A wintry mix 2017 composite esub

Explore Hudson Valley JANUARY 2017 • ULSTER PUBLISHING • WWW.HUDSONVALLEYONE.COM

A Wintry Mix

Time to reassess & get around

Post-holiday economics Small business shifts Living in a ski town...

It’s fun this time of year!

2017 2 | Winter Explore Hudson Valley

Winter 2017 Explore Hudson Valley

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yond cabin fever without binge-watching cable, streaming or old-style DVD-hinged television.

This is Wintry Mix. There are big changes afoot, in business and possibly banking, in healthcare, politics and journalism. There’s much to do.

Wintry mix

Contributors this issue include: Dan Barton, who grew up in Hyde Park and is the editor of Kingston Times.

Ed Breslin, a former editor and publisher who has written several books.

Elisabeth Henry, who lives on a mountain, writes and acts, and waits for spring.

Born in Manhattan, lived in Brooklyn, and moved to Saugerties at the age of two, Dante Kanter has had the unexpected pleasure of attending many writing programs and receiving writing awards. He is 17 years old. Journalist, author, playwright and filmmaker Mathew Klickstein’s most recent book is Slimed!

An Oral History of Nickelodeon’s Golden Age. He enjoys the dubious honor of having written Steven Seagal’s only horror film to date Ten-year-old Giada G. Labate is in the fifth grade at Rondout Valley Intermediate School. She loves reading, Star Wars, Greek mythology, comic books and Harry Potter.

Jodi LaMarco is a writer for various print and web publications in and around the Hudson Valley. Paul Smart, a veteran writer and editor, now spends half his weekdays working out of a windowless room in our state capitol.

WIKICOMMONS

Snow angels may have been a phenomenon since the days of mastodons. They’re a perfect means of cooling off from the heat of economic uncertainties and too much social media.

Trying to look forward as we huddle for warmth

By Paul Smart

H

ow does one look at economic futures in a Twitter Age? Many of us have been looking at re-gifting possibilities for the coming years — the possibilities involved in drawing profit from those electronic corkscrews in the closet and other well-meaning but somewhat odd presents of holidays past. Oth-

ers are simply looking at a big party to come.

How far into the Hudson Valley will Brooklynization reach beyond Hudson, Beacon, Kingston and Catskill? Might Poughkeepsie’s time be just around the corner? Ellenville’s? Cairo’s?

Only those nurturing runs for town and county offices seem to be fully aware that this will be a big year for local elections. The rest of us are still mulling how what happened two months ago will shape our lives for the coming four years.

Meanwhile, it’s started to feel a lot like what winters used to feel like around here. The snowfall’s lighter in many areas, but still deep enough in the right places to make for a better ski season.

Sledding’s making a comeback. Some are even starting to revert to old equations for getting be-

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2017 4 | Winter Explore Hudson Valley

Winter can be fun Kids find it’s best always to stay busy

By Giada Labate

I

love winter. It is so fresh and beautiful and sparkling white. In winter you get stuck inside a lot, though, and that can be boring. So I cooked up some ideas that you can do for entertainment. I really hope you think my ideas are worth trying.

You can watch cool movies and TV. I recently saw Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Twice. I love Star Wars! Or you could watch holiday movies.

It’s up to you and your family. I personally like the CW shows The Flash, The Arrow, Supergirl and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow.

But don’t watch too much TV! It’s not healthy.

Another option is reading. I love to read all year long! I highly recommended Barner Books in New Paltz, Half Moon Books in Kingston, and Inquiring Minds, which has places in Saugerties and New Paltz. I have always enjoyed and particularly recommend books by authors Rick Riordan, JK Rowling, William Joyce and Lemony Snicket.

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Wintertime fun for our author matches time outside whenever it snows, with equal time inside snuggling up with a good book, great television and family.

I particularly enjoy Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson, Heroes of Olympus and Magnus Chase series.

Other kids like the Kane Chronicles, also by Rick Riordan, but I don’t. All of these series are about various ancient cultures’ mythologies:. Greek, Roman, Norse and Egyptian.

You could also read comic books. There is an eclectic comic shop called October Country in New Paltz. I think the Batman Gotham Adventures are very interesting comics for young Batman fans. I also enjoy The Flash Season Zero graphic novels. They are based off the CW show I mentioned above.

Cooking is also a very useful use of wintertime.

Mostly in the winter I bake cookies! Who doesn’t like cookies? (Well, my mom doesn’t, but she likes

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cupcakes, a good alternative). You could bake any kind of cookies: sugar, gingerbread, chocolate chip, oatmeal, even just plain chocolate. Baking keeps you toasty and warm.

You can also play board games. Any board game is fun! Candy Land, Crazy Phrases, Chinese checkers . I also think the game Life is good practice for adult life. Card games are pretty fun as well. Uno, anyone? Gin rummy, perhaps?

You could always play outside. It is cold outdoors, but bundle up and dive right in! You could throw an epic snowball fight. War! Building and dressing up snowmen (or snowwomen) is always fun.

