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There has been a lot of growth in our (still) little print-book-publishing community here in COS in the past year: new independent artists, new publishers, new community studios, new recording studios, new zines, new letterpress studios. It’s been wonderful, amazing, and I can’t wait to see how far we can take this.
The first part of a lively scene is the people doing the work. We’re getting us some people, making us some work. The second part is a place where those people can gather, to share their work with other people also gathered. To bring those “other people” (the public, let’s say) in, to let the artists already there out, to make those “other people” not “other,” but people, each belonging in their individual way.
A secret group with a static membership does not grow as a community, plays no role as a group in the larger community. A place of sharing & gathering & growing/changing is crucial. One such place is on the verge of opening in south downtown Colorado Springs: Mountain Fold Books. (Full disclosure: I am a board member of Mountain Fold, and I believe fiercely in the project.) The description from the MFB website:
Mountain Fold Books is a new kind of bookstore. We're a non-profit,
membership-based bookstore and reading room/gallery that will make
small-press books and magazines accessible to the community of Colorado
Springs and the greater Pikes Peak Region. While we have an amazing
library district and two university libraries, small-press books of
poetry and art books remain difficult to access. Our aim is to help
connect Colorado Springs to the growing art and literary communities
along the Front Range of Colorado by providing a welcoming place for the
community to gather, read, exchange ideas, give readings and see books
and art that currently can only be found in larger metropolitan areas.
We are entering the last week of Mountain Fold’s first Membership Drive & Fundraiser. Success in this endeavor means that MFB will be funded until July of 2015, which means that the folks in charge can focus on making it the crucial thing that it needs to be, that this community needs, and that the small press-artists’ book-zine-print-etc. community at large needs. All of the information that you need to make your (tax deductible) donation is here:
http://www.mountainfoldbooks.org/shop/
The newest issue of JAB (The Journal of Artists’ Books), #35, has a short, thoughtful paragraph (& a color photo!) about The Heads of My Family, My Friends, My Colleagues, by Justin Sirois, in the “Books Received” section. The mini-review was written by Columbia College Chicago MFA student & Print Production Fellow Levi Sherman. This issue of JAB is pretty phenomenal—it is mostly artists’ books, six of them, to be exact.
Here is the full text on The Heads:
Justin Sirois has a knack for writing with, about, and for digital technology, so it is a pleasant surprise to see NewLights Press adapt his new book of poems The Heads of My Family, My Friends, My Colleagues to a letterpress printed codex that is perfectly suited to the content and style of the writing. On each page, black type is framed by dizzying, RGB-colored pixelesque patterns constructed out of en quads. Eight-bit tiles are knocked out of these borders, and like the poems themselves refer to online communication in their style, though the text itself also holds explicitly to the conventions of writing on the web and on cell phones. The book is as surprising as the poetry it contains, including blind embossed verses set on the interior spine fold—a thoughtful use of the double pamphlet structure. The book evokes a reading experience similar to browsing online—a schizophrenic, rhizomatic tour of sex, politics, pop culture, and everything in between, The writing, first-person and conversational, is engaging and holds the book together despite the breadth and obscurity of topics. This is a book that knows its audience and speaks powerfully both to and about them. (LS)
Thanks Levi! Thanks JAB!
One of the firstish big NewLights Press plans for Year 14 is to launch a journal of one word poetry, fiction and non-fiction. First step: an awesome name for said awesome journal. & that’s where you come in, reader. Submit your ideas for names via email to newlightspressATgmailDOTcom, or by messaging us on our Facebook page. [Ed. Note: I don’t see contact info for comments to this blog, hence the submissions via email & FB.] We will post submissions periodically as they roll in below in updated versions of this post. We can’t guarantee a winner will be chosen from the submissions, but if there is a winner, that person will get a free lifetime subscription to the journal.
Entries! (updated on 02/14/14 at 10:00 AM)
Soli
Oddments
Singletons
Constraints
Mono
Brevity
Palabra
CROWBAIT
Unalone
Economy
Bullseye
Plop
OOZER
This journal is something that’s been incubating a long time, begun actually in 2003 with the piece below (re-posted from the NewLights digital archives). Info for how to submit to the journal itself will be coming in the near future. The plan is to get two issues out by the end of this year, then four starting next.
UPDATE: The full sale of all NewLights Press items ended on Monday, 10/14/13, but the flood broadsides shown below will continue to be sold, and all of the money from those will continue to be donated. The sale has been successful. Thank you to everyone who participated & supported.
The floods that ravaged the state of Colorado a few weeks ago were widely reported in the news. The waters have since receded, and the headlines are focused on other matters. But the work of rebuilding and mitigating future disasters is long and arduous, and help is still needed. The recent, massive wildfires across the state have left many areas extremely vulnerable to flooding, and it will likely be decades until the burn scars return to normal, with vegetation that can hold the soil together and ground that can absorb water.
Always the question: What can we do? Always the answer: What we do.
