Some months ago I discovered Incline Press, a fine press publisher in the UK, and its founder Graham Moss, who found his way to printing through the same Adana press that I did:

Spine labels are the unlikely start point for what is probably the finest maker of books in Britain. Graham Moss’ background in teaching History led to paper conservation, turning in to a book repair business. Understanding how a book comes together meant a short step to binding, and binding needs those tiny printed slips — labels, book-plated, binders’ tickets. Graham got hold of a small Adana press in 1990 to print these components of the books he bound and repaired.

Later joined by librarian Kathy Whalen, Incline Press grew to become an estimable printer and publisher of lovely editions.

The press attracted my attention when I read, in a late 2024 blog post, of its plan to move to Scotland:

Incline Press has been working for the last 30 years in Oldham, England; and housed in a former cotton mill in Bow Street since 2001. We now have an opportunity to live the dream and move to beautiful, rural Scotland.  As well as printing, we will be able to develop a practice teaching the whole craft of book making, and open a seasonal gallery space which the current building cannot accommodate. But we need help to make it happen.

Having some experience with the challenges of moving printing presses, I felt a kinship. 

I felt even more kinship when I learned of the book that Graham crafted, following Kathryn’s death in 2020, Memento Mori : Memento Vivere. 

It is a heart-livening memorial-in-print, stunning in its detail and craftsmanship:

I was so moved by it that, in mid-May, I sent Graham an email:

Hello Graham,

We don’t know each other; I’m a printer in Prince Edward Island, Canada. I came across your Instagram, and then followed that to your website.

You and I, it turns out, are members of a very small club, that of letterpress printers whose longtime partners died from metastatic breast cancer in early 2020, who subsequently published a book in memoriam.

In my case, my late partner Catherine, a textile artist, died in January 2020 after living with cancer for 6 years. The next year I published Using Her Marbles, a chronology of her illness and death that had started as a series of email updates to friends and family.

I am in awe, in this light, of your Memento Mori : Memento Vivere, perhaps because I can imagine some of the topsy-turvyness that led you to create it.

This email is simply a tip of the hat your way, a small act of solidarity.

Peter

PS: Having now moved my behemoth Golding Jobber No. 8 twice in 14 years, at great expense, complexity, and with several unintended acts of damage to property, I also share not inconsiderable awe at the logistics of your recent move. 

I never received a reply from Graham. 

Today, in an Instagram post, sadly, I learned why:

Graham died today at 12.30pm in Dumfries hospital.  Kidney cancer, out of the blue. This photo is only 6 weeks ago.

No regrets, he said.

Memento Mori : Memento Vivere.

I have been listening to the audiobook of Shattered, by Hanif Kureishi, over the past few months, titrating it out on longer car trips.

A passage struck me this week, in a section about the writing of The Buddha of Suburbia (emphasis mine):

I considered myself to be a nervous, if not uptight, and repressed person. I could speak onstage, but found it difficult to be intimate with others. In the suburbs, where I was brought up, silence, if not shyness, was a virtue.

I wanted to use a freer voice, not unlike that of Henry Miller, writing the words that were somehow getting stuck or jammed up in my head. I wondered whether the restrained part of me might contain some of my most interesting ideas.

That idea—that beyond restraint lies something more—is something that’s been on my mind a lot of late.

Every therapist I’ve ever worked has pointed out that I have very strong “thinking parts” that interfere with my “feeling parts.” In any situation, it’s generally “thinking” that’s running point.

In a session this morning, I was particularly aware of this, as was my therapist, who has developed a sixth sense for when the thinking engine is running particularly hot.

“Restraint” is of the thinking domain, and I, like Kureishi, wonder what I might find if I can get it to soften back.

Shattered is available for listening with a Spotify subscription. You can also get the audiobook from Libro.fm (and support local bookstores). The ebook is currently on sale for $1.99 CDN from Amazon and Apple.