You can slide down the hills on sleds. The winter wonderland sled hill in Woodstock is always a great place! Another sledding spot is Burger Hill in Rhinebeck. Each town has a good sledding spot, I think.

At the end of the day you can make a swagilicious snow house, cool and comfortable. It is a great place to chillax. You can make all the features of a real house only out of soft snow. I really like that.

Being out doesn’t necessarily mean being outside. There are many activities in the area. You can go ice skating in Saugerties. A really great activity is going to Bounce in Poughkeepsie. The whole place is practically a big trampoline. I had a birthday party there once, and it was awesome!

There are many great bowling places in the area. There is Patel’s Bowling in Kingston. They even have cosmic bowling at night, but I haven’t done that yet.

I really enjoyed writing this article for you to read. It kept me busy on a snowy winter day. I hope that you got as much pleasure from reading this as I got from writing it. Thank you for reading my ideas!

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Winter 2017 Explore Hudson Valley

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The low-budget high life Winter is the time to really make do

ter a beautiful moment, I doodle a picture on the front of one and mail it to myself with a note about what had caught my attention. A few days later, I get a happy memory in the mail, and

By Jodi LaMarco a reminder of why I was rejected from the art program at SUNY New Paltz. â&#x20AC;&#x2122;m a little broke. Not as a Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve starting writing letters to peorule, thankfully, but certainly ple, with an actual pen, in cursive. I had to look up how to make a lowerfor now. My property taxes are case â&#x20AC;&#x153;z.â&#x20AC;? Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m pretty sure Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m screwing due, and the credit card bills I up most of the capital letters, too, but racked up over the holidays are nobodyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s complained so far. rolling in. The financial squeeze I built an igloo. Okay, thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a lie. I Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m feeling is typical for many, and built half an igloo and then it started not just because itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s time to pony to rain. I did the best I could. up. With so many people strapped Last year, I thought of an idea that for cash, small business owners and I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t follow through with: Bathose trying to survive in the â&#x20AC;&#x153;gig nanagrams. I figured that as long economyâ&#x20AC;? also see their incomes as I bought them green I could use shrink after New Yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s. Welcome to a sharpie to write little notes on bathe annual January slump. nanas and then mail them to friends.

That being said, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve come to welWho wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be thrilled to receive a come this time of year for the shift moldering banana covered with illegin perspective it gives me. WhethDION OGUST ible cursive lettering in the mail? It er I like it or not, January disables didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t happen (mostly because itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s an my spending reflex. Shopping and Ice on the windows, money burning in the furnace.... Forget the board games idiotic idea), but if anyone out there eating out are instantly gratifying, and television, all those piles of books and various art supplies. The keys to but Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m not about to plunge myself winter economic survival, our writers have found, are company and cooperation. wants to give it a whirl, let me know how it works out. into debt for a temporary (and false) have a friend or two willing to come along for the feeling of happiness. Cutting back on my spending Maybe none of these ideas appeal to you. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ride, all the better. during the winter helps me remember that there fine. This is my list, not yours. Your list can only In the wintertime, I always keep a short list of are more fulfilling things I can do with my time. come from the things you find entertaining, intrigucheap go-to activities in the back of my mind: matI began by saying that my low bank balance is ing or inspiring. Think about the sights, sounds, inee movies, board games, Christmas light-gaza perennial occurrence. That wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t always so. places and people that bring you joy, and move toing. I know a handful of places I can go that are During the years following the recession, I was ward them. Do it, and I promise you this: your budusually free of snow and good for walking. Evenpermanently broke for quite some time. My finanget will never get in the way of your happiness. tually, I run out of movies and people willing to cial situation became uncomfortably tight, and I play Pictionary, so I need to think up new ways to found that my options for a fun night or day out entertain myself. were severely limited by what was in my wallet.

I go into health-food stores and smell all of the One of the things that used to perk me up essential oils. I go to clothing stores and try on during that phase of my life was a weekly gathDonaldson & Chiera RN, Family Health NP, PC things I would never wear, just for a laugh. ering I thought of as The Unemployment Luncheon Club. I wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t the only person I knew who Please consider us for your was out of work in the aftermath of the financial eather permitting, there are road crisis, and we were all eager for something to do trips. I like to fill a thermos with good, unscheduled healthcare needs on the cheap. Once a week, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d meet a few friends strong coffee and drive into the southern for food and conversation at a restaurant with a Catskills to visit the same mountains I hike in the Onsite X-Ray and EKG great five-dollar lunch special. Most of the time, I summertime. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a nice change to see the peaks Monday to Friday 8am to 8pm couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t even afford to order a soda to go with my huddled together in their winter coats. When Saturday and Sunday 10am - 4pm sandwich, but I have fond memories of those littheyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re white I canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t imagine them green, and tle meetings. My best friend and I (she was in the when theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re green I canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t imagine them white.

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2017 6 | Winter Explore Hudson Valley

Big or small noise?

