The Morel of the Story – Urban Foraging with Bryan Dowkes

On Wednesday, May 8, 2019, I went on a whimsical urban foraging walk with about a dozen people under the expert guidance of Bryan Dowkes, a forager, educator and writer who runs a group called Foraged Ottawa [Meet Up: Ottawa Foraging: Wild Plant and Mushroom Walks].

We met at Strathcona Park near the Adawe Crossing Bridge.

It was a great day for a walk near the river, still a bit chilly but sunny and dry. Bryan started by sharing some foraging books, including The Forager’s Feast:  How to Identify, Gather, and Prepare Wild Edibles by Leda Meredith, which he said was a great intro to foraging. For some reason this made me think of The Worrier’s Feast by Wax Mannequin. In fact during the walk, I found myself thinking of songs that went with a few of the plants we talked about. There needs to be an urban foraging playlist! 

dandelion bud

The walk took us from Strathcona Park to beneath the bridge at the Queensway, almost to Hurdman and back, about 4 kms, give or take my walking time there. We covered 14 different plants on the official tour and a few more on the way back from the tour. It was a lot of fun and very whimsical. I made a few puns (see title), and made a little small talk with fellow tour participants.

Here are a few of my photos and notes. Any inaccuracies or errors are all mine.

One of the key things I learned during the walk was that it is important to understand a plant’s entire cycle. I was delighted to discover, for example, that dandelions begin as buds that are edible and delicious. I should mention that we were advised to be careful about eating the plants in the park or surrounding area due to dogs, traffic, etc. 

wild violets

We saw and discussed dandelions, garlic mustard, Japanese knotweed (which tastes a little like rhubard – Bryan gave us samples from knotweed he’d already cleaned., wild violets, day lilies, burdock, trout lilies, motherwort, ground ivy, white pine, mullen, mica cap mushrooms, wintercress, and stinging nettle.

mica cap mushrooms

Bryan with spring pesto

Bryan kindly offered us some of his delicious spring pesto, made with wild leeks, stinging nettles and garlic mustard. It was really garlicky, but had no garlic in it. Yum. Recipe is on the Foraged Ottawa FB page.

spring ephemeral – fragments from a walk

Inside a locket worn by

Napoloean, a strand of

Josephine’s hair and dried

violet petals

let’s feast until the demise

of a day lily’s bloom

we will stuff it with goat cheese,

drink dandelion wine

tasty new growth abounds

but there is poison too

pay close attention to the

margins of the leaf

cut the violets as if you’re

a barber or a deer

disturbed soil

a recipe for wild horseradish

unfettered pony

heart-shaped beliefs

escaped colonies

the endangered trout lily

tenderly discussed

foraging is an all season love affair

but I would like a fling

I do like bitter things

beware forager’s certainty

palmate leaves shaped like the hand

with five fingers five leaves

numbers and nature

the properties of pine pollen

lamb’s ear

fuzzy leaves

gregarious mushrooms

if you cut them they will bleed

If you have the chance, I encourage you to attend one of Bryan’s walks. He’s knowledgeable and friendly. The walk was great fun. Visit the Meet Up group or the Facebook page to find out more details.

2018 Favs - Music

2018 Fav Albums

I wrote a piece for the music section of Queen Mob’s Teahouse entitled 5 for coping about 5 of these albums that go together thematically for me. Thanks to Mehda Singh for her patience and editing advice, all of which I took gratefully.

And here are my list of favourites from the 28 albums I acquired in 2018

in order of release…

Superorganism, Superorganism (Domino, Hostess, March)

Haley Heynderickx, I Need to Start a Garden (Mama Bird Recording, March)

Jeremy Dutcher, Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa (Jeremy Dutcher/Fontana North, April)

I Only Ever Listen To the Mountain Goats – All Hail West Texas, various artists

(Merge Records, April)

Snail Mail, Lush (Matador Records, June)

Anna Calvi – Hunter (Domino Recording Company, August)

Conyer Clayton and Nathanaël Larochette, if the river stood still

(Independent, August)

Jennifer Pederson, White Chalk (Independent, August)

Jim Bryson, Tired of Waiting (Coax Records, September)

Rachael Yamagata, Porch Songs (Sony Music Entertainment, October)

Subhraj Singh, Coughing Into My Elbow (Independent, November)

boygenius, boygenius (Matador Records, November)

Ex : Re, Ex : Re (Glassnote Records, November)

Poets Conyer Clayton and Ryan Pratt, two friends who are also music fans, shared lists of their own with me on Twitter. Our combined musical loves for 2018 are on this Spotify playlist.

