the cassandra pages

Not too late!

One little plug for Phoenicia Publishing before the holidays are totally upon us -- and a thank you to all my blog readers who've been so supportive and have bought books or music over the past year. I appreciate you more than I can possibly say!

Here's a link to the  Phoenicia Fall_Winter 2014 newsletter which includes a gift suggestion list and a special holiday offer, valid for direct orders between now and the end of the year. I can't believe it, but we've got over 20 titles now, and some exciting ones to come in 2015. Independent publishing is not a money-making endeavor, but it's a definite labor of love and a perfect fit for my particular skills at this point in life. I'm very proud of what we've accomplished so far, and so pleased to note that most of the authors and artists I've worked with at Phoenicia are people I've met over the years through this blog and through qarrtsiluni. So grateful for that!

Note

It's the last few days for the special launch offer on Jonathan's new book, How Many Roads? so if you had been thinking about ordering a copy for yourself or as a gift for someone, you have until November 1 to receive the special price. Quite a few readers and friends of this blog have ordered copies and we can't thank you enough. I hope I've written a personal note to everyone, because your support and interest are hugely appreciated.

Launch

This party was for the launch of Jonathan's new book How Many Roads?, but it was also, for us, a symbolic moment to celebrate our first ten years in Montreal and the sense that we have truly settled: we've never had an open studio party before, inviting our friends to see where we work and spend so much of our time, and for this party we really cleaned and reorganized the place, so it feels newly special to us too. Above, some of the guests are listening to Jonathan speaking about the project, and how grateful he was to everyone for being there with us to celebrate.

When I said a few words about myself and Phoenicia, I mentioned how I had never been the same as J. or some of the other guests who had always known from an early age exactly what they wanted to do with their lives -- mine has always been a question of trying to balance a bunch of different interests and struggling with the problems that created. It's only been since moving here, in the past decade, I said, that I've finally felt all the threads of my life coming together, with a sense of integration -- and it was quite wonderful to look out and see these friends who represent the different parts of my life -- artists, writers, musicians, gardeners, neighbors, family, friends who share a spiritual path, all of whom have come from many different parts of the world -- and to be bringing out this book from a publishing venture that also brings together many of the things I do that formerly felt separate. In the end, I said, it wasn't "success" that mattered, but giving yourself fully to things that you are passionate about, and sharing that with people you love.

J. gets smooches from our friend who blogs as Duchesse at Passage des perles.

Our niece came up from New Hampshire the day before to help us, and we couldn't have done it without her. We also had a lot of help from friends: here's some of the gorgeous food arranged (and photographed) by Priya Sebastien.

The author/photographer inscribes a book.

Happy guests.

 More food beautifully arranged by Priya, with a Middle Eastern flavour.

The guests devoured a carrot cake, iconic of the 1960s (that was in the absence of  the even more iconic brownies of that era.)

And here we are with screenwriter Martine Pagé (Ni Vu Ni Connu) who helped hugely by handling the sales during the party. She and her partner Ed Hawco (Blork Blog), who took these and many other photos as a gift for us that evening, were our first friends in Montreal and we've stayed fast friends ever since -- not surprisingly, we met through blogging!

How Many Roads?

It's finally here! After three years of effort, I'm thrilled to announce that Jonathan's book of photographs of the turbulent years of the late 1960s and early 70s, How Many Roads? is finally launched. In addition to the book's 91 sepia-toned photographs, it contains an introduction by Teju Cole, essays by Steve Tozer, Hoyt Alverson, and myself, and a preface by Jonathan.

We've published it in both a paperback version and a limited-edition hardcover, with or without a signed photographic print. The books will be available for pre-order at special prices through the end of October. Paperbacks will ship soon, hardcovers at the end of the month. All the details are on the Phoenicia Publishing website.

We hope you'll take a look; this book would be a good gift for anyone who remembers or is curious about the 60s, or who'd like their children to know what it was like. (And, of course, it could be a great passive-aggressive gift for someone you know who voted for Nixon!)

This past Wednesday, we held a lancement (launch party) at our studio, which meant that we had to clean and reorganize it -- for the first time, really, since we moved in. So not only do we feel like we have a book we're proud of, but we've got a studio that feels almost new.

