Few people have been as selflessly helpful to me in recent years as Gerry Hopkirk has.

I first met Gerry when he facilitated a planning session for the L.M. Montgomery Land Trust. He took us through an exercise that, in less-skilled hands, would have been pointless dotmocracy, but that, with Gerry’s care and attention, became a seminal moment along the organization’s path.

More recently Gerry has facilitated meetings and workshops for the PEI Home and School Federation, and the result has universally been deeper engagement, better insights, and greater, more inclusive participation.

Gerry knows how to bring people together, how to set effective scenes, how to use process tropes effectively.

So if having Gerry on board makes any meeting better, what do we do about the fact that there’s only one Gerry?

We make more Gerry!

I’m happy to report that the PEI Home and School Federation has launched the Dr. Helen MacDonald Collaboration and Facilitation Scholarship, a project to pay the full tuition for a member of the home and school community on Prince Edward Island to obtain a Collaborative Leadership and Facilitation Certificate from the University of Prince Edward Island this fall. The course is facilitated by Gerry himself, along with Paula Gallant. The recipient of the scholarship must agree to “pay it forward” by offering 20 hours of leadership and facilitation services to the PEI Home and School Federation and local home & school associations over the 2016-2017 school year.

Dr. Helen MacDonald was the founding President of the PEI Home and School Federation, and I’m so glad we have this opportunity to honour her, an idea that started back at the beginning of the summer when I met her son David at the Charlottetown Farmer’s Market.

Please spread the word about this scholarship: any member of a home & school association in an Island school is welcome to apply, which means any parent, guardian, teacher, administrator or staff person. Send them to http://peihsf.ca/scholarship for details.

I am frequently infuriated by the lack of attention paid by event organizers to creating events that are inclusive to all. While I recognize that event-making is complicated and that event staff are often strapped for time, energy and resources, it’s seems like a tragic waste to place so much effort into logistics without paying careful attention to ensuring as wide and diverse an audience as possible.

In this spirit, I present Pete’s Design Patterns for Welcoming Events, a short and incomplete checklist that I’d like events to go through, during their planning and execution, to work against this tendency.

1. Reach Non-English Speakers. Not everyone speaks or reads English. And even more people don’t regularly consume the English-only media that you do. I ran into friends on Saturday, for example, who are longtime Charlottetown residents but who’d never heard of Art in the Open because they don’t read or listen to the English-language media.
2. Clearly Publish your Age Restrictions. We once drove all the way to Summerside for a Lennie Gallant concert at the Silver Fox Curling Club only to find that we couldn’t attend because it was restricted to people 19 years old and over (even though they’d happily sold us a child’s ticket). If for some reason you cannot avoid age restrictions, please be up front and clear about them.
3. Clearly Publish your Venue Accessibility. Ideally all events should be accessible to everyone, but if they are not, the least you can do is to clearly publish information about what’s accessible and what’s not. Include information about parking, stairs or other barriers, seating, audio system, and washrooms. The federal government has a useful accessible meeting-planners guide that’s just as useful for event planners. You should also consider joining the Access 2 program that provides free admission for an attendant for those who would benefit from it.
4. Publish your Schedule as Open Data. If there was ever a pool of information that cries out for uniformity, it’s information about events, especially multi-day, multi-venue events. And yet schedule data is often published at the last minute, in non-standard formats and, all-too-frequently, is published as a collection of graphic images that cannot even be read by screen readers. There are lots of free online tools that allow you to publish schedule data in a form that others can integrate into their digital lifestyles (Google Calendar is but one). Here’s an example. Here’s another.
5. Be welcoming. This is the least concrete of my patterns, but it’s arguably the most important. It’s likely that, no matter the nature of your event, lots of people carry around biases that would prevent them from attending or, if they do attend, from feeling comfortable. I’ve never been to a burlesque show, for example, because I’m afraid I’d be freaked out by, well, whatever I think goes on at burlesque shows. But I probably should go to a burlesque show, and all it might take to get me in the door would be a sentence or two in the marketing making it clear that everyone’s welcome, and someone at the door to say hello. My friend Luisa organizes a whole conference on this every year, but the basics are simple: be human, confront your assumptions, be absurdly open and welcoming.

