While we were getting JAM TODAY ready for press last year, right after the first galleys went out, my friend Hercules Bellville died. The last time I’d heard his voice was on my message machine, when I called into it from the Denver airport. I was on the way back from my first meeting with our lovely distributor, Consortium, in Minneapolis; before that I’d been with Alex, who was shooting REPO CHICK in Los Angeles. I hadn’t been home in weeks. I had no idea how long that message had sat there, on my machine.

But it was so odd for Hercules to call. He usually waited for us to call him, announcing an imminent arrival in London, which would mean a lunch somewhere, where he would eye the single sitting at the next table, and stage whisper that he loathed ‘lone diners.’ If it ever looked as if the poor man (for it was always a man, I now realize; Hercules kept his greatest tenderness, his uncompetitive side, for us women) was at all interested in our conversation, he would turn and glare at him, and say loudly, “Thank you very much!”

And it would mean dinner, for the first few years we knew each other always a tussle since Herc inevitably insisted on going out somewhere expensive and chic, and always insisted on paying. There was no stopping him. Even if one of us got up in the middle of dinner and silently went to the manager to try to forestall this, it always turned out that Herc had gotten there, mysteriously, first. I only managed to beat him once.  For his birthday, at the River Cafe.
The manager, Charles, let me arrange to pay over the phone before any of us even got there. And since we all knew that whatever beer Herc would inevitably order, he would inevitably send back, insisting it wasn’t cold enough, Charles and I arranged to have a beer frozen in a block of ice, surrounded by birthday candles, to be ready for the exchange.

I was rather proud of that one.

In later years, it was so crystal clear that what the three of us preferred was dining at his house, on the couch, with the telly on, that I don’t think we dined out once–unless it was at a restaurant particularly known for its food, which he thought I’d enjoy. He was so thoughtful that way. As in so many other ways. As long as he didn’t think you’d caught on.

Anyway, something about there being a message from him alarmed me. There was an undercurrent of tenderness in his voice, too, which was usually reserved for very special occasions indeed. So I called him back from the airport, got his machine, told him we’d both try to call him later. We did, but we never got through.  Of course I know now that he probably never got any of the messages; he went into the hospital before I even picked up his, and, shortly after, too quickly for us to fly over and say good bye, he died.

So I added a piece about him to the finished JAM TODAY, really, just for myself, just to make myself feel a little better. It was my secret favorite part of the book. Then not so secret, since when I read from the book, I inevitably chose that piece. Sometimes I’d serve the eggplant caviar mentioned in it alongside. To my great delight, in Los Angeles, at Skylight Books, a woman, a fellow writer, came up to me afterwards and said, “Was that Hercules Bellville you were reading about? I thought so. I’m good friends with his goddaughter.”

That was lovely.

Then Alex filmed the talk and put it up on You Tube, and asked if there were any tags I wanted put with it, and I said, “Put Herc’s name.” Because I had a kind of fantasy that someday, another one of Herc’s friends would be idly Googling him, and find it, and maybe get in touch. He had so many friends, Hercules. He was gifted that way.

And it happened just that way. Today I got a letter, beautiful handwriting on beautiful paper, from just such a person, in London. A friend of Herc’s, thanking me for the book, saying the part about Hercules made her cry, and now she loves eggplant.

I’ll write her back. And when I go to London, I’ll ask her out for tea. We can have a good laugh, or a good cry, or both, together, which is a very good thing indeed.

So that made me think that the world being a small place is not a bad thing at all.

What a year this has been.  Our first three books–Mike Madrid’s THE SUPERGIRLS, my JAM TODAY, Brian Griffith’s CORRECTING JESUS–all launched and bobbing up and down with a high heart on the high seas.  We had about a day and a half to realize, relieved, that the first year of the Press has been a success, before we started freaking out in the normal way about next year. Next year…this year, my God, it’s this year already…is our Fairy Tale Year. We’d planned that because, well, you know, of all the dissed stories in the world, the ones that get looked down on the most, while being of the most major (albeit hidden from view) importance, Fairy Tales have to top the list.  Along with cooking, female superheroes, and a Jesus who didn’t set out to rule the world but just help everybody get along, these stories are of basic importance to the culture.  Ignored, patronized, even scorned (depending on how much the scorner needs a scornee to make him/her feel good about her/himself).  And maybe that is a sign, in fact, I think it is a sign, of how really important, at bottom, they are.

Anyway, we’d all been talking about this among ourselves, and with a few writers, of course, and I can’t think that we advertised it very much.  Emails between us.  Phone calls, yes.  Maybe a mention in a blog or two.  But that doesn’t explain what happened next.

About a month or two ago, this would be late fall, I went out, as usual, in the morning to walk the dogs in the woods behind the house.  Alex was gone for some reason–he’d gone to town, I think–but anyway, I was alone.

There’s a big tree back there, next to the creek, one that’s bigger than all the others, left over from being saved, somehow, from the general logging of the area back at the turn of the twentieth century.  It’s a fir, and it’s so big around that you can’t hug it, two people can’t even touch fingers if they try to circle it with their arms.  It’s a favorite tree of ours; we usually stops to greet it in some way as we pass, so I guess I automatically turn toward it on my walk even when I’m alone.