For my own part, I'm extremely happy this project is finally out in the world. The book's title, drawn from the Bob Dylan song, not only echoes one of the book's sub-themes -- what the interstates did to rural New England -- it also describes the circuitous path we've been on to this point! Jonathan and I have done so many publishing projects for clients and other people in the past that it makes me very happy to finally see some of his own work collected permanently in book form. It's part of his own photographic legacy, and it's also social documentation of an important period in American history that has a good deal to say to us today. Although these photos were taken before we met, our experiences of that time were similar. The process of revisiting this part of my own past has been both interesting and fruitful: I understand more about how I was shaped by these events, and also about the fateful turns our world has taken since then. Meanwhile, the accounts of the people and events of those years are already becoming simplified, distilled, and distorted -- or so it seems to me. Even recent history deserves a closer and more first-hand look than the textbooks are likely to give.

A CD in the Making

Back in late November, J. and I traveled to Boston, and the studios of WGBH, for the third and final day of a recording session for a disc Phoenicia would be publishing in early 2014. The CD would contain two recent works for solo piano by our friend, composer Jon Appleton: The Scarlatti Doubles and The Couperin Doubles. I knew both sets of pieces well; Jon had sent me drafts and final copies as .pdf files during the months he was composing them, and I had tried them out myself on the piano. Some of the Scarlatti Doubles were technically beyond me, but by the time of the recording, I was pretty familiar with all the pieces.

Jon engaged a young Korean-American pianist, Minkyung Oh, to record the works, and they had met several times and had numerous discussions about the music and interpretation. When J. and I arrived in Boston, nearly all of the recording was already done; all that remained were the editing and one section of one piece to be recorded again.

I've been involved in several recordings, as a choir singer and instrumental player in large ensembles, and in my earlier days doing advertising for New England Digital, makers of the Synclavier, a leading music synthesizer and editing workstation, I'd visited a lot of recording studios in L.A., New York and other cities during photo sessions. A prior disc of Jon's music that was also published by Phoenicia was comprised of works recorded at the Moscow Conservtory. Banquet celeste, a collection of contemporary liturgical music for choir and organ that our choir put out a few years ago, was the result of four long nights of painstaking recording; I sang in the choir, J. took photographs, and we designed the packaging and a commemorative book inside, but the editing was done by the director and his engineer.

So this was the first time I'd been directly involved in the production and editing process. The engineer, Frank Cunningham (above, center), is a consummate professional who knew exactly what he was doing. Minkyung (below, right) and Jon (below, center) had both reviewed the raw recording takes from the previous two nights, and had their lists of edits ready. During the long night of editing, the four of us worked together, with the scores, to come as close to perfection as we could, while J. documented the process. (That's his photo below, the other two are mine.)

As in all artistic creative processes, one of the most difficult decisions is when to stop. Perfection in music probably isn't achievable, but the astounding capacity of digital recording and editing makes it tempting to try. When we stopped at 10:00 pm, we were all exhausted, but happy with the results. Minkyung's performance had been extraordinary: brilliant, virtuosic, but also extremely sensitive. Without that to begin with, no editing process in the world can make a great recording. All we were really doing was very fine-tuning.

It was a fascinating and challenging experience for me, and something I'd like to do again. I have a pretty good ear, but that eveing I was pushed to listen in a different way; in addition my role was to help faciliate our work as a team. Reflecting on the process afterwards, it was clear to me that I had been drawing on a lifetime of skills, and wouldn't have been able to contribute in the same way even ten years ago. That was part of what I found so interesting. Jon, who just turned 75, has been a composer and professor of composition all his adult life. This was Minkyung's first recording; she is just starting out on what I hope will be an illustrious career as a performer and teacher. Frank, the engineer, Jonathan, and I are all about the same age; we've been around the block, but not as long as Jon. Everyone brought different skills and experience to the project, and there were five different personalities in the room. That can spell disaster or it can be a strength; this collaboration was a success even though there were, inevitably, rocky moments: there always are. In the next post I'll share the result with you!

Phoenicia Publishing News

Over at Phoenicia today, I was delighted to announce the forthcoming publication of Night Willow, a collection of prose poems by Luisa A. Igloria. Readers of The Cassandra Pages may be familiar with Luisa's work through her daily writing project, poems that are published and archived at Dave Bonta's Via Negativa.

