The Germinating Conversations initiative is an ongoing grassroots initiative started in 2012 through meetings and events in Southern Manitoba where people—food growers and food eaters—come together to practise difficult conversations and learn how to hold different, and sometimes opposite, opinions. Through the affiliations of its participants, the dialogues receive occasional informal support from 3 organizations: A Rocha Canada, Canadian Foodgrains Bank (CFGB), Canadian Mennonite University (CMU), and Mennonite Central Committee Canada and Manitoba (MCC Canada & MCC Manitoba).
Creating a book
In the final practicum component of her undergraduate degree at CMU in 2019, Marta Bunnett Wiebe undertook the task of gathering material from years of Germinating Conversations events, interviewing participants, and inviting others to write reflections and explications of the Germinating Conversations process. Alongside an editorial committee of members of the dialogue, she envisioned a publication—not just an anthology but also a learning resource for engaging difficult conversations. As of spring 2021, Bunnette Wiebe now works for MCC Manitoba as their Peace and Advocacy Program Coordinator, and you can read more about her here.
I was approached in the winter of 2019/2020 by Bunnett Wiebe and the committee to provide a designer's perspective on what such a book or resource could be, to lead a design process conversation to articulate a tangible goal, and to ultimately create and fully build out what would become the 248-page Germinating Conversations: Stories from a Sustained Rural-Urban Dialogue on Food, Faith, Farming, and the Land. The committee had seen the successes of the Intotemak TRC Trilogy I had worked on, and were keen to create something with a similar impact.
As the Germinating Conversations initiative were and continue to be fundamentally grassroots and ad-hoc, energy had rightly gone to relationships, event planning, correspondence, and reading. Only one dialogue event in 2013 had been comprehensively photographed, and all video recordings were low res and of limited use. Though dialogues had happened in open public forums, journalistic coverage or commentary was very sparse.
In analyzing all of Bunnett Wiebe's collected material, She, the Committee, our copyeditor, and I all agreed that the mere stories of people with wildly diverging views persistently committing to have conversations with each other was immensely hopeful. These would contribute to the book's goal of spurring on new brave dialogues as much as the methods, strategies, and postures the book hoped to offer would.
The challenge was therefore how to invite readers into stories about strangers without getting bogged down by the rich but overwhelming dearth of relationships, places, backstories, context, jargon, and their own stereotypes about rural or urban people.
Given a poverty of preexisting images, any design would rely on creative layout and visual formatting and a limited use of more generic stock images.
Workshopping
I created and introduced 3 different "lookbooks" for the editorial committee to review. Each lookbook brought parts of the then-still draft source material to life in several layouts and forms. The exercise not only served the practical purpose of design ideation, but also refreshed the editorial committee's imagination around the possibilities the raw content presented.
The committee and I gathered in-person to evaluate and discuss these lookbooks and toss around ideas for the book's content and look and feel.
In addition to charting some ideas for how to structure and arrange the book's content, the committee almost unanimously preferred Version 1, and it became the core style that informed some of the ensuing layout explorations.
Typography
The type you see for most text is the Calluna superfamily--Sans and serif--along with the humanist Reforma superfamily for titling.
Reforma exists in 3 "eras" and offers incredibly nuance. 1918 is a rather sharp serif, and 2018 is a more modern-presenting sans serif, with 1969 living somewhere in between.
Sorting and Styling
Making the vast array of content digestible, meaningful, and compelling would be a challenging, and identifying the kinds of content that the book would contain and represent would allow for meaningfully imagine an art and layout style.
In Bunnett Wiebe's vision for the book, four sections-- "Listening," "Discerning," "Dialoguing," and "Continuing the Conversation"-- function both as chapters in a story and as elemental themes of human communication. The chronologically backbone - transcripts and records of the Germinating Conversations dialogues-- would be sprinkled throughout with commentary and supplementary material written or compiled after 2019.
In the end, we identified 3 types of content:
These are the actual transcripts and records of conversations that took place during Germinating Conversations dialogues.
These content pieces have almost no visual records, so large drop quotes above each piece's often generic sounding title serve as the topical "snapshot" or taste of the message and help distinguishing the otherwise structurally identical pieces from each other. Since the visuals vary wildly, directly relevant visuals are set in with the text.
These are written reflections - both on the process of dialogue abstractly, but also on specific experiences in the Germinating Conversations dialogues.
These content pieces separate their editorially selected images from the piece itself in order to allow the connection between the author's intent and the editorially selected image to remain ambiguous and open to interpretation.
These are creative aids like contextual galleries, information sidebars, creative illustrations, object lessons, and time capsule items from the dialogues.
The purpose of the highly distinct formatting was to allow for a creative representation format in which many of these supplementary conversations, documents, notes, and other pieces originally appeared. They are not dialogue transcripts or written reflections and as such do not have a uniform or standardized formatting.
Furthermore, content subcategories like essays, homilies, reflections, speeches, presentations, and poems are identified under each byline both on the piece and in the table of contents in order to provide further background to readers.
To further help readers quickly grasp the context required to appreciate all of this content, I suggested to editor Marta Bunnett-Wiebe that we add a year on year timeline to the book's introduction as an easily digestable and entertaining alternative to the full narrative text.
Additionally, given the importance of the context of writers in the book, I suggested adding a colour map of voices was added to the book's centrefold, connecting each of the book's 35 speakers, authors, and contributors to a location in Canada (mostly Manitoba) alongside each of their author bios, providing readers a big picture of the authors contexts and where they fall on the urban/rural divide without needing to comb through the bio paragraphs scattered across the book. The use of colour would create a natural magnet to the middle that would encourage readers to visit it frequently as they worked their way through.
While the content sorting system is responsible for many of the choices made, numerous other interesting design decisions and intriguing boutique graphics can be seen throughout the book.
The end of the book features a Facilitation Guide that helps readers navigate the book and translate stories and wisdom into practical guides for new conversations, whether about similar topics or entirely new ones.
"Sustaining the Dialogue" photographs
As previously mentioned, very few Germinating Conversations dialogue events were comprehensively photographed--all, that is, save for one.
The incredible images and portraits taken at one of the first Germinating Conversations - "Sustaining the Dialogue" in 2013 by Cecilly Hildebrand, a frequent dialogue participant, are the visual through line of the book. They both serve the real event they depict but they also archetypically illustrate the nuances and tensions of human communication.
Each of the book's sections opens with one of these powerful photographs, and many of them appear throughout the book in a variety of forms.
Stock Imagery
Wherever possible, stock photographs depicting food and farming appeared with a full description caption in order to bridge the gap between the decontextualized nature of stock imagery imagery in a highly contextualized book.
Specially featured images
In addition to stock photography, the book is peppered with original artwork, images by Manitoban photographers, and even stills from Daniel J. Clark's 2018 Flat-Earth Documentary Behind the Curve (used with permission).
Original commissioned artwork
For the cover, we commissioned Christina Janzen, a local artist and printmaker, to create an original print to be used on the cover.
The Back Cover
The back cover is perhaps the most direct nod to other dialogues by other people in other spheres, weaving images together beside the book's summary, topping the page with select endorsements.
Printed by Friesens Corporation in Altona, Manitoba, Canada, Germinating Conversations: Stories from a Sustained Rural-Urban Dialogue on Food, Faith, Farming, and the Land was published jointly by its 4 publication partners in the summer of 2021 in its print format and in ePub format. You can buy the book here.
You can read about the book in the Winnipeg Free Press, the Canadian Mennonite, and on CMU Media Releases. You can read an interview with editor Marta Bunnett-Wiebe at Mennonite Church Canada, and you can listen to her interview with MCC's Threads podcast.
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