If you’re still looking for a gift for some of your reading friends, please consider a contribution to Canada’s landscapes and literature: a charitable donation in your friends’ names to Project Bookmark Canada. We’ll send them acknowledgements and thanks, and together you’ll contribute to the network of sites and stories that we’re building across Canada. A gift to a friend can become a gift to all Canadian readers, for years to come.

We accept donations online via Canada Helps or by cheque, by mail.

Warm holiday wishes from all the Project Bookmark Canada team — our authors, board members and volunteers. We’ll be back in January with news on our Bookmark priorities for 2012.

Project Bookmark Canada President Ben McNally and Executive Director Miranda Hill.

First, there was the AGM for members of Project Bookmark Canada. We had big changes on our board as two of our founding board members, Catherine Graham and Alexa Dodge, retired from their positions after years of enthusiastic promotion and encouragement. And we welcomed two new executive members to the board: Michelle Brownrigg as Vice President and Kevin Noel as Treasurer.

Then there was champagne and cake, pictures from the 10 unveilings and we sold tee shirts and memberships to people who wanted to advertise their association with our organization and help us grow.

Our Project Bookmark Canada volunteers Meredith McLean, Eve Freedman and Beatrice Freedman in our stylish Bookmark shirts.

We toasted those first 10 Bookmarks, from Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion that we Bookmarked at Toronto’s Bloor Street Viaduct in April 2009 to Sheree-Lee Olson’s Sailor Girl that we Bookmarked this fall in Port Colborne at Lock 8 of the Welland Canal.

We also looked ahead to Bookmarks eleven to 20. Our top priority in the months to come will be to establish Project Bookmark Canada in provinces and territories outside Ontario. We are a national charitable organization building a national network, and we hope to soon have Bookmarks in Newfoundland, Manitoba and British Columbia. We will also be encouraging the growth and maintenance of our Ontario network. One way we’ll do that is by supporting individuals in Oakville and Waterloo who are championing Bookmark installations in those communities.

Before we even had our first Bookmark in the ground, we were inspired by this line from Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion: “Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting.” Years ago, we imagined a national network of stories and poems that would let us read our way across the country. Bookmark by Bookmark, it’s coming to be.

Photo by Meredith McLean. Cake by Sandy Hawkins

The nice people at The Afterword and at The Writers’ Trust of Canada asked me to send them a few columns to run this week, in the days leading up to the presentation of the Journey Prize (which I’m lucky enough to be nominated for this year, for my story “Petitions to Saint Chronic”). You can read my thoughts on various things writerly in the previous columns and in tomorrow’s column. Today, I’m writing about something readerly: How Project Bookmark Canada came to be. Of course, I’m saying that its secret subtitle should be: “How I Got Myself Into This.”

I hope you’ll enjoy reading about the beginnings of Bookmark — this big idea that just keeps growing!

And how lucky we are that they do.

For the last couple of months, Project Bookmark Canada and Ontario: Read It Here have had the assistance of two graduates of the Creative Book Publishing Program at Humber College. Kate Burgess and Liz Hilborn have been researching and promoting Ontario literary sites, including our newest Bookmarks in Port Colborne, Hamilton, Midland and Mississauga. Their contributions and their enthusiasm have been stellar. All this fall, you’ll be able to find their work at openbookontario.com in the form of interviews, articles, photos and videos.

At last week’s Bookmark unveiling in Port Colborne, Ontario: Read It Here intern Kate and I were very happy to meet Kathleen Icely, who is studying publishing at Ryerson University and who is working as an intern for The Porcupine’s Quill. Kathleen was a big part of the organization leading up to the unveiling. She sent out promotional copies of Sailor Girl by Sheree-Lee Olson, made sure we at Bookmark had all we needed and she enticed reporters to cover the installation. Thanks to Kathleen, we had really good media coverage, in print and on television.

The Porcupine’s Quill publisher Tim Inkster and I took our two interns out to lunch with the author and the host community following the event. Interns work hard and don’t get a lot of perks, so it’s nice if we can spring for a plate of pasta now and then!

Interns Kate Burgess (left) and Kathleen Icely (right), celebrate the unveiling of Bookmark 10: SAILOR GIRL in Port Colborne with author, Sheree-Lee Olson.

And though interns are with us to learn a lot and to help us out, it’s great if they can have some fun along the way.Judging from the looks of them, I would say they were enjoying themselves. But don’t take my word for it, you can read Kathleen’s own account on the Porcupette blog.

And now Project Bookmark Canada is happy to introduce a new addition to our team.

Project Bookmark Canada intern, Meredith McLean

Meredith McLean will be interning with our organization for the next several months. Meredith is a recent graduate of McGill University. I met Meredith this summer and told her a bit about Project Bookmark Canada. Luckily for us, she was intrigued and has agreed to bring her organizational, event management, research and reading skills to us, while she gets a closer look at the publishing industry as a whole. You’ll be hearing more from Meredith directly, when she begins posting to the blog in a week or two. Welcome, Meredith.

And thanks to all you interns, working for us and out there in other parts of the publishing world. We’re hoping you’ll stick around—and give us authors to read for years to come.

Author Sheree-Lee Olson and Port Colborne Mayor Vance Badawey unveil Bookmark 10: SAILOR GIRL at Lock 8.

Project Bookmark Canada reached a milestone today with the unveiling of our tenth Bookmark. Bookmark 10: Sailor Girlby Sheree-Lee Olson (published by The Porcupine’s Quill) is installed in Port Colborne at Lock 8 where, in Olson’s novel, Kate — a young ship’s porter — steps off a ship to make a phone call to a friend.

