The Al Purdy A-Frame Association just released its 2025 Annual Report.

It contains both a review of the organization’s work to nurture the country’s poets, and also sentences like “Geotechnical and hydrological studies revealed that the existing
crawlspace floor was below the water table.”

I recommend reading it while listening to The Al Purdy Songbook, a 2018 album featuring tracks from Bruce Cockburn, Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, and Gord Downie among others. It may be the most poetically Canadian thing ever.

You can contribute to the Al Purdy A-Frame Association on CanadaHelps.org.

A group of Europeans, flowing from the same bundle of Danish energy that begat Reboot all those years ago, gathered in Cophenhagen recently for Rebuild:

20 years ago, Europe had a thriving generation of social platforms and the entrepreneurs, designers, and programmers building them. A capability and an industry that have been lost.

Rebuild is a catalyst to support and serve the new generation of European social platforms. Gathering the people in Europe who can make it happen. The entrepreneurs, the pioneers, the investors, the digital leaders.

The gathering resulted in the drafting of a letter, which finishes with this call to action:

To the builders of the critical social platforms where we connect, forge friendships, share resources, knowledge and hope, you are building more than products. You are building for our culture. Our values. Our democracies. You are building for Europe, and our collective self-confidence. Change has never been more needed. But we know change is possible.

Now let’s build it.

Linda Liukas has more.

From University of Winds I learned about British Summer Time Walks, instigated by Blake Morris:

Replace your morning scroll with a morning stroll.

British Summer Time is a series of short sunrise walks in consideration of the time change. Over fourteen seasons, walkers from across Europe, Asia and the Americas have walked the dawn with me. You can join from anywhere in the world for one walk, all of them, or anywhere in between.

Its a simple process:

1. Go for a walk from fifteen minutes before sunrise until fifteen minutes after.

2. Share your sunrise through email or social media.  

This ticked a bunch of boxes for Lisa and me, so we committed (to ourselves, really). Today was day 7 of 22. Lisa’s heroically roused herself from her sickbed all but 2 mornings; somehow, against all odds, I’ve managed all 7.

Here’s the proof of life:

And here are the sunrise photos. Some days the sun was awfully elusive (the pouring rain on day 1 almost did us in).

There are still 15 British Summer Time Walks to go: join in!

Henry Jamison released Big Flower Light Go Boom yesterday. It’s a balm for what ails. From his Instagram:

Big Flower Light Go Boom, my fourth record, is out today. It’s been a long time coming and my life has changed quite a lot since I wrote it, but I stand behind it more than ever somehow. I said “big flower light go boom” when I saw fireworks for the first time and it’s that same response to the beauty and terror of the world that makes me keep writing songs. Other than that, it isn’t “about” anything. It isn’t a “project” and there’s no overarching concept. It’s just friendship and solitude all mixed together. It’s just…seeking.

I found a collection of school photos in an album at my mother’s house. We’ll come back to these later. 

One evening, a decade ago, I was looking down at my phone that was resting on a table below me. Suddenly I got dizzy. Very dizzy: the kind of dizzy where I had to hold onto the table to keep myself from falling over. 

The worst of it passed in a few minutes, but, give or take, I’ve had a persistent vague feeling of, well, something not being quite right ever since. Not dizziness, really. Not vertigo. But something just being off. Visual dissonance.

In the intervening ten years, I’ve sought help for understanding what’s going on. I talked to my family doctor, my optometrist, a physiotherapist specializing in vertigo, a physiotherapist specializing in concussions. 

What gradually emerged is that my eyes are misaligned. Rather than working smoothly together in a ballet of synchronized binocular vision, one eye is going off half-cocked some of the time, and everything that I have been feeling is a result, directly or indireclty, of that fact.

I found some relief from my symptoms by having my eyeglasses prescription adjusted, adding a prism, and using dedicated “computer glasses.” Then, last year, I had a pair of Neurolens eyeglasses prescribed, with a graduated prism, and they’ve made a noticeable improvement.