A high school senior’s musings on the advent of his hearing from colleges

By Dante Kanter

I

n the documentary about Bob Dylan’s England tour called Don’t Look Back, Dylan gets in an argument with a teenager at a party in his hotel room over a shot glass that had been thrown out the window. They’re face to face, noses almost pressed together. A heavy, merry-looking Welsh singer stands between them, trying to calm things down. In the course of the argument, the teenager blows up. “You’re a big noise!” he says, his hands miming an explosion. “I’m a small noise,” he says, balling his hands together, “I’m nothing.”

At 17, there are a lot of questions about what size noise you are. You are moving into something bigger, into what adults who forget what it was like to be children call “the real world.”

This real world has had all kinds of movies made about it, which usually go like this: A young person has a dream. They work hard to achieve the dream. They leave their home. They start their trek toward the dream. Life in the real world is not what they expected. They fail, they are humiliated.

They reach such a point of humiliation that something must be done. So they do or say something that has never been done or said before, and are rocketed to fame and fortune.

It’s not these movies’ faults that they are telling young people lies. After all, they make these movies to excite us, and there is nothing that exciting about people fudging up all the time. But there is one major problem here. Movies are only made about people who are worth telling movies about, and sold to people who would never have a movie made about them. A group of big noises giving millions of small noises big noises to identify with.

Let me get one thing straight. There’s nothing wrong with failure. In fact, it’s one of the most charming things about people, and is where most of our identities come from. This is why in movies a failure must happen. It keeps us interested.

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One moment we’re kids playing in the snow, or building cities with Lego; the next we’ll face the climate change that adulthood brings. A new generation is waiting to hear where it’ll spend its college years, and what they’ll end up doing in changing job markets to meet their dreams and hopes. Let’s hope all maintain the humor and self-reflection of our author.

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We are suckers for pain, as long as the pain stops eventually, or the pain that people are feeling is beautiful.

Unfortunately, a lot of real, non-movie people’s pain is boredom, a pain that neither ceases nor interests others.

H

ow does this all relate to getting into college? Colleges are doing the exact same thing as bad coming-of-age movies do. For tens of thousands of dollars a year, they are selling us the idea of success. I don’t fault them for that.

Every college has one or two genuine successes.

People’s desire to be successful makes them very easy to exploit, especially in America.

I fall into this trap more often than not. I am convinced in the back part of my brain that no

Winter 2017 Explore Hudson Valley matter my job or what happens to me I’ll become a famous writer when I become an adult. I’ll get a book published and everyone will suddenly be in love with me.

This is one of the main reasons I’ve applied to very selective schools: it will be a good chapter in my posthumous biography.

On the other side of things, for most kids this promise of success is also one of their first brushups with failure. Some kids who are very smart in other ways do not get into schools that are built for them because they are unable to tell a sheet of answer bubbles in what pattern soldier ants evacuate a collapsed anthill. That’s deeply unfair. It gives kids, including myself, a real, deep feeling of adulthood. I was recently rejected from Columbia because I am not too good at filling out bubbles on a sheet. I never felt more grown up.

The real answer to what I will be doing is that I will be alive. I will be breathing, existing and sensing. People my age have a lot of concern about their future. The future is a huge foggy mirror in front of our faces all the time.

| 7

But we forget, we young people, that no matter what that future we’ll be alive as long as possible.

Colleges cannot give or take away anything that important.

And I’ll probably still be writing something.

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olleges are meant to be noise machines. You must be a big enough of a noise to enter, and when you leave you’ll be so loud as to shake the floors. The problem with this is that there is no way colleges can teach people to succeed. Success is completely unknowable. There are ways to teach people literature and geometry, but these sorts of things tend to be on the back burner for most people.

I calm myself down by pretending that I really know how my future will turn out. I will turn out a failure. This gives me a brief jolt of panic, but I slide through it.

I take a look at myself. Maybe I’m in the same home in which I’m writing this article. It’s my parents’ home, with three rooms and a studio where my parents go to be alone and make their art.

Maybe I will be in an apartment somewhere with no windows. What will I be doing? Working somewhere, I hope, or living off unemployment benefits.

I may be completely alone, which I know I will be at some point in time. What happened? I got into the wrong college and didn’t get a good enough degree. Or I did everything right and was still kicked down the stairs by the vagaries of time.

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2017 8 | Winter Explore Hudson Valley

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Kingston’s Stockade District, long a refuge for history and county business, has emerged as a key Hudson Valley center for new business and Brooklyn transplants. The buzz is expected to spread into Midtown next, eventually meeting up with the continuing hipness of the Rondout neighborhood.

An impermanent address The lamentations of a citizen of Nowhere on Hudson

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Winter 2017 Explore Hudson Valley I served my time throughout my twenties in Hollywood, a two-hour drive from where Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d grown up with mom. I followed the run up with three separate stints in New York City, where oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s individual rent goes up by thousands per number of necessary roommates in oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s apartment (no less than 2.5, no more than 6.5).

Simply put, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d learned my lesson.

So, underwritten by a long-running remote gig for a Food Network show and largesse from a modestly successful book publication supplemented by regular freelance work for local weeklies/theaters/TV stations and their ilk, I set off not only to visit but to live in and truly experience the rest of this for-spacious-skied country of ours, seeking out places beyond those entertainment hubs where creative elves cobble books, music, television shows and films involving characters who tend, more often than not, to reside in the very same places of their conjurers.