I still remember reading, with that sense of excitement and surprise editors always look for, the first poem Luisa sent to an issue of qarrtsiluni that Dave and I were co-editing. We were pretty blown away by that poem, and by many subsequent ones too. That was the beginning of a long association which has continued on FB, where I see Luisa's regular posts. I've hoped to publish one of her books for a long time, and am proud that we've signed an agreement for Night Willow.

In addition to being a very hard-working and prolific poet, a teacher, wife, mother, and daughter, Luisa is a collaborator with other artists: her poems at Via Negativa are usually inspired by one of Dave's posts at The Morning Porch. Maybe it was fated that we'd work together on this book, because the title poem was inspired by a painting of mine, and a post I wrote here. Now I'm excited about making a beautiful book for her poems to inhabit.

That painting was dreamlike, and these prose poems of Luisa's are too. Like much of her work, Night Willow employs memory and associations as well as the ingredients of the everyday, but goes beyond the narrative and the purely lyrical to create a dream-like atmosphere that contains beauty and bewilderment, along with many other emotions.

In writing Night Willow, Igloria said she wanted to stretch both herself and her craft, asking her prose to do "the same hard muscle work I expect in every poem that I write."

"It was an experience that felt almost like trying my hand at musical composition," she said. "I wanted to create mood, tone, networks of memory and echo so that the poems could speak to each other across and within the collection - but at the same time achieve a level of language that is also precise and thoughtful."

Before beginning to work with Luisa on this project, I didn't realize that she was the first Filipina woman of letters installed in the Palanca Literary Hall of Fame in the Philippines, and is an eleven-time winner of that country's highest literary award, the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature (in poetry, non-fiction, and short fiction) as well as having a very long list of American poetry awards to her credit.

Like many other immigrant artists and writers, she is sometimes put into an ethnic classification: Carlos Angeles wrote, "“[Her] poetry inhabits the heart first, then the mind, and the soul…her work contains some of the most extraordinary and most polished poetry written by a Filipino poet in English today.” I absolutely agree, but think there's no reason to limit Igloria's strength by comparing her to one country's poetic output; it's extraordinary and polished poetry by any standard.

Waiting to Unfold

I haven't written much about my publishing projects lately, but today is a launch day, so it's a perfect time to do that!

Rachel Barenblat, also known as The Velveteen Rabbi, has been a friend of mine for almost as long as I've both been blogging. After becoming friends through our blogs, we worked together on an anthology of poems, Brilliant Coroners, and on the online literary journal qarrtsiluni. We met several times in person, in Boston, Montreal, and New York. During the past decade, she studied to become a rabbi, was ordained, and started serving a congregation. As religious people coming from different places we both engaged with and talked about the difficult issues of the Middle East. We did a presentation together about Jewish and Christian approaches to Scripture, and contemporary life and politics. Recently she entered into the world of parenthood. All the while, she blogged, and wrote poems. Very good poems.

When I started Phoenicia Publishing, it was because I wanted to publish the work of writers like Rachel, who had the courage to look beyond borders and convention and to illuminate the liminal spaces of ethnicity, spirituality, politics, and personal identity. Works that created bridges for readers, rather than walls behind which we could fortify ourselves, or hide within our prejudices. The first book of Rachel's that I published, 70 Faces: Torah Poems, looks at the first five books of the Hebrew Bible through a feminist perspective. Other people shared my own enthusiasm: for an independently-published book of poetry, it's done amazingly well.

 

Today we're launching Rachel's second full-length collection, Waiting to Unfold. These are poems about pregnancy, birth and early parenthood, but again, she doesn't take the expected route. The poems, written as letters to her unborn son and then as a sort of poetic journal of the first year of his life, take an unflinching look at the difficulties as well as the joys of motherhood. I'm not a parent myself, but I've often observed that parents, and mothers especially, are under tremendous pressure to feel and to say that everything is rosy, even perfect, when in fact the experience is often quite mixed. A lot of women who give birth find themselves finally admitted to the secret club of motherhood, where it's almost as if they have to sign a pledge not to reveal the darker side.