This is my last favourites entry of 2018. I wish all of you a happy new year. I hope 2018 is joyous, productive, full of love and light. Thanks for reading.

A Year of Whimsy

A book can be almost anything. It can be a piece of paper you pleat like a fan with a single word written on every page. It can be an out-of-date guide book salvaged from the trash, remade by pasting into it images and passages snipped from old magazines. It can be a stack of lottery tickets and theatre tickets and numbered tickets from the meat counter at the store, hole-punched and gathered on a key ring. It can be three autumn leaves tied together with a piece of blue thread.

                                    --Leah Hager Cohen as quoted in the Fairytale Museum by Susannah M. Smith (Invisible Publishing, 2018)

At the end of 2017, I made a new year’s resolution to create individual handmade books in 2018. This plan was in keeping with my general creative and life mission of doing things for the sake of whimsy, exploration and connection. These words are even on my business card.

I thought the project could satisfy all three. For me, whimsy means embracing a spirit of playfulness. I am influenced by Maurice Sendak and Edward Gorey and Lewis Carroll and Carl Jung and Leonora Carrington and Djuna Barnes and a host of other great writers and artists, including contemporaries, such as Caroline Bergvall, Gary Barwin and Steve Venright. Play for me is an important part of my artistic practice and just makes life more fun.

Exploration is pretty straight-forward. It’s about keeping one’s mind open and trying different things, even when that little voice inside says you can’t do this because you don’t have the skills, or some version thereof. I don’t usually have an issue with writer’s block. In my opinion, the way through any kind of artistic block, aside from being around as much art as you can be, is to create and to try different media.

Connection is about connecting with kindred misfits. Those who don’t feel they fit in to conventional society.  This is a constant concern of mine because loneliness is my constant companion. I combat it by doing things like this. I know I am not alone, she says with irony, in feeling lonely and estranged from typical societal values.

My plan was to make twenty-six books over the year and give them to kindreds, keeping one for myself. What ended up happening was that it took my only half the year to create the books because I got excited and couldn’t stop playing.

Once I finished the books, I had to get them to the various recipients. Not all of them were local and some of the ways I contained the work made mailing a bit of a challenge.

Below is an inventory of the books of whimsy and some notes on my philosophies throughout the process of creating them.

 1.         Content: collage combined with unpublished poem; newspaper and found pages; Cover: photo from previous year’s calendar; Binding; staples; Size: 5.5 x 8 “;

Process: glue;

Notes: I am terrible with glue. It gets everywhere and makes a huge mess. Later on I figured out how to use a paintbrush to apply the glue and that helped a bit. But I still made a mess. I just stopped worrying about it.

2.         Content: published story, collage

            Cover: male angel art;

            Binding: staples;

            Size: 5.5 x 8”    Process: glue.

3.         Content: unpublished fairy story; black pages; gold ink; collage, and paint;      Cover: black with gold ink;   Binding: rings;  Size: 8.5 x 11; Process: frustrated with glue, I used coloured tape and duct tape.      Notes: the tape unstuck itself and the book needed significant repair / glue.

4.         Content: unpublished song parody;

            Cover: black paper, gold ink

            Binding: wire and beads

            Size: 4 x 6 “

            Process: tape and duct tape;

Notes: first book made specifically with someone in mind who had requested a book of whimsy.

5.         Content: found poem from cut out lines from magazines and collage;

            Cover: black paper, silver ink;

            Binding: ring;

            Size: 4 x 6”;

            Process: transparent tape;

6.         Content: collage and erasure poems on file folders;

            Cover: acrylic paint;

            Binding: staples;

            Size: 8.5 x 11”;

            Process: glue (trying again with more success).

 7.         Content: pencil crayon drawings and vispo, rubber stamps and quotes;

            Cover: acrylic paint;

            Binding: staples;

            Size 11 x 17 folded into 8.5 x 11;

            Process: direct drawing and printing; Note: while some of the content of the books is previously composed and saved on my computer, some of it is ephemeral, which means only the recipient of the book will have a copy and not me. I like the idea of creating ephemeral work. It goes against the traditional notion of publishing as the value of multiple copies and permanence. It’s possible that an idea that occurred to me during the creation of an ephemeral work will worm its way into another work that I save and attempt to publish, but not essential.