I wanted to avoid the effects of that charming myth Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d once heard while living in Boulder, Colorado, called â&#x20AC;&#x153;Niwotâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Curse,â&#x20AC;? where it seems that Chief Niwot (trans. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Left Handâ&#x20AC;?) put a curse on the white imperialists who invaded his countryside: The descendants of those who had stolen his land would forever be destined to leave the area, only to come back as though locked in some kind of futile Sisyphean loop.

Could it be Niwotâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Curse that has repeatedly pulled me back to the Hudson Valley?

Up through my early â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;tween years, mom, a native of Queens, would whisk us back to her home state a few times each year, where weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d spend most of our time at my uncleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s in Red Hook (not the Brooklyn one) following a split-second stop at the childhood home back in the city. Red Hook also meant trips to Woodstock, where we found postmodern old-timey general stores proffering all manner of candy from barrels taller than I, along with pastel-colored pixie stick tubes just as big.

Midstate New York meant freedom and fantasy to me, like some tranquil state of hypnagogic reverie where one could tromp safely for miles in woods. There were never crowds, and everyone

knew each otherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s names and wore the same red or blue jackets or sweaters. It was simple, like a television show.

Toward the end of my time served in LA, while still deciding What To Do Now and being just mopey enough, I considered grad school. At one time I point hopped a train up to Rhinebeck in search of Bard College. Taking taxis was a price I had expected, but paying a fixed $20 wherever I went, anywhere, seemed a bit steep. So I walked the eight miles to campus.

I skulked about the cafeteria, noticing everyone wore purple pajamas and pink slippers, had short blue hair and Phil Silvers-like glasses. Something didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t jibe with my own sensibility and I nearly left before discovering that the filmmaker of my favorite movie of that year, Wendy & Lucy, was teaching there, but wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be in her office until the next day.

I decided to spend what little I had to make her acquaintance, and took a cab back to my motel and to and from Rhinebeck once more the next day. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Kelly?â&#x20AC;? I asked, creeping into her office. She answered that I was in the right place. and we spoke briefly about her film. While talking, I found myself unconsciously petting a beautiful golden dog.

When I looked up to Reichardt and she smiled, nodding, it dawned on me: I was petting Lucy, the dog from the Ď&#x201D;ilm: oh yes!

The price of the train, motel and cabs was well worth it for that experience alone.

A

while later, mooching off an onagain-off-again girlfriend mooching off of her sister who owned an apartment handed down from their dead grandfather far up the buttcrack of the Bronx where a much-older roommate

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2017 10 | Winter Explore Hudson Valley mooched off of said girlfriend squatting in her living room, I realized that I needed a place to get away to finish that soon-to-be-modestly-successful book of mine. I asked a few writer colleagues where they would go and all gave me the same answer: Hudson Valley.

Craigslist turned up a perfect-sounding situation, and I ended up for a month away from “the City” in Kingston. I met my innkeeper at a delightfully hamishe coffee shop where I had been dropped off by the bus, and lugged my duffel bag to her house peopled by the many she rented rooms to. I felt at home in a way I hadn’t truly felt in far too long (if ever) and worked 15 hours a day on my book.

It did not surprise me that artists and writers such as Jim Jarmusch lived in the area. There was a festival or two, a parade or two as well, and plenty of jazz, a small music venue acting as a community hub for us nocturnal weirdoes. There was fairly good riverside seafood.

E

ven though I eventually had a strange exit from town, with money owed me by the innkeeper/landlady who kept her five dogs in diapers, the Hudson Valley remained firmly in my mind as a place for a longer stay. And, indeed, the following summer, I decided to give New Paltz a try,

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having traveled through it on that initial bus ride to Kingston, and feeling it might make for an even better stay just from the glimpse of its bars, coffee shops and bookstores outside the dusty bus window. I decided to try a summer at the local hostel.

Although I should have known better than to have made my arrangements with a girl whose dread-haired patchouli stoniness I could actually hear over the phone when I called (two months in advance), I made the error regardless. Calling to confirm my plans two days before heading up by train, I learned that the parboiled pixie had forgotten to enter my information and there were no availabilities.

I quickly Craigslisted an entire floor to myself in a house in Catskill and stayed a full month developing my next book, remotely working for that Food Network show and exploring the forest wilderness, the placid riverside walks. I enjoyed myself at the assorted restaurants, coffee shop and two occasionally opened bars in town that, like far too many other businesses in the area, only vaguely understand the idea of offering goods and services throughout the day and week.

I met a number of various people who were as immediately welcoming as could be. They fit neatly into two categories: older area habitués, mostly semi-retired and moved into town only a few

years previously to find sanctuary away from a loudly booming life elsewhere, and native bikers populating those aforementioned bars, or local young people shambling around elsewhere, who never seemed legally married but undertook all manner of “domestic” relations that resulted in all manner of fascinating modern-day melodrama.