Rachel had a miscarriage before she gave birth to her son; that experience and that unborn child are not forgotten, but woven into her poems about this subsequent pregnancy as he writes of her worries as well as her anticipation. And after the birth, she experiences and is treated for post-partum depression, eventually emerging from that cloud. The majority of the poems are celebratory, joyful, funny, and above all, honest. Like all of Rachel's work, I found them very accessible, and -- like the author herself -- imbued with a deep spirituality that's always present but never overbearing.

It was a real pleasure as well to work with the exuberant cover artist, Mary Bullington, a Roanoke, Virginia artist who I met through Marly Youmans. The cover art is a detail of one of Mary's collages, titled "Creation."

The whole process of publishing a book -- like becoming a parent, I imagine -- is exciting, demanding, and challenging; the best part of it is working with the author and artist as a team trying to do our creative best, and trying to do justice to the words themselves.

I hope some of you might decide to buy a book for yourself or to give to a mother you love; while you're over at Phoenicia please take note that all of the other full-length poetry books are on sale through the end of April, in honor of National Poetry Month. The books are all available through Amazon UK and Europe, but if you're on this side of the pond and able to order through the e-store, both the author and publisher will receive considerably more of your support. Thanks!

 

Thaliad, last two days for pre-order!

I'll be making a formal announcement on Friday about Phoenicia's publication of Thaliad, by Marly Youmans -- with cover and illustrations by Clive Hicks-Jenkins -- but wanted to let Cassandra's blog readers know that there are just two more days to pre-order the hardcover edition at a special price of $23.00.

I can't even begin to tell you how lovely this book is when you hold it in your hands, or how proud I am to have been part of the collaboration that made it. After November 30, it will be offered in both paperback ($13.95) and hardcover editions ($26.00.) The first fifty orders (of either edition) will also receive something very special, to be announced soon!

Your E-reader is Reading You (and the Implications for Literature)

Books may have been thought to be dangerous in the past, but it was a matter of having your mom find the steamy novel under your bed, or having to read subversive titles in secret. The reader was still in charge, and the book was an object, even if that object was a symbol of something else .Now, we learn, our e-readers are anything but passive objects. Like the eye behind a hidden two-way mirror, they're looking back at us, and passing along what they learn to a higher authority. (Imagine if Lady Chatterly's Lover or Das Kapital had been able to do that?) But, in true 21st -century form, political and moral snooping are taking a back seat to the real payoff: how to maximize profits.

An article in the Guardian, "Big E-reader is Watching You," tells the details of the types of information being collected:

"With digital content we have the ability all of a sudden to glean new insights into our customers," says Todd Humphrey, Kobo's executive vice president of business development. "How often do they pick up and engage with a book? What's the average time when they start to read? How many pages do they read an hour? How long does it take to read a book? And through bookmarking, people tell us where they stop. If we were to dive into that reader space, we could see they picked up a book, read the first five pages in five hours, then never picked up and engaged with the book again. What does that say, if 90% of readers stop after chapter five? It certainly provides insight for the publisher and the author."

Yes, no doubt it does. And that's what I find the scariest of all, because of its implications not just for book publishing in general, but for literature. We live in a society where budgets are increasingly determined through quantitative, not qualitative, measures. Teachers are judged by their students' scores on standardized tests; even university courses sink or swim on the bottom line: how much income they generate for the institution. The resources available for artistic endeavors of all types are dwindling, along with the energy of those who are willing to champion excellent work which may appeal to a small market.

But if that's not bad enough, now, for the first time, we have the spectre of quantitative information being used by publishers to influence not only what is written, but how it's written. In genre fiction, perhaps, this isn't so outlandish as it sounds. Here's British fantasy/sci-fi writer China Mieville:

"I hope it wouldn't change how I wrote, but conversely I do wonder if getting specifically worked up about this is simply a kind of neophobia, because if it did change how you wrote, wouldn't it just be a new variant of what authors have done for centuries, which is writing to a market?" he says. "In other words, that writing to algorithm, while I'm certainly no fan, is just writing to what one believes readers want – no more or less infra dig than writing in response to demands from the marketing department, or in response to one's analysis on perusing the bestseller list, or trying to second-guess what makes a best seller. A bit more micro-level in its analysis, but not qualitatively 'worse' or 'better'."
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Reader privacy is another major issue. And while e-book manufacturers like Kobo say they will only use and pass along (read: sell) information to publishers that has been aggregated -- not individual statistics - do you really want your e-book reading habits used in this way? Or has social media altered our view of privacy so much that we can accept that even reading a book is no longer a private act?