Did you know there’s an open map of memorial benches? There weren’t any added on PEI yet, so I added Catherine’s bench in the Gardens of Hope, and the bench in Victoria Park in memory of Lisa’s Grandfather George and Uncle Ron.

I encourage you to add more.

As I neared the go-no-go point outside of Truro, Nova Scotia, where I needed to decide “ferry or bridge,” I placed a call to the ferry booking line to check on load status of the 1:30 p.m. from Caribou. 

“There aren’t that many big trucks,” said the friendly agent, “so you’ll probably get on. And, if you don’t, you’ll get on the 3:15 p.m. for sure.”

So, go.

Every time I take the ferry, I think of Harry Baglole.

Many years ago I ran into Harry in the cafeteria in Caribou. At that point—and maybe until he died?—Harry had never taken the Confederation Bridge to Nova Scotia, his Friends of the Island blood still running as hot as ever. That left him with the ferry.

We had a lovely chat; I always enjoyed chatting with Harry, whether it was in the ferry terminal, over the breakfast service at the Bonshaw Hall, or concerning matters large and small at Island Studies Press.

And so I can’t take the ferry and not think of him.

My reservationist was on the money for the 1:30 p.m.: I got a space on the big truck deck, and was one of the last vehicles to load on what ended up as a full vessel.

On the drive from Truro to Caribou I listened to an old Radiolab episode, Desperately Seeking Symmetry, that was music to my lateral-thinking ears.

I love the way the episode starts:

And do you ever wonder what actually happens when two people click, when the halves kind of meet?

Meaning what?

You know, you go in through your day, maybe you’re at a party, you meet people and you’re like, hey, how are you? How are you? And they say something, they try and be interesting, you try and be interesting back, but in the end, you’re like, I don’t need to remember that name.

Right, of course.

Gone.

And then comes along somebody.

Yeah, every hundred times, the stars align, the world falls away, things narrow, and you just click.

I know that.

But do you ever wonder what actually happens in that moment?

Like when you meet someone that you really get, I just, I don’t think that there’s anything that really feels better than that.

That’s Lauren Silbert, she’s a neuroscientist at Princeton. She wonders. She’s been wondering for a while.

From there they jump to functional MRIs, Alice in Wonderland, Neil deGrasse Tyson, chirality, electrons spin, and all manner of other things. 

Fascinating. Lateral (very lateral).

I started the day at the Just Us! Café in Grand-Pré, which serves up excellent coffee. So excellent I had a cortado, a pause, and then an espresso. They also make a good cinnamon bun.

Once I hit the road for the 380 km drive home, I thought about dropping into Halifax. I was set to bump up against the edge Halifax anyway, en route to Truro, so why not. But the magnetic pull of Big City Living was overwhelmed by the magnetic pull of Getting Back to the Island, and so I bumped up against Halifax and slingshotted right back out the highway toward home.

I’ve had the idea, for years, to assemble a book of stories about the PEI ferries, titled Just Ferry Stories. There are so many of them.

The title of the book (and this post) is an homage to Just Mary Stories, a CBC Radio program that my mother listened to as a child; sufficient connection might exist only in my head to make it a marketable title (see also Mom Jokes, a This American Life segment I also listened to on the drive).

(Mary was Mary Grannan: go and read her Wikipedia page; she was a Great Canadian.)

To my surprise, in a published anthology of the stories, I found The Gift of Lady Moon, which starts (emphasis mine):

Peter Lawrence really went to the moon. It’s a queer story, and it’s not my fault that it begins: “It is.” “It is not.” “It is!”

“Well, then, we’ll see if it’s real snow,” and Dottie Dawson threw the beautiful green glassy into the fireplace. The flames sputtered and spat and licked at the green globe, and the two children stood there in surprise at what Dottie had done. They looked at each other, and then they stared unhappily into the grate.

“Oh, Peter! Oh, Peter! I’m sorry,” said Dottie. “Oh, Peter! I didn’t mean to … I …” 

Peter didn’t answer. His lips were tight. His hands were clenched. He stood very, very still. Dottie ran from the room.

