Mother Hubbard and EAP’s Raison d’être.

by admin Posted on March 31, 2013

The whole purpose of Exterminating Angel Press is to find, develop, and publish stories that have been overlooked in the mad dash for competition to get to the top of…of what? We’re thinking about that too. What is it we’re all in this mad dash for? And what happens when one of us gets to the top and gets to dance on all the corpses down below?

Well, maybe that’s a bit extreme. Let’s dial back. It does seem to me that monoculture in any form is unhealthy, that it does, as they say, take all kinds to make a world. At least any kind of world that’s going to be worth living in.

So when Mike Madrid, EAP’s creative director and resident popular culture expert, discovered a whole treasure trove of comics from the 40′s and 50′s, all that had fallen into public domain out of lack of interest, lack of belief that there was anything interesting in them, and when he described one or two of them to me, I knew immediately this was an EAP sort of a thing. These are stories that reveal possibilities other than the usual ones we’re seeing now, the more stultified, endlessly repeated muscle bound superheroes who save a couple of worlds and then go on to have their own line of toys. These are stories about superheroines who didn’t make the cut. They were too out there to catch a mass market eye. A debutante who makes herself ugly to fight crime. A sexy pussy cat who beats up criminals without letting her dog boyfriend know what she’s doing. A queen of the jungle who refuses to let anyone exploit her territory, and the people and animals that live there.

Then there’s the postmenopausal superheroine, Mother Hubbard. I always find it interesting that when I tell people about her, the first reaction is stunned laughter. Then I usually say something like, “See, you laughed. Why did you laugh? What is is about the superhero story that we’ve all agreed on that makes that funny?”

It’s interesting. It tells us something about ourselves. And, as we say around here, until we know a little bit about ourselves, fuck all is going to change.

The main thing about these stories, though, is that, being so out there, so unexpected, so unlike any story lines that hardened and calcified afterwards, they are supremely entertaining. And we’ve got 28 of them, the whole stories, coming out with Mike’s commentary, in October. We’re working on it now. And if you want to get a look at his introduction, you can have a look here…

 

Posted in Todblog | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off

On Having Fun.

by admin Posted on February 22, 2013

I had fun giving a screenwriting seminar at the Boulder International Film Festival recently. It’s always fun to talk about story, and structure, and how they go together, with other people who are thinking about that too. There was this one moment, though, where the whole room kind of froze, like in a movie, come to think of it, ‘time stood still’, when someone in the back complained, “But what about when it’s time to stop having fun and actually sell the screenplay?”

I looked at him blankly. Who knows for how long. Then time started up again, and I said flatly, “It’s never time to stop having fun.”

Now I did wonder later if I had answered that one correctly. I mean, I could have gone off into a riff about the usual ways to try to sell your work, rather than pointing out (as I did) that the system is so rigged it’s like winning the lottery to sell anything if you’re outside of the system, let alone unknown and outside the system. And that the single best solution is to join together with talented people you know and make the script yourself. But my answer had been absolutely spontaneous. From my heart, actually. Because if there is one thing I have learned in my fifty odd years here, it’s that if you’re not having fun, you might as well pack up and go back to your home planet. Because that is the only real reward there is. All other rewards spring from that.

The whole exchange made me giggle later. For some reason, it reminded me of something I’d forgotten long ago. Years and years ago, when I was a struggling screenwriter starting out in Los Angeles, my fellow strugglers and I had a joke. You could ask a producer, any producer, a money guy, what kind of stories they wanted, what kind of stories would sell, and what they would answer, always, was “GOOD stories.” But the joke was they would never tell you what ‘GOOD’ was.

Then I became a producer (long story, but yes, indeed I did). And wearing that costume, one day, on the set of a Mexican film financed by an American company where my Dear Husband was working as an actor, I found myself sitting next to one of those money guys. One of those guys who would never ever tell me, the bohemian untrustworthy artist, what the secret was of getting ahead as a screenwriter. He was young, and expensively and casually well dressed, and smug as hell, and because I was an ‘American producer’, the Cornell Business School educated (he told me that immediately) self-contented stuffed suit from the parent company decided I was likely to be one of the few civilized folk around. He was Mexican born, but it was clear he didn’t think too much of the smarts of his homeland. Unlike those of an American producer.  He assumed my husband, being an Anglo actor, would be similarly in the know.

This gripped me with excitement. For the first time, I was undercover with one of these guys. He would tell me the secret to why they always would say, so evasively, “GOOD stories.” So I cautiously began.

What kind of material was his parent company looking for?