"If they don't bookmark, and they're not online when they're reading, and they're not taking notes, we're not going to glean much information except for the purchase itself," Humphrey says.

But, he readily admits, they want more. The knowledge of where people stop reading, or how particular books are read, "could eventually affect what's published."

"You can understand what books are selling, where in the world, how fast people are reading them, how long it takes them to finish, where they accelerate or decelerate through a book – all of that at the end provides the publisher with pretty interesting insights to work with the author, on the style of the book and the story, and from a publishing perspective how to market based on where it is selling. At the end of the day, it does allow publishers more information than they would have if they just put the book on a shelf," he says. "It is going to be interesting to watch how it evolves over time. It is more power to the people who are essentially telling publishers and authors what it is they want to read."

Books as reader-driven commodity? We're already almost there. So what's the implication for literature? I predict that here, as in all the arts, a small sub-group of writers and publishers will emerge, largely separate from what's going on in the big-business side of publishing, and continue to create and make available works of enduring quality, for a smaller group of readers. But to preserve that level of care for the written word in human culture will take a level of selflessness, ingenuity, and determination we've only seen before when culture is threatened by totalitarianism, war, or extreme poverty.

In the long run, I fervently hope that Darwinian capitalism will run its course and that a more benevolent and humane world society will emerge. That long run may be very long indeed, and if human society does indeed survive, the process is going to be ugly, threatening, and at times truly dangerous to our bodies and particularly to our spirits.

Books have always been a symbol of human freedom. What we do with them is always significant. Are we prepared for the next phase in our relationship, and for what it's going to take to preserve not only the very best writing, but those who write it?

(This article is cross-posted to the Phoenicia Publishing blog.)

A Visit to the Modern Scriptorium

The major task at my studio this week has been to make packages of bound, pre-publication review copies of Thaliad, forthcoming in November from Phoenicia, for the big review lists: Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Library Journal. These outfits are very selective and only review a small percentage of the books they receive. Then there's the effort and expense of pulling all the required elements together into a presentation package -- ISBN and technical info, author's bio, previous credits, blurbs and comments on previous books, illustrations and cover art -- and essentially "making" the book itself three to four months prior to publication.

After a couple of years running a tiny publishing house, I understand very well why bigger publishers have staffs, and interns, and larger budgets, and also why so many of them go out of business.

And I see why it continues to appeal to me. There's such pleasure in collaboration, made tangible when I see my own work coming together with Marly Youmans' words, and Clive Hick-Jenkins' collages. But there's more to it. As I was remembering yesterday while I printed and cut and bound these copies, I've been "making books" ever since I was a little girl. I found an early one when we were moving from Vermont: it was about 2 1/2 x 2/12 inches square, with a text written in pencil and illustrations in colored pencil; I must have made it when I was about seven or eight. There's something about the whole process, from conception to holding the finished object, that is deeply satisfying to me; it's part of what led me to write and do art, and certainly what led to my interest and, later, professional career in calligraphy, typography and graphic design, and the book arts.

It all felt like a particularly appropriate process for this book, too, because so much of Thaliad is about re-learning the old ways, the handcrafts and basic skills and wisdom, after an apocalypse. Clive picked up on this in his choice of a folk-art motif, drawn from early-American quilts, for the illustration style.

Some things about us, deep inside, simply don't change very much over the years, but technology certainly has. I would have given my best swirly glass marbles, half a century ago, for the ability to do what I was able to do this week in terms of computer files and ease of printing multiple copies right in my own studio. But the most satisfying part was still the handwork: feeling the pages under my fingers, hearing the swish of the papercutter blade, watching the cut sheets pile up to become a book-block, and finally, binding them into a book that could be paged-through and easily read. It's an elemental process, one that connects me with medieval scribes and woodblock printers and even further back, and still feels somehow miraculous and very human, emerging as it does out of our desire to create, to communicate, to share.