Tales of Failure

How I Messed Up and What I Learned

Reconvene Sessions is back with another virtual session, this time all about …

Messing up. Losing the plot. Bombing it. As every event creator knows, there’s no rite of passage quite like producing an event that really just does not go as planned. And no matter how many successful events you’ve already got under your belt, the risk of an event coming apart at the seams never really goes away.

Veteran creators from Green-Wood Cemetery, Eastwind Books of Berkeley, UrbanGlass, and The Bloody Mary Festival will share with you not only their own tales of woe, but the lessons they learned (and put into practice) after the proverbial smoke cleared. One part commiseration and one part education make for a can’t-miss celebration of live events and the creators behind them.

Who You'll Hear From:

• Harry Weil, the Director of Public Programs at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, who organizes with his team nearly 300 public events each year, including after-hours tours, death education classes and workshops, immersive music and dance productions, and contemporary art installations.

• Janie Chen, Events Coordinator at Eastwind Books of Berkeley, an independent bookstore active since 1982 with a specific focus on Asian-American and ethnic studies literature, where she produces events centering storytelling, multicultural education, and histories of activism.

• Kellie Krouse, Instructor and Registrar at New York City-based nonprofit UrbanGlass, which for nearly 40 years has fostered experimentation and advanced the use and critical understanding of glass as a creative medium.

• Evan Weiss, Founder of The Bloody Mary Festival, who transformed a passion project into the largest celebration of the Bloody Mary in the world, producing 10 annual events across the United States in which bars, restaurants, and bottled mixes face off for the title of Best Bloody Mary.

What You'll Learn:

• How events can go off the rails, despite best-laid plans
• What you can do to course-correct when things don’t go as planned
• How veteran creators deal with failure
• How to translate mess-ups into opportunity and learning

After all, live events are exactly that: Live. Join us to celebrate their magic — and a bit of the chaos!