 8.         Content: unpublished haiku written with red marker;

            Cover: fancy paper scrap;

Binding: envelope style with silver ring and yellow silk wool wound around the book.

Size: 8.5 x 11 landscape

Process: individual sheets and some glue;

Note: I had the concept for this book in mind for a month or so and even wrote a little bit of its opening in the previous book.

9.         Content: wrote out quotes and long poem written in pencil on torn paper;

            Cover: torn paper;

            Binding: staples;

            Size: 4 x 8 “;

            Process: stapled pages together first, then filled them.

10.       Content: handwritten guide, no other copies;

            Cover: acrylic paint;

            Binding: staples;

            Size: 4 x 5 “;

11.       Content: postcards and watercolour paint – imaginary correspondence; ephemeral;

            Cover: red box with blue box inside; gold ink;

            Binding: no additional binding;

            Size: 6.5 x 4.5 x 2.5 “

            Note: I loved using these boxes and will probably do more projects with them. I also began to use watercolour paints and fell in love with them.

12.       Content: watercolour cards and abecedarian;

            Cover: yellow box with green box inside; black ink;

            Binding: no additional binding;

            Size: 6.5 x 4.5 x 2.5 in.

13.       Content: watercolour, quotes and music;

            Cover: pink box and yellow box inside; silver ink;

            Binding: no additional binding;

            Size: 6.5 x 4.5 x 2.5 in.

14.       Content: tiny chapbook with unpublished but recorded poems;

            Cover: small red box, gold ink;

            Binding: no additional binding;

            Size:  4 x 2.

15.       Content: Dark Pines under Water by Gwendolyn MacEwen; watercolour postcards;

            Cover: magic marker painted on envelope;

            Binding: no additional binding;

            Size: 4 x 8;

Note: I sealed the envelope after I made the book and had no recollection of what it contains. Mysteriously, the envelope became unstuck, probably owing to the humidity.

16.       Content: individual watercolour prints and handwriting of The Red Bird You Wait For by Gwendolyn MacEwen;

            Cover: doodled envelope;

            Binding: no additional binding;

            Size: 8.5 x 11;

Note: see 15. Lesson learned. Although also quite whimsical; the recipient made a lovely video of the work, which was seen by another friend on FB. I made a similar work for him.

17.       Content: the summer of blue, a story written in blue fountain pen on blue paper;

            Cover: old incense tube;

            Binding: no additional binding;

            Size: 8.5 x 14;

            Note: it’s fun to look at potential unorthodox containers for the books of whimsy.

 18.       Content: essential reads and matching teas; list typed up;

            Cover: old incense tube;

            Binding: no additional binding;

            Size: 8.5 x 14.

19.       outtake

            Content: cut up paper dolls with words

            Cover: envelope and gold ink;

            Binding: no additional binding;

            Size: 4 x 4;

            Process: learned how to make a paper doll chain and did it badly;

Note: I wasn’t entirely comfortable with this one; while I’m ok with failure as part of my process, this seemed too messed up to me. I gave it to the final recipient because I figured it would be fun for the final person to receive the outtakes.

19.       Content: previous project long poem with art;

            Cover: nice paper with gold ink;

            Binding: staples;

            Size: 8.5 x 11;

            Note: an old project resurrected with someone in mind.

20.       outttake

Content: another freaky cut up with the dolls and paper flowers plus a poem for added value;

Cover: envelope; silver ink;

Binding: no additional binding;

Size: 4 x 6;

Note: same as 19 outtake.

20.       Content: long collaborative poem and photos; not published but stored on my computer;

            Cover: photo;

            Binding: staples

            Size 5.5 x 8;

            Note: made specifically with someone in mind, the collaborator.

 21.       Content: abstract photoshop art and scraps of lines from random poems recorded;   Cover: abstract photo shop art; silver ink;  Binding: staple;

            Size: 7 x 7.   22:       Content: pencil crayoned characters – no copies;

            Cover: nice paper, black ink;

            Binding: staples;

            Size: 5.5 x 8

            Note: I’m a terrible drawer; all of these characters have no hands, but somehow they have character and are interesting when combined with my imagination. I hope.  23:       Content: watercolour and drawn characters; black ink; no copies;

            Cover: nice paper; black ink;

            Binding: staples;

            Size: 5.5 x 8;

            Note: I wanted to explore more characters and try watercolours; this one isn’t a particularly happy one. I might have to add a letter of warning.