Do those five things and you’ll open your events up to a much wider audience. You’ll be happier. I’ll be happier. And the people who wouldn’t have seen what you’re up to otherwise will be happier.

(Feel free to add to this list in the comments).

Two photos I took last night of Fleet, by artist Alexis Bulman, mounted in the waters of Charlottetown Harbour off Beaconsfield last night as part of Art in the Open. My camera, of its own volition, took two photos in rapid succession with different settings, and I animated them together (the lights in the floating tents don’t actually pulse like this, at least not in a way that the human eye can see). I enjoy the notion that the tents might have come alive without us noticing.

As summer fades out of focus, here are three new things to take you into autumn:

1. Cucumber-Mint Soda from Upstreet Craft Brewing. Sometimes you want to go up the street and play Apples to Apples, but you don’t want a drink drink. Or perhaps you simply don’t drink beer at all. It seems odd that cucumber and mint would combine to be your salvation, but it works. If you’re not so brave, there’s also a sour cherry-based soda.
2. Purity Milk at Lawtons in the Polyclinic. We of the Purity-preferring clan have long been challenged, especially on the weekend, with finding a handy source for milk from Purity Dairy. Catherine turned me on to the fact that Lawtons sells Purity products; it’s at 8:00 a.m. weekdays, 9:00 a.m. Saturday and 11:00 a.m. Sunday. Maybe not a new thing, technically, but news for me.
3. The Humble Barber, above COWS at the corner of Queen and Grafton, and, specifically, Zack Squires, cut my hair last Saturday. I’m a longtime Ray’s customer, so this was a departure for me, but [[Oliver]] spoke so highly of Zack’s talents that I had no choice by to try. I was not disappointed: Zack is an accomplished barber and a genuinely curious conversationalist. I will be back.

You may recall that a year ago, Nadja, the eldest daughter of my dear old friends Yvonne and Bob, landed on Prince Edward Island with friends, a leg on their post-graduation east coast tour.

Fast-forward a year, and Nadja is now thousands of miles away, rough camping in a Slovakian castle with her partner Hannes.

Next week they’re headed for Berlin and, challenged for a place to stay, asked me if I knew of someone they could crash with.

My friend Morgan gamely and generously volunteered.

Which is how I found myself today chatting with Morgan in Berlin via Twitter in one window and Nadja in Slovakia in another, coordinating details of said arrangement.

I haven’t been this connection-proud since I arranged for Nadja’s cousin Cal to visit SoundCloud 4 years ago.

You are a generous city, Berlin.

Here’s a photographic journey through the process I took to set, print and bind a book of klischees. Making books, it turns out, is well within the realm of the possible for everyday people: all you need is paper, glue and patience.

Printing

I started by printing the signatures for the book. On standard letter-sized card stock I printed four klischees on each side. The setup in the chase looked like this:

And a prototype of the finished signatures looked like this:

The printing took several weeks, off an on when I had time. I printed in batches of 2 or 3 pages a session, and ended up with seven pieces of 8-1/2 x 11 inch card stock printed double-sided. When I sliced these in half I had fourteen pieces of 4-1/4 x 11 inch card stock, ready for folding.

