True False by Miles Klee OR Books, 2015 264 pages – OR Books 1.) Miles Klee is a male Lydia Davis on a cyberpunk acid trip. These are stories, but the density,…
Sad Spell Press was almost an accident. Elle and I had both considered printing chapbooks in the future but when we read a few of the submissions for Issue 1 and realized we didn’t have the space to share the work in the mag but we did still have the ability to share it, we decided to expand our plans ahead of schedule. We chose the name Sad Spell because it was already in use as the title of our blog, so that everything written that wasn’t for an issue of Witch Craft Magazine would fall under the same title. Our Spellbook Series 1 definitely does the name of our new press justice as each author picks off little pieces of your heart in turn.
The name of the press is a little tongue in cheek. I’m well aware that small (micro? nano?) presses don’t always have a lot of staying power, and short books of experimental (innovative?) poetry and prose don’t necessarily have a lot of persistence. My initial idea of Persistent Editions was somewhat absurd and performative: “printing” in or on tangible, persistent media, such as stone, concrete, wood, etc. So in that case there would be some kind of literal persistence—meant to be a bulwark or maybe just a helpless contretemps against the inevitable flow of time, and the futility of trying to keep track of anything in the accelerating communication/media landscape. Persistent Editions was meant to be the opposite of Twitter—the text that you can’t move, that does not slide easily down a screen. While I love Twitter, and use it, I think there is a need for the opposite as well.
I’ve always been lucky in that the previous chapbook has always paid for the next. Mostly because I do everything myself and so my overhead is low. I don’t take a salary from doing this. All profits of one chap go into the cost of making another. So right now it’s tough. With so many great presses and high quality books being produced there’s a lot of competition for bucks.
Letter Machine Editions started as a conversation between Noah Eli Gordon and me in Denver. We were sitting at the bar at City O City, and we were talking about the great small presses that our friends run—Octopus Books, Ugly Duckling Presse, Action Books—and others. Then we started discussing what we’d publish if we ran a press. Before the end of the night that “if” became a “when,” I think—and then it was just a matter of time and energy and money and follow-through.
I look for something that is so undeniably original and singular, it might as well be something that you can’t quite explain. I love it when something gets around but everyone that reads can’t easily explain what it’s about. Typically people use associations—it’s SOME MOVIE crossed with ANOTHER MOVIE, or SOME NOVEL crossed with SOME AUTHOR VOICE/STYLE.
We were convinced that some of the best writing from writers we knew happened outside of their normal writing forms and practices, e.g., in conversation, in emails, in rants while driving, etc. We then began commissioning these works as they occurred or as we encountered them, and we published them as our Tract Series of pamphlets.
Byron Alexander Campbell: Hey Patrick, I am going over your love letter submission and getting things ready, and have been talking with Janice Lee about it, and we were wondering if…