So in that spirit the NewLights Press is excited to announce the 2013 DELUGE OF AWESOMENESS SALE. For the next four days, until 12 AM on Monday, 10/14/13, all money from the sales of any NewLights Press item will be donated to flood relief and mitigation efforts in Colorado, both up north in the Boulder area and here in the Pikes Peak Region.
And of course there is a new, featured item in the sale: a limited edition letterpress printed broadside, written, designed and printed by a group of students at The Press at Colorado College.
2013 Colorado Flood Broadside
by Ashley Johnson, Patrick Lofgren and Katie Smith
Letterpress from lead type, collagraph and linoleum
Edition of 90
10.75” x 14.75”
2013
$10
You can view the rest of the available books here and broadsides here.
Thank you for reading, thank you for your help.
Hatch Show Print’s motto is: “Preservation Through Use.” When they say this they are talking specifically about their collection of historic type & image blocks. They “preserve” those physical things by continuing to use them and keeping the iconic images that they produced circulating in the culture. The idea of “preservation through use” is an oxymoron—using those blocks is not going to preserve them. That use is going to destroy them.
Generally speaking, when it comes to Book Arts & letterpress printing, I am against preservation. Not that I want to see all of our lovely tools, equipment & materials burned & scrapped. Quite the opposite, actually. I am against preservation in the sense that something that needs to be “preserved” is something that has died, that is in the process of rapid decay. The preservation impulse in Book Arts, while noble & in some ways worthwhile, is holding it back.
Letterpress printing, hand bookbinding, small/private press publishing, etc., etc. are commercially obsolete. That does not mean they are “dead”—historically over, sealed shut, capable of no further development in aesthetics and/or technology. The Economy is not the only economy. These things—these techniques, tools, equipment, processes, materials, ways of doing-learning-moving—are living things. & there is, terrifyingly, excitingly, more work to be done.
The Vista Sans Wood Type Project gets at several very important things:
1) It literally advances the technology of type production & letterpress printing. There is now a typeface that was never available as type, in lead or wood, in the world in physical form. And the type is different from traditional wood type—some of it has a very visible grain. It is not so precious anymore—it can be kerned, mortised, cut, spliced without worry. It points toward even more possibilities.
2) The project is not just about the type, it’s also about its utility & function. The functional/shareable is the new relational.
3) The project is not just about the type, it’s also about how it’s used to advance the aesthetic range of letterpress printing. You can see lots of the prints in the video above. Very few of them look like a “traditional” letterpress broadside. & that points to one very, very important thing about letterpress printing—it’s an extremely flexible & adaptable medium. The pinnacle of its aesthetic achievement was not/is not black, serifed text type on white or off-white paper.
4) The project is not just about the type, it’s about community, about this community of incredible people making incredible things.
Things like the Vista Sans Wood Type Project are absolutely crucial to keeping the fields of book arts, printing, typography, design, publishing, etc., etc. moving & interesting & fun. Tricia & Ashley have already made the type, but now they need some funds to make a book documenting the project—a book that will take the project even further. Please consider helping them out by following the link at the end of the video or by clicking here.
It was the first reading in a new series called “Say Hello to Your Last Poem.” The readers were Matt Potter, a promising & motivated Colorado College student, and Corina Copp, a fantastic poet from Brooklyn & author of Pro Magenta/Be Met (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011). The series is being organized by Noel Black (author of Uselysses, also Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011) and myself, and it was held at the home of Noel and his wife, artist/curator Marina Eckler. They have this incredible house with a backyard that extends up to a red rock outcropping, like a mini national park, and that’s where we did the actual reading, with crazy colored lights and the vastness of the sky & mountains behind the readers. It started with a potluck dinner and just the right amount of people came out. Everything synced.
So why am I making such a big deal out of a little house reading? It’s not a novel format, even here in the Springs, which has a thriving house-show-music scene. And one would expect a good reading from two good poets. Hey, no big deal.
& “no big deal” is absolutely correct, which is why it was awesome, and which is why I am excited about it & the future of doing this. Because these things don’t have to be a big deal, and they’re often better if they’re not. All one needs is an interested & loving & awesome local community. & we’ve got that here in Colorado Springs, believe it or not.
The people, the place, the work, the event itself. It’s all there, shimmering, and on top of all that I realized what’s been missing from the work of the NewLights Press for far, far too long—being anchored in a community, one that is both local & reaching out & welcoming in. (It’s been since the early days in Baltimore, when we were organizing readings, making chapbooks, and having a great & terrible time all of the time.) I’ve often said, on this blog and elsewhere, that one of the most important & vital parts of small press publishing is the community, the community already established, and the community that the making & sharing of work is constantly building. But in all of my transience over the last 8 years (!) I had forgotten that literally bringing people together is one of the best parts, one of the most important parts.
I had somehow forgotten about the interplay between the work produced (the writing, the books) and the local-right-there-and-giving-you-hugs audience, about how important those flesh & blood & laughing people are, and about how work made in that environment can become an anchor point for a shared, lived experience.
More readings? Yes.
More books? Yes.
We hope to see you all here soon.