This particular morning was an early warning of winter, weather-wise, with that first early snowfall that surprises you out from nowhere after a deceptively warm day.  Everything was white and quiet, and the sky was a solid blue. I should have been paying more attention to it, the morning was so beautiful, but I had a bunch of admin tasks on my desk, and I was thinking, mostly, about those.  But as I passed the tree, I looked at it the way I always did.  And looked again.

Because there, leaning neatly up against the trunk of the giant fir tree, sitting up straight on the snow, was a brown paper and string wrapped parcel.

You can imagine how this isn’t a normal sight, this kind of thing, in the woods behind my house.  It’s National Forest property back there, and hardly anyone walks on it but me and Alex, and, occasionally, the child of a neighbor of ours.  My first thought was that this was some kind of treasure of Rory’s (it’s near enough a Native American fort he’s put together in the woods to make that a likely case).  So I walked on past it.  But when I got home something about it nagged at me. I was worried, I think, that more snow, or even rain, would come and ruin it–whatever it was.  So I went back and bent down to get it. And found, to my real surprise, that the thing–the parcel–was addressed to me!

Like this:

“To the Publisher of Exterminating Angel Press
located in the woods of the State of Jefferson
in the country of Cascadia”

Well, that address is a bit of a joke, a bit of a fantasy that we have around here in the Pacific Northwest, where there is, periodically, a movement to secede from the imperial union of the USA and form our own country.  So of course now I thought the thing was a joke for sure.  And nothing about the parcel, when I opened it in front of an early fire in our woodstove back at the house, made me think differently.

It was a book.  Not just a manuscript, a book, and not a new book, either.  Someone–it looked like a lot of someones–had been reading it before it got wrapped up in paper and string. There were stamps on the parcel, which I’ve carefully kept in case they turn out to be a clue, of a type that I certainly have never seen before, and that no one I’ve shown them to can identify either.  There were a lot of them, stuck on haphazardly, kind of the way you do when you’re in a hurry and not sure how much postage a package is going to take.  Most of them were gold lined around the edges, and pictures of mountains and rivers–that kind of thing.  Two of them were pictures of a young woman holding a crown and smiling. I didn’t recognize her. No one else did either, though Mike said she looked kind of familiar, though he couldn’t remember from where.

And there was a letter that came with the book. This letter claimed the parcel had come to me, not to beat around the bush here, from another world.  Another country in another world.  There are a lot of peculiarities about the letter which I won’t go into here.  It may be that we’ll publish the whole thing entire after I’ve given it some thought.  All I want to say now about it is that everyone around here–husband, neighbors, local friends–absolutely deny having any hand in its appearance. If it’s a joke, the joker has yet to claim the credit of it.

I asked Alan, our Fed Ex guy; Jesse, our UPS driver; and Ben, our mailman (who delivers to our mailbox three miles away, and I doubt he even knows where our house IS, but it was worth a shot, I thought), if they had any idea where the parcel had appeared from, but all three of them seemed honestly surprised by the question (except Jesse, but he’s too cool to admit being surprised by anything–most UPS drivers are).  So that seems to rule out any kind of regular delivery.

Which leaves me with another problem.  The sender of the parcel–or rather, the writer of the letter that came with the parcel, since he implies in it that there was more than one hand in the sending of the book itself–had asked for me to send him something, and by return of post! He asked–well, pleaded is not too strong a word–for copies of fairy tales of our world, of the kind of stories like the one I found was packed in the parcel. He asked me for stories that might have, say, the same kind of meaning on our own world as the book he’d sent me had in his. He said.

As you can imagine, I didn’t quite know how to answer that one. Not yet, anyway.  And of course I didn’t know how on earth (literally) to get the book to Dr. Fallaize (whoever he is), at Otterbridge Press (whatever that is), in Arcadia (wherever that could be).  In the end, though, and feeling more than a little silly, I packed up a copy I had of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, along with a collection of the better known tales of Hans Christian Anderson.  I included a respectful, if short, note, along with my business card and one of our catalogs.  “Might as well do the thing right,” I thought. I wrapped the whole thing up in paper and string. I’m not sure why I did that, but somehow I felt like it was important.  And then, with Alex and the dogs along watching with interest, I somewhat ceremoniously and self consciously (well, it was embarrassing, okay?) laid the thing in exactly the same spot where the first parcel was found, under the grandmother fir tree in the woods behind our house.

Nothing happened. It was still there next day.

Alex and I had a good laugh about that.  “But why not leave it there?” Alex said when I headed toward the tree to collect the parcel back again. “It’s not going to snow or rain or anything for at least the next few days.  Why not leave it for awhile and see what happens?”

Alex has always been a person who is more interested in what might be able to happen than in what actually does, and sometimes, I have found, this is an interesting attitude to take.  Anyway, this time I listened to him, and did, in fact, leave the parcel there.  Every day, then, I checked it with a pretend casualness. I was rather anxious about the whole thing. But the parcel stayed obdurately there.  It stayed oddly cold, though, and the snow didn’t melt.  Only a little, but this was just a mild dripping off the tree. You could see it just dampened the parcel a little; not even the address was smeared.  Which, by the way, read like this:

Dr. Alan Fallaize c/o Otterbridge Press
The Tower By The Pond
St. Vitus College
Wrykyn
ARCADIA

Then, one morning, about three or four days later, and just before a thaw and threatened rainfall, I went out with the dogs and Alex for our walk.  And the books were gone.  Just like that.

