Smallpressapalooza, Thursday, March 20
Micropresses are the new milkshake.
Table of Contents: | Clear Cut Press | Chiasmus Press | Hawthorne Books | Future Tense Books | Marriage Records | The Unwin-dunraven Literary Ecclesia
July 23rd, 2008
Writer’s Edge Faculty Reading | The collective literary fringe new and now.0 comments
July 16th, 2008
COMIC BOOK TATTOO, Various Artists | The Portland/Tori Amos/Sandman connection revealed.0 comments
July 9th, 2008
David Wroblewski, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle | It’s like Hamlet, but with puppies.2 comments
July 2nd, 2008
While They Slept, Kathryn Harrison | A triple murder hits close to home.1 comment
June 25th, 2008
Andre Dubus III, The Garden Of Last Days | A stripper, a big tipper and two towers.0 comments
June 18th, 2008
Sasa Stanisic, How The Soldier Repairs The Gramophone | What kids talk about when they talk about war.2 comments
June 18th, 2008
Joseph O’Neill Netherland | A new novel set in post-9/11 New York simply isn’t cricket (it’s Seinfeld).0 comments
June 11th, 2008
Betty Roberts, With Grit And By Grace | A woman on top, for all the right reasons.0 comments
June 4th, 2008
Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes | Finally, some valuable intelligence on the agency that was supposed to have provided it for us.0 comments
May 28th, 2008
Brendan Mullen, Live At The Masque | The burn-hot, burn-fast punk life, while it lasted.0 comments
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[March 19th, 2008]
March is Women’s History Month. It is Greek-American Month, Irish-American Month, Native American Heritage Month, Caffeine Awareness Month, Music In Our Schools Month, Mental Retardation Month and Foot Health Month. It is a month in favor of noodles and of sauce, a booster for peanuts and frozen foods. These things, we are told, might otherwise be forgotten.
Among these commemorations of the maybe-overlooked, March is also Small Press Month, as celebrated by Powell’s this Thursday, March 20, with Smallpressapalooza, a marathon reading featuring 15 independently published authors including the avant-lit legend Steve Katz and local bizarro-lit luminary Carlton Mellick III.
Small book presses are essentially indie labels for books: avenues for outsider voices, international fiction, experimental fiction and poetry of all stripes, for debut authors and even for more established literary treasures like William T. Vollman and Lydia Davis. Essentially, they print the stuff that the large corporate publishers—stung by years of low profits—are too gun-shy to print and promote.
As with albums on small music labels, books on small presses may be unlikely to be carried in suburban chain stores, and they are less likely to be reviewed. But small presses often also carry some of the more interesting stuff around, books that take risks and seem new rather than rehash last year’s chick- or dick-lit phenom. According to Lidia Yuknavitch, founder of Chiasmus Press and one of the readers at Smallpressapalooza, “there is a vital need for small presses because literature has become the product of high capitalism.... Small presses retain a kind of revolutionary interruptive energy.”
In the interests of exploring that energy, here’s a round-up (by no means exhaustive) of a few small- or micropresses in Portland you might not be familiar with.
^Clear Cut Press
Co-founded in 2001 by Richard Jensen (co-founder also of music label Up Records) and by local author Matthew Stadler, the literary imprint produces handsome, Japanese-printed softcovers of art, fiction or poetry. Small in both size and number (there are only nine so far), the books are not only good-looking but also meticulously curated in terms of content, to the extent they could sensibly be collected as a set.
Book to look out for: Orphans (2006), by Charles D’Ambrosio. These essays of moment and place have been compared to Joan Didion’s 1960s evocations of California, but don’t be fooled: D’Ambrosio is no prose minimalist, and he’s got none of Didion’s patrician reservations. The insight and close observation is there—those strange turns of mind and phrase that smack you upside the sinuses—but so too is a 24-page ode to pissing in the ocean and maybe eating part of a whale. You got me? Visit clearcutpress.com for more info.
^Chiasmus Press
Chiasmus is maybe the avant-punks in this crew—that is to say, punks with doctorates. Under Yuknavitch’s editorial mantle, the books are headlong and kinetic and often sexually ballsy (so to speak), yet also informed by critical reading and the breakdown of the normal kind of storytelling. You get the idea they’ve all read ’80s prose experimentalist Kathy Acker and want to mess you up from somewhere inside Michel Foucault’s big bald noggin.
Book to look out for: Frank, by R.M. Berry (2005) Berry’s Frank is demanding and ambitious and still somehow nuttily hilarious. The author calls this an “unwriting” of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, except that this time around the monster unleashed is language itself. Visit chiasmusmedia.net for more info.
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^Hawthorne Books
Hawthorne is perhaps the best organized of the Portland presses, and one of the few to devote itself to not only discovering new talent but also to bringing back from out-of-print titles by worthy authors such as Tom Spanbauer (Chuck Palahniuk’s mentor) and the unjustly disappeared Richard Wiley.
Book to look out for: Clown Girl, by Portlander Monica Drake (2006). What could have become a collection of quirks became here a Sherwood Anderson grotesquerie, some big allegory of the sorry show everybody puts on anyway. There are reasons Chuck Palahniuk is still jealous of her. Visit hawthornebooks.com for more info.
^Future Tense Books
As befits a press founded by someone who works at a bookstore (Powell’s Kevin Sampsell), the books on Future Tense are highly diverse, running the gamut from books on golf to Jemiah Jefferson’s celebrity fictions (St*rf*cker) to the blockbuster-ish teen memoirs of Ms. Zoe Trope (since picked up by Harper).
