My friends at Balisage announced that this year’s Balisage conference will be the last ever. They’ll call it a day and declare victory, and I’m sad.

Balisage has been part of my life for a long time now. I’ve presented at every Balisage conference since 2012, trying every year to come up with something that would ensure me going, because it was never a given with my employers or clients. One year, I remember being worried enough the reviewers might not accept my paper, so I submitted two; this was incredibly stupid and hurt both papers, not to mention my audience. They always noticed.

I’ve reviewed papers for about as long, the vast number of the papers eminently enjoyable and fun to read. I rejected a select few and was proven wrong more than once, but I always learnt a lot. I don’t think anything has ever shaped me quite as much as Balisage.

Come August it’ll all happen just one more time. I loved travelling to first Montréal, CA, and later Bethesda and Rockville, MD, USA, to meet everyone for my markup holiday, as I would call these things. I’ve never ever been talkative so I would always listen more than talk, but the good folks at Balisage would become my friends, and I cannot even begin to describe how much these yearly travels meant to me. How welcome I felt; how much I felt being part of something much larger than me.

Covid put a stop to all that, of course, and Balisage became an online thing. It’s been great but not quite the same, much of it because when you present online you only ever face your monitor; you can’t play to your audience. I miss being there terribly. I miss the personal touch; you can ask questions and initiate a conversation, but you can never casually bump into a speaker by the coffee and tell them how much you enjoyed their presentation. not if you are like me.

You can also never just hang out playing Werewolf whilst ganging up on some poor sob happening to wear a red shirt that day. It was as if you had found home away from home.

The last ever Balisage. I’m sad today.