The Mudras of Literacy: A meditation

In Our Lady Collegiate Church, an 11th century Flamboyant Gothic cathedral in Vernon, France, I happened upon a series of six photographs entitled "La Vie Contemplative." There was no photo credit posted anywhere, no hint of who the photographer or designer of the series might be; the prints themselves looked fairly modern, not too aged, with silver overtones and intentionally crackled edges.

The photos depicted what seemed to be a set of mudras, but the statues were not Buddhas or Bodhisattvas; instead they were Virgin Marys with stone-blank eyes and spider-cracked fingers.

I was quite surprised to see the mix of mudras and Catholic iconography. I was also quite moved by the content of the mudra series, which seemed to be instructions for literacy, a meditation on "The Contemplative Life." To see literacy and reading portrayed as a sacred act was deeply gratifying.

The order of the mudras was as follows:

Ouverture de Livre: Opening the Book. The Mary holds a book in her hands, slightly cracked. This mudra indicates the spark of initation and the will that must precede it. Before anything can happen, we must choose to act -- to open the book -- in this day and age, no small feat.

Lecture: Reading. The Mary holds the open book in her open hands, her blank face tilted slightly downwards. This indicates the willingness to listen, to absorb, to to look outside one's self for guidance and direction, stimulation and illumination.

Recueillement: Reverence. Her hands are in prayer over the open book, indicating respect for the intellect and gratitude for the act itself.

Meditation: Meditation. The Mary's arms are held up as if to show off her hands, but she no hands to show: they have been cut off at the wrist. There is no action in this phase, no manual procedure to accomplish. The Mary sits and waits.

Inseignement: Lesson. The Mary's hands are back. One hand rests on the book, the other is raised as though waving "hi," but her fingertips are missing, severed. The information sets in. The change occurs.

Contemplation: Contemplation. The Mary is once again full bodied. She holds the book open in her lap, and her fingertips touch the soft, warm spot of her heart.

Redesign Notes

In late October, 2009, The Landscape Press was reborn. The process was quite organic and the birth as natural as possible, though the computer did freeze a few times and I was forced to conduct a manual reboot.

On hiatus

You'll note that I didn't write from Paris. The Landscape Press and all things American seemed quite remote.

I am going through some tremendous changes right now, not the least of which is a genre switch. After years of being fascinated with breach literature and creative nonfiction, I suddenly find myself penning a good deal of plain old-fashioned third-person fiction.

It may be that The Landscape Press is the product of a past self who has been lost to time. A wedding, we have found, is particularly apt at wrenching your life in two, the Before and the After, particularly for women, who are expected to change their names, or more popular now, to tack their husband's name onto their own so their name becomes very long. (I however have not officially changed my name as of yet, and have no immediate plans to do so.)

A pause is required, to develop in new directions, and to see if Landscape can be redefined to be useful to the writer I am becoming.

In honor of E&F's V.IV launch

In about six weeks I’ll be married and in Paris with David for most of the summer--on honeymoon and holiday, a much needed break from lovely-but-sleepy Ithaca and the dreadful adjunct workaday grind. I *eagerly* anticipate time to reflect on future projects, as wedding planning has obliterated any personal work time. In the meantime, in honor of the upcoming launch of V.IV, I thought I’d use this space to expound a bit on our production ethics.

There is a bit of urgency for this: a new online journal called “Wag’s Revue” was recently launched by a friend-of-a-friend. We read their opening introduction and were alarmed to see that they claimed that no one else had successfully brought the rigors of print media to the internet. Well, we did that in 2006. We introduced ourselves and opened up a nice little conversation with editor Will. He liked our work and modified his opening statement accordingly. We never thought it necessary to make a production statement: best to just do the work and put it out there, and let readers and viewers sift through it and interpret it. In light of Wags, though, it seems time to be publicly forthright about our intentions and aims.

Let me amend. We never made a production statement because design, form, vehicle and transmission are secondary to E&F’s content, aesthetic, and literary aspirations. However, Landscape Press explores the craft of bookmaking and self-production distribution, so I feel justified in doing a bit of that here.

In designing E&F, we made conscious innovations. For one, our goal was to bring the highest standards of print publication to the web. Simplicity was key: don’t make readers sift around a cluttered website with junk tabs all over the top and sidebars. A classic aesthetic orients readers immediately, only to disorient them when they realize the only links are PDFs, all dead-ends.