From Catskill, I found that Hudson — across the river — proved an even better answer to my seeking of a perfect place to possibly settle in, what with organic falafel pizza, all the live music I could possibly muster, plus a bookstore-brewhouse-coffee shop where one could mutter about the ongoing iPod playlist, “Could you play that Sonic Youth song one more time?” and draw cheers.

That quietly hamishe vibe was there, yet again, and I learned almost instantly that there was no point in bringing work to the coffee shop or bookstore or pizza place, for someone would inevitably engage me in conversation or offer up the finest of breads, or even, once, their car.

I nearly ended up settling in Hudson, and had begun talking with a real-estate agent who moonlighted as a bartender (or was it the other way around?) when I realized I was too much of a pharisaic tenderfoot for the winter ahead, and the area’s creative pipelines and infrastructure needed a bit more investment of money (and business hours) before I could comfortably call it home.

Sure, the Hudson Valley is a cheaper, cleaner, healthier, more serene place than the urinesoaked Big City two hours away. But having grown up without religion or sports, I’ve never been one for a sense of team or community and I think I was similarly frightened off by a kind of cult-like “join us” quality that struck me as something I am not yet mature enough to resign myself to.

Fast-forward past a few years in seeking out new people and their underrepresented stories in the Midwest to my current spot in Baltimore and I can tell you that yes, I’ll always return, and yes, the day may very well come when I’ll call Hudson Valley my home. It may prove too late, after everyone else in New York City discovers its hidden secrets and it too becomes too loud, too bright, too expensive and, as the filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson would say, “too too.”

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2017 12 | Winter Explore Hudson Valley

There’s always room at the bottom Publishing in the Hudson Valley is a creative act

By Paul Smart

I

started this piece about book publishing in the Hudson Valley a year ago this week.

I wanted to interview a young man who had started a business in my town, publishing books. I had spent an evening talking with Patrick Kiley of Publication Studio, wrote a long profile about him, and submitted it with photos.

“It’s about a guy with a copy machine,” said my editor. “What does this have to do with publishing?”

After an attempt to defend myself, my story, and what I found interesting about the pile of books Kiley was publishing, I realized I had to take a closer look at this industry in its smaller forms.

Publication Studio is indeed what my editor said it was: a storefront operation where Kiley makes books one at a time using a computer design program, a copy machine, a paper cutter, and

a hot-glue binder. But it’s also part of a larger idea.

At first the idea was a consortium of publication studios around the world, currently numbering eleven, that would each publish books and then sell them through a joint website, as well as 60 bookstores around the globe. Now it’s morphed.

The studios share books with each other by uploading them to a book cloud available in common to all Publication Studios. Any studio then makes and sells any book from that cloud, charging prices set by the studio that originated the book and agreeing, each time, to give half the revenue from each sale to the book’s author.

“A Publication Studio is a workplace where publication happens,” reads the PS website for its studios in Oakland, Portland, OR, Minneapolis, Canada, the Netherlands, London, Glasgow and Sao Paolo, Brazil. “Conversations, socializing, and physical labor lead to books that are available in all forms, material and digital. The social life of the book is hosted there.”

The guy who founded the PS movement, Matthew Stadler, had run a subscription-based publishing venture for a while. He started noticing the many previously published authors who couldn’t

Seen through the cracks A review of one great work caught online

By Ed Breslin

W

ith the shut-in weather upon us it’s nice to know there’s a terrific novel available that’s guaranteed to banish the winter blues. This past summer I plucked a novel off the Internet after a friend recommended it. The World of Rae English by Lucy Rosenthal, published by the Black Lawrence Press of Pittsburgh, turned out to be the best novel I’ve read in the last five years, maybe longer. Enduringly good, it sticks in the mind long after you finish it.

Since big commercial publishing houses in the digital era have abrogated most cultural responsibilities, more and more I find good books, especially good fiction and good poetry, published by small cottage-industry houses and the ever-more-significant university presses.

Lucy Rosenthal’s author bio states that she is the recipient of a Pulitzer Fellowship in Critical Writing, has written a previous novel The Ticket Out, and has edited the anthologies Great American Love Stories, World Treasury of Love Stories, and The Eloquent Short Story: Varieties of Narration. She has also taught writing at Sarah Lawrence, Columbia and NYU. Prominent New York City commercial houses published all her previous books. That makes Lucy Rosenthal Exhibit A in the argument that large commercial publishing houses are no longer interested in authors of serious literature who are not mediagenic and possessed of a “platform,” like a newspaper column, a movie, a radio or TV show to help launch and extend the promotion of their books.

For the lack of a platform, an accomplished author, editor, anthologizer and collegiate writing teacher like Ms. Rosenthal is up against it when it comes to publishing her work with mainstream commercial houses.

Yet her most recent novel is magnificent. She takes a plethora of creative and professorial characters at a large Midwestern state university’s writers’ workshop and makes them all as individualistically vivid and understandable, if not always as likable, as the most indelibly drawn characters in Dickens or Woolf. In telling their stories in a spare and trenchant style, in only 60,000 words, she creates a whole universe, encapsulating the joys and heartaches offered by this wondrous but painful thing called life.