Book to look out for: Partial List of People to Bleach, by Gary Lutz (1997). Lutz is possibly the premier maker of the great American sentence, that twisty post-Gertrude-Stein thing that comes only from the turned stomach. Here’s the first one that ever got my attention: “From time to time I show up in myself just long enough for people to know that they are not in the room alone.” He’s our own little Beckett, and he knows how to make grammar an enemy. Visit futuretensebooks.com for more info.
^Marriage Records
Marriage doesn’t want to publish you. They put out music, but don’t want to record you. Marriage is sort of a limited-entry club, a means for a group of friends to put out the art they like by the people they like. Their series of unthemed book/journal editions, Veneer, is accordingly filled with seemingly everybody they know writing about anything.
Book to look out for: The Sky Position, by Tom Blood (2006) This one just got done winning an Oregon Book Award. Blood’s poems are a sort of grammatically indeterminate metaphysical play, punctuated often by a sudden burst of the immediate, as when “someone, a cool someone/ brought five pounds of roses in the trunk of a pinto hatchback/and then this was buried in your lawn, the car and everything.” Visit marriagerecs.com for more info.
^The Unwin-Dunraven Literary Ecclesia
The editors of UDLE—Garett Strickland, Ashley Edwards and Ashley Toliver—describe their enterprise as a “literary convergence.” As this has played out so far, it means they bring together both performance and publication, printing small numbered editions to coincide with quarterly readings held at the Mizpah Church, rather than hold poetry/prose readings as an after-the-fact promotion of something already published.
Book to look out for: Unwin Dunraven Quarterly, No. 1. The edition for UDLE’s inaugural reading series (March 2008) includes work by poets Joshua Marie Wilkinson and Noah Eli Gordon, a new favorite of mine. In Gordon’s poem “Ten Ways to Take Apart an Airplane,” Gordon asks, “Is this how you underline your way into the pantheon? Pegasus was a horse. The airplane, an automobile.” Visit unwin-dunraven.org for more info.
It's true I did try to get in touch (via telephone) on an admittedly very short time frame before the article, and unfortunately didn't succeed. Thus, in my passing plug for the project I did rely on my own apparently unreliable reading of Veneer, and upon editor A. Flint Jamison's perhaps coy characterization upon publication of the first edition (which included pieces covering asymptotic approaches to infinite technological growth, investigations of Mormonism, odes to online avatars, accounts of radiation incidents, ruminations on the essential character of Frenchness, and camera consumer reporting.) Mr. Jamison had written of the project: "Veneer has no focus. Kind of like the internet -- but we're the ones stealing it." (www.veneermagazine.com/info/safety-...) I did not look for then, nor still ever quite find a theme, but had considered the breadth of topics and somewhat decontextualized articles to be part of the appeal.
From e-mails about Veneer I'd received beginning with the launch of the project a year or so ago--in which Mr. Jamison talked about the friends with whom he was happy to be working--I apparently misinterpreted the process for how the writers for the issues were found/selected. I of course had not meant to even attempt a full account of his project in the limited space allotted, but regret that in my brief mention of it I made a mischaracterization. I would recommend to interested readers that they visit the site at www.veneermagazine.com to gain a more accurate picture, and to suss it out for themselves. [Disclosure: Mr. Jamison is the brother of a "personal friend" of mine, who is currently angry with me.]
As for limited entry: Marriage does indeed advise any band/writer who wants to be distributed by the label/press that they should instead "start their own label". This is just fine, of course, and I had assumed this to be meant in the same good humor and goodwill with which my brief mention of the label/press was written, by folks we'd really like to think don't take themselves so seriously. Because as it goes, clubhouses have by and large been a positive force in the world's imaginative life, as attested to by generations of improvisational carpenters, some of whom terrifically skilled. For example: Tom Blood, whom I know at least as much through his poetry and singular performances as through his relationships with close friends, and whom I was happy to see receive his recent award.
wow. matthew, thank you for your reconsideration here. i truly appreciate it. veneer is a complicated project for me and i doubt if i would be able to describe in a line or two with a deadline... no, i definitely wouldn't. i think inherent in any group there is a clubness especially when when made public or published. this is just part of what makes it a thing at all. i never think of it in a we/they way though. we are all in the same club here, when viewed from the gondola.
I wish Veneer well as a project--I've been poring over and puzzling through the 3rd Veneer over the past day or so, which I hadn't gotten to just yet. I find that the more I go through it the less that's assured I know how to say about it, which is generally discomfiting to a writer but otherwise an interesting experience.
the thing that most excited me about veneer 3 was this: veneermagazine.com/needs/03-pages/v...
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Seems like you're fighting for the same wonderful thing, guys. Veneer's actually the only one of these I've actually read. I can't say I always "get" it, but it always makes me feel jealous and unmodern when I pick it up, like I'm not doing enough to understand and encourage conspiracy and expertise and craft. Maybe it's a little intentionally obtuse in its process. So? I marvel at its swiftly tilting design and their disdain of hackery. And this is one of the more charming things I've read: www.veneermagazine.com/01-18/01/the...
would have been cool if you got a hold of me regarding our limited-entry club. heard you tried, but maybe there was a typo in the address? just so you know though, matthew, you are especially way off on veneer. its content is determined according to an unusually strict theme, or rubric more exactly, and filled with articles by people whom we've never met.
as far as working with friends, it's true! everyone i've worked with over the past 15 years has become a friend (with the exception of veneer, of course, whose writers are strangers to me). guilty! in the future i will try and make more enemies out of those with whom i work.
glad you could at least recognize the talent in tom, "a personal friend of yours" as i remember you writing on the book awards article.
curtis knapp.