Cabildo Quarterly. Issue #9. Spring 2016. Belchertown MA; Pittsburgh PA. But they were my teeth. And I was weightless. Whistler’s Nocturne by Laura Lee Washburn Blue and gold Southampton water, night is coming on; I want to dive into that water, my own bay, tanker in the right distance, the yellow ball of sun submersible with my thumb. The sea is a wavering tomb where the group is always subsumed in favor and honor of the one in fluid harmony— not even a choice this tandem motion with your universe. This is my wish, never for death, but to go down into that salt and blue, to be alone only as the sun is alone. Laura Lee Washburn is the Director of Creative Writing at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, and the author of This Good Warm Place: 10th Anniversary Expanded Edition (March Street) and Watching the Contortionists (Palanquin Chapbook Prize)She is married to the writer Roland Sodowsky, and is one of the founders and the Co-President of the Board of SEK Women Helping Women.
People Who Led to My Self-Publishing (From Bagging the Beats at Midnight, a bookstore memoir in progress) By Karen Lillis There was our customer Arthur Nersesian, who told me the story of The Fuck Up, his trademark novel of East Village slackerdom (years before Linklater owned the concept): He had published it himself and sold it on the street for 11 years before Akashic Press picked it up; MTV Books republished it from there and he finally got paid. He sold it on the street; Arthur was a street bookseller for years before he taught writing and then left that behind when he had enough royalty-generating novels to write full-time. When he was teaching at a college in the Bronx, he had a young fiction hopeful come onto him after class; concerned, he asked a senior colleague, “What do I do?” “Oh, you can take her up to the roof,” was the reply. Arthur didn’t miss teaching and was a disciplined daily writer by the time I met him, often composing on his laptop at a nearby Starbucks. Though he never stayed long, he came into the store so frequently to chat with the clerks that he was like an honorary coworker. I had the feeling that he might have been popping by like this for decades. In any case, I considered the publishing trajectory of The Fuck Up a kind of realistic rags-to-riches story I could aspire to. Anaïs Nin was another predecessor in self-publishing. I found her thin volume of nonfiction, In Favor of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays, in the Literature section early in my time at St Mark’s and devoured her essays about men and women—I ended up buying a number of copies for different women friends who were also navigating the dating line between emotionally-retarded hipsters and expressive–but-retrograde machos. Meanwhile her “Story of My Printing Press” neatly laid out the how’s and the why’s of self-publishing. You self-publish because the commercial world could take decades to catch up to your brand of brilliance, because it’s best to get your work out there while it’s fresh, and because as long as you’re able-bodied and don’t mind wearing different hats (writer, book designer, printer, binder, publisher, promoter, etc.), why the hell not? If you’re lucky, Frances Steloff from Gotham Book Mart will chip in to help back you. And actually, I was lucky: Bob didn’t hand me money and I didn’t even steal the use of his store’s basement copy machine; but when the time came, he put my novel in the window and faced it out on the front wall—and I was grateful for the attention and sales. Hunter Kennedy was an ambitious writer disguised as the ultimate Southern slacker. He ran a literary magazine, and was someone I’d known since I was 17. First as an undergrad in Charlottesville when we were both cordoned off in the Nerd Dorm and later shared a photography class, and a few years after that when we each ended up in Austin, Texas. There Hunter helped me buy an enlarger in return for
the chance to use my makeshift darkroom sometimes. We crossed paths again when he had a first-floor loft in Williamsburg and I was in a Greenpoint railroad apartment, and during those years I also saw him in the bookstore. In Austin, where none of us worked too hard or too often at our dayjobs, Hunter had published this great one-page monthly called The Minus Times. While computerscience geekery swirled around us in the tech sector of Texas, Hunter pecked away at an old typewriter, working on a novel set in his native South Carolina and putting out this simple, two-sided xeroxed sheet of short, typewritten stories or novel excerpts, thiftstore yearbook portraits, “Letters From the Editor,” and cut-ups (which he called “Random Ax”) made from newspaper clippings. By the time I ran into him at the bookstore, the record label Drag City had picked up his zine and he’d turned it into a 20-page lit mag with writings and drawings by David Berman and an interview with Southern novelist Barry Hannah. The magazine was no longer xeroxed, but he did a great job of keeping the aesthetics deeply lo-fi and the techniques still relatively Luddite. Sander Hicks was someone I met from at least three different directions when I first got to New York in 1992. I was addicted to the copy machine by then, having adopted it during my art major as a kind of accessible tool of printmaking, and also needing a trail of everything I wrote. Two of my pals from Charlottesville had migrated from my favorite Kinko’s there to the Kinko’s on 12th Street near University Place around the same time I moved north, so naturally I frequented that copy spot. While xeroxing my letters, art reviews, and collages, I crushed out on the tall, charismatic, and dapper cashier whose nametag read “Sander.” Then I met him officially at a party some other Charlottesville friends were throwing—Sander was briefly in a band with my buddies Jon and Eric. At the end of that summer, my childhood friend Elizabeth moved in with me and talked about looking up her college theater cohort, Sander—same fellow. Around