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find publishers any more. He didn’t like the idea of self-publishing under the aegis of the large corporations who’ve come to dominate that side of the book industry. “Stadler’s idea was to make the book when it’s paid for and sold,” Kiley told me.

“It’s a lean process, and it’s author-based. I work with the writer to get a book ready, make a digital file and PDF final. Then we print.”

He held up a copy of the first book he published, a novel by Maine-based Douglas Milliken. “It cost about $10 to make the book, taking in costs of paper, glue and a little bit for my time,” he explained.

“We charge $20, which gives $5 to Doug and $5 for the studio. We write checks to our authors every quarter.”

I looked through works he’s published by Hudson Valley authors and artists Peter Lamborn Wilson, Matt Bua, Dina Bursztyn and Maximilian Goldfarb. ****** What does this have to do with publishing, I asked myself. I contacted people I knew publishing works throughout the region, from the regional presses once focused mainly on local histories and memoirs (Black Dome Press, Hope Farm Press and Purple Mountain Press) to more idiosyncratic publishers working with poetry and art such as Codfish Press, Mayapple, Monkfish, and McPherson & Company. I started meeting with publishers and writers, some of whom had tried self-publishing at times. Eventually, a pattern emerged.

“There is no more important function of writing at this time than to call us to awaken. The state of siege under which human consciousness — human conscience — is living has not abated in the time since Blake wrote,” wrote Codhill founder David Appelbaum back in 1998. “The seriousness of the situation has only intensified. To serve our memory of what is truly important: to that the writer should be a guide.”

Poet Shiv Mirabato of Woodstock’s Shivastan Press, told me how he’d been inspired by the fabled Hanuman Books started by Raymond Foye (another Woodstocker), who got books made in Nepal on handmade paper. Shivastan Press eventually succeeded, drawing some top authors.

“Basically, I do what I can afford,” Mirabito explained. He covers all but the printing costs for most of the works in runs of between 250 and 350.

“I want the books to cost the poet $3 or $4 apiece, so they can make lunch every time they sell one.”

Judith Kerman moved her Mayapple Press from Michigan to the Hudson Valley in 2010, 30 years after its founding. Mayapple “focuses on literature not often celebrated by either the mainstream or the avant-garde.” That includes “poetry which is both challenging and accessible, women’s writing, the rustbelt/rural culture that stretches from the Hudson Valley to the Great Lakes, the recent immigrant experience, contemporary Jewish literature, science-fiction poetry, and poetry in translation.”

Poet Sam Truitt, director at George and Susan Quasha’s Station Hill Press, created near Bard College as part of a rambling arts center when a National Endowment of the Arts grant helped the couple buy a rambling old property in the late 1970s. “Susan as a visual artist learned the exigencies of making first-rate books and has remained our designer,” said Truitt. “The early rationale for Station Hill was to publish the poetry of friends, which happened to be the work they liked, and that’s been consistent 250 books later, though with a broader definition of ‘friend’ to include Gertrude Stein, Federico Garcia Lorca and Maurice Blanchot.”

At its most active in the 1980s, Station Hill “had a loose crew of about 40 people producing primo American and European literature via a slew of printing presses,” said Truitt. “Today we publish about five books annually.”

From a business standpoint, these enormous books aren’t immediately profitable. Because they are necessary foundation work on American poetry, they have long-term prospects.

“We are mostly using print-on-demand (POD)

Winter 2017 Explore Hudson Valley printing via Ingram’s Lightning Source, which lowers our going-in cost and risks as well as reducing our in-house storage,” explains Truitt. “but our per-unit revenue takes a hit.”

Truitt quotes Black Mountain College poet Robert Creeley’s statement, “Every poet should have a mimeograph machine.” ****** Kingston’s McPherson & Company, which started as Treacle Press over 40 years ago when Bruce McPherson published his Brown University friend Jaimy Gordon’s first novel (she would later win the National Book Award with her third collaboration with McPherson), still follows the more established small-press model, publishing editions in the thousands and continuing its longstanding relationships with key independent bookstores around the nation. Its sole operator notes that his authors are aging as he does, and yet he and they keep winning awards for their high-style literary work.

“It may sound pretentious to say that I simply publish books that seem to me important and worth sharing. But as an independent publisher, without directors and shareholders, I’m free to take risks that others perhaps can’t,” McPherson told the literary journal Ploughshares a few years ago. “I go for the best I can find — or who find me — and throw everything I’ve got behind the books I choose to do. It’s not really all that hard these days to find material of the highest quality.

The Big Six still publish excellent books, of course, but seem to have relinquished entire provinces of literature to smaller publishers.”

At lunch in Kingston last winter, the erudite and still-enthusiastic publisher talk about when students in the 1970s published works using mimeograph machines, and then advanced to chapbooks in editions of 300 or 400 copies of their poetry and prose. The small presses began to compete with the larger companies that had dominated literature for the previous half century.