“Oh, you know–GOOD stories.”

I could feel Alex tensing up, halfway between hilarity and rage, next to me. I clamped a warning hand down on his knee.

“Oh yeah, I know…that’s what we always say. But what do you guys mean by ‘good’?”

He laughed. I held my breath. Here it comes, I thought.

“Well,” he said confidingly. “You know. Nothing ironic. The public won’t go for that, too complicated. Simple stuff. Nothing downer.”

Oh yes, I nodded sagely. Of course.

He expanded under the attention.

“Well,” he continued. “For example. We had a choice between bringing two different musicals to tour Mexico–’Les Mis’ or ‘The Lion King’. It was a no brainer, of course. ‘The Lion King’, hands down. ‘Les Mis’ has got all that downer social content.”

At that, Alex began to leap out of his chair. I clamped down harder with my hand.

“Oh yes,” I said nodding again. “Good choice.”

Then, thankfully, someone called the money guy to the other side of the set, and he got up, waving a friendly goodbye as he went.

The two of us waved back.

“It’s the end,” Alex said through his teeth as he smiled a wide, fake smile. “It’s the end of the fucking world.”

But of course it wasn’t, you know. And Alex knew it wasn’t. We had a good laugh about it over a drink after the shoot. Because, like all artists, we have our own secret, which we’ll willingly share with whoever wants it. Any artist knows the world–our world, the human world–will only keep going as long as there are people operating out of joy to power it. What else is all of this but a dance? And if you start treating a dance like some kind of profit making goal machine, it stops being a dance immediately, and becomes something else entirely–something grim, something deadening, something ultimately dead.  And while I know someday I’ll definitely be dead, I’ll be damned if I’ll be grim and deadening along the way. I’ll be damned if I’ll leave death behind me for others. I’ll be damned if I’ll ever stop having fun.

 

Posted in Todblog | Tagged , , | Comments Off

Wonder Women of All Kinds, and a Wonder Man, too…

by admin Posted on January 31, 2013

The documentary Wonder Women! The Untold Story of the American Superheroine is a smashing look at how the story of superheroines has helped form, and continues to form our culture, and EAP’s Mike Madrid, author of “The Supergirls: Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy, and the History of Comic Book Heroines,” is one of the great interview subjects, along with Lynda Carter, Gloria Steinem, and Kathleen Hanna–so I think that makes him an honorary fabulous chick.

Anyway, I loved the doc so much, that when I heard my pal, the legendary independent film producer Margaret Matheson was coming to Boulder, I nudged the International Film Series director here, Pablo Kjolseth, into slotting Wonder Women! into their new Tuesday night documentary series, this Tuesday, Feb. 5, at 7 pm, in Muenzinger Auditorium, on the University of Colorado campus, in Boulder.

Then, since all of Margaret’s many choices of films over an incredibly productive ongoing career are made based on the story told, and since all of EAP’s point is that stories form culture, and how has that happened, and how can that make our world a better place, anyway? And since both Margaret and I are always interested in what’s going on in other people’s heads, Pablo is letting us use the screening as a way to find out.

So Margaret and I will introduce the documentary, and lead a conversation afterward about just that. How stories interact with culture, and what that means for us, and what that means for how we can go on.

And as a matter of fact, I happen to have inside knowledge that a lot of Wonder Women are coming to the screening, creatives and strong wills of all kinds, and so I’m wondering what will happen next…

Posted in Todblog | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off

Why We Don’t Have a ‘Submissions Policy’

by admin Posted on January 16, 2013

I get a lot of emails that start something like this, “I’ve looked all over your website, but I can’t find your submission guidelines.” And I usually email back something like, “Well, that’s because we don’t have any. We don’t have guidelines, and we tend not to call them ‘submissions’, since we think of them more along the lines as contributions. So why don’t you just send me something you like that you’ve written, and I can tell you if we’re the right place for you or not.”

(We can do that right now, being so small. Who knows how long that will last? There is, after all, only so much time in a day, and everyone everywhere has their own limits. So I also ask that possible contributors to the magazine be patient when I reach mine.)

Now this is only for  “EAP: The Magazine”–EAP books are something else again. For one thing, our publishing program is full up for the next couple of years–yes, indeed, that’s how long it takes to get books out there into the world. But also, we need to get to know our writers before we settle down to work seriously with them, and that takes real time and commitment.  We’re a small outfit, and we’re in this for the joy of it, which is a damn good thing, because it doesn’t pay in much else. We don’t look at work that comes in and say, “Eureka! A genius! Rush it to press!” That doesn’t work for us, for a few really good reasons. The main one is that what we love and cherish are hard workers who are also hard headed and realistic about what has to be done to get work–any kind of work–heard. Those people are rare. And that kind of realism develops with a relationship.