24.       Content: photos taken over a year or so and new prose poems (recorded on my computer);

            Cover: photo; gold ink;

            Binding: staples;

            Size: 11 x 17, folded in half.

 25.       Content: art and previously written poems, excerpt;

            Cover: photoshop art;

            Binding: staples;

            Size: 5.5 x 8.

            Note: I made this with someone in mind.

26.       Content: this essay and inventory;

            Cover: old incense tube;

            Binding: no additional binding;

            Size: 8.5 x 11;

            Note: it seemed important to wrap up the project with thoughts on the process and some record of what the books were. I took a few photos on Instagram but that’s all I plan. What the recipients do with these boxes of whimsy when they receive them is up to them. I will either mail them or give them to them in person. It is my hope that some people will end up creating more whimsy and sharing it with fellow kindreds. To quote Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are: “let the wild rumpus start!”

 Post-script

For local recipients, I handed out the books of whimsy at my home, in food courts, cafes and restaurants over cocktails, dhal, dumplings, in their homes, and at readings. It took until December, 2018 for me to distribute the books. The books found homes in Ottawa in Hintonburg, Alta Vista, Lower Town, Orleans, West Ottawa, Mountain, Montreal, Gatineau, Alberta, British Columbia, Hamilton, Toronto, Welland, and Paris, France.

I didn’t make the books with any kind of response in mind, nor did I have expectations of any kind. I just wanted to share the books and celebrate whimsy with kindreds. I had some lovely surprises, including a request for a book, a video made of one book and one of the recipient’s children making me my own book of whimsy, which was such a touching response.

 Both the process and the content have inspired new ideas, including the novel I began

in August.

At times of anxiety and trouble, I found it helpful to work on the books. The process

and colour soothed and distracted me.

I’ve begun volume 2, which is mostly maniacal doodling in pre-made sketch

books. I’m not putting any deadline or expectations on the project this time, other than

I’ll make 26 of them and give them out as they’re finished.

 I encourage you to make your own whimsy (MYOW) and give it away to others, so that
they can make their own and share it. A kind of whimsical domino effect of art and
whimsy and exploration and connection. We’re all kindreds in one way or another. 

 Thanks to all of the recipients for accepting these books of whimsy. 

above/ground press 2 - more fav chapbooks of 2018

above/ground press 2018 – part, the second

Jenna Jarvis, year of pulses (July)

Yes, I’m biased. I’ve loved Jenna’s poetry since we first published her on Bywords.ca seven years ago and I had the chance to help edit her first poetry chapbook, The Tiger with the Crooked Mouth (Bywords, 2013).

There are only six poems in this chapbook. They are quirky and smart and humorous at times. I had to look up words.  Expectation is suspect, and beauty is paired with ugliness: “kantō” “the mall punks sulk at a deluge/they’re expected to crave//but rain binds them and clouds/of fresh smoke to the entrance//I vomit over an empty stomach…” There’s a feistiness: “we decided that la famiglia was/a mob of stone butches who sulked in parking lots…” (24 Fried Foods You Have To Try In This Lifetime) so yes, lots of sulking in public spaces.

There’s lots of pairing in these poems: beauty with ugliness, local with international places, humour with frankness.

Jason Christie, glass language (excerpt) (July)

Also biased, I like Jason’s poetry and on rare occasions we have coffee together. I can hear his voice as I read this. He astonishes right from the beginning: “Writing it’s like/Snowfall,…” and “poems like/the look of molten metal/or friendship.” You think: “weird, but …yeah…” There’s a sweetness too in the way Jason lets his life into the poem: “Hey Emmett Starts daycare” and “kindness is a child full of packed weather, grammar in a tide he calls joy a rock/we coalesce”

I love the accumulation of odd similes and light, the lack of articles doesn’t make for telegram type lines as it sometimes does in some poetry. here they would detract from the associative feel. Weather is here. the word “Unbegun” is repeated. “i have no time to have time.” I feel empathy. This language as fragile as glass, but also containing a lot and looking beautiful in the light.