“Clearly to many of us, the economics of book publishing were no longer working as they had,” McPherson explained. “I held other jobs to make it work, but then in 1984 decided I’d have to take it more seriously and publish more books...I screwed up my courage and went to The New York Times and ended up getting what we published reviewed.”

Over the years, though, McPherson and other small publishers have all noted how their markets and the outlets available to them for getting books out to a reading public have shrunk. He spoke about “always swimming upstream,” and learning “not to expect being in the mainstream any more.”

McPherson & Company, partly fueled by the numbers of writing programs proliferating these days, keeps finding its niche.

“Writing well is much more difficult than basketball,” he told Ploughshares. “Writing exceptionally well is a gift, a curse, a freakish genetic accident, an unimaginable capacity for grace and clarity and vision and imagination and je ne sais quoi.”

Good writing and publishing, McPherson told me, meant “engaging with the culture in a way that means you’re part of an ongoing dialogue where the work stays alive. I’ve always addressed that area of writing and reading. The purpose of literature is to change someone or something in our society. I consider that of the highest value.” ****** Each publisher, independent bookstore owner and author I spoke with inevitably pointed to the fact that Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and James Joyce’s Ulysses, D.H. and T.E. Lawrence, Henry Miller, the Beats, and even the monumental Leo Tolstoy all wrote books published in editions of 100 or less, often through presses stashed at the back of enterprising bookstores. Maverick founder Hervey White’s economic lifeblood ran through the publishing endeavors that supported his utopian art-colony dreams.

Self-published have an enthusiasm and adventurousness that many of the works from the major publishers lack. But by and large they don’t engage on deeper levels as consistently, by and large, as the well-curated and cared-for offerings from our small publishers.

“It was only after I flunked out of Cornell University in 1973 that I began to consider myself a poet. Five years later, I published my first collection: Sparrow’s Poetry Coloring Book, a manuscript I hand-printed and illustrated. My friend

| 13

ending up bending in some other directions. They were more social,” he told me, trying to explain how he’d become a radical publisher pioneering a new business model, yet also fitting into the legacy of the small presses.

He worked with the Yale University library’s rare-book collection, and later curated exhibitions at the New York Public Library. “Finally I said, ‘Well, I’ve had all these experiences and jobs, some out of the ordinary.’ I think it took me that much time to meet enough artists to understand that publishing is a living activity. It’s something that happens because people want it to. You have a book put in front of you and it feels like it should be there,” he said during a recent visit, his presses running and flowers all around him.

“What I do is not the same as printing 1000 copies and sending them out to some stores as a commodity,” Patrick Kiley told me. “I have to think of relationships and connections. I have to get the book to the right people almost one by one...What we’re trying to prove is that publishing is not just a commercial business but a political act. It’s about the creation of a public for things that one cares about. It’s about using simple tools and your skills as a book maker to make a book happen.”

Belmont Crocodile [I’m using a pseudonym] who worked at a xerox shop, produced the book at night, illegally, while his boss wasn’t looking. Belmont used thick card stock, and bound the pages with Elmer’s Glue. Thus began my career in guerrilla publishing,” recalled the Phoenicia author Sparrow, who also mimeographed a journal for several years and has since worked through several small presses. “No matter how many major publishers retrench, there’s always room on the bottom. And the bottom is where I feel comfortable.”

Kiley’s Publication Studio, which moved to a Troy storefront several months after starting my profile on its maverick operation, had new books to show me each time I visited this year, as well as an evolving series of literary events featuring his authors and the region’s literary crowd. He was sharing his space with his girlfriend’s flower business; it was always cheery, welcoming. He seemed to be managing well, if not on any fast train to riches.

I recall him telling me about growing up in a literary household in MIchigan, where his father taught. He explained his erratic career path.

He’d started off as an English major, dreamed of getting an MFA, or possibly teaching. “My talents

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2017 14 | Winter Explore Hudson Valley

Living in a ski town Some days it’s a snow globe, others a wet mess, but always an economy

By Elisabeth Henry

T

hey are here. They come here to ski from Rockland County in New York, the five boroughs, and New Jersey. And England.

Oddly, no one comes from Albany. I suppose denizens of The Capitol District, when they think “ski” think “north.”

They should be thinking “nearby” and “up.” At 4000-plus feet above sea level, the snowmaking machines at our local ski resorts furnish a winter wonderland with the flip of the switch. And the switch gets flipped when the bones get read in early October.

Except for last year. Last year was a guilty pleasure for those of us who really should be living in Boca. Last winter was one balmy snowless day after another! But snow is the MacGuffin. Those making a living in the winter-sports industry need it, and the winter sports enthusiasts want it. They really, really want it.

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He pulled a chair out from the table where I sat.

A visiting ski mom next to me and cuddled a little closer to me, a look of disdain on her face.

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Summer in the Valley is one of four Explore Hudson Valley supplements Ulster Publishing puts out each year. It is distributed in the company’s four weekly newspapers and separately at select locations, reaching an estimated readership of over 50,000. Its website is www.hudsonvalleyone. com. For more info on upcoming special sections, including how to place an ad, call 845-334-8200, fax 845-334-8202 or email: info@ulsterpublishing.com.