At first I accused Al of picking them up for a joke, but he denied it so earnestly I had to believe him.  His theory was a bear, or the boy next door.  But a bear seemed unlikely (what on earth would a bear want with a couple of musty old books?), and cautious questioning discovered that Rory had been away at the time at a fencing tournament in California. And anyway, what would HE have done with those books, even if he had been at home?

It was a lot later that I remembered something odd…or, at any rate, just as odd as all the other occurrences around the tree and the parcels. The night before I found the first parcel, and the night before my own two books disappeared–I’d heard an owl hooting behind the house.  I love owls, so I notice when they hoot.  We hadn’t heard one for a long time, is why I remember. But I didn’t connect it with the parcels. Even now I’m not sure it isn’t a more than slightly nutty thing to do, connecting it, somehow, with the parcels.  Not any more nutty, though, I think philosophically, than all the rest of it. I mean, if you’re going to start accepting nutty, you might as well go all the way.

Now I have to figure out what to do. Because in the parcel was a fairy tale, with scholarly footnotes explaining its importance to, I guess, this other world. I don’t know why these people sent the book to EAP. The only thing I can think of is that they–and the fairy tale itself–stress the importance of the Small over the Great.  And if there’s one press that’s Small, well, it’s got to be EAP. And if there’s one that values the Small over the Great, the Everyday over the Big Blast, well, that’s got to be EAP too.

Whether or not these people (if I can call them that), these scholars from another world, were right in entrusting their work to EAP, well, only the rest of 2010 will tell.

Nothing like having the first season of your own publishing company to make you feel somewhat giddy, and like you don’t know up from down.  I mean, I DON’T know up from down, but generally I can hide that fact from myself fairly successfully.

Still, that giddiness thing is not unpleasant. Oh yeah, sure, there’s that sudden realization that in a tiny margin business you can make a mistake and kapow! That’s it for you. But you know, after a lifetime of bohemian excesses (kept in certain bounds by a prim middle class Catholic upbringing, to the extent that they almost can’t be called excesses at all…that is, until you look them over later), this kind of thing is quite exhilarating.  We’ve got each other, Alex and I point out delightedly, we’ve got our health, we’ve got our dogs, we’ve got our friends and family, we’ve got our creative activity, and if we don’t have a particularly healthy bank balance, well, just exactly how much do we WANT to be that different from our neighbors?

Here’s the thing: I don’t want to be different from my neighbors. I don’t want to be that kind of artist whose main goal (we know who these guys are) is to be different from everyone else and acknowledged to BE different.  Not only do I not want it because I think it’s bad for the community, that kind of attitude, I don’t want it because I know it’s bad for ME. I don’t like it. It gives me an unpleasant taste in my mouth to fantasize that I have any more rights or any more worth than anyone else.

In short, I don’t want to be Ayn Rand.

I was kind of surprised a little while ago, while guestblogging on the Powell’s Books Blog site, that the piece that got the most comment was a rather lighthearted one about our dog agility teacher and the home grown vegetables in her neighborhood.  Almost as an afterthought, I titled it: AYN RAND WOULD NOT UNDERSTAND THIS POST. And immediately, IMMEDIATELY, got a comment sternly lecturing me about how Ayn Rand was for everything good and true and beautiful and I should read THE FOUNTAINHEAD RIGHT NOW.

Well, I mean, I’ve read The Fountainhead, which is saying something, since from a literary point of view it’s just about unreadable.  From a sociological point of view, of course, it’s fascinating, and what’s more fascinating about it is why on earth it’s so popular with young people right now.  I think a New York Times article today must have nailed it: the book promises you can be different from everyone else, a GENIUS, not constrained by normal people’s rules, if you just clap your hands and believe in Ayn Rand.

What about those of us who don’t want to be geniuses, and are damn sick of how many of them clutter up the public highways? What about US?

And  speaking of them, Brian Griffith—who is a prime example of a wonderful, thoughtful, commonsensical PERSON who has no wish to be a genius, only a member of a sane community—has his wonderful, thoughtful, commonsensical book CORRECTING JESUS: 2000 Years of Changing the Story, out now with us, Exterminating Angel Press. Publishers Weekly gave it a good, commonsensical review. And it’s just like sitting over dessert with the most courteous thinker ever, who wants to share with you what he’s noticed in poring over historical texts of the last two thousand years.  You know the kind of dinner guest I’m talking about.  The one who is so into his subject, that you can’t help but be fascinated.

So do yourself a favor.  Drop that copy of THE FOUNTAINHEAD off at the nearest Goodwill.  Pour yourself a nice cup of tea. And sit down with Brian Griffith for an hour or two and have a conversation with him in your head. It’ll be way more fun in the long run. I promise. And it has the added benefit that you won’t feel any residual guilt for spending time with a book where the hero rapes the heroine and then blows up a public low income housing project just because it doesn’t meet his fastidious tastes.

You’ll feel much better being a person hanging out with other people, instead of being a genius all alone while he/she’s being looked up to by the mob below. That I can absolutely promise.

I think a lot about the scene in the Wizard of Oz where the WIzard’s voice booms out, “I am the Great and Powerful OZ!” And then, when Toto pushes the curtain aside and shows the shamefaced carny who’s running the apparatus, booms, “Pay NO attention to the Man Behind the Curtain!” It always makes me laugh. And I always think, giggling a little, that really we could have called EAP, as an alternative, The Man Behind the Curtain Press.

