to make it beautiful and weird, but also clear and informative.”