My mother has never been able to explain how I came to have the middle name Lawrence. Maybe this was the source?

That story also contains the word heckadoodle, so I’m clearly on Team Just Mary.

L. and I headed to the Annapolis Valley today to drop her at a week-long overnight camp (Lisa is in Montreal, on assignment).

Every time I go to the Valley I am reminded how very far away it is. You look at a map, and it seems like it should be close; it’s only 160 km as the crow flies:

When you factor in all the hither and yon necessitated by bodies of water and terrain, though, you end up driving more than double that, about 380 km. The quickest route involves going to Halifax, and then bouncing back; confounding if, like me, you are averse to doubling back:

We made it—left the shore at 9:00 a.m., and pulled into camp at 4:00 p.m.—and it was a beautiful day for a drive. We shared the Bluetooth on the drive, and thus alternated between intense teen music and esoteric NPR podcast interviews.

Having dropped L. at camp, it seemed folly to drive back the 380 km to PEI on the same day, so I booked myself a room, and am staying in Wolfville for the night.

The summer I turned 18, I bought myself a train pass and travelled east, ending up in Halifax, where I stayed for three nights in the residence at Dalhousie University.

How 1984 me knew that such a thing was possible, pre-Internet, I have no recollection, but it was a helpful, mind-expanding stay for someone whose lodging on the road theretofore had consisted of Holiday Inns and Howard Johnsons. 

Staying at Dal was cheap, clean, and central; I paid $25 a night for my room, which included breakfast.

Tonight, echo of that, I’m overnight at Acadia University in Wolfville. 

It’s $85 a night, no breakfast included. But it’s relatively cheap, mostly clean, and certainly central.

I brought my Brompton folding bicycle with me, determined to build activity into the end of a day which otherwise involved staring at highways. 

Looking at the map, I found that there’s a cycleway that runs along the old rail bed, through Wolfville and along the edge of  Grand-Pré. I found myself a restaurant a reasonable 7 km cycle from my dorm and headed off to supper.

The cycleway proved a stunning way to travel; I cannot imagine a better way to experience the Grand-Pré dyke system up close:

It took me about 25 minutes to make it to the restaurant. The meal was, alas, forgettable. But the location was lovely, and the weather on the patio was perfect.

On the ride home I diverted into the Grand-Pré National Historic Site. I’d visited before, a decade ago, but a visit at sunset was a whole different experience: I had the entire site to myself, and the golden hour made everything pop into resplendence.

The ride home was slightly more downhill-feeling than the ride there, and so I was more relaxed. 

I stopped on the edge of Wolfville to look at the mud flats:

On Main Street, I perched on the steps of the old MT&T building, and sketched the Acadia Cinema opposite:

The ride up to my dorm was a lot more effort than the ride down; I pulled in about 9:00 p.m., two hours, and 14 km of cycling after I left.

A very large day.

Remember Act Quickly Summer is Almost Over? 

(Could that really have been 11 years ago?)

I’ve been trying to cultivate a different attitude about summer of late, more “be present, and enjoy the summer” than “ACT QUICKLY!” Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

Lisa marks her birthday as the halfway point of summer, and as her birthday was this week, it seems like a good time to reflect on the presence or lack thereof.

The Gathering of the Rukavinas

The Gathering of the Rukavinas has come to an end for 2025: my little brothers brought their families to the Island, the first time we’d all been in the same place since forever. We were 17 at Peak Rukavina, and while I would have liked more time with everyone, I consider it a success that we managed to wrangle all 17 of us into Salt & Sol for supper (great service and great food; I’d take a large group there any time!).

Home Exchange

We’ve decamped to the shore for much of the summer, which lets us host home exchange guests downtown (we have had a few days open up in August if you’re looking). The shore (Lisa prefers “the beach”) is quieter, involves more swimming, a much smaller space, and considerably more languid afternoons. We are privileged.