I mean, the main point is of course to get ideas out there. A particular kind of idea, of course…or ideas.  Ideas on how an individual, just one person, can confront all of the looming problems in the world around us without either getting mowed down–without giving up her/his individual pleasure in life–or cowed into denial and servile acceptance “because that’s just the way it is, I can’t change it.”  But I think it’s also part of the point to show that any individual, keeping his/her head down, and determined to both enjoy life and push it in the right direction at the same time, can do that. It’s open to everyone. It’s part of every day life. And don’t let the Man Behind the Curtain fool you into thinking it can only be done by a big booming voice coming from a loudspeaker hidden somewhere in the room.

Now ideas are the reason books are made.  Or they should be the reason, anyway, in the same way that it should be the reason that goods are made that they fill a need, and not just somebody’s bank account. So you can start very small. You can start at home. It can be part of your everyday life, and I’m arguing that it should be–ideas, I mean.  Your ideas, my ideas, then they get exchanged, they turn into a third idea and they launch out into the world.

This is an everyday process, which somehow has gotten taken over by the ‘experts’. Mainly because we let them. Mainly because of a lack of confidence, a lack of autonomy, on our own part…a terror that our own opinion would be scorned, would be wrong, would be…set aside as not as grand as those others. Mainly because we actually believe that voice when it insists it’s the Great and Powerful Oz.

We let ourselves get mystified. And that’s the first place we can start in making our world a better place.  We can refuse the mystification. We can insist on seeing the Man Behind the Curtain.

All of this! Just because I’ve been wrestling all week with admin problems coming out of publishing books. Printing issues. Proofing issues. Sales to foreign countries issues. And, of all things, liquor license issues. I mean, it turns out it’s quite difficult just to serve a little bit of wine to some friends to celebrate a book. At least, if that celebration is in public. And my wrestling with that little issue, as I meditated on it and looked at first that way to solve it, then rejected it to look at another way, I started to get that picture of the poor Wizard fruitlessly pulling levers in my head; it just kept floating through. And I realized as I wondered why that image, that, of course, one of the ways that we mystify the process of getting ideas out there is we mystify the whole production process, and the whole sharing with the world process (the former we mystify by pretending the ideas just got out by themselves by sheer strength of truth–the powerful use this one a lot to hide the monoculture of ideas it’s to their benefit to enforce, I notice–or we mystify the latter by calling it ‘marketing and publicity’ and relegating THAT to the experts again), instead of just making plain what happens along the way. And that this, in fact, doesn’t do the mystifiers any more good than it does us.  I mean, when was the Wizard happier, when he was terrifying the Emerald City, or when he was hanging out at the end with Dorothy and telling her his whole story?

In a way, the entire media business in this country, at least the large, formal, entrenched, monopolistic media that most people see as the whole iceberg, is run as if by the Great and Powerful Oz, the Man Behind the Curtain, with no real story showing at all.  Real story showing being considered unprofessional, somehow…not done. I don’t think this is healthy. I think that curtain’s got to go. And I think one way that curtain can get tweaked is by as many people as possible taking over the means of production themselves…and the means of distribution, too.  And along the way, being quite clear about how the process really happens, and what’s really going on.

Kind of overwhelming, planning the launches of THE SUPERGIRLS and JAM TODAY for September, right around when they hit the stores on September 15.  Like having wrapped candies thrown at you from all directions–which way do you turn?  How do you collect them and pass them out?  How do you say thank you to all those invisible hands throwing them?

We’re going to launch THE SUPERGIRLS at the absolute perfect venue for it, in my opinion–the Cartoon Art Museum, in San Francisco.  They’ve been completely swell about it (”Love to support local authors”), and it’s set for Thursday, September 10, at 7 pm, in case you’re out and about and around there that night and want to see Mike finally get his revenge on me for not letting him fill his book with illustrations from the comics (”are you crazy? do you know how much DC and Marvel CHARGE for rights?”),  you should come on over.  We’re planning to have a little wine, a little cheese, and a lot of artwork from the comics, all the stuff that Mike loves–and he wants to ask everyone which superheroines THEY love.  Because, as he says, “I don’t like just talking.  I’m more the interactive type.” Which someday we’ll figure out how to work in the books, too–it’s coming, it’s coming.

Then JAM TODAY is also going to the perfect venue:  Powell’s Hawthorne store, in Portland.  This makes me particularly happy, since Powell’s is the ur-independent bookstore of all independent bookstores, and since Portland, in its laid back, young, progressive style is everything EAP wistfully wants to hang with.  I’ll be there, on Sunday, September 13, at 4, and since I’M interactive, too (and am always terrifically curious to know what everyone else is eating), it’ll probably be about what you all have in your kitchens, how many people you have to feed, and what you’re going to do about it.  My motto being: “If you can get control of your refrigerator, you can get control of your life!”  And not a bad motto, either.

