The news that my longtime friend, neighbour, and mentor Catherine Hennessey died this week at age 92, leaves me at a loss for words. 

I am flooded by scores of memories—hauling her pig to the butcher in the back of her pickup truck (the one with the plywood dashboard), her driving the wrong way down a one-way street in Boston, being handed pears and chocolate in a bag to take home for dessert on the day Olivia was born, endless macaroni and cheese.

Too many to neatly summarize into a picture of a friendship and a life.

So I will, for now at least, just post this sketch I drew, in 2018, of Catherine standing in front of her apartment door at Harbourside.

Buy a Set

Last Monday morning I went over the print shop with some creative energy. I’d been mulling around an idea for an alphabet book, one I might return to. But an alphabet book didn’t seem, well, meaty. Or vulnerable.

There have been a lot of heightened emotions in our circles—in me—this winter, and anger pops up more often than I’d like. It’s only (embarrassingly) recently that I’ve even begun to admit that I feel anger at all. Emotion that feels like anger I’ve been quick to stomp on, to rationalize away, to pretend it doesn’t exist.

And so it came to me: what about a set of notebooks, The Books of Anger, that would let me spend some time, some intimate hands-on time, with the flavours of anger. It’s hard not to introspect about, say, “irritation” while pulling big heavy metal type—I R R I T A T I O N—out of the type drawer, locking it into place, and printing it on card stock with bright orange ink.

“Oh, I’m feeling resentful about…”

“I’m exasperated that we keep looping back again to this…”

I could connect with every one. Except fury. Fury eludes me so far. I know it’s in there, though.

So, The Books of Anger.

A set of five notebooks: Resentment, Irritation, Exasperation, Frustration, Fury.

The look and feel of them sprang into my mind in one fell swoop. Setting type, printing, cutting, scoring, punching holes, binding, trimming, and rounding the corners took another week and a bit.

I printed 12 sets, and they’re available for sale on our Queen Square Press shop, on a kind of “pay what you can” scale of $25, $50, or $75, with 4 sets available at each price (the 12 sets are identical; all that’s different is the price you pay). If you’re looking for help calibrating the price you pay, each set required about 2 hours of my labour from start to finish.

I printed the covers on the Golding Jobber No. 8 letterpress. I set the titles in 120 point Akzidenz Grotesk, all-caps, and printed them using Victory Ink rubber-based Pantone Orange 165 on white 74 pound card stock.

The back cover is printed in black ink on the back of every book, in 11 point (who ever heard of 11 point type?) Futura Bold. This was tricky, because I don’t have any 11 point spaces, so I used 10 point and hoped for the best. 

The inside pages are 24 lb. coloured paper; each flavour of anger has its own colour:

• Resentment — Red
• Irritation — Blue
• Exasperation — Green
• Frustration — Yellow
• Fury — Orange

I choose the colours for each flavour based on my gut feeling. “What colour is irritation?” and so on.

I hand-bound the covers inside pages are together with colour-matched cord, using a link stitch, a technique I learned from Ido Agassi in this video. It’s a fiddlier stitch than a simple pamphlet stitch, but the result is more appealing along the bound edge.

Enjoy. Get angry.

Buy a Set

With nudges from Lisa and many other sources, I’m again realizing the importance of hydration to general health.

Today this led me to this Reddit thread that provides an Apple Shortcut that will let me log water consumption to Apple Health. I installed it. It works. It’s simple and, because it’s a Shortcut, I can remix it.

There are myriad dedicated apps for doing this that have more bells and whistles—reminders to drink, calculations of required daily intake, etc.—but every single one I’ve encountered is a bait-and-switch free-to-paid upsell. I just wanted to log my water intake, and the Shortcut does it well, and does it free.

One of the lovely things about Shortcuts is that if you’re all-in on the Apple ecosystem, installing them on one device makes them available on all devices. So I can now log water intake from my MacBook Air, from my iPhone, and from the HomePod in our kitchen.

I refreshed the gallery in our front hallway yesterday. Featured, from left to right:

• 024 by Halifax artist Bruce Roosen.
• Undersea by Charlottetown artist Monica Lacey.
• A “P is for Press” broadside from Shelburne Museum in Vermont, courtesy Valerie Bang-Jansen.
• An uncut alphabet book I printed in Berlin in 2011.
• The broadside life is an ocean love is the boat that I printed in 2022 to celebrate the marriage of Cian O’Morain and Mary MacGillivray. It’s a line from the Christie Moore song The Voyage.
• The broadside You Have an Obligation to Explain,  printed in my shop at The Guild in 2012.

See also Art Space and The one where I finally find a way to hang my collection of ephemera on the wall…

Via University of Winds, a link to Open Infrastructure Map, useful here on Prince Edward Island for seeing a map of Maritime Electric and Summerside’s electricity infrastructure.

Terry Godier on “phantom obligation” and RSS readers:

There’s a particular kind of guilt that visits me when I open my feed reader after a few days away. It’s not the guilt of having done something wrong, exactly. It’s more like the feeling of walking into a room where people have been waiting for you, except when you look around, the room is empty. There’s no one there. There never was.

Terry is the developer of Current Reader (for iOS, iPadOS and macOS), and his thorough, well-formed argument for how and why it’s designed as it is convinced me to spend $12.99 on it, sight-unseen.