Lunch with Thelma and Steven

We had lunch with Thelma and Steven at The Cork & Cast. They rode the bus in from Foxley River for the day! It was a delight. 

(Thelma wrote a beautiful tribute to her late mother; please go and read it.)

Golf Caddy

Lisa’s parents gifted her an afternoon of golf at Red Sands, and I came along to drive the golf cart. It was my first time on a golf course in about 20 years. I sunk a few off-the-books putts, and learned a lot about the game from Lisa’s father Hoss. I’m not turned, but I am sympathetic.

The Dice Game

We were hosted by our shore-friends (“beach-friends”) Alison and Walt, and were taught a complicated after-supper game called simply “The Dice Game” that involves a heavy emphasis on ones and fives. For the first 30 minutes I was dumbfounded, but I caught on.

Back to Owl’s Hollow

I was pulled into Owl’s Hollow for the first time in forever by the promise of “tasty ices lattes” on their outdoor sign. The ices lattes, I can confirm, are indeed tasty. And the store has never looked better. Somehow, despite there being 8 foot high letters painted on the side of the building that spell out TOYS & GAMES, I was somehow surprised to find they sell games. I bought two: That’s Not a Hat, and Really Loud Librarians. So far my latte-to-game purchase ratio is 1:1.

Neurolens Eyeglasses

The biggest transformation in my life—I’m burying the lede here—is that, after months of dithering and scheming, I have a new pair of eyeglasses, with Neurolens lenses in them. 

I’ve been dealing with a basket of symptoms for more than a decade—vertigo, dizziness, fatigue, neck pain, general ennui—that seemed eye-misalignment-related. I’ve talked to my doctor, my physiotherapist, my osteopath, a concussion specialist; nobody was able to help.

Last fall my optometrist, suggested I might look into Neurolens as an enhancement to the standard-issue prism correct she’s been putting in my prescription for many years. I was skeptical, afraid it wouldn’t work and the setback would be a blow I didn’t need, and put off by the cost (about $1500, all-in, all out-of-pocket, as we’ve no insurance). But, with Lisa’s nudging, I made a last-minute appointment at a Halifax optometrist that has the Neurolens diagnostic machine, got a prescription, and then returned last month to order frames and lenses.

The Halifax optometrist recommended that, in addition to the lenses, I get a clip-on blue light filter, to help me address possibly-related issues with fluorescent lights (Sobeys has always been my number one symptom trigger). This clip-on requirement significantly reduced the choice of their frames I could choose from, and this paucity of choice led me to throw caution to the wind and choose a pair of bold red frames:

I’ve been wearing the lenses for almost two weeks now. My first note, after a day, was “I find it very difficult to focus on the text on my cell phone. It’s not blurry, but it does feel like my eyes are misaligned.” and I’ve had a variety of “acclimation” challenges since, all of them, I’m told, to be expected.

What I haven’t had are any of the symptoms I sought out to address: no vertigo, no dizziness, no fatigue, no neck pain, no general ennui. This despite a lot of triggering situations this week: shopping, dinner parties, night driving, computer use.

I’m not ready to proclaim victory yet, but signs are very positive that these new lenses are going to make a very real and dramatic improvement in my day to day life.

Instructions for Myself

In May, when I read James A. Reeves’ post Instructions for Myself, I felt called to turn it into a chapbook. James kindly agreed, and over the course of several early-summer weeks I set and printed the pages, bound a small edition, and shipped it off to James.

James replied with a very kind thank you post.

I love everything about this.

Keith Milligan’s Beech

One of Charlottetown’s hidden gems is Premiers’ Grove, on the Experimental Farm, about here, where a tree has been planted in honour of all premiers of Prince Edward Island since Walter Shaw.

Wade MacLauchlan’s tree is the most recent,  a red oak planted in 2016. 

The grove includes a beech tree for Keith Milligan, who was Premier for just 50 days, back in 1996. It’s my favourite.