Why disorient the reader? It was, how do you say, our little joke. Web-browsers expect to be ushered around a website on an endless chain of links. If one pulls up the cover document, they find a dead-end; no way to click back to the homepage, and the same is true of any single piece pulled up on the content page. Sometimes there is just nowhere to go and you are at the End. When you pick up a book, you can put it down, but you can’t press a button and transform it into something else … it is what it is for you to accept and consume, or reject and ignore.

Oh well, for the highly frustrated viewer, there is always the “back” key on one’s browser, and the content page is familiar enough, meant to look like the Table of Content in any printed magazine.

Why PDFs? Simplicity, readability, and freedom to maneuver. Wags has embedded their pages as images on the page. It saves the reader the extra step of waiting for a PDF to load, but requires scrolling while reading. PDFs, once loaded, may be saved to a desktop and easily printed out, to be carried and read on a bus, subway, café, or at one’s kitchen table. They are extremely simple to make from a layout document. They can also be manipulated-the reader can zoom in and out as they need to. A reader can see the entire document on one page and the print is big enough to allow this. The idea was to create the impression of an open book: Hence : a “spread.”

Also: PDFs create the illusion of tactile pleasure. Wags emphasizes that its books are not in print and are never meant to be in print. Conversely, E&F aims to straddle the web and print hemispheres and reap benefit from both mediums. We are in print: we do limited print runs that are given to contributors and sold locally. But we also wanted to provide readers with something as close to a free print copy as we could. The pdf, especially if you download the entire book file from our website, is meant to give the impression that you are reaching into the web and pulling out a solid object that exists in space and can materially appear in front of you. You may print and staple or binder clip the issue as you like, and carry it along with you. Those of us who love the printed form find this very important: book-as-companion. Plus, ever heard of haptics? Touching things lights up the brain. As Ed Park has said regarding the New-York Ghost, a PDF newsletter which he circulated by anonymous email, thus solving the “pesky distribution problem.”

In any case, Essays & Fictions welcomes Wag’s Revue as another champion of aesthetic control on an internet filled with clunky designers and hack bloggers. Check them out: www.wagsrevue.com.

In keeping with our mission, I will comment on the content in V.IV. We are very excited to showcase Karl Parker, who, along with Joshua Land, is taking some important and exciting risks in the content and form of their criticism and thus furthering one of the more crucial literary goals of E&F: to present literature that “breaches” reader’s expectations of genre.

We also have included some delightfully dark fiction by Veronica Vela, Keala Francis, David Pollock, and myself. You may read beginning May 1 at www.essaysandfictions.com.

I will next speak with you from Paris, the city that stole my heart away from New York. Until then, Au Revoir!

In an age so fantastical ...

In early December, an NPR report summarized the dire conditions in book publishing: an acquisitions freeze at Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt and the staggering decline of bookstores all over the country, including big chains such as Borders, rumored to be going out of business, and even the seemingly "recession-proof" mainstay that is Barnes & Noble. Last month, as though we are already searching for the silver lining of this stormcloud, this belated bit of reporting hit the New York Times: "Self-Publishers Flourish As Writers Pay The Tab" (tinyurl.com/bcy3mj).

A pull-quote from a Burlington, VT resident presented the “shocking” proposal that not all writers need to hit publication paydirt in order to feel satisfied with their work: "Many people incorrectly assume that profit is the sole motive for self-publishing,” Todd writes. “For many writers, creating the work and then sharing it is its own reward."

The Landscape Press explored this idea at its onset in summer 2007. At the time, I was interested in privacy; to paraphrase Bjork in discussing her album Vespertine, I was enamored with the joy of intimacy, the kind of music or writing you do while sitting underneath your kitchen table (or in your garden), alone. Eventually you may share that kind of work with others, but the idea is to examine the nature of consciousness through paying excruciating attention to detail, and thus to facilitate personal spiritual growth.

Later, I wondered how much this fascination was, for myself, a rebellious reaction to our Era of Oversharing and the trashy sideshow that is found in some corners of the New York publishing world. Finishing an MFA program of any kind might evoke the desire for privacy: after years of workshops, I was eager to re-establish a privileged relationship with my work. And as my co-editors and I started to print and sell our own copies of Essays & Fictions, and as Landscape produced its own chapbooks, I found the process valuable on many levels, but I was entirely conscious that standardization has made self-production necessary, essentially forcing most writers to the wilderness to create in obscurity—however blissful they may find that obscurity, it is still just that – obscurity, invisibility, silence.

