Lucy Foster on Holding Space Without Authority

Details

Interviewee: Lucie Foster
Role: 6th Season Lead (maternity cover)
Community: Feÿtopia
Location: chateau du fey
Date: 2026-04-29
Language: English

Summary

Lucy Foster, in her third year at the château after five years attending events there, took on the season lead role when Jess went on maternity leave. What was framed as an hour a day of check-ins became being the single point of contact for every question in the house. She was extracted for two weeks mid-season to prevent a breakdown. The interview traces the arc: why she took the role (wanting to understand how a place like this works before opening her own; an innate belief that people deserve to live surrounded by more love and acceptance); where the design failed (no clear communication layer between the container and the staff; culture diluted by high-turnover workshop weeks; no structured conflict resolution); and what she believes the community needs next (a values document, open conflict forums, more creation space, and a clearer answer to the question of what it means to be Feytopia). She names three things essential to the place: the building itself, the core Fey Tolkiens who set the foundation, and people arriving with intention into a ready space. She names three things she would change: a longer season, a stronger emotional container, and a defined values framework.

Key quotes

I got picked up and taken out for two weeks before I killed someone, because I couldn’t walk into a space without someone asking me about the house and not even checking in with me.

All of the responsibilities, none of the authority, and an endless stream of people asking me questions.

Relationship hygiene. That’s the thing.

I think it’s time to define what it means to be Feytopia. Because we bandy this word about a lot, and do we really know? Did we ever decide?

We have the people wanting to come and we don’t have the space to put them in.

Transcript

Sharon: Let's start with your name and where we're sitting.

Lucy: My name is Lucy Foster, and we are sat at the Château de Fey in the Feytopia container.

Sharon: You and this beautiful ancient tree behind us.

Lucy: Beautiful, surrounded by 400 year old trees, the glorious sunshine, the trees.

Sharon: Since when are you part of this community?

Lucy: So this is my third year that I've been staying here. I've been coming to events held at the château for the last five years.

Sharon: How did you first hear about this place?

Lucy: It came to me through another collective that I work with. They had an AA, and they always wanted to bring one of the Paris editions here. It was my first interaction with that collective. I came to volunteer at one of their seminars, and I fell in love with the container, the house, and some of the marvelous characters I was lucky enough to have very, very brief interactions with over that weekend. It inspired me to sort of anchor around and follow and watch what was going on here, because something about it definitely excited me.

Sharon: What was that thing?

Lucy: It was a very short interaction I actually had with it, and it carried a frequency of the magic that I really try to chase and follow. It was this kind of immediate sense of, this is the way I want to go, this feels right. I was at a time in my life where I was really tuning myself into, where do you want to go? I had a lot of freedom to be able to move. And with that, a lot of the questions like, what are we doing here? What are we searching for? It was such a starkly synchronistic moment. It shifted something. That was what anchored me into the house herself and the land.

Sharon: What kind of values led you to search for a place like this?

Lucy: An innate feeling that we can be living a greater day to day. It pains me a lot to see people carrying so much struggle and so much hate in their own individual struggles through life. When I started practicing breathwork a few years ago, one of the things that I really noticed was just how we're all experiencing the same thing, and how important it is that we surround ourselves with others that allow us to validate our own experience.

Being here and seeing collectives create their own land and having these very magical interactions, all of which kind of opened my mind up a little bit more to, yeah, there's new ways we can be doing things. All around coming together to create safety and to play together into a better world for tomorrow.

That was 100% what threw me in. These are the people I want to spend more time with. These are people I want to play and create with, and they all seem to be creating from a very similar set of desires, a very aligned value of how lucky we are to be here. How can we find exciting and extraordinary ways to play with that knowledge, and to share it and to weave it with others.

Sharon: How did it feel to make the first steps into this place?

Lucy: Intimidating. You know when you're right in it and you're like, oh wow, it's such a fresh house of mirrors, almost. Not just how you connect to the people within the space, but what comes up for ourselves when we land in the space. I found that very fascinating. I struggled a little bit with having no threads to anchor to for safety or rest, and then being surrounded by so many relationships that seemed to carry so much depth. I kept thinking, I'll never be here long enough to build up that kind of depth with some of the people in the space.

Then remembering, you are lucky to be here. What an extraordinary anthropological study and potentiality to rewire the trajectory of your purpose. What you want to do with this world. It's finding the people that actually make that happen.

Sharon: What's the difference between a creative collective building a festival and what's happening over here?

Lucy: With the festival events, we work very creatively coming to some kind of output or some kind of end goal. We don't have that here. How we come together, we have a period of months that we get to play and experiment in this way, but we're not all fully anchoring into one defined goal. So with that, it gives you more of a visceral spread, and more of a mycelial network effect.

I think about this when we talk about Black Mountain College a lot, how they had the curriculum that they ran in, and we just don't have that. But we have what we create, something that's more organic, more growing. So every year it's a bit different, each year it develops different flavors and different depths without being very contained within, this is what we do.

I would love to see more structured aspects to it, because I believe in the power of what we could do if we could anchor some of the magic and deliver it with greater impact. That could help more people activate their own versions of this, which is what I would love to see more of.

