This is my fourth year as Artistic Director and Executive Director for the festival. I first volunteered for the festival in the late nineties, when I got stuck as a parking attendant for hours without water or any clear sense of what I was supposed to be doing.  Since then, I’ve coordinated Healing Arts and the Club Crawl, eventually taking on the positions I’m in now.

The festival is run by a small, dedicated, and hard-working group of volunteers, many of whom have been with the festival for years and work, month after month, year-round to bring together three great days in late August.  We’ve made a lot of changes to the festival in the past 4 years, changes I’m very proud of because they’ve made the festival infinitely better, and infinitely easier to run.  We’ve tightened up, planned carefully, and created a strong foundation for considered growth.  But change always angers people, especially when they see it as negatively impacting themselves.

Last year, when I proposed that we cut the Club Crawl, it was not the first time I’d argued that it was a waste of effort that reflected poorly on the festival as a whole.  Originally conceived as a fundraiser for the festival, the Club Crawl rarely worked as such, generally losing money despite our best efforts.  In my opinion, it was a clusterfuck; paying artists a pittance to play in venues unsuited for live music, running technicians ragged as they dealt with jury-rigged gear and practically no switch-over time.  Venue owners didn’t feel they were getting a good deal, either, and as a result, often dropped out or screwed us in some way at the last minute.  The final straw, for me, was when one of our funders praised the festival as a whole but suggested in strong terms that the Club Crawl didn’t live up to the standards they expected as a baseline for paid, professional artists.  I agreed, and either argued persuasively to the Board of Directors or just browbeat them (they may want to comment on which) into axing the Club Crawl for 2009.

I have to admit I was completely taken off guard by the anger from several local artists.  What I saw as a shitty gig or tokenism they (I guess) saw as inclusion. And I’m sorry they felt that way; it reflects poorly on local audiences and venues that a $50 gig with no real soundcheck is considered okay for a skilled artist who’s been playing for years.  I know it’s a lot harder to get into the festival now than it was in the past, because there are fewer slots.  But I think it’s important for any publicly-funded arts organization to treat artists with respect, and part of that respect is to create opportunities that operate at a professional standard – decent pay, decent playing conditions.  Another facet of that respect is to set the bar high and encourage the community to reach it.

My philosophy for booking has always pretty much been the same, from my very earliest days as a promoter, through my MoHo days, to now.  I book great professional artists who are good to work with, and I pay them as well as I can and ensure they work in decent conditions.  My resources are limited and I’m bound by the conditions of my funders, and this means that, if I’m going to follow my own ethical code, I book fewer artists, but better gigs, than we’ve done in the past.

In addition, we receive funding from the terrific Arts Presentation Canada program, run by the Federal government, whose purpose is to increase diversity at festivals, and who stipulate that their funding should be used to book artists from out-of-province as well as emerging and culturally diverse acts.  I see this as an opportunity to introduce Peterborough artists and audiences to the sounds and ideas that are happening across the country, but it also means that there are fewer slots for local artists than in the past.

I’m extremely lucky because I book a free festival, so I don’t have to worry about a draw – every year, 7000-9000 people come regardless of who’s playing.  Personally, I prefer to support emerging acts in any case, and I really don’t like the idea of blowing half or more of my artistic budget on the last two acts of the night.  But it also means that we miss out on those tasty admissions fees that can make up a third or more of a festival’s funding.  The idea of fencing off the festival area and charging admission has been bruited about, but none of the current Board are comfortable with the idea of changing 21 years of tradition in such a fundamental way – we like the festival free and accessible.  So we do our best with the funding we receive, and I think we do a pretty damned good job.

There are so many things I wish for the Peterborough Folk Festival - good god, how I’d love to expand and do three days in the park, to rebuild that concrete stage with a proper proscenium and offices and dry storage underneath,  and re-terrace the hill.  How I’d love for us to own our own sound gear, to build some permanent platforms in the park, and to do weekly concerts throughout the Summer and a Winter series.  I want to draw in the communities of new Canadians in Peterborough and become relevant to them, and I’d like to see more participatory workshops where our audience get to learn how to do things.  I want to see fewer and fewer cars in the parking area, and more and more people arrive on foot or via transit/canoe/bicycle. I want to see an increasingly diverse crowd of people enjoying the kind of music they can’t hear anywhere else in the City.

My dreams always outstrip my abilities, and our finances.  I am constantly disappointed by what I was not able to achieve in any given year.  But by consistently setting the bar higher for ourselves, we reach a little higher every year, and do better.  It’s hard work, but I think we can’t ask any less of ourselves than we ask of our community.  And I think that, if we don’t ask for high standards from our community, we tacitly encourage unprofessional-ism and sloppy work.

Join us, August 27 – 29, 2010, as we try to reach a little higher than we have before; there will be mistakes, absolutely, and things that don’t quite make the grade.  But there’s a spirit of sweetness, or openness, and a sense of community that you won’t find elsewhere.  Moments of beauty that you can share with friends and family, great music, delicious food, and fabulous crafts.  For all the heartache I’ve occasionally felt over the PFF, the end is always worth it.

