Here at Exterminating Angel Press we’re taking deep breaths at the start of each new day, which is just as well since we’re about to head into the semi annual hell for leather gallop across the plains that is the launch of any new books. Two should arrive in the bookstores any day now–in fact, E. E. King’s DIRK QUIGBY’S GUIDE TO THE AFTERLIFE (the only book in history, as we continually say around here, to have cover blurbs from Ray Bradbury AND Margaret Cho) is probably already there on the shelves.

Then comes Danbert Nobacon’s 3 DEAD PRINCES: An Anarchist Fairy Tale, illustrated by our own dear in-house filmmaker/vegeterian husband Alex Cox (and yes, that suit of armor Queen Gwynmerelda puts on before the  Battle of Bald River Falls, is indeed based on an outfit in my own wardrobe, though I don’t wear it outside the house much…). The cover blurbs on this book are hilarious, too–and our lovely distributor informs me that, once again, we have made blurb history by publishing the only book that’s ever gone through their warehouse with a cover quote from Iggy Pop.

Danbert’s got a new album coming out at the same time as the book–WOEBEGONE–and he’ll be touring with both. We’re kicking it off with an evening at his home brew pub in Twisp,Washington, and judging from the last evening I spent at his home brew pub in Twisp, Washington, it ought to be a raucous, multi age blast. Not to mention the local organic red wine I STILL vividly remember and am looking forward to meeting again…

Then E. E. King (she goes by EEK around here) and Danbert show up in Los Angeles, then San Francisco...then we’re all together in Portland, at Powell’s Hawthorne store, on Monday, October 4, at 7:30 pm…all of us: Dan, EEK, Alex, and me (also the dogs, but they’ll be in the car). So if you’re around…or if you’re around for the Wordstock book festival the following weekend at the Portland Convention Center, drop by our booth. We’ll all be hanging around the booth, along with our new ace intern, Alison Week.

Okay, okay, I know I said I would never have an intern again–not because they aren’t lovely, charming, intelligent, and punctual, but because training someone takes a lot of time, and who has any time these days? And then they go away, and it was all for naught. But Alison asked very nicely, and promised faithfully to either make my life easier or to move on, and by God, she IS making my life easier by coordinating all the events for EEK and Dan.

In fact, she made my life so much easier, that I was tempted by another flurry of emails from another young woman looking to intern in publishing, too. So welcome Amber Garner, who is presently wrestling with the Satan that is our website content management system. I’m looking forward to seeing who wins. If it’s her, you’ll hear more about her later. (So far it’s AMBER 2, CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM 0–congratulations, Amber. Now just don’t get cocky.)

The main thing that gives me hope about these interns (and indeed pushed me over the edge into taking them on, even though I’d sworn etc etc etc) is that they are young, intelligent women who want to get into publishing. You may not know this, but a few years ago, all the talk was of how the publishing business was aging rapidly with no one young coming in. And now, everywhere you look, a vibrant, enthusiastic, above all, book-loving new generation is moving full speed ahead.  It’s kind of fun watching two of them. Actually, it’s a lot of fun. And I really do feel we owe that generation a whole lot for our having eviscerated the economy and left it lying for dead just as they are setting out on life. We owe to them to teach them whatever tricks we have learned for surviving and thriving, and getting on without giving up your ideals for dead, too.

So whatever I can do of that, I’m happy to do. Well, we’ll see.

Meanwhile, we’ve found the perfect name for David Marin’s memoir of adopting three minority kids under the age of nine: THIS IS US (in stores September 2011, oh yeah, you think that’s too far ahead for me to mention, but just watch the months scream by…). David came up with that one, and I must say, it’s just the right fit. Now for the subtitle Mike’s having a great time turning the design for it over in his head. And we all met this weekend, for the first time, in Golden Gate Park, around the merry go round in the Children’s Playground. Ace intern Alison Week just happened to be in town, so she dropped by too. And ace intern Amber Garner stayed home and fixed our events page.