After that, we’re planning on showing up at University Bookstore, in Seattle; Pilot Bookstore, also in Seattle (an adorably tiny space, our ace Seattle intern Jessica Johnson informs me); Omnivore Books, in San Francisco (thanks, Celia, for being so kind even after discovering there is no jam recipe in Jam Today); Golden Apple Comics; in Los Angeles…and I’m working on Vroman’s in Pasadena, Capitola Book Cafe, in Capitola of course!…Skylight…Kepler’s…Booksmith…ah, yikes!  Here it all comes…

And then, on a less concretely practical note (and if you get bored by philosophy, skip this bit), I was thinking again about the point of EAP books, and the point of getting them out there, and the main point we want to explore and extend a discussion on.  This morning, my Beloved Husband and I were having our usual amiable argument about some public figure or other (Elliot Spitzer, this time, I believe), and I said, “The thing is, our interest in this kind of thing is different.  Comes from a different angle.  What you’re primarily interested in, when you look at public events and at history, is how the rich and powerful oppress those beneath them.  And this is very sensible.  But my primary interest is how we all connive with the forces of oppression and repression ourselves–why we don’t just walk out the door and set ourselves free.”  That’s the question EAP wants to explore.  It may look odd, our first two books being about comic book superheroines and about food, but it’s always been serenely obvious to me: we’re trapped in a certain way of looking at things, a certain way of telling stories, and that leaves us limited options of how to act, and how to visualize ourselves and our potentialities.  Why not look at the entertainment we consume in a different way? Why not wonder why superheroines are always treated differently from superheroes, rather than just taking it for granted, or even just assuming that it’s the oppression of patriarchy? (I mean, it might be, but is that all?)

And why not think that the best way to start with changing the world is to make sure that ourselves and our loved ones are healthy and happy, and then work out from there? Why not start by making sure everyone is well fed, in a sensible, pleasurable way? Why not think today the kitchen, tomorrow the world!?

That was what I was thinking about this morning…but I’m kinda dying to get out and about and see what other people think about the same kind of things…so I hope I see you at one of those places above (dates and times to come…)…

We have two dogs who are, of course, the lights of our lives, both of them strays, both dumped on the side of some road, both picked up by local shelters.  The first one we adopted we thought was a mutt, but then, of course, it turned out he was a purebred Australian Cattle Dog.  After falling in love with him, Alex announced the next dog was going to be the same breed, and so we found Pearl. They’re easy to find in shelters, those dogs–people get them because they’re cute and then just can’t cope with the reality of the breed’s energy.

i don’t mean to be boring you about the dogs–hang on, this really is going somewhere.  But I have to spend a few sentences saying how much they add to our lives.  Dog lovers will immediately know what I mean, but for everyone else, there is something about love coming and going from and to wherever and whatever that is energizing, life giving…that makes one feel what it means to be truly human.  It is the two way exchange of love (and this can be between people, between a person and an animal, between a person and the natural world…even between a person and a long dead author of a book…) that pulls you out of any fantasies that may be substituting in your life for reality, and brings you face to face with what life really is.  Love, in other words, as opposed to any other human activity, is like swimming with the current in a cold, clear stream.  Everything else is like splashing around in a muddy pond.

I’m saying this, because I was really struck this week by a book about the Australian Cattle Dog that I got as a present for Alex.  Most of the book, it turns out disappointingly enough, is about the perfect form of the breed.  This is what their feet should look like. This is what their eyes should look like.  This is what their coat should be colored–this and no other.

Anyone who has ever been in love–truly in love, no matter with who or what–will recognize that this is not the way we assess the Beloved.  We don’t think about bits and pieces; we just move with a surge of joy toward her, him, or it. What could be more perfect than the Whole Beloved?  What could be more perfect than one’s loved husband or child, or dog, or maple tree, or mountain lake, or book? And how could it be compared, really, to anything else but itself?

It kept nagging at me, looking at that book about the abstract Australian Cattle Dog, and then looking at our own, living, breathing exemplars of the breed, that our whole culture has gotten very attenuated making the same mistake as people obsessed with breeding dogs to a certain look.  It’s done the same thing to ‘acceptable’ ideas as the obsessed dog breeder has done to what it thinks of as an ‘acceptable’ dog.  There are only a few ideas which are acceptable, and they have to be presented in a certain way, in certain words, surrounded by certain forms of advertising.  They have to be written, even if only apparently and only in name, by acceptable names, that have passed inspection in a certain way.  Like the collie that is admired for its slender head, so that collies are now bred with hardly any brain between the ears to achieve this, the culture is in danger of having real life and real ideas bred out of it in favor of a Byzantine, repetitive, dead set of personalities and principles, repeated over and over.

It really is.  When was the last time you read something in the major media that made you sit up and say, “wow.  there’s something new I never would have thought of in a million years.” Well, you can’t remember it probably.  I can’t, anyway.  And one thing I really have seen, working on EAP for the last few years, is that anyone who has worked consistently in the major media (there are exceptions, David Budbill comes immediately to mind) has a terrible time adapting to what I’m asking for: direct communication about WHAT THEY REALLY THINK.  Not what they think they should think, or what they’re allowed to think in the major papers and mags, although this has sometimes become such second nature that the writers themselves are fooled about what they think in their secret hearts. Where I’ve found the most interesting, and the most spontaneous, communication was from people who, by and large, had nothing to lose by saying what really was there.

Anyone can do this, though it’s hard to break through the official barrier. Anyone can just engage in a serious and loving way with what they really think about what’s going on around them.  And not only can anyone do this, for Christ’s sake, anyone and everyone SHOULD do this.  Look at the mess we’re in.  I mean, really look at it. Don’t get lulled by what you read in the papers. Don’t start thinking you’re not responsible either, and I don’t mean just because you don’t recycle.  I mean every single one of us is responsible for what we really think, and then for expressing that clearly, and then for acting out of that truth.