Sharon: So in the second year, you chose to come and take quite a big role here. Why did you do that?

Lucy: I fell in love when I was here. I just came for two weeks, I ended up staying for three months. I then had an incredible year travelling around, being able to carry that inspiration out. It changed how I navigated the world.

My personal dream will be to be able to run my own smaller version of a community house such as this. So to be able to actually understand how it works, and what Jess has built, I saw as a great honor. It was a lot more work than any of us appreciated at the time. But I was excited to be able to help out a community I really want to support, and to be able to hold space for the people I love.

Sharon: What were the assumptions that maybe changed? The relationships that maybe changed?

Lucy: Yeah. So to begin with, the idea was that Jess had never stepped out of this project in the last eight years. So it was a really great space to be able to see, okay, cool, where are we at? We needed someone in between the container and the Château staff. So it was kind of framed that it would be like an hour a day check-in, just to make sure everything was flowing, any worries, any room for clash and things like that on the ground.

It became very clear in the first few weeks that the one hour a day wasn't even a way to quantify it. From my point of view, I was very happy. I was like, look, no, it's cool, it's good, I love this, I'm good at this, I'm happy to have this space.

I had a great lesson in my own limits with that, which became more evident as the months went on. The thing that I really struggled with as the months went by was the loss of the other aspects of my own identity when I became like point guard for everything in the house. All of the responsibilities, none of the authority, and an endless stream of people asking me questions.

The reason everyone says I got burnt out was because I had to be picked up and taken out for two weeks before I killed someone, because I couldn't walk into a space without someone asking me about the house and not even checking in with me.

We were doing a lot of workshops last year as well. When the workshops came through, we would have some weeks where we had more people coming in than people who'd been in the container before. So we were struggling to maintain the culture with a higher turnover of people. A small group of us that were here the whole way through, having to maintain the reputation of Feytopia, with people coming through for a week for a workshop as a peak experience.

Sharon: What patterns of behaviours or culture are getting in the way of this space living to its full potential?

Lucy: Relationship hygiene. It's funny, because it's the thing, like I said very early before, first arriving in the space. You're kind of looking around and there's so much life that has already been lived within the space and within the people there.

I find that this community in particular comes from a wider perspective of the spectrum. With that, we are not as anchored into emotional resonance and resilience as I would find, say, with my festival community. I feel like we know that everyone needs to resonate in that way, but we need to have a container that holds the full spectrum of the emotional experience that people are having here.

That would come from more open conflict resolution, or spaces for that. If ever there is something that happens or goes wrong, it kind of goes into a smaller group of people who've been in the community longer or who've held positions of more responsibility. But it never really gets opened in concert. In a house like this, people hear things and they talk. So if something has happened between two people and it's not an open topic of discussion, you're still going to feel the effects of it in the home.

Sharon: What do you think are the three things that if they were not existing here, this place would not be Feytopia?

Lucy: The building herself. I think it plays a very, very key role. Like they all do. Everyone talks about the nature, but our buildings carry their own energetic imprint. And Fey plays with us, like we play with her.

The core group of Fey Tolkiens, who bedded down here for the first season and set the foundations for the base of what it means to experience life here. From them, I see a wave of people through all different industries, different ways of how we can play with this reality, mind, body, and spirit.

And the nature herself, and all that stuff. I think the people put the intention, and the space was so ready for it. It's been extraordinary just in the last three years to witness how that changes year on year.

Sharon: What would be two things, if added or changed, would make this place even more live up to its potential?

Lucy: It's refinement now, I think. A longer season, because we'd like to be here when it's sunny.

Better learnings around the emotional layer of the house. How we can explore what it actually means when we come together in community to live together, how we're doing at that, openly and honestly, what we think we can do with that, and more space and understanding of how to do that.

I think now is the time to define what it means to be Feytopia. Because we bandy this word about a lot, and do we really know? Did we ever define it? The OGs were like, you don't get to define it, that's the whole point. I was like, no, I think now is the time that you can. It's not that you're defining it into a static moment, but we have enough experience to be like, hey, these are our values. That in turn will help when we have conflict. Because a lot of the time the conflict comes up and it's something that's so basic, like consent, or things that we assume everybody should be aware of because they're within our container. We would benefit now from having this down somewhere to be like, hey, this is what these values mean to us. This is what consent means. Not to be thrown about, but as a guidance and where to point people when things come up.

Sharon: What is the biggest challenge of this place in becoming something like Black Mountain College?

Lucy: It's the structure of units, like space, time, money. The constraints that we have based on those things. When we look at what our future plans are, and the creation of what we will build on this land that will take it to that level. For now, we need to figure out how to activate the community, so that we can get this stuff funded. We already find ourselves over capacity, with waitlists. We have the people wanting to come, and we don't have the space to put them in.

Sharon: Thank you. Is there anything else you want to say to close?

Lucy: If you've got a big pot of gold, you don't have to run a house. Go and experience community, like, try them all. I think there's so much power in what we can do when we come together. We don't need to know what we're doing just yet. We just need to be coming together at this point. And it pains me every day to see how far away so many people in this world are from being able to experience this. I think about how much my perception of my own life changed and enhanced from being given that simple gift of being able to show up. It changes your life.