Of course, as in any area of life, you can only develop real relationships with a very few people. And each one of those takes its own kind of nurturing. And time. Lots of time.

What we’re not interested in is ‘discovering’ the next genius. We don’t think that genius thing has been too terribly fruitful for the culture at large. Not to mention for the discovered geniuses themselves. Just look at the record. Also, anyone who thinks they are a genius tends to be an incredible pain in the ass to work with. Fact.

So we don’t have submissions guidelines. We’re perfectly happy to receive any kind of courteous, direct, short and to the point communication about anyone’s work, as long as it seeks to find people of like mind, and not people who will help get it rich and famous. Anyone who thinks they’re going to get rich and famous with their books needs to immediately stop wasting their time on this website and click on somewhere else. I’d suggest Time Warner. Or similar. Though I think even Time Warner may have realized they’re not going to get rich with books either.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Whirling Winter Words.

by admin Posted on November 30, 2012

The Winter issue of EAP: The Magazine is up, and we had an avalanche of contributions this time. (Special thanks to Marissa Bell Toffoli, our ace poetry editor, for so graciously and competently working with all the poets who contacted us–and see her contribution, “Would, Will.”) What we particularly like is hearing from all the generations, from a grandfather (“It’s Da Shooz”) to a teenager (“On Epigrams: A Postive Note”) to nine year old Asia, whose tribute to BOOKS is one with which we heartily agree.

Deb Baker muses on the responsibility of a mother to explain to her children the value of words in WORK…we heartily agree with that, too…

Kelsey Liu continues to make us happy with her beautifully crafted stories from high school, in this case, a tale of aspirant parents treating their child like an entrant in a dog show: “The Koi Pond,” I bet there are a lot of young people out there who can relate.

There are so many great pieces in this issue, but there are two brand new contributors I have to call attention to here. Alexandra Kitty has conjured up the most enchanting, and effective, new detective we’ve seen since Victoria’s reign: Miss Magnus Lyme. She’s the Sherlock Holmes for the 21st century, or, rather, Sherlock’s older, smarter brother, Mycroft. Follow her special brand of clear sighted aid to those in distress in “Let Them Howl.”

And we’re tinkering over here with the idea of a new branch on the EAP tree: one made up of “How To” books that tend toward supporting “How To Take Control of Your Own Life.” (There’s a gardening book in the works, written by a poet…more on that soon….) This issue, EAP welcomes Matt Stone, who writes about nutrition, about eating, about the way you already know what to do without leaning on ‘expert’ knowledge that may be more about separating you from your money than your calories. Have a look at “Nutrition in Three Words,” and see what you think. Let us know, too.

Finally, two EAP authors are already busy working on new projects–we’re eagerly watching their progress–and we’re delighted to have a peek here. Anarchist fairy tale author and punk rocker Danbert Nobacon on “First Words.” And our favorite independent historian, Brian Griffith, from his new book on how animal stories interact with culture: “Using the Evil Word on Animals.”

Welcome back, All.

Posted in Todblog | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off

Books, EBooks, Minneapolis, and Kale with Brown Rice (for Claudia).

by admin Posted on November 13, 2012

It was sales conference time, with Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, the winter version at their Minneapolis headquarters, someplace I always love to visit. Killer airport, Minneapolis, the only one in the world where you can get brown rice and kale as an entree at an airport cafe. And I LIKE brown rice and kale. For breakfast, on my way home, I had a big plate of fruit with two slices of toast, organic peanut butter and little mounds of sunflower seeds and raisins on the side. This may sound like a small thing, but it almost makes me weep with gratitude and pleasure to get real food at a normal price inside of TSA security gates.

Minneapolis 4ever, is what I say.

One of the things I like to do, going back and forth to both the fall/winter and spring/summer conferences, is check out what people are reading on the plane. This is always quite enlightening. Last year, flying back from MSP, every single person who was reading on the plane, with the sole exception of me, was reading on an electronic device of some kind. I, of course, was deep into not only an actual book, but a LIBRARY book. Some kind of Luddite nut, I could hear them all thinking around me.

But things have changed.

This year, I noticed the guy next to me was reading a book. An actual book. And when I looked across the aisle, the woman sitting there was reading a book, too. True, it was a book by Bill O’Reilly. But it was still a book.