This is a dilemma that many literary artists will continue to grapple with until something opens up and a real shift in publishing and literary trafficking occurs. MSM routinely ignores indy titles for awards and grants. MSM publishes only based on definite market (what they can prove will sell), and the more they will be forced to pander to the common denominator, the less vital and interesting the published work will be. I think many of us watch in slack-jawed awe, wondering how low this spectacle can sink before even the chains finally go belly-up out of cultural worthlessness -- inefficient, wasteful business practices used to hock rubbish that has no lasting value. However, much of what is self-published is bland and self-indulgent as well: while the capitalist machine produces worthless pulp, the NYTimes article ends by pointing out that left to their own devices, so do the people.

I disagree with the final point of the editor, however. Having a market doesn’t dictate whether or not a book “should” be published----the quality, complexity, and integrity of the work should dictate whether or not the book is worth the resources it requires to circulate it. One of the worst bastard byproducts of the New Age and revolution politics was the idea that Everyone’s Ideas Matter. So anywhere there's a market, we pander to it, and I'd argue that it is actually harming us as a people and a society to continue to stubbornly insist on “taking everyone’s ideas into account.”

Under the Bush administration, expertise was not respected, and scholars and scientists discredited and marginalized. Our public dialogue was broken by the intentional enaction of disparity between language and concrete value. Diplomacy dictates that very disparity out of necessity, but it yawned into an bottomless abyss in the first years of the 21st century. People are then reduced to an ape-like recognition-behavior: the Sarah Palin phenomenon ("she looks like me, therefore, I trust her.")

All this is to say that I firmly argue that rhetorical and quality standards must come back into vogue and esteem in literature as well as politics (which should go without saying by now, I presume). Perhaps one reason for the bankruptcy of literature is as the NYTimes article states, that more people want to write than want to read! And when they do read, they read commercial junk produced by the culture machine, and then imitate it, and pat themselves on the back for their shadow play, mistaking it for authentic creativity. Somehow, many seem to lack the ability to distinguish mediocrity from brilliance.

In an earlier Landscape post (“The Eleventh Question”), I pointed out that a boom in self-publishing won’t make a dime’s worth of difference unless the quality of the published work is enhanced. In the same post, I drew a connection with Baudrillard: the shadow has replaced the monolith: to many self-published writers, the appearance of being a writer is more pressing, more appealing, and more important than the evolutionary and more difficult process of hard, disciplined, daily work of producing complicated, nuanced, urgent literature. In part this is because literary writing, as in art, demands a kind of psychological nakedness: all your hang-ups are out there for all the world to see and judge. In part this is also because there is no immediate payoff to the more difficult kind of writing that demands discarding 95% of what you write and intensely laboring over the remaining 5% to craft from nothing, something as close to perfection as we can hope to attain.

I recently interviewed a professor who wrote his book in a remarkably short period of time. When I inquired further, he said that he did several interviews and took extended notes. Then he used a software program to sort his notes by theme and keyword, and used the results to dictate his chapters. As a nonfiction writer who has written book-length works, I have always found that the act of combing through the research is its own art that gives shape, originality and nuance to the final structure ... I felt a bit cheated that the man did not even take the trouble to sort his own research.

I’d like to emphasize that the hands-on, labor intensive, fluxus act of designing and making your own books, as E&F, Kitchen Press, Cannibal, and many others have done, is far different from paying iUniverse to do it all for you. I address this at length in Landscape’s essay "On Self-Production," but suffice it to say for now that I continue to encourage readers and writers to distinguish self-production from self-publishing. E&F co-editor David Pollock has said that the latter is simply lazy, and I’m inclined to agree. Design is its own art form, and the NYTimes article doesn’t address those who are hand-making or self-designing their own books as an act of fluxus between the literary and visual arts as well as a declaration of social independence, however quiet it may be in the din of rampant vigilante publishing and MSM McTitles.

Still, even self-production emerges as an answer to the wilderness most writers are thrown into. Standardization has been the subject of sci-fi horror for many years, and we understand why, but we’re seeing new extremes in literary marginalization---the “standard” becoming so grotesquly inflated and large that absolutely everyone else is fractured, splintered and scattered, thus creating the need for an entity like Luna Park Review to attempt to catalogue what they have aptly and nobly named the Carnival. Many journals report a similar story: quality independent publishers have little funding and struggle to stay alive, or shut down after a few issues. Journals backed by an institution have a better chance at survival because they have funding, but many seem blighted by the same blase of MSM titles. With little to tie these journals together, and even fewer readers, it is hard to estimate the value of all this independent publishing, and even harder to see where all this is going.