Bill Mavreas, A Mercy of Signs (August)

11 black and white visual poems made no doubt through a manual process, perhaps copied multiple times. Mercy towards imperfection as seen in drip, imperfect black lines, degradation of image, bleed of black and grey, overlap of keys, such beautiful signs. Also while I haven’t made note of most memorable readings of the year, Billy’s interpretation / explanation of his process during the above/ground press 25^th anniversary celebration last August was wondrous and bears mentioning.

Stephen Brockwell, Immune to the Sacred (August)

I have been a great admirer of Stephen’s writing for many years and include this chapbook as a reason why. The poems in the chapbook balance reflection and depth with play and vigour.  These poems address border crossings, the environment, social media, immigration, personal history, the wonder of nature, metaphysics. These are comments on nature vs technology or man vs nature depicted in ironic wonder and beauty. “so many colours even the worst days/are flecked with one beautiful/but toxic unrecycled utterance” in “Convocation Address.”

There are poems in which we see the subject as a manipulator of nature for his own sake, such as in “Sad Child, Happy Child,”: “You logged an old forest/to clear a small plot/for your cottage. The flames a beautiful sight,/the stumps a fine source of fuel.” Or in “Silent Uses for Trees” in which we find the title of the chapbook when the speaker talks about cutting down a tree for Christmas: “Peter spooled the saw up/through the branches./Swaying, he topped the crown./Maybe we’re immune to the sacred./ […] We burned the tree on New Year’s Eve.”

There’s a wryness to these poems, which respond to contemporary politics, the destruction of the environment and social media. For example in the poem, “Questionable Social Media Metaphor” in which the social media cliché of migrant children interned in camps have been likened to butterflies: “I won’t shake my fist/in a public square./Your neighbour won’t. One of his kids might,/Ashley not Cam. Look: a hummingbird/darting between the columbines and panies/patriotic blooms for July!”

One of the things that impresses me about Stephen’s poetry is his ability to move from understatedness to emotion without seeming to be emotional at all. For example the poem, “Ceiling” beings by talking about a corporate ceiling and moves to the speaker’s “mother’s ceiling” to a wish to burn down the house. The emotion builds and builds until it explodes. I admire this type of control. It strengthens the poem. And it echoes some of the techniques used in Stephen’s last book, “All of Us Reticent, Here Together” (Mansfield Press, 2016) which uses various methods to deal with trauma, including accumulation.

The poems in this chapbook contain specific and unflinching descriptions.

“Out of the shell,/slugs make their way through/human tracts,//hasty, eviscerating.” in “My South Florida Vacation.”

There’s plenty of humour and word play in the collection. “all the fallen angels/eat ripe damson plums/and watch Ted Danson wash glasses.” in “We all have Wants.”

“Immune to the Sacred” is a collection of poems that refuses the view of the world as if through rose-coloured glasses or perhaps accepts that these glasses probably were made by sacrificing something in nature. The speaker of these poems has rejected Pangloss’s optimistic philosophy and is embracing a shared culpability for the state of the world, perhaps one could say he is attempting to cultivate his own garden.

Might there be a final part 3? Let's hope so. I still have a stack of chapbooks to go through.

above/ground press 2018 – a few favs so far

The 25^th anniversary means a lot of celebrating to do. My magazine folder overfloweth. I start the day thinking I have too many above/ground press chapbooks. I decide to cull. I haven’t had a chance yet to read the chapbooks published in 2018 as part of the subscription package, so I start to do this. This is one of my December rituals. The problem is…I can’t give away or throw any of them out, as usual. I like too many of them immediately and the others I know I’ll probably enjoy when I have more patience, more time. So I have to put them on the shelves. Here are a few favs so far from the early months of the year. I shall write more about others later, all being well.

Adrienne Gruber, Gestational Trail (February)

There’s something beautiful and exotic about this suite of poems that are set on the West Coast Trail in BC. Gestational because the speaker of the poem is pregnant during this hike. For example, in Darling to Tsusiat Falls, we learn of another woman who hadn’t realized she still carried a fetus and delivered it. There are apt and unique descriptions: “Boots etch the sand” and “A potato singes my palm” in Tsusiat Falls to Cribs. I love the sensuality of the work and feel compassion for the speaker, who wants “a cold crisp one so badly, dense with wheat and calories” in Cribs to Walbran and wipes “between thighs/wince until the paper comes out clear.” in Tsusiat Falls to Cribs.