the time I shot photos for the demo tape of Sander’s band Subterfuge, Sander started using his graveyard shift at Kinko’s to produce soft-bound books via the copy and binding machines. (A book or two before he learned Quark, he xeroxed his first novel in a funny 5” x 6” format made of one-sided copies. That was the form in which I found a stack of his book Foam in the stairwell of St Mark’s Bookshop--when it was at 12 St Mark’s Place.) Soft Skull Press was born as a venture after my own Robin Hood heart—a completely pirated press showcasing punk literature by underground rockers like Todd Colby, Lee Ranaldo, John S. Hall, and Sander himself. (Sander, having grown up in DC at the moment that Fugazi was vocalizing a new unrest, had been inspired by the hero of Do-It-Yourself, Ian McKaye.) Then a year or two after I reviewed Sander’s senior thesis play for The Southern Quarterly, the press went legit. When I began working at the bookstore, I started seeing Sander replenishing poetry titles on consignment. By then I was completely jazzed about the idea of an edgy publishing house (angry at all the right things) produced by the “people’s printing press”—the xerox machine. It occurs to me that Soft Skull was one of the small presses that was closest to the bookstore in terms of its mission and aesthetics—on the one hand, it was about a relentless critique of the Powers That Be, and on the other hand it celebrated the freshest avant-garde literature, publishing intense and absolutely readable poetry and prose by the newest and best emerging writers. Soft Skull didn’t fuck around with pedigrees or writing that was opaque—the press’ underlying urgency to communicate both signaled and created a community of readers, writers, and activists. Poet Julien Poirier was a pal who eventually showed up as a customer at the bookstore after several months spent writing in Morocco. I had met him a few times when we were the only two writers at academic parties in Greenpoint thrown by my roommate and his grammar school friend’s girlfriend. We would eventually turn every conversation to the dilemma of getting published, and the elated feeling we had when we finished a work—the feeling that made us want to xerox copies of it and hand it out to everyone we knew. We had both proceeded to do so, but in relatively clumsy formats that only our friends could possibly forgive. It was later that we both got into self-publishing in a more serious fashion. Of course, self-publishing was in the air at St Mark’s Bookshop. There were all the iconic authors we knew
had self-published—Nin, William Blake, Walt Whitman, Kathy Acker, Gertrude Stein. There was our distant notion of the samizdat press in Soviet Russia, or our knee-deep knowledge of the zine culture in America, still going pretty strong in the late 90s. The store carried a whole world of books by underground or unknown authors and artists submitted for sale on consignment. These included but also stretched beyond “the consignment shelf ”—a tall, thin, wooden structure with pocket shelves situated approximately in between Anais Nin’s diaries and the John O’Hara titles in the Literature section. The consignment shelf was full of copy-machine and other handmade offerings of comics, poetry, political screeds, and literary (and other) prose. The store had a totally open policy for such items, accepting three copies from any self-publisher with a local address. But the shelf was so notorious, it drew some seriously talented folks from near and far, and was perused religiously by certain customers. The idea of self-publishing slid easily into the realm of micro publishing or small-run anthologies—which recalls my favorite truism of Diana the magazine buyer. Whenever the staff gathered like hyenas around an arch-hip new literary magazine (finding it not up to snuff), our most frequent put-down was that the editor was just “publishing his friends.” Diana would laugh and remind us: “Most literary magazines start out as a collection of the editor’s friends. It’s just that some people have really interesting friends.” Karen Lillis the author of four short novels. Her writing has appeared in The Austin Chronicle, Blink Ink, Lit Hub, New York Nights, Pulse/Berlin, TRIPCITY, Undie Press, and Volume 1 Brooklyn, among others. She received a2014 Acker Award for Avant Garde Excellence in Fiction.
Where Else? by Jacob Fricke written in transit, momentarily pausing in the middle of nowhere every place is stuffed with sunlight every hour’s beneath the sky there is never any travel none need find a reason why the rooms and faces keep on shifting shimmering through time and space that is just the sunlight’s circle trees might grow in any waste in the street or up mt. mansfield they twist proper, every one though we know them but in passing everywhere is with the sun Jacob Fricke was Poet Laureate of Belfast, Maine.
AN AWESOME MUSTACHE AND OTHER STOPS ON THE WAY TO ENLIGHTENMENT by Matthias Holt I wish you could see a picture of my mustache. It's pretty awesome. Seriously. I say this with tons of humility because before the last few weeks there had never been anything truly awesome about my face and I was the first guy to admit it. So when I say this mustache is extraordinary, believe it. Burt Reynolds would weep. I tried to get a picture of it, but it doesn't really translate to Instagram. You've got to see it move I think. I guess it's an action mustache. Imagine the perfect Wyoming sunset, the sound of horses' hooves in the distance, the smell of fire and tobacco, some dude playing a tough-ass song on a harmonica. Now imagine that, only in facial hair. That's this mustache. And it's pretty lucky because the rest of my beard is sort of splotchy and I'm getting thin up top. It's like all my hair growth power got sucked into a black hole of excellence between my lip and nostrils. Also, I wish you could hear me read this essay out loud. Because my mustache really adds a timbre to my voice that is sort of hard to describe. I’m not saying it’s my