This year I intend to step down at Executive Director of the Peterborough Folk Festival; if you’re interested in the job (it’s primarily a volunteer position, involving grant writing and administrative work, but comes with a small honourarium), you can get in touch with me and we’ll talk about it.

I think those first few years I must have been a bit weird; assigned a drug with a name that implied it would work (Effexor – now with even more effex!), I found I’d traded one kind of miserable for another, though it was a more bearable misery.  I wished for a switch to flip, a miracle, a fixer.  I wished (oh, I still do) that they could find my depression and cut it out where it lies. We tried different drugs, different doses, and eventually I found that what really helped was Omega 3-6-9 capsules and exercise, and everything improved dramatically after that.

But lingering at the back of my mind is the fear that I’ll slip, or that the Omega’s effects will wear off and I’ll be back where I started or worse.  I’ve read the literature; Clinical Depression is theorized to essentially scar your brain, making it easy to fall back into the chasm you’ve hauled yourself out of.  I don’t mind being sad sometimes, but that unvarying sameness of depression isn’t sadness.  It’s hard to describe, but it’s not the same as being sad.  I look back at it with a horror that motivates me now to ensure I never go back there.

So I turned to a section of the bookstore heretofore ignored; the self-help section.  Ugh, I know.  I’ve read books on clearing your clutter with Feng Shui and the science of happiness; I’ve done The Artist’s Way thrice (differently useful each time).  I’ve read acres of text on a variety of  subjects, from recovering from mental blocks to overcoming addictions.  Because, much as Depression is a medical condition, it’s also a habit, an addiction, a way of living.  The familiar, comforting awfulness of depression is a security blanket – a certainty – where the world of overall happiness and possibility is a terrifying no-man’s land.  It’s the Devil I know; it’s the lover I can’t quite get over.

Reading Russell Brand’s My Booky Wook, I see that the techniques employed to overcome drug and sex addictions are the same techniques, differently framed, that I find in The Artist’s Way, which makes perfect sense. I also see that once he cleared up his issues and began seriously working on them and his addictions, his focus was freed up to work on success, and he achieved that in a relatively short time. Not that he hadn’t been having successes before that; you generally don’t get handed tv shows. But he’d always kinda been a fringe fuckup until he got himself in hand.

Positive thinking comes off as hocus-pocus and silliness, as does a lot of this self-help stuff, I know. But I think it’s often in the wording, and in the way the basic concepts are described. And also in the scorn of people whose half-attempts lead inevitably to failure; you can’t discount the contentedly miserable, and how much they try to ensure that other miserable people stay cosily with them.

Breaking addictions and habits, overcoming fears and blocks, often has to do with figuring out (without all the noise and obligations and sense of unworthiness and whatever other garbage you’ve got screaming around in your brain) what it is you want, and making plans to move forward in that direction.  And then going there.  And that’s positive thinking in a nutshell.  It’s not magic, it’s not some massive Secret.  It’s just that if you intend to do something, you’re much more likely to do it than if you put off thinking about the future and never really take steps to do anything in particular.  I can wish to win the lottery all day, but if I don’t go buy a ticket, I certainly won’t win.

I’ve dug up the foundations and poked around a fair amount, and now I know what the structure of my life rests on, where I can build safely and what needs to be stripped back down and rebuilt from scratch. So onwards to the ongoing, serious, simple work.

I’ve been playing Wii a fair amount over the past month; the games are interesting and fun and fairly encouraging, and the language of the movement is a challenge without being impossible. But the main focus of the games almost across the board is balance and posture, which I find interesting. It was also one of the first things we learned at theatre school; one of the few useful things I came away with. For years, I’d destroyed shoes and screwed up my joints because I walked on the outside of my feet, and our Movement teacher corrected me, and I practiced the hell out of that. Everyday, walking to and from school, I’d be working to correct my posture, walk on the three balance points of my feet. I think that’s why people get an impression of confidence from me; I still walk with good posture and control. But it took months, and a hundred thousand tiny shifts every day, until walking that way became habit.

My mind is the same as my posture; I tend to mentally walk the wrong way, see things in the worst light, avoiding making plans if the future seems too scary or uncertain or full of possibilities to contemplate. When I allow my mind to unbalance itself like that, focus too much on fear, it becomes unstable, bowed over, and next thing you know I’m crowd-sourcing bad advice and making panicky decisions and accepting overwhelming volunteer commitments. I fall off the path I ought to be walking, meander and flail all over the goddamn place, end up with very little progress once I finally find my way again. For all my hard work, I’m never much closer to my ultimate goals. But that’s starting to change. I’ve become much better at catching myself lately, and correcting my mental posture. Catching those dark, negative thoughts and renegotiating them; remapping the future with every tiny shift in thinking.