Gary Barwin and Tom Prime, gravitynipplemilk (March)

I enjoy Gary’s work and especially the collaborations. Admittedly we did a vispo collab together (Bone Sapling, AngelHousePress 2014). A Gary Barwin production often contains antlers and this chapbook is no exception. These are poems to smile over and exclaim! This chapbook is fearlessly silly and there’s something profound about the poems too: “mountains are nothing but light/nothing but light and argument” in Rain Song. It would be easy to dismiss the work here because of this delightful play, but don’t do it. I don’t know Tom’s work at all but I know that often behind the silly in Gary’s work lies a depth and compassion for the world that bears paying attention to. Such is the case here in this collaboration. These are contemplative, metaphysical poems with a heaping spoonful of humour: “we’re all a little greasy/carbon, fallen angels, gold---//it’s a lot of pressure/capitalism: “Take my life…please” in Dial the Dinosaur Option

Gary Barwin and Alice Burdick, Pleasure Bristles (March)

Another collab? cool, cool. When chameleonic wordsmith GB grafts his shapeshifting skills onto another surreal amiga, AB, styles change yet again. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still loads of silly here, but there’s more macabre as well, more creepy: “how would you choose to live if/the world was a forest of large-headed clowns?” in Release the Tortoises. There are pale ghosts and detached hands, old gods who scream, red moons. These are dreamy moonpoems.

Alice Notley, UNDO (March)

I read the Descent of Alette last year and now I’m hooked on Alice Notley. I like the largeness, the largesse of these poems, not overly wordy but generous in their description and what they reveal about the speaker. They move from micro (description of emotion and states “Almost sticky grace envelopes you in Jan 8) to macro (philosophy): “Like fingertips or pebbled surface knowing a mirror’s essence” in Malorum Sanatio. Blurred vision causes a dream of “spontaneous irregular spirals” and vision and streetlamps to look crooked in Souls on Métro while the speaker is tired “of having separate senses”. There is a breathlessness in the unpunctated Alice’s Soul and the accumulation of the long poem Malorum Sanatio. It is incantatory with gorgeous bits such as “I had no form before I was madly born” and “I remember being this soul the spy and savior”. 

These poems are haunting. They are compassionate. They acknowledge the world’s brutality and our shared sense of trauma. Sometimes, like in Green and Gold, they are heartbreaking and breathtaking: “I can a savior save you collage of fishers/Whose eyes are     outer space   magenta   fiery for/               Green gold cerise”.  I love the colour here and in Agonites. There’s something about the way the poet disorders conventional syntax here that is so masterful, so brilliant. I am full of envy. As she writes in Undo, the title track, as they say, “To let poetry inhabit your body is to heal yourself.” I am inhabited. I am not healed, but healing…I could go on and quote line after line, these poems are exactly what I  need/ed: “we’re all     poetry because   we’re compressed and lyrical” in All The Souls In The Cigar Box.

Sean Braune, The Cosmos (March)

Biased perhaps because AngelHousePress published Sean’s the Story of Lilith but I really enjoy Sean’s word play, sense of humour and eccentric associations. This is part of a larger work called “accelerated reading,” “a frenetic reading practice of the text.” I find myself reading that way too and laughing over a line here, a line there, skimming a bit. In this chapbook and with this concept, the author gives readers his permission to skim. I appreciate that and so I do from this long poem that shows the absurdity of the cosmetics industry and advertising by isolating and remixing ad excerpts…

“one smooth swipe emma stone wears HD gladiolus love”

“you’re fearless you’re worth it/live in copper”

“light lime lemon-ade-rita fiesta”

“road trip picture it:/   you your girls four wheels and one wild ride outside your fashion comfort zone”

“now the world is my runway, klondike”

kate siklosi, po po poems (April)

It’s great to see younger poets making visual poetry and it’s great to see small press publishers, such as above/ground press (who published my own The Vispo Bible: Mark this year) publishing vispo. These are energetic, sophisticated and elegant Letraset works. Very few visual poets I know of work with Letraset because it’s becoming harder to find.

More later…in the meantime, shouldn’t you subscribe?

The Chapbook As An Ephemeral Publication

I made the decision recently to end chapbook publication for AngelHousePress/DevilHouse. I did this because the time, and energy required to produce chapbooks is taking its toll. I am finding that I have less and less time for my own writing and something had to go. So I chose chapbook publication.