So maybe this whole intern thing is going to work out…

And if you’re around in LA, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Salt Lake City, Taos, Santa Fe, Chicago, St. Louis, Philadelphia, and/or Brooklyn…and you want to meet some terrific writers, and (in Danbert’s case) hear some terrific music, check our Events listing, and our Facebook page…and see if Amber has bested the Internet, at least three out of five, and gotten up all the significant details.

See you in a couple of months.  Oh my god, in a couple of months we’re on to galloping toward the SPRING 2011 season…here it comes…heading right for us…

It was a dramatic two months here at EAP. The Consortium sales conference in May, where I presented EAP’s two books for October (Danbert Nobacon’s 3 DEAD PRINCES, with illustrations by EAP’s own Beloved Vegetarian Husband, Alex Cox), and E. E. King’s DIRK QUIGBY’S GUIDE TO THE AFTERLIFE. The sales reps had made the whole trip easy for me by having, through their efforts, made another Consortium book, TINKERS, a Pulitzer prize winner, which meant, happily, that the very pleasant Greg Cowles of the New York Times had a moment to spare to talk about EAP books…he doesn’t know it, but he’s in for being taken out for a glass of something soon, one of my favorite ways of attempting to influence the media.  And I finally met Maggie Ruggiero, formerly of GOURMET magazine, who I contacted after noticing whenever I cut out a recipe of that mag, it was one of hers. I sent her JAM TODAY, and she emailed back, and now I am the proud owner of one of her handmade sex scandal tea towels (you can ask, but it’s hard to explain without illustrations), and the happy memory of sitting with her after dinner on the High Line watching the traffic go uptown.

And galleys for DIRK and 3 DEAD PRINCES, and sending out review copies, and getting ready for the ALA conference (which by the time this appears I will have been to and back)…

And signing three contracts for three more books. Brian Griffith on Chinese goddesses, and Lorenzo O’Brien, that anarchic film producer, on BEING a film producer: “HARD TO KILL: My Life as an International Film Producer”…which HE wants to call “My Life Becoming a Human Cockroach,” which gives you a pretty clear idea of the content. That one started with his calling my own dear husband  to share a day in his recent life, a day which included being fired twice by a coke addled boss, and then hired back when it was clear no one else had a clue about the admin on the film.  And Lorenzo said, “How did I GET here?” And I said, “Well, there’s a book.” And he said, “I’ll write it! But most of the stuff in it will probably be libelous.” And I said, “We’ll worry about that later, then, shall we?”

He’s sent me the first two chapters, and they are, indeed, delightfully, hilariously libelous. So it’s a good thing EAP has a very nice publishing lawyer up there in Portland (hi, Amy! work coming your way soon!). As well as for the fact that we’re deep in talks to publish a little something about Walt Disney in 2013, which, unless things have changed radically in the world before then, should bring down on us the full weight of the Disney legal apparat.  A sympathetic lawyer I’ve already consulted about THAT one says that legal scholars in the US think Disney is getting just too damn uppity and too damn bullying about its alleged rights, and so the time may be coming for a tiny David to at least tweak the toe of the Goliath. We’ll see.

But I think the most exciting EAP event was getting  David Marin’s query and manuscript over the virtual transom last month. Queries we get tend to fall into one of two categories: books their authors are sending out to EVERYONE in the hope that someone bites, and books that are coming from the same values as EAP, but we don’t think, for whatever reason, we can publish.  The first get a polite email suggesting another publisher, and the second get an invitation to fool around on the website and see what happens next. (DIRK QUIGBY was one of these latter, in fact.)

I don’t think it has happened before that I got a manuscript that was, out of the blue, so perfectly EAP and so just what I was looking for, that I rubbed m my eyes and wondered if it was a joke. Or an instance of severe self deception.

But so it was with David’s manuscript.