The Queen Square Press Shop

Lisa and I are having a lot of fun expanding our printing and printmaking skills. Sometimes we put what we make up in our little online store. Often we forget to announce that. Here are some of my favourite things we have for sale:

• Nanny’s Vase, a reduction lino print that Lisa carved and printed for Sally Caston’s print exchange.
• Shipping Tag Letters. Perhaps a product I’m the best customer for (isn’t that the best kind of product?). A to Z, plus &. $2.50 each.
• Furiously Curious. Lisa framed this in a bold red frame and hung it on the wall in our stairway, and seeing it every day has transformed my relationship with this broadside. It might be my favourite of all the things I’ve printed.
• Chicken Rocket. It’s all in the name.
• Terms of Union Flash Cards. I printed these a decade ago. I’ve gifted them to every new Premier as a handy reference. They may be a product of no interest to anyone but the most esoteric constitutional/letterpress wonk. But I love them.

Cat Camp

Lisa is off to Montreal for a week to catch up with old friends. L. is off to the Valley for a week to meet new friends, at summer camp. 

Meanwhile, I’m moving from the shore (beach) back into town for 10 days to look after Mike and Karen’s cats, and to support my mother. I will miss the swimming; I’m looking forward to spending time with Mom; I’m daunted by the cats. 

Wish me luck.

If Lisa and I had a formal relationship agreement, there would be a clause like this:

3.1 Peter agrees to monitor the zeitgeist, and to supply Lisa with a consistent flow of interesting reading material, including material related to topical issues and works of contemporary fiction.

3.2 Peter agrees that, even in situations where Peter appears to have secured materials for his own consumption, Lisa will have “first dibs.”

I write this without malice: it is one of the great joys of this chapter of my life that I have a partner who is as curious as I am, a partner with a broad intellectual palette, and a willingness to dig into seeming tangents and make them our own.

One example of this came last month, when I brought home the book Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le Cunff, after reading this brief review by Rishikesh Sreehari in his 10+1 Things newsletter:

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been slowly reading and digesting this beautiful book called “Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World” by Anne-Laure Le Cunff. I’ve been following Anne via her newsletter for a while now and was excited when she released this book. It challenges the traditional linear approach to goals and instead proposes treating life as a series of small experiments guided by curiosity rather than rigid outcomes. What I love most is how she reframes uncertainty as an opportunity rather than something to fear, and shows how to use tiny experiments to discover what truly matters to you. 

Lisa glommed onto the book immediately, read it from cover to cover, and started mulling how to inject its lessons into our daily life.

One of the concepts that author Le Cunff focused on is that of the “pact,” something she described in a blog post:

Make a pact. Trying to force a specific outcome in chaotic times is like trying to herd butterflies. However, just like chaos theory has its attractors orienting a system in a particular direction, you can orient yourself by defining a pact with yourself.

Make a commitment to dedicate a certain amount of time or a certain number of repetitions towards a project you care about. Similar to a compass, a pact encourages you to show up and surf the chaos, letting a new self-organization emerge over time. It needs to be purposeful, actionable, contextual, and trackable. Examples of such pacts include:

• Writing for one hour every morning before everyone wakes up
• Publishing one newsletter every week about a topic you care about
• Studying for a JavaScript certification for two hours every Sunday

As you can see, there is no finish line; no success metrics except for whether you show up or not. Each pact is simply a little experiment, a chance to learn about the world and about yourself. Focusing on your output rather than the outcome will rekindle your sense of agency without falling prey to the illusion of control.

Lisa came to me a few weeks ago and proposed that she assign me a pact. I can’t recall whether I had to pre-agree to the pact without knowing what it concerned, or whether I got to hear about it first.

The pact was simple: agree to drink 1½ litres of water every day.

I’m notorious, at least inside the confines of our relationship, for not keeping hydrated. For whatever reasons—false bravado, exceptionalism, laziness—I’ve never been a water bottle carrier (and may have, in my private moments, looked askance at those who were).

I certainly was nowhere near drinking 1½ litres of water every day.

I said yes.

I just took a swig of water from my water bottle. “Pact drinking,” I call it.