At this point I’m leaning toward the hope that a kind of explosion will take place, in which the BIG circle of standardized publishing just bursts, through closing bookstores, leading to more acquisition freezes, leading to bankrupt media companies, the shutdown of corporate publishing, and the end of the current literary stranglehold. The NYTimes article points out that books will still exist because people will always love them, and that because they are easier than ever to publish, there is no fear of books disappearing. Then maybe more of the tiny circles would have some space and some resource to branch out a bit and grow. I realize this is a fantasy, but as James Baldwin once famously said, “in an age so fantastical, I would hesitate to say precisely what a fantasy is.”

Commercial and literary publishing clearly isn't the only market system in a breakdown at the moment. I recently heard a pundit say, “we’re not in a recession, we’re in a resetting." It’s not clear to us now if we are in a permanent cultural decline (some famously compare us to Rome) or in the midst of an opening of possibilities, of a shift in consciousness. However idealistic it may be, I continue to hope for the latter. To quote Baldwin again, “this is the possibility that I find myself holding in the center of my mind, and driving toward.” ~~~ Danielle Marie

In Response to 'The Knife by the Handle at Last'

I strongly disagree with the major assertion made by Tim Parks in ‘The Knife by the Handle at Last’ [NYR, Sept. 25]. “Perhaps particularly for women writers, (the family memoir) offers the opportunity to turn the tables on oppressive patriarchy,” Parks writes, arguing that there is power in simply summoning up the courage to tell the story. Conversely, I’d argue that the very need to tell the story in the form of a literary memoir is proof that the tables have not been turned at all, that daughter is still very much in the grip of the oppressive patriarchy, since she remains unable to tell her own story, and can only relate her experience through her role as a victim.

I think it is time to say the emperor has no clothes, and point out that the writing of such a book cannot, by definition of its existence, be considered a triumphant act. Novel-writing is incredibly time-consuming and requires the obsessive attention of the author. The act of writing such a book at all indicates continued, ongoing, and current psychological dependence, perhaps even enslavement. All that time spent remembering what the Father did, and painstakingly reconstructing it, reliving it, each and every detail … doesn’t this prove that it’s the Father, and not triumphant Daughter, who is still pulling all the strings and calling all the shots? If she were truly free, wouldn’t she pursue her own interests and cultivate her own story?

As lovers of literature, we must also look at how the story is being told, and hold the memoirist up to the same standards any literary writer. Irony and wit can go a long way to help the family memoir in its bid for readability, but female abuse memoirs are, almost without exception, clichéd and formulaic in plot, crude and childish in use of language, and bland and absolutely self-serious in tone. Nevertheless, they are venerated in popular criticism; Oprah and Rosie O’Donnell (who publicly supported Rachel Sontag’s House Rules) have led the ongoing public embrace of a culture of melodrama and victimization, and this seems to have bled over into literary circles as well.

We don’t laugh at female abuse memoirs, partly because the tone lacks wit, but also because in a sense we know we’re still watching the victim try to assimilate her experience. For a woman of the 21st century to not only embrace the role of victim, but also to use as a guise for public celebrity is not only unoriginal and incredibly boring, it’s also offensive to women who have been through similar experiences of abuse and have realized that to publicly play that role perpetuates it in culture: Visibility issues abound for female writers – many of the best are marginalized, ignored, ridiculed, or doomed to obscurity, and literary circles need more female writers of strength, power and prowess, not more gender-specific victimization.

Furthermore, it could be argued that one never truly triumphs over abuse or loss at all, but that successful healing involves accepting the abuse or the loss and learning to live with it as part of everyday existence. Does someone who has truly ‘gotten over it’ need to say so, and say it so loudly, in so many pages and with such extensive marketing and publicity campaigns?

I am one female reader who is simply not buying it, and I also think it’s potentially damaging to a young female reader’s sense of self to see so many female victimized characters while she’s shopping for something to read. In 1856, George Eliot penned an article for the Westminster Review entitled Silly Novels by Lady Novelists. In 1859, a critic named W.R. Greg wrote an article entitled The False Morality of Lady Novelists. Following in this trajectory, we could easily group these female abuse narratives under a 21st century subgenre all its own: I’d call it False Healing in Female Memoir.