At first I groaned when I got the email.  Subject heading: “Query: Multi cultural non fiction.” And the accompanying note: “In 2005 I became the only single Caucasian male in the United States to adopt three minority siblings – all abandoned by fieldworkers and felons in Santa Barbara County. Tempest-Tost To Me is our story. The title is from the Statue of Liberty inscription. Topics include illegal immigration, multi-racial adoption, and parenting. The manuscript has 75,000 words.” First of all, the politically correct nature of it all made me automatically suspicious. More PARADE magazine and looking to be on Oprah than EAP, I thought. I had an immediate vision of a saccharine line of self promotion, of children being trotted out like trick ponies to promote the author’s work under the name of do-gooding–a vision I can only greet with a profound shudder. In short, I thought this was one of those: just give a quick read to the prologue and first chapter, then a polite email back suggesting a bigger publisher.

Then I started reading. Then I was in tears by the second chapter. No, this was not what I had thought. This was the real, true thing: a writer who had an idea he passionately wanted to get across. And I very much doubted the guy who had written even what little I’d read so far was interested in exploiting his own children.

What came through most was the real, fierce feeling here. This single guy adopted three maltreated kids, and fell absolutely in love with them. You could tell he was in love with them in every line. Needless to say, since he WAS the only single Caucasian male etc. the road to adoption was not an easy one. And his outrage that these children were treated as anything but individual, important souls came through clearly to me, too.

So I emailed cautiously back.  Are you sure you know who you’re sending this to? We’re a very small outfit, only in our second year…

Oh yes, he emailed back. I know who you are. I found you on the Consortium website.

Still cautious, but thawing fast, I emailed:

“David–Read the manuscript and thoroughly enjoyed it–especially the individual personalities of the three kids.  Now the main question I’m going to ask you  is: What is the most important thing to you about this manuscript? What do you think it’s really about, what idea were you most trying to get across?

Just to make sure that what interests me most harmonizes with what interests you.  And what interests me (and makes it an EAP book) is that the entire story contradicts the dominant cultural story that only moms are nurturers, that dads somehow are emotionally less connected, less loving, less empathetic.  I mean, unless they’re gay, so goes the dominant cultural story…and that just cuts half the population off from their ability to feel in the way that is most satisfying to a human being. What’s most important in your manuscript is Love, of course.

So that’s what interests me. All the editing I’d suggest (and do) would go to making that point clear…and to bringing out your own voice as clearly as possible…another EAP thing is that while all EAP books have to be literate, even literary, they need to be written in a clear, informal voice, like the reader is having a conversation with the writer.

This has just what I look for in a certain kind of book–the ability to appeal to a wider group of people and get ideas across to them that they probably wouldn’t accept in the abstract (for one thing, the irrationality of the xenophobia)…I have this belief that the American audience is irrational but warm hearted, and if you can touch their hearts, you can change their Fox News default settings.”

And David emailed back:

“Well, Tod, you wrote what I want the book to be about better than I could! I appreciate that.

Yes to parenting gender. It’s packed with issues. For one, if as many single men adopted (it’s 1% now) as single women (33%) foster homes would be nearly empty. Second, the whole lawsuit fiasco shows that it’s not just women who face discrimination in the work place.

And yes to Fox News.  There are people out there right now advocating that children of “illegals” be stripped of their US citizenship. That would be my children.

A third part that’s important to me are the struggles people have with social services. The system is broken, and slower than flowing concrete when it’s working. I want social workers, and social work students, administrators, and educators to see another side.

Last, even though you’d like to feature more of my voice in the book (and I’m okay with that), the heroes are my children and their older sister. I’d like to bring that out even more if I can.”

Yes. So the contract went out, was discussed and signed, and I asked David to write a little bit more about why he decided to adopt even one child, let alone three. That piece is in this month’s issue of EAP. That, I thought, would be the start of a long, fruitful (we hope) back and forth before the manuscript is ready to be published. Some things will get developed more fully, some things will get thrown out. It’s always fun to see that process.

The first thing that went, of course, was the title “Tempest Tost.” Pretty title, but too much like a Robertson Davies novel, or a study on Shakespeare’s later plays. We’re looking for something simpler–in fact, David, in his piece this month, asks readers to make suggestions. In my own head, I call it what I called his piece: Why I Adopted Three Kids. But we’ll see where it ends up…

More later. By the next blog, we’ll be at the release date for 3 DEAD PRINCES and DIRK QUIGBY’S GUIDE TO THE AFTERLIFE, and everything will have, doubtless, taken yet another turn…

Stay tuned. I know I will.