Between the water I engulfed during our morning workout, the water I had at lunch out, and the water I’ve had from the bottle, I’m probably near the one litre mark already, and the day isn’t half over yet.

The utility of the pact isn’t statistical, though (output, rather than outcome): it’s been a nudge toward building a habit, and that nudge has become linked to being thirsty, and feeling the positive effects of drinking nearby water (and learning to withstand the more-frequent-peeing needs).

Meanwhile, as Lisa writes in more detail in her own blog post about pacts, Lisa agreed to take on a pact assigned by me, blind, as a counterpoint. 

The one I assigned her—to write, vulnerably, on her blog every day for two weeks—was several orders of magnitude more involved than “drink some more water,” but she rose to the challenge, and I’ve been delighted to read what she’s been writing:

• Rings of Fire (27 June 2025)
• I’ve Changed for the Better (29 June 2025)
• The Pesticide Showcase (23 June 2025)
• Funkitude (24 June 2025)
• A Bias Toward Action! (22 June 2025)
• I Was Angry (20 June 2025)
• Yoga to Guide My Way On (18 June 2025)
• Recipe for Frustration (20 June 2025)
• Hedging Against Death (17 June 2025)
• Resisting Writing (16 June 2025)

I am, it should go without saying, a huge proponent of the practice of writing introspectively in public, and in reading what others have written in the same spirit (there are 94 RSS feeds in my RSS reader; words from these authors are the bulk of what I read online every day). 

To have a partner who’s a talented writer, whose words challenge me, delight me, and sometimes confront me, how great is that!

Lisa finished the pact yesterday with these words:

And so, I have completed this particular pact. I’m grateful to Peter for buying the book and saying yes to a pact of his own. It feels like a big success, as I feel more capable and less resistant. I intend to continue writing, but what to do from here? Just write blog posts everyday for the rest of my life? Hardly. Clearly I’ll need a new tiny experiment so I can pact it up!

Pact it up, my darling, pact it up.

Some helpful advice from the postmistress at the Charlottetown Post Office this morning. If you have standard stamps, which right now are $1.44 singly or $1.24 in books, these can be used like this:

• Mailing a standard letter in Canada takes one.
• Mailing a standard letter to the USA takes two.
• Mailing a standard letter internationally takes three.

Using this mnemonic means you’ll overpay for the letter to the USA (by 73 cents), but having a way to remember the postage without thinking about it is worth that to me.

Ten years ago I installed an Ikea Digniet wire in our dining room to provide a place to “hang my collection of ephemera.” When we got the dining room painted a few years ago, it got taken down, the wall repaired, and the ephemera went back into the archive.

But I saved the wire, and today Lisa and I hung it back up, this time in our front hallway:

From left to right, the pieces we’ve hung to start:

• A whimsical and very detailed drawing by Halifax artist Bruce Roosen.
• A bright, colourful monotype from Lisa’s recent experimenting in the print shop.
• A print I found in my archives from the late artist Sandy Hunter, a friend from my Peterborough days.
• An experiment in printing with wooden type that I printed in Serrazzano last spring.
• A colourful alphabet-on-black that surely must have come from Jackson Creek Press.

Meanwhile, around the corner at the bottom of the stairs, Lisa hung a framed version of my Furiously Curious print, using an inexpensive red frame from Ikea that complements it well:

And, while we were on an art-roll, Lisa suggested we retrieve a large painting from storage and use it to fill up a large empty space on our kitchen wall:

Behind all three of these hangings were slight eruptions of internal discomfort that I needed to quell.

I don’t like drilling holes into walls (it seems so permanent).

I don’t like that the fridge door can slam into the kitchen artwork.

That the front door opening can rustle the art-on-a-wire makes me nervous.

But what trumps those discomforts are the inarguable facts that they improve our living space significantly, and they allow us a place to see our own work, and those of our friends and familiars, out in the open.

(Lisa wrote a post—a much better one—about the same thing!)