And the first truth we’ve got to act out of is this: the basic, most important value of a truly human life is the human ability to love something wholeheartedly in the present.  Not to analyze it, or try to ‘perfect’ it, but to love it, in joy.

In other words, take your own values and perceptions out for a mountain walk and watch them gambol about, and don’t try to force them to be bred to fit what the New York Times tells you is the correct aspirant upper class way to think.  Get out there and see what your ideas do on their own, for God’s sake, and love them that way, and guide them in the way that looks best to you–not to Vanity Fair.

And then write to me when you do. That’s what I’m looking for.  That’s the kind of stuff I want to publish for the next twenty years. That’s the way Brian Griffith thinks and writes, and that’s the way Mike Madrid does, too. Why are things this way, they say? Why not this way? What would happen if it was? And maybe then the collie would start broadening out its head, and not be as elegant and attenuated to the eye, but maybe it would be a better companion and friend that way, who knows? I mean, unless we try.

(The first three EAP books will come out in September and November of this year, but you can prebuy them now at a discount on Amazon…THE SUPERGIRLS: Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy, and the History of the Comic Book Heroine, by Mike Madrid; JAM TODAY: A Diary of Cooking WIth What You’ve Got, by me; and CORRECTING JESUS: 2000 Years of Changing the Story, by Brian Griffith.  Get ‘em while they’re hot.)

Back from the Consortium Books sales conference in New York, and I’m so full up of new information that I feel like if you press the center of my skull, it’ll all come spurting out my pores.  I sat in on most of the publisher presentations–what’s coming up, how they think the sales reps can sell it, what their hopes are for the books–and, let me tell you, the mind reels at the sheer capacity of those reps, who sit there taking it all in, and who still look honestly as enthusiastic at the last presentation as they did to the first.  More maybe–mine was the second, since I’m the newbie.  I thought it would be a doddle; I mean how many other panels have I sat through? How many presentations of various kinds? But the minute I got up there, and looked out at the hotel conference room, and saw them all sitting there–thirty or so serious faces all looking up at me and saying, “Well, we want to sell your books, are you going to help us here?” and my legs and my voice went all wobbly and never recovered.  But I’ll tell you something about where I’ve landed with Consortium. This is not your gladiatorial combat. The people here all want the same thing, and it’s all idea based; it’s all BOOK based. Everyone’s got to make a living, sure, but that’s not where the real interest lies. So imagine my relief getting down off that dais, and being met by kind expressions and voices, all saying reassuring things about selling my books.

They said reassuring things too, to my even greater surprise, at a couple of meetings with Publishers Weekly. What they said was that there was some feeling around the place that small publishers, with a stubborn vision, and a pruned list, may be the future of publishing. Of course I liked that. Seeing as how, as Mike and I continually say to each other (with some hilarity) that we here at EAP are ‘modest, yet grandiose’. That was the mandate I gave Mike in designing our catalog. ‘Modest, yet grandiose’. And, by God, he stepped up to the design plate. (If you want a copy of the ‘modest, yet grandiose’  Exterminating Angel Press Very First Season’s Catalog, just email info@exterminatingangel.com, with your address, and we’ll send one along.)

More hilarity, too. After the four days spent zipping ’round New York, from place to place, like a very well behaved bee–Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, a truly crackerjack young publicist named Lauren Cerand who has a mean brain under that purple beret, lunch with my press rep, digital resources presentation, Consortium publishers meeting, presentations, cocktail party, and so on–had one very nice break, a dinner alone at Grand Central Oyster Bar, where I got into a mild and entertaining argument about the relative merits of West Coast and East Coast oysters with the banker sitting on my left at the counter, resulting in his buying extra oysters and insisting I have some…then on his remarking that I was a “really good feeder.” (Despite his propaganda, West Coast oysters remain supreme.) After it all,  I kind of slid over to New Jersey, utterly wrung,  to spend an evening with a friend there before getting a 6 am flight from Newark next morning. And sitting in the garden, I gave a little summary of what at gone on (at request). My friend’s husband said, “It doesn’t sound like a very profitable business.” “No,” I said. “Maybe 3% a year, if you’re canny.” He looked at me with astonishment (his wife’s friends never cease to astound him with their eccentricities, but he, being a kind man, usually can hide this.  not this time, though.), and said, “Why are you working at a 3% a year business?” I just grinned at that one and didn’t answer. “Just because you like it?” he said.

“Just because I like it,” I said.

And I do like it. Thinking back, through the jetlag, over the last few days, I think about seeing the books everywhere, and hearing about lovely books being brought forward and launched by a wide variety of brave, smart, and funny people. And I think about how not one person gave me any bullshit about themselves; this is a pretty good average, considering I talked to so many people my voice just about gave out. (Actually, it did literally give out when I insisted on introducing myself to the goddess Amy Goodman; I started on a coughing fit that ended THAT conversation fast, and told me it was about time to go home.) And I think about how this is what motors the culture, THIS, not the immodest but grandiose stuff that claims to.  This. Because what motors anything is the small, determined, quietly humming bit, not the loud, large, flashy, publicized bit. Every day life is what forms us; not all those heroics that sell so many cars and computers. And these books are every day life, in the finest possible way.

So I do like it.

(Don’t forget, if you want a copy of that catalog, I’ve presently got two thousand of them, give or take a few dozen, in boxes on my office floor; I’ll be happy to send you one.)