Despite these gains, which have helped enough to make daily life reasonable, I’ve remained curious about the underlying physiology behind my problem. Had a suffered a concussion that I somehow missed? Is it inherited? Something else? Is there anything else that can be done?

Last year, I stumbled, almost accidentially, upon the practice of orthoptics:

Orthoptists are the experts in diagnosing and treating defects in eye movements and problems with how the eyes work together, called binocular vision. 

I was excited to learn that there is an entire profession dedicated to the exact issue I was living with, and then even more excited to find out that Prince Edward Island has its very own publically funded orthoptics clinic.

Orthoptists investigate, diagnose, and treat abnormalities in eye alignment, eye movement, and binocular vision. A variety of treatments may help patients, including glasses, prisms, eye patching, eye exercises, etc.

I asked my optometrist to refer me to the clinic, in March of 2025. 

I had my appointment last week, a year later.

At that appointment, the provincial orthoptist, Mariah Hogan, spent about an hour with me, going through a series of tests and observations that bore something in common with an everyrday regular eye exam, of the sort of had dozens of times, but then extending into new territory focused on alignment, double vision, and the muscles of my eyes.

What emerged she described, in her report, as “likely congenital longstanding right cranial nerve 4 palsy.” More fully:

On full measures, his RHT increases on opposite (left) gaze and ipsilateral (right) tilt, in keeping w ith a Right CN4 palsy. As such, I also notice a marked right superior oblique underaction of -2.5, w ith corresponding right inferior oblique overaction of +3.

I have a Superior Oblique Palsy, also known as a Congenital Fourth Nerve Palsy:

Congenital fourth nerve palsy is a condition present at birth characterized by a vertical misalignment of the eyes due to a weakness or paralysis of the superior oblique muscle.

One amazing aspect of this is that I don’t experience double vision, something that affects many people with this issue. The orthoptist concluded that this was something I’ve likely lived with all my life, and that my brain has learned, essentially, how to turn off inputs from one eye when I’m looking at at distance—“suppression ability” is what she wrote. 

She went as far as to stimulate double vision in me through a series of lenses and gazes. 

Ack! 

Trust me, you don’t want double visiion. 

I don’t want double vision.

Fortunately, I don’t have it.

Because my brain is so good a supressing double vision “at the CPU level,” I’ve never known that it was doing this. And for it to have become so good means, she told me, that it was likely something my brain learned before I was 7 years old.

That I’ve only noticed residual side-effects of this palsy in my 50s isn’t unusual, and, indeed, looking at my father’s medical history, I found this:

Occasional problems with double vision started about 1995 but were not successfully resolved till 1997 when they were corrected with prisms in the glasses. Later detailed examination showed an imbalance in eye muscles which appeared to be stable. 

My father was 60 years old in 1997. 

I turn 60 next month. 

So, yes, congenital and likely inherited.

Now, pop back up and look at that collection of school photos. One of the symptoms of a superioe oblique palsy is a “characteristic head tilt” that “is usually away from the affected side to reduce eye strain and prevent double vision.” 

It’s there. In almost every photo:

I’ve never noticed this head tilt, and it’s never been pointed out to me, but I know it well, because I’ve lived with persistent neck strain that I imagine goes hand in hand with it.

After living with this so far in life, I’ll live with this for the rest of my life (there are surgical interventions possible, but not universally recommended; maybe an option for the future).

Beyond the relief I feel at having what I’ve been living with ascribed to an actual physiological condition (as opposed to say, being cursed), I’ve found the metaphor of my brain swooping in to protect me from double vision, without me even knowing this was happening, as a very helpful metaphor in my work with a therapist. 

Our brains are amazing. And plastic. And tricky.

CCGS Louis S. St-Laurent set against the Charlottetown waterfront, on a mid-March day with the combination of ice still in the harbour and an outside temperature of 8ºC creating a foggy skyline.

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…