Project Bookmark Canada launched to the public in April 2009 with Bookmark 1: In the Skin of a Lionby Michael Ondaatje at the Bloor Street Viaduct in Toronto.

Michael Ondaatje and Toronto Mayor David Miller at the unveiling for Bookmark 1: IN THE SKIN OF A LION, in Toronto at the Bloor Street Viaduct

It was an auspicious beginning, with lots of good will, super city support and great media. But still, it was just one Bookmark! Two and half years — and 9 Bookmarks — later, it feels like we’ve come a long way.

Helping us get here have been our members, individual donors and our partners — at cities and with other organizations. For the past two years, our Ontario: Read It Here partnership with Open Book: Ontario and the Creative Book Publishing Program at Humber College, has allowed us to create Bookmarks in eight of our 10 locations. We are very grateful to the Ontario Media Development Corporation for funding this initiative, allowing Project Bookmark Canada to move to a whole new level and bringing Ontario-based literature to new audiences — on an ongoing basis.

But, despite the double digits, we feel we’re really just getting started. Project Bookmark Canada is working to realize our vision of a national network of site-specific literature, allowing residents and visitors to read their way right across the country. We look forward to creating this lasting legacy (for the country, its writers and its readers) and to the relationships — new and existing — that we’ll build along the way.

That’s how John Terpstra’s “Giants,” now our 9th Bookmark, begins. It’s a wise and wonderful poem that has giants sitting atop the Niagara Escarpment and throwing stones toward the sand strip below, 3 miles away. In a few simple words it manages to elucidate a place that is beautiful and magical and all too often taken for granted.

But at today’s unveiling in Hamilton’s Sam Lawrence Park, the appreciation for the place, the poem and the poet were on full display. Coming out to celebrate with John Terpstra were Mayor Bob Bratina (who spoke passionately about what Hamilton was, is and can be) Councillor Scott Duvall, Beth Goodger and Philip Homerski and others from the City; a great contingent from the Hamilton Public Library; our local book store Bryan Prince Bookseller; and readers, writers and overall Hamilton boosters. It was a special launch for our organization too, as Hamilton is the city that Project Bookmark Canada calls home.

John Terpstra told us that Georgia O’Keefe said that God told her the mountains were hers, if she painted them and so he felt he should be able to say the same about the escarpment. However, John said, he was willing to share it with anyone else who loved it as he did.

Thanks for sharing, John — through your writing and your Bookmark.

We love it here. Absolutely.

It was a sunny day and Sylvia has a great crowd of Midland residents, friends, members of two writing groups, and family applauded her reading and celebrated the Bookmark. Immediately following the unveiling, Deputy Mayor Stephan Kramp, CEO of the Midland Public Library Bill Molesworth, and Director of Parks and Recreation Bryan Peter brainstormed with Sylvia Maultash Warsh about community reading initiatives that might be tied in to the Bookmark.

Right away, this makes me feel like Bookmark 8 is a success. Bookmark is born of a love of reading and community, and if we can inspire connections between people who write and make books and the people who read them, then we’ve done what we’ve set out to do.

Valleys Senior Public School Principal Diana Fowlie and poet Jeff Latosik with Bookmark 7: "Song for the Field Behind Mississauga Valley Public School"

I loved it. I love that you wouldn’t normally look at this well-kept stretch of grass and say, “this is a spot to inspire poetry.” I love that Jeff told us that this was the beginning and end of his journey from and to school for many years and that this place stayed with him. I love that Jeff said, as a beginning poet, he wondered if Mississauga was a place that could be written about, until he realized one night, sitting with a bunch of poet friends in Toronto, that all of them at the table had grown up in Mississauga. I love that the collection that featured this poem went on to win the Trillium Book Award for poetry. I love that now, a kid passing by this spot will think “Yes, poetry lives here,” and might be inspired to ask himself or herself: “What’s my story? How will I tell it?”

And I love that Diana Fowlie, the current principal of Valleys Senior Public School was right there, eagerly taping the event and asking if Jeff could come talk to the students.

Yes, Jeff said, of course. I love that most of all.

It’s been a great few days while we played courier, taking the Bookmarks to each locale and showing them for the first time to our community hosts. It’s wonderful to walk the sites with our supporters from each city and to imagine these stories being set into the soil here. It’s also great to see people’s faces light up when they see each Bookmark for the first time.

So now Kate and I will get back in the car and head for head office in Hamilton where we have a few more days of media outreach and planning to do before the launches begin — on Friday in Mississauga with Jeff Latosik’s “Song for the Field Behind Mississauga Valley Public School.”

Cross your fingers for sun and I hope to see you there!

The Project Bookmark Canada office is my home office, which has its advantages, but also its disadvantages. For example, it’s not so great when the business meeting you are conducting at your dining room table is interrupted by delivery of new dishwasher (to replace the one that broke over a year ago), but it’s wonderful to receive all four Bookmark plaques and posts for this fall’s installations and to know that they are safe inside your house.

Last year, we had some nailbiting moments as Bookmarks that were en route to the works offices in each of our host communities were held up at the border for days and days at a time, or making their way to strange in-between depots where the shipping companies would change trucks, as the dates for unveilings drew ever nearer. On one, too memorable, occasion the Bookmark arrived just as the town hall in Owen Sound was closing — the night before the unveiling ceremony!

So this time, I opted to use my home office as a home warehouse and had the Bookmarks shipped directly here. Yesterday (after the dishwasher delivery) all four arrived at my door. In the next few days I’ll be ferrying them to our host communities — most likely in the family van. Glamorous? No. Convenient? Somewhat. Reassuring? Absolutely.

It’s September 14 and we know where our Bookmarks are: Toronto, Owen Sound, Kingston, Ottawa — and my house.