Scoring and Folding

I scored each of the 4-1/4 x 11 inch pieces:

Then folded each on in half along the score:

I then used a bone folder – an invaluable tool that only appears to have any utility once you actually use it for something – to enhanced the folding a little:

I ended up with a stack of folded signatures:

Which I then compacted with the bone folder (this turns out to be a key step: it’s what takes “ragtag collection of folded pieces of paper” and turns them into something book-like):

Next, I pulled two pieces of Japanese paper out of my paper closet and cut them to size (4-1/4 by 5-1/2 inches) to go at the start and end of the book:

The finished product, before gluing, looked like this:

Gluing

With the book ready for glue, I clamped everything together with a binder clip; this is so helpful in keeping everything in alignment, and this kind of binder clip is much easier to manage than the more common “black with silver parts that fold back” kind, especially when it comes to removing it:

I slipped the clamped signatures into a book press (a piece of equipment helpfully left in my office by the previous occupants), and then clamp the whole thing tight in the press, while gingerly removing the binder clip:

I then used a cheap paintbrush to spread a thin layer of regular old white glue (I used Aleene’s Original Tacky Glue, but I imagine any brand would do) along the edge of the book:

The brush is very useful for creating a really smooth layer of glue. I repeated this process again once the first layer of glue dried (this may not be technically required, but it afforded me some gluing-piece-of-mind):

Preparing the Cover

While waiting for the glue to dry, I took a piece of letter-sized purple card stock and trimmed it down to 5-1/2 by 11 inches, and then scored it 4-1/4 inches in:

I then added a second score, using the glued book block as a guide to the location. The result was a front cover, spine, and back cover; I left the back cover to trim after the cover-gluing:

 

Gluing the Cover

I spread a layer of glue along the spine of the book block, put the cover in place, and then clamped the result into the book press (not so much for the pressure as to have it clamped in place so I could apply some pressure to the spine of the book with my thumb to remove glue bubbles):

Trimming the Cover

Once the spine had dried, I removed it from the book press and, using a straight edge as a guide (an excellent tip I picked up from a YouTube bookbinding video), I trimmed the back cover:

The Finished Book

The finished book looks remarkably book-like:

From The Guardian, 100 years ago today in 1916, reporting on the “Rogers Case,” wherein W.K. Rogers was charged with “illegally operating an automobile on July 9th.”

As soon as Comma Queen coming to Victoria Literary Festival appeared in my river of news, I knew this was a place I had to be.

The “Comma Queen” is Mary Norris, a query proofreader at The New Yorker. You may know her from hits like Whichcraft: That vs. Which, and Pronouns for Pets—“That” and “Who”.

If, like me, you pray at the church of The New Yorker, when someone from 1 World Trade Center comes to your remote outpost, you go.

The Victoria Literary Festival, it turns out, is a low-key late-summer event that the intelligentsia of the tiny seaside village stage mostly for themselves. Although, as organizer Linda Gilbert said in a CBC Mainstreet interview, “we’ll let other people come… it’s for anyone who happens to be around.” A Victoria kind of thing to say.

Mary Norris was part of a triple bill that started with tea expert Linda Gaylard, ruminating on tea and grammar, and continued with a performance piece by choreographer Julia Sauvé. Each act was punctuated by an intermission, with cocktail, sandwiches and chocolate.

All of this shoehorned into Island Chocolates’ space on Main Street.

It was, in other words, about the best possible event you can imagine, in about the best possible location you can imagine.

The crowd was an enthusiastic bunch of high society types and earthy locals; a pleasant bunch to be among.

Norris held court, complete with the comma crown and the comma shaker. She’s a compelling speaker, a skilled explainer, and was willing to entertain my fanboyish questions about the magazine.

How did tiny Victoria manage to attract someone of such import, someone whose upcoming gigs include the Italian Consulate in Dublin and Shakespeare & Co. in Paris? According to Linda Gilbert, and confirmed by Norris herself, they simply asked. And she said yes.

As the night drew to a close, I bought, and had signed, a copy of Norris’s book Between You & Me, grabbed a chocolate R for the road, and headed out into the dark streets of Victoria to find my car.

Saturday morning at the Charlottetown Farmer’s Market.

Walking from picking up the mail up the street, past Zion church, across the street to Church Street and by St. Paul’s, where a lone piper stood under a tree, sheltered from the rain. Across Queen’s Square in front of the Coles Building and along Richmond Street to work.