There’s a lot to report, but the main thing that sticks out is the delivery–TODAY!–of a dozen Pentel black rolling writer pens from Staples. They don’t sell these in the stores anymore, and I’d been told they weren’t making them at all, but then, aha!…when trying to find another five dollar item to make my home delivery of padded envelopes come up to the free shipping total, I…gasp…discovered them on line.

Now you’re saying to yourself, “What on earth is she going on about?” But you don’t know what these pens mean to me. A lifetime of writing with these pens on reversed scrap paper clipped to scavenged clipboards. A smooth flow from the pen. An easy grip. A clear bold line.

The only pen. The one and only. The great love of my life, even beating out the sublime IBM Selectric typewriter.

The Selectric, alas, is now in honorable retirement in the attic, its golfball elements and spare ribbons staring mournfully out at me every time I go into the supplies cupboard. I learned to live without it. The world moves on, and we must move with it.

But moving onto gel pens was hard.  Damn hard. I find them uncomfortable to hold, and the line they give is so mingy. Unfriendly. Alienating.

I find myself writing less and less by hand. Which in a way makes me feel as if my hands are freezing up. As well as the cord that runs from my heart to my head and back down to my fingers. Sure, the beautiful wireless keyboard is a breeze to use. But it’s not the same. When you’re writing, especially those first drafts which are a kind of outpouring to a secret corner, or a favorite doll, that first lot of scratchings needs to be…more personal. This is the difference, as well, between a scribbled Filofax address book and a computer list. Somehow, when you look at a handwritten entry, you remember much more about the person it represents…and, perhaps more to the point here, about how you FEEL about them.

Forgive this paean to the pen. But when I woke up this morning, I thought: “They’re coming. They’re coming today!” And while I am normally a very happy person (if also very agitated, anxious, and alienated…but these things can all go together in the modern world, popular press notwithstanding), I was even happier at that thought.

I keep looking down the drive for the UPS van…

In other news:

First galley copies arrived of EAP’s fall books: Danbert Nobacon’s 3 DEAD PRINCES, and E. E. King’s DIRK QUIGBY’S GUIDE TO THE AFTERLIFE. Mike has done the most amazing job of design…and it doesn’t hurt that the Beloved Husband’s (aka Alex Cox’s) illustrations for 3 DEAD PRINCES are beyond praise. Check out the one illustrating this issue of EAP. He does have the knack of getting down to whatever creative job is at hand, I must say that, and totally objective, too. (I mean, he could be a great husband without being a terrific artist; it certainly helps me that he’s both, however.)

Now they all go flying out to try and find quotes to go on the cover. We’ve already got a spiffy one from RAY BRADBURY.  That’s right, you heard me, RAY BRADBURY. For DIRK QUIGBY. He says: “Impish and delightful—a Zagat’s guide to the Heavens!” Which I think pretty much sums up the book.

And then there was the Pulitzer that went to Paul Harding’s TINKERS.

You have to look at that one. That was one great piece of news. The first novel from an indie press (Bellevue Literary Press…fabulous) to win the Pulitzer in what? Six hundred years? And the New York Times blogged that they’d never gotten a copy of it.  Of course, the stunned publicist looked back over her correspondence and found that she’d sent TEN COPIES to the New York Times at various intervals, but probably they got mislaid, delivered to the wrong address, eaten by rats in the mail room, or stolen. Something like that. It couldn’t possibly be that the New York Times, busy as it is, lets independent presses drop off its radar, could it? Naw…

And Bellevue Literary Press is one of the Consortium Distribution family of publishers. Of which we are a proud, proud, proud, younger sister. And Consortium publishers scooped up not one, but TWO Pulitzers.

Well done all round, and gives all of us a warm fuzzy feeling before we hit the wireless keyboard with renewed enthusiasm for our work in your wake.

(Or, better yet, before we hit the clipboard with a brand new BLACK PENTEL ROLLING WRITER PEN.

Sigh.)

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.)