(via Patrick Rhone)

I found my way to Ben Werdmuller through his profile on People and Blogs, and I found my way to his post Building trust in the open by following his RSS feed. 

In the post he discusses his presentation to the Protocols for Publishers meeting, which took place in London at Newspeak House.

Newspeak House is an independent residential college founded in 2015 to study, nurture and inspire emerging communities of practice across civil society and the public sector in the UK.

In the 2025-26 cohort at Newspeak House, I spotted Gamithra Marga, whose tagline is “raves, machines, and dishwashers.”

Gamithra has a rich presence on the web, which includes an evolving statement of mission, the current iteration of which starts:

I want to live in a world that shares, self-hosts, builds, and raves. I want to live in a world that protects humanity, expression, and feeling alive. I want to live in a world where connection is abundant, protocols are open, knowledge is shared, resources are beautifully managed, communication is kind, and structures are co-created. A world of empowered communities that gracefully govern themselves and their commons in harmony with all beings.

And guidelines—growth, honesty, compassion—which they have permanently tattooed on their body:

permanently engraving the Guidelines on skin helps with unconditional commitment to not hiding from truth, not living on autopilot, and unconditionally caring for self

It’s that last point, after following links through the forest of the web, truly resonated with me.

I have no tattoos, for myriad reasons, one of which is that I’ve always thought it to be more permanence than I would ever be able to muster. Whatever could I possibly ever think important enough to be forever.

Gamithra’s tattooed guidelines challenge me on that: growth, honesty, compassion are values that are intrinsic; they don’t come and go. Communicating, in a lasting, personal, that these are what’s held dear and core is a powerful thing.

It prompts me to think “what are my inviolable beliefs,” the ones that I would be willing to have tattooed on me.

Dr. Glendenning died this week.

On the spectrum of thoughts about how we educate our children (and ourselves), there was no one I was more aligned with.

And there was no person who had more lasting influence on education on Prince Edward Island than he.

My friend Dave wrote a loving remembrance.

Brilliant words from Robin Sloan in his latest newsletter:

Consider the printer!

There’s a reason they are the eternal bane of computer users. It’s because, in most systems, they are the bridge between the digital and the physical: the place where a stream of symbols collides with dust, moisture, friction, obstruction … welcome to the real world!

Engineers have been toiling for many decades to perfect the printer, and still, it jams. After all this time, the printer remains, notoriously and hilariously, the weak link.

But it’s not the printer’s fault that it sits across a step-change in complexity; visualize wild vortices, brutal turbulence. The digital, no matter how hard it tries — and it does try — cannot match the gnarl of the physical.

Brilliant in part because, yes, printers. Who among us has not done battle. It’s like the bits actively resist becoming atoms.

(I’ve found the same thing with 3D printers, laser cutters, Cricut machines).

In the same newsletter Sloan writes about magic circles (canonical magic circle video introduction), and includes what amounts to career advice that I would happily offer to anyone:

Think about your work and your interests. If they are fully inside the magic circle of “symbols, in, symbols out”, then your world is changing, and will soon change faster, and it’s probably time to get creative about what you might do differently, and how you might “season” your work with the physical.

“Season your work with the physical,” that’s what Sloan has been doing lately, and it’s at the heart of what I’ve been doing for as long as I can remember.

I received the sad news this morning that my friend Allan Rankin has died.

I was introduced to Allan many years ago: he and Roy Johnstone and I got together to see about having me make websites for them. Both had just released albums, and there was a sense in the air—a tentative, early, faint sense—that musicians should have websites. And so was hatched AllanRankin.com. In the process I became a fan of Allan’s music: rich, evocative, well-crafted songs about the Island he loved so dearly.

Over the years since, our paths crossed innumerable times, personally and professionally. Allan was one of my mentors in how to live a good life in my adopted province, and he bestowed a great compliment on me by calling me a “new growth Islander.”

Allan was witty, creative, contrarian, and wickedly smart. 

While he was a political candidate–he ran for the NDP against then-Premier Alex Campbell in 1974–Allan excelled at being just out of view. He was instrumental in nurturing the careers of many worthy public servants over his years in government. 

He was an incisive writer, both as a songwriter and in the column he wrote for several years for The Eastern Graphic.

By times a New Democrat and a Liberal, Allan ended as a fervant supporter of the Green Party, support that advanced the party’s cause greatly.

My favourite times spent with Allan, though, were at the movies. 

Both fans of action-adventure films, with partners who weren’t, Allan I would meet for late nite showings of the films of Tom Cruise at the Cineplex in Charlottetown, the hour and the circumstance giving an air of international mystery to the affair.

My favourite song of Allan’s is Raise the Dead of Wintertime, a song that only Allan could write, and a song that so-captures a slice of Prince Edward Island. From Allan’s notes about the song:

One perfectly still and beautiful winter’s morning at Christophers Cross, in western Prince Edward Island, Vincent Handrahan hitched up his little morgan horse and we took a ride over the back fields, surveying the supply of fire wood that had been cut and still needed hauling. That sleigh ride, and the hardworking and resourceful people of West Prince, inspired ‘Raise the Dead of Wintertime.’

I cannot help but have a tear come to my eye when I listen to him singing this line:

And when at night we’re by the stove
Our bellies full and our stories told
The winds of winter might blow cold
But none of us will feel it

Goodbye, old friend. I will miss you.