Fascinated, I got up to walk to the back of the plane. I did a quick head count. And it was half and half. Half eDevices. Half books.

I sat back down, and thought about that, and about how at sales conference the dynamic Katie Khatib, of the anarchist AK Press, had put in a courteous and eloquent plea for us to talk at these things a little less about the future of the eBook, and a little more about the actual Book. The Book we all know and love.

Here’s the thing about Books. As objects, they are more than simple conveyers of information or pleasure. They have lives of their own. Holding them, you feel through to all the work that went into not just their writing and editing, but their design and manufacture, their sale, their passing from hand to hand. They are, I must repeat, alive in a way that the simple abstraction of their content is not. The difference here is analogous to the difference between homemade split pea soup, and Lipton Cup ‘O Soup. Both are soup. But one has a history and a living meaning that has been leached, for convenience’s sake, from the other.

They both have their place. And any platform for ideas is a good platform–at EAP we put ‘em up on every platform going. But I, in my own personal private reading time,  prefer a little less convenience and a little more life. I’ll always prefer the real thing to the abstraction. In just about every part of life.

 

Posted in Todblog | Tagged , , , | Comments Off

EAP: The Magazine’s Winter Issue will be online December 1.

by admin Posted on November 1, 2012

Imagine my chagrin when I turned the EAP sights back on the website, and noticed that while I had thought the new quarterly EAP: The Magazine was going up December 1, it was listed as going up November 1. And here it is November 1. Aha, I said to myself, those little gray cells are leaking out your ears, take a deep breath, have another cup of tea, and put the issue back a month.

So I send apologies to the writers who were waiting for the magazine to go up today. This is what comes of having a harried, though seriously entertained, single person organizing editorial, production, marketing, and beyond. At least, this is what comes of having this single person do it.

That’s a little misleading, since this single person couldn’t run Exterminating Angel Press without a whole passel of dedicated, talented, passionate-about-ideas people, who, come to think of it, it’s my pleasure to call out here. Mike Madrid, popular culture editor, and elegant book designer (as well as illustrator, author, and ideas maven). Molly Mikolowski and Nick Liberty of A Literary Light, providing counseling and support and publicity, even while their own lives have them surfing a tsunami. John Sutherland, whose typesetting abilities and whose calm attention to deadline and detail is such an endless comfort. And everyone, just everyone, at Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, because there is nothing like being a lone publisher with a phalanx of super competent folk who really love books at her back. (And special thanks this week to Jim Nichols, who is not just super competent, but touchingly thoughtful, too.)

Anyway, apologies for the magazine cock up. We’ve had a flood, and I do mean a flood, of contributions for this next issue, and swimming through it has been a delight, but it’s taken some doing, I can tell you. Still we’ve come out of the flood with a treasure or two, but about that, to check out the treasures for yourself, you’ll have to wait till December 1.

Posted in Todblog | Tagged , | Comments Off

With thanks to the independents…

by admin Posted on October 9, 2012

Rumors Coffee and Tea House/Townie Books, which is located on the charming main street of the single most beautifully situated town in the known world—Crested Butte, Colorado, fact—, is a perfect example of what I thought was the future of bookstores, back when I got into running a small publishing house….If the independents could just hold on and sail through the economic storm, this was the kind of store I thought was the future, thought so back in the past, and now I here I was in the present, sitting outside in the sun on a store loveseat, surrounded by eager talkers, myself doubtless the eagerest to talk, about stories. Rumors handed me a mug of tea and offered me a podium, undisturbed when I said I wasn’t a podium kind of a gal, doubtless because they’re not a podium kind of a bookstore. Which has always been my point about  the independents. They aren’t about a one way transaction of selling something to the buyer. They’re about a community space in which to share ideas, and since the best way to do that is by reading and by talking with others over a cup of something, the ones I always thought of as the future (and now here we are in the present) were those that took that seriously–the bookstore as gathering and feeding space for the mind.

These people, these stores, deserve our support. If you are one of those people, who, heaven forbid, has actually gloated in a bookstore lately about how you can snap a picture of a book on its shelves, and then order it from your phone for cheaper off Amazon (and you wouldn’t believe how many anecdotes of temporarily insane readers wandering into stores and doing just that I’ve heard lately…or maybe you would), then you need to sit down, spend some time alone thinking about yourself and your place in the world and how that place is connected to other people, their families, their hopes, their futures, too…not just yours…and…er...reconsider.

