What would you say in six minutes and 40 seconds?

Scranton Pecha Kucha Night, Sat., Jan. 28, 7:30-9:30 p.m., The Vintage Theater (119 Penn Ave., Scranton) $5 suggested donation benefits theater. Info: Facebook, @PechaKuchaScran

by Nikki M. Mascali
Weekender Editor

If you  had six minutes and 40 seconds to say something, anything, what would you say?

While you might still be pondering that question, eight people from Northeastern Pennsylvania figured out what they would say and will share it with the audience at Pecha Kucha Night Scranton.

Pronounced peh-CHA-kuh-cha — and sounding like it should precede “God bless you” — Pecha Kucha is a speaking format invented in 2003 by Tokyo architects Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein. Looking for a way to bring colleagues, friends and creatives together, the two conceived the 20x20 presentation: 20 slides that are talked about for 20 seconds apiece, which gives presenters six minutes and 40 seconds to show their work, tell a story or captivate the audience.

The Scranton Pecha Kucha Night (PKN) will be held Saturday, Jan. 28 at The Vintage Theater and was the brainchild of Brad Peniston, who founded PKN Philadelphia three years ago with his brother, James. PKN Philadelphia held its ninth installment Saturday.

“I read out about Pecha Kucha, I think it was in Wired magazine,” Peniston said, calling in from his office in Washington, D.C. “The fact that you can get a bunch of people who are passionate about a wide variety of stuff together and bring them together in one night where people can talk about their ideas, I just thought it was such a great idea.”

Bringing PKN to Scranton was borne out of a Peniston brothers January tradition: Traveling someplace new that has a lot of history. In recent years, the two saw the country’s biggest chess library, The John G. White Chess and Checkers Collection, at the Cleveland Public Library and went curling in Kalamazoo, Mich., last year. The latter trip included a Tweetup organized by a local woman.

“Essentially, she tweeted out to a bunch of her followers, ‘Hey, some random dudes from the East Coast are coming to Kalamazoo, let’s all have dinner.’ It was such a terrific thing to get insight into a place that you wouldn’t if you were just a tourist,” Peniston said. “We talked to all these people who all had great stories and interesting things doing. We thought, ‘How could we do that when we go to Scranton?’”

Hoping to keep with the Tweetup aspect from Kalamazoo, Peniston thought a PKN would be a good idea for this trip “and have people tell us what’s so cool about what they’re doing and about their city.”

Like most people doing research, “I reached out and Googled people,” Peniston said. Eventually, he connected with Mandy Boyle, an SEO team leader at Solid Cactus.

“I have never heard of this before in my life,” Boyle said, adding that as soon as she got Peniston’s e-mail, she did some Googling of her own and found sample videos of Pecha Kucha.

“I saw one about (“Dancing Matt” Harding), who had gotten the world to dance with him, and I thought, ‘Wow, this is really, really cool,’” she explained. “As soon as I started to learn more, I reached out to Brad and said, ‘Hey, I’d love the chance to present.’”

Boyle offered to help get the word out, and PKN Scranton began to develop.

“It would not have come to be without Mandy’s help on the ground — there’s only so much you can do through e-mailing random people in a town you’ve never been to,” Peniston said with a laugh.

Face time

Boyle has seen a lot of interest in PKN Scranton, especially among NEPA’s blogger and Twitter community.

“I’ve seen a lot of people buzzing about it,” she said. “And we’ve gotten a lot of great speakers involved with the night, who are really great about spreading the word.”

Presenters include Michelle Davies, an NEPAblogs.org co-contributor presenting “#ScrantonMovieNames,” “Stained Glass & the Passing of an Old World” by NEPAblogs.org founder Harold Jenkins; “Restoring the Slope” by Leadership Lackawanna Class of 2012 member Gerard M. Hetman; “Library Crimes & Misdemeanors” by newspaper librarian Brian Fulton; “In Pursuit of the Light” by professional photographer Brent Pennington; “Preparing America to Compete in the 21st Century Global Economy” by SkillSoft technology trainer Michael J. Murphy; “How to Slow Down Time” by “Welcome To Scranton” author Greg Halpin and Boyle’s “Life Lessons from the Gateway Cinema.”

Noticing that Pecha Kucha presentations always told a story, Boyle took to Facebook and asked people what the best story she ever told them was.

“A lot of people had mentioned the stories I told them about working at the Gateway Cinema (in Edwardsville),” she said. “I was thinking about how we all learn things from our first jobs and how we take those lessons with us, and I think I can tie in some of those funnier moments of working at the Gateway in with some life lessons that I learned from that experience.”

With everyone so tied to technology — even social media is not really “social” when you think about it — Pecha Kucha offers good, old-fashioned face-to-face time.

“It’s so much more dynamic to get in front of somebody and talk for an uninterrupted six minutes and 40 seconds,” Peniston said. “It’s enough to really get a good point across, but not too much that you turn the person off. And once you get off the stage, somebody in the audience can go find a presenter and actually say, ‘That was really interesting’ or ‘I agree or disagree.’”

Taking PK from night to day

By day, Peniston is the editor of Armed Forces Journal, a monthly magazine that offers analysis and commentary about military affairs. He’s given about a dozen Pecha Kucha presentations since discovering the concept, but his most recent was in the magazine’s newsroom.

“We started actually having a little Pecha Kucha afternoon here in the newsroom where people could share what they knew about various topics,” he said.

He finds the constrained nature of Pecha Kucha a perfect fit for his field.

“Even a busy newsroom will go and see what someone has to say for six minutes and 40 seconds,” he began. “We had our congressional reporter talk about the upcoming budget season last year, and that was terrific because you think budget, policy — I’m already falling asleep — but if you have to do it in 20 slides, 20 seconds a slide; not only is that a small amount of time to devote to it, but the presenter has to have really thought about what he is going to say in 20 seconds.”

Boyle hopes that Saturday’s Pecha Kucha Night is the first of many.

“I think this is going to be a lot of fun. … I really think this is something great for us to do every year or as often as we can.”

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