LANDSCAPE PRESS SPECIAL: interview with JUSTIN MARKS

Justin Marks is an award-winning poet and founder of Kitchen Press Chapbooks. We wanted to hear what he had to say about self-production ethics, chapbook aesthetics, and his experiences running a micro-press in a macro-climate like Manhattan.

In his own words:

“I’m a poet, publisher and editor. I grew up in Marion, NY, a small town about 50 miles east of Rochester, NY. I moved to Chapel Hill, NC in 1995 to complete my undergraduate studies at UNC-Chapel Hill. In 1998 I started work on my MA in English at North Carolina State University, where I also taught for three years. In 2002 I relocated to New York City to pursue an MFA in Poetry at the New School. I currently live in New York City. If I can help it I won’t ever leave New York. I may wind up moving to Queens or Brooklyn or something, but I hope to always live somewhere in one of the 5 boroughs ... I love it here. It’s the only place I’ve ever felt at home. ”

Kitchen Press was founded in 2005.

Landscape's Questions for a Book Artist or Self-Produced Writer:

1) What is the social role of a micro-press in today’s literary marketplace, environment, and economy?

I like the idea of micro and diy presses as being part of a gift economy. So, in that sense, I see them as a (small) corrective to supercapitalism.

Micro-presses, all independent publishing, really, are an absolutely necessary alternative to the impenetrable and narrowly focused world of “legitimate,” mainstream publishing. For me, independent publishing represents Jack Spicer’s idea that whatever impediments stand between a writer and her audience must be removed.

Micro-presses also provide a great community for writers. The micro-press world is (no pun intended) so small. You wind up meeting a ton of really great and talented people.

There also an interesting little piece I read in the Guardian recently about the history and persistence of chapbooks. You can check it out here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2008/sep/02/theneedforchapbooks

2) How is the reader affected by choices of font, paper quality, color, white space and other elements of design on the page?

I think these things can either attract a reader a reader to a book, or repel them from it; enhance the reading experience, or more difficult. While I love and admire books that essentially are art objects, I rarely read them more than once, or at least I’m hesitant to. I don’t want to ruin this beautiful work of art. Some books are constructed so intricately or poorly that they are literally difficult to read.

So that all affects the reader’s experience. I personally strive for a balance, to make Kitchen Press chapbooks nice enough looking that they catch people’s attention, as well as make the poet happy, but not so nice that people treat them like an art object. Of course, I’m not by any means a very talented book artist. I don’t think I could make an art object book if I wanted to.

3) Is book design primarily a vehicle for content, or does the design claim equal part of the concept and content?

I don’t know if the design can claim equal part. I suppose it could. I mean, I’ve definitely bought books simply because I thought they looked cool. I think that book design should compliment the content of a book, maybe help turn up the volume a little bit on a certain aspect of the content. But that may just be me.

4) Since design dramatically affects the reader’s experience of the text, it naturally follows to ask, then, why aren’t ALL writers more concerned with the production of their own work?

I think all writers are concerned with these issues. At least, I hope they are. But with mainstream publishing you often don’t have a choice. You generally can’t choose your trim size or cover art, font, paper stock or anything. You may be able to make some requests, but you won’t have much control or final say.

Once a manuscript is turned in, the whole process largely becomes a business transaction. The writer won’t have any input until the she receives galley proofs, and then all she can do is proofread, maybe haggle a little over the cover image, but not much. It’s a pretty impersonal exchange in that respect.

And with poetry, it’s even worse. You likely won’t even have an editor. You have to rely on your peers to help you get your manuscript into truly publishable shape. The publisher is basically just a middle-man of sorts.

5) Is writing, designing, making, printing and distributing your own books an act of anarchy; is it subversive or dangerous for any reason?

No, not really. I think it’s often an act of necessity, more than anything, but also choice. I’m starting to notice that certain poets who won fairly prestigious first book contests are self publishing their second books. Ariana Reines is one. She started her own press—mal-o-mar—and put out her second book, the incredible Coeur de Lion. I can’t pretend to know her reasons, but I think it’s something we’re going to see more and more often.

6) How can we make the book less precious than an art object but more valuable than a cheaply printed extra-thick pamphlet hocked and sold at an inflated price?

First thing to do is not publish cheaply printed, overpriced pamphlets. Desktop publishing technology is pretty user-friendly these days, and fairly affordable. It’s really not that difficult to make a handsome book, something that’s not an art object but at the same time nice looking, something you can be proud of in terms of packaging and content.

7) Do you think it is it time to finally diminish the social stigma on “self-publishing?” Do you think this is an outdated notion that can retire? Why/why not?