Phew.  What a month.  First galley copies of THE SUPERGIRLS and JAM TODAY, and they’re all off to the 28 Consortium sales reps, who today sent ‘round their various reports on the state of the book buying nation.  Fascinating.  And how sensible. Every body’s got their own voice, and they’re pretty much all voices bung full of common sense.   How amazingly comforting it feels to know there are all these competent people watching our back.

And the galleys went off to various to get quotes for the covers.  Now THAT is the reward for all the time spent laboriously combing the manuscripts for the niggling typos that everyone missed, no matter how many times we all went over them.  And for the hours spent compiling the indexes, nipping and tucking the text to make it fit properly on the allotted pages. You get a quote from somebody when you least expect it, my God, somebody you actually admire, and you sit back for a minute and think, “whew.”  That’s about it.  Just “whew.”

The first one we got for THE SUPERGIRLS was from Stan Lee.  You can imagine how that affected Mike.  I think it was probably the first thing he thought about every morning for days.  And that’s on days when he had quite a bit to think about.  Even without me calling up every five minutes to make some kind of change in his layouts of the books and of the really stellar catalog he’s designed for us (“I like it—it’s modest, yet grandiose…just like EAP.”)

Then there was JAM TODAY.  Yeah, yeah, so I wrote it too—see the JAM TODAY blog from which it sprang.  But let me tell you, being a publisher kind of trumps being a writer while you’re in the production phase, and I don’t think I thought about it one way or the other except as a piece of a project that had to be done as well as I could manage.  So when I sent it out, the first time I sent it, to one of my most admired cookbook writers, it was gone about two days when I suddenly realized.  Oh my God.  No one’s ever read that manuscript but me.  I mean, it was a little bit the overworked oldest daughter in the family, if you know what I mean—the other two books got more of my close attention; THIS one was just supposed to get on with it and help me with the rest of them.  I didn’t pay her any attention.  Oh my God, I thought.  Both Mike’s book, and Brian’s book—which comes out in November (Correcting Jesus, EAP’s Christmas book, nice touch that)—they’d both been edited and edited and discussed and discussed.  But not mine.  Oh my God.  What if it is an incredible piece of crap?  I never asked!

So when I got back the most generous, amazing quote from Deborah Madison,  I almost keeled over dead with relief.  And you know what?  As the publisher, not as the writer.  Because the publisher was thinking, dear God, what if I was about to launch a total lemon? But the writer said to the publisher:  Well.  Dear.  It can’t actually BE a lemon, not completely, not if Deborah Madison is willing to say nice things in public about it.  Now CAN it?

By the time I got an even more heartening quote from similarly admired John Thorne, I was back to being a writer—maybe because it was two in an insomniac morning, and the publisher was beaten to hell, leaving only the writer to moon over the emails.  And the pleasure I got from that quote…well.  I can’t say anymore.  Just…WELL.

And in other news…we may have an intern.  Yes, we may have found an intern. Yes, and she may turn out to be such a perfect fit that I cannot be blamed for originally thinking she was an April Fool’s joke perpetrated by my friends, until I noticed our introductory conversation was taking place on April 2.  She lives in Seattle.  I’m sending her your way, Bruce of Chin Music, and Rick Simonson at Elliott Bay Books.  Oh, please, Goddess, let her be as she appears.  Her name is Jessica and her works are good.  But more on that at a later time.

Next month:  our first sales conference.  New York City, just like I pictured it.

Mat Capper, EAP’s special correspondent from Liverpool, reminded me the other day about the first time we met.  It was in Sefton Park, in Toxteth, in Liverpool, on the set of REVENGERS TRAGEDY.  I was producing the film, and he was acting in it.

The scene that day was a marquee in an open field, where a wedding takes place.  The bad guys invade the tent, kill the guests, and proceed to steal their money.  Mat played one of the bad guys. The guests were all extras, recruited from who knew where…just people who wanted a laugh, or people who knew one of us, or people passing by…that kind of thing.  All Liverpudlians.  Scousers, as they’re otherwise known.

Some minor prop error had occurred, and we discovered we didn’t have the play money needed for the robbery.  Heads went together.  No problem–Lucy, our excellent production accountant, was there with the cash to pay the day players. ?3000 is what I remember, then about $6000.  Without much more ado, we scattered the real cash all over the extras playing dead, and shot the scene.  Collected the cash, went on with the day, and didn’t think much more about it.

Until I had to listen to the horrified cries of outsiders, .  “You did WHAT? Where?  In TOXTETH?  One of the worst neighborhoods in Europe?  Don’t you know about Scousers?  They would’ve stolen you blind!”

Only they didn’t.  We didn’t lose one ten pound note.  It hadn’t occurred to us we’d lose one ten pound note.  And you know why?  Because everyone there was having fun, they were all essential elements to the film, everyone was being creative together.  There isn’t much more fun you can have in this world short of having sex with a loved one.  Which is another form of creative group activity, come to think of it.

I thought about that this week, when Alex and I were on a road trip together, sharing the car (we brought the dogs for fun) so I could go to San Francisco to spend the day finalizing design for the first two EAP books, and he could show the rough cut of REPO CHICK to a roomful of technicians who are going to do the effects.

The EAP designer and I had a blast.  It was (and is) a ton of work. But there’s a big difference between the kind of work you do because you’ve got a creative and practical goal, and the kind you do because you think you have to, for whatever reason.  We got through everything we had to do, and I suggested we hop over to Berkeley and watch Al’s screening.  (On the way over, on BART, we designed the EAP catalog. That was fun, too.)