Winter 2017 Explore Hudson Valley A young woman approached, bearing a mug of hot chocolate and a pastry for the old man.

“Isn’t that nice?” the woman next to me whispered, taking in the sad tableau with a tsk-tsk.

“They must know he is poor and hungry.”

“No,” I whispered back. “He owns this resort.”

S

ki wear and snowboard apparel are nifty, let’s be honest. At one time, our mountain was dotted with chic little ski shops selling attractive, pricey togs. But alas, nevermore. Online sales have done their worst in that marketplace, as they have in all others (with the exception of high-end racehorses and very perishable produce). There aren’t enough residents up here to support much of any sort of retail. The added shame is that good ski wear is really, really warm and sturdy, qualities much needed for all of us when the mercury dips below zero, whether or not we ski.

We are high and frigid if, as can happen, we leave our coat in an overheated restaurant one mild night when the wine is flowing. It is possible to purchase a hoodie at the local supermarket that says “I Can Put You on the Naughty List.” But that garment would not withstand the ravages of winter, and the sentiment would certainly frighten our visitors, unacquainted as they are with this grandmother of two. We are grateful for our local church thrift stores, and we stock up when they are open in summer. They close in winter because they can not afford to heat their facilities.

I

’m not sure how skiers look beneath the greenish glow of the compact fluorescents at school and workplace, but here beneath our brilliant blue skies they can be identified by their rosy cheeks, sparkling eyes, trim physiques. They frequent our excellent breakfast cafes and consume quantities of delicious calories. Despite the spirit of the times, these meals often include bacon, sausage, ham and fried potatoes.

Of course they want whipped cream on their hot chocolate. They love it that we can tell them just where the maple trees are that wept the maple syrup for them. Likewise the hives that the honeybee called home, and in which they stored their nectar.

No matter how physically fit these tourists are, no one can take for granted the effects the altitude has on the weather, or the effects the altitude has if you makes one bad move on a cliffside trail.

There is a documented case of two young men who followed their GPS onto a snowmobile trail deep into the forest. In their jeep. And got stuck.

Lady luck was with them in the form of two bars on their cell phones.

My children attended a neighborhood private school that encouraged derring-do in the students.

It was only recently that my kids confessed to routinely sledding on a mountain road so treacherous that the state closes it (installs barriers!) from November until June. That road is carved into the side of a mountain. One side drops off for hundreds of feet. There are no guard rails.

It is best, I believe, that they withheld this information until now when they have, at last, emerged from the age of “Wow!” to “WTF?” It was their teenage years that brought me to prayer. Had I known what they were doing in grammar school,

we might be talking electric shock therapy.

Despite the emphasis of out modern times on physical fitness (I am referring, of course, to diabolical apparatuses like the Fitbit, a merciless step-counter which functions to urge people to keep on moving, like rats on a treadmill and which had to be concocted by a psychopathic genius at the NSA), not all skiers are svelte athletes with an equally heightened fashion sense.

In Sweden, people ski to get to work. It is an easy way to overcome Mother Nature’s frosty impediment to travel. My little son was once put in an advanced snow boarding class because of his ability. He was seven. There were three German women in his class, who were not as capable. They were also saftig and jolly. My little boy spent several hours watching them tumble, helping them up, engaging in snowball fights, and laughing until his stomach ached. The obvious language gap mattered not.

Snow is fun. Our local children have the advantage of easily and conveniently participating in sports not readily available to flatlander kids.

Many of them start at about age three on The Bunny Trail. Some of them go on and compete nationally. The ski resorts encourage this, and offer affordable programs. Some kids get recruited to very good colleges and universities to compete for honors that pay tuition.

These are sports that one can grow old doing.

My own grandfather was caught in a blizzard at the top of a mountain. I hope he is smiling down at his great-grandchildren now, and has let go

of whatever disappointment he had that not one child of his, or grandchild, had any intention of ever strapping on a ski boot. He also raced speedboats.

Perhaps his early death and the family-wide wall of silence around his adventures accounts for my aversion, and that of my cousins, to thrill seeking. But here I am, so married to this land now that when I find myself in a really flat landscape I feel twitchy. Vulnerable. Something is missing.

At one time these ski towns were also wild party towns. Many who crowded in the bars and lounges did not ski at all. They drank and smoked and drugged and crashed cars and passed out on the sidewalks.

That has changed. Times have changed. As much as I like to poke fun at our obsession with All Things Wellness All the Time, I did have my own epiphany.

It was the morning after the forced frivolity of New Year’s Eve, the year after I graduated from college. A dozen of us had partied at a friend’s club, and returned to his home to sleep it off. The next morning I woke earlier than everyone else. As I nursed a headache, smoked a Benson and Hedges, and tentatively sipped black coffee, I watched kids play outside. They were sledding, and making snow forts and snow men in the falling snow. They were noisy and happy and warm, in spite of the cold in the world.

It occurred to me then that I wanted to spend the rest of my life feeling that good. And now I do.

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