Yes, absolutely. Bands have been starting their own labels and putting out their own music, as well as that of others, for years. Fugazi is a prime example. I don’t see why it should be any different for writers.

The most important thing for an artist, in my mind, is to get the work out and find an audience. If you have to self-publish to do that, so be it. Even if you don’t have to self-publish, you might find it to be a healthy alternative to the less appealing aspects of mainstream publishing.

8) Do you think a mass of self-produced work destabilizes the value system by which we judge literary quality? Why/why not?

No, or if it does, it’s probably a necessary destabilization. But really I think it’s more about change. It used to be that people who self-published were generally seen as hacks. Now that’s not so much the case.

At the same time, it’s not like self-published books are winning major prizes like the Pulitzer or National Book Award. So their impact is probably still safely “below radar.”

In the Kitchen, Making Chapbooks

~ What are some other book arts traditions in which you work?

I mainly draw from other publishers like myself and their presses: Fewer & Further, Ugly Duckling, Lame House, Effing Press, Octopus, Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, Cannibal Books, horse less press, Rose Metal…the list could go on for a long time.

~Can you describe your production process – how you actually make the books?

It’s basically just me, my laptop and printer. I print the pages, fold them, press them, cut them, score the spine and saddle staple.

I like watching TV while I make books. Project Runway and Law & Order are great for that.

~Why hand-make books instead of sending them to a print-on-demand to be perfect bound?

To a large extent, money. It costs more to do a perfect bound book, even if it is POD. But I also think hand-bound books make for a different reading experience, more intimate perhaps; definitely more well rounded. In my experience, I’m much more aware of books as objects when they are hand-bound, and how that frames the presentation of the content.

Plus, I just like making the books. It’s fun, satisfies that drives that wants to work with my hands.

There’s also the relationship that happens between me and the book I’m working on. You’ll never know a book so uniquely as the book you literally make yourself. (emphasis added)

~ How would you describe your dominating aesthetic or blend of aesthetics?

I guess sort of New York School, so-called “post-avant” poetries, as well as more traditional aesthetics. It’s difficult to be specific. I think the original punk, new wave and hardcore movements in music have had an influence on me, if not in aesthetics than definitely in ethos—the whole diy thing.

Select list of important titles:

Hit Wave, by Jon Leon (September 2008)
Tentative List (A), by Thomas David Lisk (June 2008)
Out of Light, by Joe Massey (February 2008)
Why I am White, by Mathias Svalina (August 2007)
Run Down the Emphasis, by Erin Elizabeth Burke (June 2007)
Otherhow, by Morgan Lucas Schuldt (April 2007)
Thanks for Sending the Engine, by Elisa Gabbert (February 2007)
WIDE TREE, by Chris Tonelli (March 2006)
Morning News, by Ana Božičević (March 2006)
Fingergun, by Matt Rasmussen (December 2005)

~Who does your design?

Design for me is kind of catch-as catch can. I’ve done layout for the covers that only consist of text (Otherhow and Hit Wave).

Josh Elliott (mjoshelliott.com) designed the covers for You Being You by Proxy, Fingergun, Morning News, WIDE TREE and Thanks for Sending the Engine. He’s a friend of mine from college and a designer at Dark Horse Comics in Portland, OR.

Brian Morris (http://www.beemo.net/) designed the cover for Run Down the Emphasis. He’s a friend and graphic designer I know from an ad agency I worked at.

Efrem Oshinsky (http://efremoshinskyfineart.wordpress.com/) did the cover art for Why I am White and designed the cover for Tentative List (A). Efrem is a copywriter and printmaker I know from the same ad agency I worked at with Brian.

Poets tend to have artists/designers as friends, so lately I’ve just had them ask for the art they think will fit their book form their graphic artist friends. Joe Massey had Scott Pierce from Effing Press (http://www.effingpress.com/) design his cover. Lily Brown and Sandra Simonds are having friends do the art for their covers.

I go for a balance between basically whatever the poet wants and the (rather limited) means at my disposal.

~How big are your runs? How do you distribute?

Everything’s basically POD. If someone orders I book, I make one. Generally speaking, though, I sell anywhere from 50-100 copies of each book.

I send review copies to various review sites, and sell on consignment in independent book stores, like Ada Books in Rhode Island, Powell’s in Oregon and Woodland Pattern in Wisconsin.

The majority of sales, though, are online (http://www.kitchen-press-book-store.blogspot.com/).