But again, it takes a hundred thousand tiny shifts every day, and constant vigilance, and sometimes when I’m tired or something bad happens I relapse and have to start all over again. But even though it often feels like I’m landing back at the beginning, in reality, I’m creating muscle memory; I’m learning how to stay focused, balanced, happy. It gets easier every day, and every failure is steps closer to success than the last failure.

I doubt I’ll ever get to a point where I don’t have to make corrections. But that’s expected; I’m human, and perfection is unattainable. Success is in the attempt, not the conclusion.

In the Christian church, suicide is generally considered a sin, but I think that the act itself is not the thing that is the sin. The real sin is despair; loss of hope, the end of attempting to succeed. I’m sure a Christian would say, the lack of faith in god, which is despair, but as a semi-pretty-much-non-believer, I’m going to say it’s the lack of faith that things can change and that you have the power to change them.

If you look around right now, we are living in an age where change is happening at great speed. I won’t say unprecedented speed; no student of history can say that word without irony, and I’m not sure I believe that there’s been a time when change wasn’t a constant. But we are living in an age of change, and we are very aware of it, and it is unstable and a little terrifying, if you’re inclined to look on it that way. And sometimes I do, and wonder what’s the point in say, going back to school, if nothing I learn will be relevant by the time I get out?

But the shift I make, when I starting talking to myself like that, is to see this as an exhilarating opportunity. I have maybe a good 40 years left in my life to play a part in the massive and wild changes that are happening around the world; changes in technology, in society, a brave new world. The longer I wait to jump in, the less time I have. If I was 80 today, it would still be the right time. If I was 10, it would be the right time. The right time is whatever time it is.

Things will happen, good and bad. Planes will fall from the sky, romances will flare and die, joints will ache and the weather will turn. That stuff’s all going to happen whether I’m happy or sad, passionately involved or fearfully crouching on the sidelines or wearily turning away from it all. The only things I have control over are my thoughts and actions, and they are mine, and I have faith I can change them; I know I can. I’ve done it a hundred thousand times.

I have issues with the concept of charity; I wonder (especially with large, international charities) where the money goes, how much gets socked away into ‘administrative costs’, how much good is actually done, and whether or not charitable aid actually ends up creating dependents instead of assisting people and nations to stand on their own feet.  And having worked for various charities and non-profits, both in paid and volunteer positions, I have questions about how ethically some of them are run – how they treat their employees, how they set goals and measure results, how responsible and smart and efficient they are.  I see a lot of burnout, and a lot of brilliant people martyring themselves to no discernible positive effect in the community, a lot of waste.  Or wearing themselves thin until they’re no longer able to work in that field, with a huge net loss of intelligence, connections and human power.

But more troubling for me is this trend towards passive charity; the buying of something to demonstrate your beliefs, in substitution for actually acting on them.

Recently, Merlin Mann linked to a book called ‘Conspicuous Compassion,’ about the phenomenon of publicly displaying our charity (you can get a .pdf of the first chapter here; I recommend that you read it).  Though it goes to some places I disagree with, overall it was with relief that I saw this discomfort expressed by someone else.

I do agree that these public displays of charitable empathy exist in lieu of actual charitable acts.  People whom I see with white ribbons and pink standing mixers and red phones are rarely people I see taking any concrete actions around spousal abuse, cancer, or AIDS.  These are not the people you see volunteering at shelters or hospitals, though you may find them at parties and marathons.  And while I understand that these events, objects or products can in some ways raise awareness, open discussion and make an issue mainstream, when the next issue, product, or ribbon comes along, the spotlight moves with it.  I wonder how much of the real work gets done, when charities spend so much of their limited time and resources organizing gala events.

I see that some good may come of a few dollars, from a purchase you were going to make anyway, going towards research.  Or at least I see the argument.  But with many cause-branded products, the donation is not automatic; you have to register your purchase separately.  And the door is wide open for fraudulent schemes if you, as consumer, aren’t doing your homework on the companies and charities you’re supporting.  And hey, do you really need a new cellphone or standing mixer?  Your $200+ would be better donated directly to the charities doing the most research, the most active good.

But I’m going to tell you, as someone who runs a non-profit and sits on the Boards of charitable organizations, lots of local (and international) groups need your time as much as your money.  We need people to spend a couple of hours doing a fairly boring task.  We need a weekly commitment to make an hour’s worth of phone calls.  We’re asking you to help technicians load gear in and out of a venue.  We need you to drop in and stuff envelopes, or monitor a gallery, or sell tickets, or update our website.  We’re not asking for the kind of time your mothers put in to volunteer work; nobody has that anymore.  But a few hours out of your month or year make a big difference; a much bigger difference than your ribbon, your t-shirt, your standing mixer, your pink jewelry.  And it could make a discernible difference right there in your community.

Do you think AIDS is terrible?  Me too.  Do you think it’s wrong that some people abuse their spouses?  Me too.  Do you think it would be great if your community had a thriving, inclusive, arts community with lots of great resources?  Me too.

But honestly?  I don’t care what you think.  I care what you do.

So what are you doing?