Speaking of community, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to get this blog to include contributions from other people. I’ve always hoped that it could be a resource for others engaged in similar activities, but perhaps it can also be a channel of communication for that community as well. My first thought on how to do this was to do simple profiles of other small presses and makers of artists’ books. But then it came to my attention that someone else is already doing that, has been doing it for awhile, and is probably doing a better job than I would. I haven’t given up on that idea completely, but I need to figure out how to steer it in a different direction.And then, of course, there could also be interviews. And there will be interviews—in fact, this post is the first one (Really! Keep reading!). I thought it might be interesting to do the interviews with groups of people, asking one question about a particular topic. As usual, I’m doing everything on the fly, in the morning before I go to work, so I haven’t quite refined the system to have received multiple answers that I would post all at once. I’m excited about this first one, so it’s going up now. Here it is: a question about community, directed to Adam Robinson, the proprietor of the great Publishing Genius Press in Baltimore, MD.
NewLights: Publishing Genius is based in Baltimore, MD, and frequently publishes work by Baltimore writers. Does Publishing Genius make it a point to publish work by local writers and artists? And why? And are there other activities around publishing that you see as important for fostering local community?
Adam Robinson: Initially, I didn't have any intention of publishing writers local to my community. In fact, I didn't realize until last year that a significant portion of PGP books were from Baltimoreans (7 out of 18, basically). Then, when I did realize it, it came as no surprise. It made sense, not because Baltimore has a particularly rich literary community (which, as you know, it does), but because I seek out like-minded people, and I become friends with them, and I pay close attention to what my friends do. I do feel like it's one of my goals to promote my community's culture, and interestingly that is another way of expressing myself, personally. By publishing Megan McShea's book (forthcoming), I'm saying, "This is who I am, or what I want to be like." However, does this foster local community? I mean, it bolsters Baltimore's writers outside of the community, but I'm not doing a great deal to get the books into the hands of this city's residents. But one aspect that I think does foster the community, something that you pointed to in your blog post, is bringing in outsiders for the event, and showing them around town. Taking them to the amazing local literary hotspots like Atomic Books and Normals. Introduce them to people by hosting readings and encouraging the exchange of ideas. And not just that, but publishing and reading translations, I think, has been on my mind a lot lately. Because it's an important question: what is a community. There are worlds within worlds. Before I'm a Baltimorean, I think, I'm an artist. That links me with other artists, regardless of location. So I want to know what my fellow art citizens are doing in Spain and Iraq and Singapore. This last bit is perhaps more ethereal than the practicalities influencing your question, it's basically where PGP has been since starting out -- that the literature community takes priority over the municipality -- and yet 40% of the books are by writers who live within 10 miles of me.
Hopefully there will be more of these soon, hopefully they can be presented together. (Of course they can.) If this is a question that you’d be interested in answering, please let me know at newlightspress-AT-gmail-DOT-com.
On Monday I had the good fortune to see Ralph Nader speak at Colorado College. It was a great talk, focused on the increasing “corporatization” of American life & politics. (You can watch the whole lecture here.) He didn’t just talk about how bad things are, but gave lots of simple, practical suggestions for people to get involved and begin to change things. So, naturally, I wondered: what can I do, personally? And not just what can I do in terms of getting directly involved with politics/civics, but what can I do, what can the NewLights Press do, to integrate this kind of responsibility and action into daily practice?
One of the ideas that came out in the talk was the idea of “displacement” of large corporations by local businesses and economies—an idea very important to (and already well developed in) the building of more sustainable and responsible agricultural practices. But what is a local economy/ecology for writing and art? What role can small presses play in developing that local culture in a positive way?
One could argue that small presses, by nature of their being small, only participate in a local economy. But when I look at NewLights particularly, it’s quite clear that we haven’t engaged with our home community in a purposeful way in a long time. NewLights has published work by writers from all over the country—most recently by someone from Austin, TX, who was living in NYC when we started the project. J.A. Tyler lives in Fort Collins, CO (about 2 hours away from CO Springs), but publishing a Colorado based writer was an accident—that project began when NewLights was in California, before I knew that I might be moving to Colorado.
NewLights has resided in 4 different states in the last 8 years of its existence. The only place it was rooted in for a significant amount of time was Baltimore, where it began. So I could use the excuse that I’ve moved around too much to invest a lot in a local community. But that’s just an excuse, and now that things seem more permanent, the question returns: what can we do?
And the answer, very simply, perhaps too simply: publish Colorado writers! And when you do that organize readings and other events! Create a space-time for a community to develop! And when you work with a writer or artist from another place, get them out here to do an event, so that there is an exchange with other local economies! It really is that simple. But it’s also not that simple—more questions arise.
If the goal of the press is to publish “the best” writing that we can find (the “best” of our particular area of interest), then are those writers and artists going to necessarily reside in Colorado? And particularly in Colorado Springs? So what does it mean when, as a press, a commitment is made to publishing local work? Does that involve lowering our standards? Or will that commitment allow a space for that local work to grow?
I have a feeling we’ll come back to this….
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