Exterminating Angel Press

Creative Solutions for Practical Idealists.

Exangel

What Happens Next.

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This remains one of my favorite of our EAP themes, this one this summer, so do have a look at what inspired it, the intense Stripped and Despoiled, by Charles S. Kraszewski. Also there’s Into the Underworld and Beyond, where Bruce Thompson takes issue with Joseph Campbell (and why not?), as well as the (as usual) supremely eccentric Devils Curve, by EAP favorites Marie Davis and Margaret Hultz. We love that it’s four hands at a single creative task. And then there’s my very favorite for this issue: Tim J. Myers and The Gift of Pleasure. Made my day, Tim, thanks.

Also, don’t forget to have a look at the poem that amounts to an EAP daily prayer: #171, by Chris Farago. (Thanks, Chris!)

Meanwhile, you out there may or may not know that EAP is located in the Pacific Northwest, in what we call Cascadia…and is a partner in Cascadia Publishers, a venture of about 30 independent publishers from the region. This year we’ve been gifted with a nice little infrastructure of what was formerly a local book and author fair in the town of Ashland, nestled in the foothills of Oregon. Renamed the “Ashland Literary Arts Festival,” it’s happening for the first time this year, Saturday, October 28, from 10 to 4, at Hannon Library, our partner, on the Southern Oregon University campus, in beautiful Ashland, Oregon. We’re celebrating independent voices, and independent publishing—and independent all things literary: books, poetry, film, comics, ideas—because our own feeling is the culture needs independent thought now more than ever.

Many things are planned. About twenty independent publishers will take the main floor. We’ll have a couple of independent films with panels. EAP’s own Mike Madrid will be on hand to discuss the independence of comics, and we’ll have a Wonder Woman costume contest. Willamette Writers and Timberline Review will showcase grassroots writing. Poetry will hold an entire floor, and you can take a selfie with Shakespeare (aka Geoff Ridden in a doublet) in the library’s special Shakespeare collections room. I’ll be there, running like a mad thing to and fro, but the main things I’ll be seated for are a panel I’ll moderate on Anarchy in the USA, and a talk with local Mail Tribune food writer Sarah Lemon on the importance of writing about…what else? …food! I’m hoping to be able to announce a special guest for that one soon.

So if you’re in the neighborhood that day, or even if you get a yen to come to Ashland in the autumn when it is arguably at its best, come on by. Join in. Be independent. Support independent. And let’s get those new ideas on the move.

Welcome back.

The Language of Spirituality.

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by Thomas Larson. Growing up, neither my child nor my adolescent selves nursed the Christian nipple; my ex-Catholic father was an atheist, and Sundays were spent, by my choice, singing (not worshipping) in a church choir. After I read, age twenty or so, James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, I […]

Stripped and Despoiled.

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by C.S. Kraszewski.   I and suddenly it hits you there is to be no more becoming you are no longer and yet there you are paralyzed, you are a soul sealed tight between pith and ray in the sapwood of a palm tree on the Strip never to reach the air and light at […]

What Then?

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by Marissa Bell Toffoli.   Resist the evening, the settling of scores. Watch our cocktails sweat next to the binoculars on the patio table. Our shade grows long. My boy palms his silhouette–everything still new. Suspended between generations. Your wise hands to his youth. Instead of anchored, unmoored. I hunger for stories, but you’re not […]

On Not Yet Having Read “Waterland”.

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by Chris Farago. I spent the day inside, With a sunburned neck, reading. I think it was in tribute to a friend, A commentary on the life I ought to be living, Alternating the raucous pleasure of urban hikes And multiple drinks with a period Of quite-literal sober reflection, Examining the damage done to my […]

Into the Underworld and Beyond.

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by Bruce E.R. Thompson   I have a bone to pick with Joseph Campbell, but I’ll get to that in a minute. What I really want to talk about is visits to the underworld. The best known story of a journey to the underworld is Dante’s Inferno. It is a 14th Century depiction of a […]

The Three Spheres of Ignotum Prophetam.

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by Ronnie Pontiac. For hundreds of years scholars have attributed a mysterious manuscript to Ignotum Prophetam.  Best known to European historians as one of the mad monks of history, the contemporary consensus attempts to prove from scant and contradictory evidence that Ignotum was never more than a myth, most likely invented on the island of […]

The Gift of Pleasure.

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by Tim J. Myers.   A number of years after God had driven the man and the woman from the garden of Paradise–years as humans count them, that is–the archangel Gabriel came to the angel Aziel there in the place of the Blessed. Aziel was one of the principalities, an angel of the middle rank […]

The Opium-Eater.

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by Laura Roman. Prelude Thomas De Quincey’s influence on writers and filmmakers reaches wide and far. In the nineteenth century he was a prominent part of the Romantic circle, confluencing with Wordsworth and Coleridge, later influencing Elizabeth Barrett, Virginia Woolf, Edgar Allan Poe, Jorge Luis Borges, Ralph Waldo Emerson, American illustrator Zhenya Gay (whose rendition […]

My Finger on Your Cheek.

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by John Grey. There’s some out there who labor over hieroglyphics on ancient stone, suckered in by the need to know what just might be unknowable. And then there’s your face. In each expression, a definite meaning is not always implicit. Instead, you provide me, from your eyes to mouth, with abstract images into which […]