How to account for, much less explain, America’s malaise? Is it that our politics lack imagination, or that our imaginations too easily give into the temptations of ostensibly ideology-free escapism?…
In 1974 a handful of writers—including Jonathan Baumbach, Steve Katz, and Ronald Sukenick—started meeting in Baumbach’s Brooklyn apartment. They were frustrated by the increasing McDonaldization of New York publishing, by how innovative writing practices were being marginalized to a greater and greater extent. Their solution: launch what then was a publishing experiment (and what now has become one of the primary paradigms among the small-press world): a collective run by and for authors. The idea was for that handful to contribute their own money to construct a small alternative publishing ecology that would last, at most, two or three years.
So now we go about a more traditional way of raising money that seems to be working very well. These traditional methods included an online campaign and a direct mailing to donors and friends of the press. In the direct mailings we sent a letter informing people of who we are, what we do and how we plan on utilizing this funding. We told them how their donations would actually help worthy poets get a book published and into the world. Initially I had my doubts about how well this would work out based upon the cost of the program, however it was the most successful campaign we have ever had.
In the opening sequence of W. D. Richter’s faux-blockbuster The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension! (1984), our absurdly polymath hero—world-famous brain surgeon, particle physicist, lead guitarist and…
The Petals of Your Eyes by Aimee Parkison Starcherone Books, 2014 112 pages / Starcherone / Amazon / Goodreads Review by Brooke Wonders Aimee Parkison’s newest novel, The Petals of…