In the meantime, I’m seeing people talk about the chapbook on social media. Some feel that limited editions are not reasonable. They talk about scarcity economics and seeing the chapbook as a commodity. I am normally on the side of abundance, certainly in love and desire, I believe that both are infinite, but like everyone else I understand that time, energy and money are not infinite.

I see the chapbook as a fling rather than a marriage. It’s a medium for experimentation.

For AngelHousePress/DevilHouse, we make 50 copies and don’t do reprints. We could either reprint a sold out chapbook or work on something new, introducing a new writer to our readers. I chose to do the latter. I didn’t ever want to be just a printer, folder, stapler, mailer. I wanted to publish writers who were either working in new ways from their usual or those who were just starting to experiment with words, form, content.

I don’t believe that my aesthetic should be adopted by other small presses. I have complete admiration and love for above/ground press, Ottawa’s local chapbook publishing engine that could, run by my dear friend and publisher, rob mclennan. He’s published 6 chapbooks of mine and I’m grateful. I love that he makes print runs of 250 and 300 copies and has a healthy list of subscribers, including me, who receive these great chapbooks, and that he hands them out freely to other writers, editors and publishers. This is marvelous, but we’re talking about a pretty much superhuman effort and devotion to the chapbook and to the writers he publishes. We’re talking about 25 years and 12-hour days at a copying machine, we’re talking about a whole room devoted to chapbook storage in a house he and his wife own.

Not everyone has that devotion, superpower or owns their own home. Not everyone can spend that much money, time and energy on such activity. I can’t. And more importantly, I won’t.

I admire publishers such as Apt. 9 Press who create chapbooks by hand-sewing them and even sometimes do letterpress designs. These are gorgeous and limited editions. Sometimes Cameron Anstee, who runs Apt. 9, will also do reprints. I respect that too. I hope these additional print runs sell out so that he has room to make more chapbooks.

New Ottawa presses have started up in the last few years. They run the gamut from folded and stapled to handsewn, from the traditional 5.5 x 8.5 size to variations, to broadsides with little seeds inside for planting. The point is that there are many ways to make and publish chapbooks. I respect and support all the different ways there are.

I respect the work of the writers we have published, but the only time a run sells out is when they buy it out or they promote the hell out of the work and their friends and family buy it. Many writers take only their 10 complementary copies and buy no more (at half price for authors), nor do they promote the work at all. In at least two cases, I haven’t even received an acknowledgment or thank you from the author upon receipt of the work.

AngelHousePress/DevilHouse chapbooks have never been shortlisted for any awards, and very occasionally have they been reviewed. My taste as an editor is not mainstream. I like raw stuff, ragged edges and rebels. I am not a huge fan of minimalism as a chief aesthetic. I like accumulation, hems and haws, flaws, broken fragments. I love the attempt.

Both AngelHousePress and DevilHouse will continue to exist in the form of online activity where we get a lot of unique views and response. I admit that none of these online initiatives have received awards or reviews either, but that’s standard in the literary world.

I have no more room in my apartment cupboards to store chapbooks. If I’d made more than 50 copies, I would probably have had to throw out books at this stage and I never want to do that. Instead AngelHousePress/DevilHouse has published great titles and some of them are sold out. Some of them are still in my cupboards though and I’d like you to read through the descriptions on the site and support the authors by buying their work.

We’re having a 2 for 1 sale right now. Please visit https://angelhousepress.com/index.php?Chapbooks and http://devilhousepress.com/index.php?Debauchery to see what great chapbooks you can get at the low price of $3-5 per chapbook. Yes, you probably won’t find most of these authors in the pages of CanLit or at galas in snazzy clothes. You’ll find them at work on their next creation. And if you come across a title that is sold out, Google the writer and buy their other creations. The important thing is that readers support writers and writers create work that resonate for readers. Not all readers are going to enjoy the odnik prose of DevilHouse or the quirky pomes of AngelHousePress, but maybe you will. Give it a shot.

Once I’ve accomplished all the tasks on my 2018 to do list, I shall revisit returning to offering the AngelHousePress Close Reading Service for New Women and Gender Queer Poets and I may even expand it. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, support your local and not so local chapbook presses. Buy the chapbooks and review them on GoodReads or other places that review chapbooks, such as Arc Poetry Magazine and Broken Pencil Magazine. The chapbook is an excellent little book that kicks against the mainstream pricks and gives you something you won’t find in Chapters or on Amazon.