These are not simple marketable commodities. These are BOOKS. They stretch out into eternity with all their innards, one way or another, some not making it as far as others, sure, but so what? Does every kid you know star in the school play? The important thing is they shouldn’t be mistaken for key chains, or room deodorizer, or Garfield bookmarks, or movie tie-in memorabilia. They are alive, books are. All real book lovers know that.

I’m off to Powell’s Bookstore, in Portland, now, the Hawthorne store branch, where the excellent Scott Mahood holds sway, and which is chock full of real book lovers looking at real books, and I’ll get my usual hit off that, the way I do off everything that is well and thoroughly alive. So thanks to all the indie booksellers who keep that part of life…alive.

Posted in Todblog | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off

Trade Shows, Sales Reps, and Tiaras.

by admin Posted on September 20, 2012

So I’m off for the annual Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Trade Show, in Denver, lugging my passel of books and pens along with me, and this is the moment (is there ever not a moment?) to once again express how impossible would be the job of the independent publisher without the truly astonishing work of the independent publishers’ sales reps.

These people crisscross the country, sometimes over unbelievably wide territories–to hear their stories is like listening to the denizens of some early wagon train, schlepping it across the twenty seven north south mountain ranges of Nevada–selling (cajoling, coaxing, promoting) independent viewpoints, independent ideas, in the form of independent books, to booksellers hanging around their espresso machines all over the country.

They’re the pollinators. You think Amazon is the only place to buy/sell books? Where do you think people learn about these books? The ideas get in the bloodstream, and before you know it, they’re in your blood too, and you’re looking around for words to confirm or deny, or support or complete…and there you are, looking at a book.

So now I’m off to the hive, to listen to the buzzing about what’s out there, and add a little buzz of my own. And in between the buzz, to giggle with Dory Dutton, one of the best in a group of Best with a capital ‘B’ (this means you, John, and Lise, and Terri and Bill, and Steve, and Stephen, and Melissa, and Keith, and JANE, and and and and and and…), because one of the things that science has taught me is that women behave differently when stressed than men do…we don’t go in for that ‘fight or fly’ response, apparently, when stressed we bond with other women and play with children, or with people capable of acting like children without descending to childishness. A real art, that.

Off to do both. Bond and play. See you later.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Women in Filmmaking.

by admin Posted on September 12, 2012

So I’m going to be in on a panel discussion tonight, in Boulder, on Women in Filmmaking, and it’s starting to get easier for me to connect my former life in film with my present life in books. There was a time when I just couldn’t see how to put them together–for one thing (and this is one reason I disliked being in the film world) there is such a strong gravity of illusion around the world of movies that you can hardly float in a real word. The least of it is people always thinking you live in Los Angeles. For example, there are the people who think, as we say jokingly around here, that I killed Hunter Thompson. Well, I certainly didn’t like him much. But people get these weird ideas about their icons, and if the person behind the icon doesn’t have a very strong center, that person starts living what people expect of them. And that, sometimes, kills them in the end. Nobody else has to do it. All you have to do is look around you to see that’s true.

And then, movie-making, which has its genesis in both the Mob wanting to launder its money, and in the U.S. government seeing it as what they call ‘soft propaganda’ for American hegemony, is an art form frequently in denial. No big surprise that it’s been the American art form of the Twentieth Century, since we Americans have made an art form of denial itself (and I say this as a loyal countrywoman, mind you). It denies its hysteria. It denies its exploitation of people under the sign of Glamour. It denies its rigid hierarchical form, more rigid than the Old Testament, sometimes. It is very big on denying.

But as I go on, I can see so much more clearly the issues involved with the two worlds, film and books,–any two worlds in our one world–being separated. There is a hierarchical structure going on here, the same one that separates subject headings in bookstores, as if wisdom could be broken up into tiny, unrelated sections. There is plenty of wisdom found in film, Goddess knows I’ve found a lot myself, but it’s hidden in all the shrieks and screams and drug overdoses and taped-on evening gowns, not unlike the real diamond in the detective stories, hidden in a costume jewelry display.

And, of course, these days, finding the diamonds in the paste is all I’m interested in.

So I’m pleased I’m going to be on this panel tonight, especially with a group of talented women who recognize quite clearly that it’s a fiction, another form of denial, to say that women have jumped over the barriers to recognition of their voice in film, or, for that matter, in any other art. I’m feeling easier these days about all those years I spent hammering away at film. I’m feeling like it’s got everything to do with what I want to support in books, too. I’m feeling like it’s getting easier for me to spot the diamonds in the mess on the sale counter, every day easier and easier.

 

 

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off