The screening was at Phil Tippett’s place.  Phil Tippett Studios, you may or may not know, is one of the most highly regarded special effects joints on the planet.  They do a lot of the high end studio special effects.  And they wanted to do REPO CHICK, outside of normal working hours, for just about zero money–just for fun.

So this was after hours.  All thirty or so people sitting in the room rigged up for a screening had finished their work-for-pay for the day.   The mood was festive and alive; when Mike and I got there, we discovered my dogs had been given the run of the facility (along with a surfeit of corn chips).  There was pizza and beer.  We sat down and watched the film; a discussion followed of what had to be done.  Phil stood up and warned his crew that it was a lot of work, and that they had to remember about their day jobs.  Everyone greeted this news cheerfully and went back to discussing REPO CHICK.

Later that night, sitting over a cup of chamomile tea, Phil said, “This reminds everyone of why we got into all of this in the first place.  Everyone’s always asking me what it was like back in the day when you worked with creative people just for creative reasons, and not all the time for money.  And this is it.  We need this; it reenergizes everybody.”

When Alex and I talked it over on the drive home, we laughed about the reason why the dominant culture drives it into all of us that to do something for fun is childish, not serious, not worth anything culturally.  That’s because if everyone indeed acted as if the purpose of human endeavor was joy rather than gritting your teeth misery in order to collect some cash, some dominance, some prestige, the whole economic house of cards would just come down.  And the Great and Terrifying Wizard of Oz would be revealed for the shamefaced snake oil salesman he has been all along.

(And if you want to read something by someone who has spent a lifetime working for joy, read Danbert Nobacon’s PERFORMANCE AND EVOLUTION? in this month’s EAP. It makes you want to get out and start your own rock and roll band. What is it with these guys up North?)

There were fourteen people peering benevolently at me from around the table.  The effect would have been overwhelming, if it wasn’t so comforting—rather, as I said later, like being lifted up by a particularly cosy tidal wave.  Each one of the people nodding and smiling had their own specialty, and each specialty was something I wanted to know more about.

Best of all, all their specialties and mine were going to combine into a force heading for one goal.  And there was nobody on top, nobody ‘in charge’ (except where it was somebody’s job to be in charge of some specific project), nobody who could suddenly and capriciously bring the whole thing to an end…nobody who would want to, anyway.  I could tell that right away, looking around the table.  This was a group of people who were happy in their jobs and absorbed in their work.

It was my meeting with the distributor Consortium, a book distributor specializing in the needs of independent and small publishers.  Their list is an impressive one—many of the small publishers I’ve admired over the years turn out to be parked there—and the atmosphere in the office is a pleasant, functional, get-on-with-it-and-have-fun-why-don’t-you kind of a thing that you can feel right away.

Consortium has a policy of spending a full day with any new publisher, so you (the publisher—me) can meet everyone, put faces on functions, understand what they do…and so they, presumably, can get a look at you (the publisher—me).  A little overwhelming by the middle of the day, when I have a stack of handouts and cards in front of me, and my mental hard drive is beginning to call for back up.  But exciting.  Really exciting.

Faces on functions.  Jaime covers Amazon, Nan does Barnes and Noble, Bill sells to wholesalers.  Michael knows production. Natalie settles the catalog.  Heather can tell me everything I need to know about libraries and schools…

My notes are all over the place, and all over bits and pieces of paper.  But when I’m back at my desk and survey them, they do (satisfyingly enough) make sense.

Here’s what made the most sense, though, when I had time to settle and think things over: this is a nonhierarchical way to work.  This is not a pyramid arranged with someone on top, and people spreading out, with various rights and responsibilities, on varying tiers, below.  This is an equity of work.  The point is the work, not the structure; the structure serves the work, not the other way ‘round.  When someone’s in charge, it’s to get something done; it’s properly situational.

It is, all ‘round, the way I like to work.  The way I’ve started and mean to go on.  So I think EAP’s ended up in the right place.

(And by the way, the above is why I get nervous hearing people talk about ‘submissions’ to EAP, when I think of them as ‘contributions’.  ‘Submissions’ makes me think a piece of work is being submitted to my judgment of its worth, and that’s something I don’t feel at all competent to do—how many things of worth have been ignored or scorned because the person doing the ignoring or scorning just had no judgment at all?  ‘Contributions’, though, that’s about sending something in to add to the general conversation.  And if I say no, that’s not EAP, I’m not judging its worth—whatever that means—but whether or not it adds to the conversation.  We’ve gotten a lot of stuff sent over the electronic transom that was competently, even beautifully, written, but that seemed utterly oblivious to the subject of partnership and equity, and how they can be achieved in a culture based on domination and hierarchy.  And when I say, well, this piece should go somewhere else, those writers sometimes get very, very annoyed.   Because, I suppose, they’re used to being judged on a whole different set of criteria, and not fetching up somewhere where the judging function is not exactly the first one we reach for.  What function is the first one EAP reaches for?  Hmmm.  The curiosity function.  Is this telling me something I didn’t know from someone who knows better than me?  And since anyone writing, or photoing, or filming, or any other form of expression, exactly what his or her own experience truly is knows that subject much better than me, that’s the kind of expression that gets my attention every time.)