• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar
Exterminating Angel Press

Exterminating Angel Press

Creative Solutions for Practical Idealists.

  • Home.
  • Our Books.
  • About Us.
    • What EAP’s About.
    • Why Exterminating Angel?
    • Becoming Part of the EAP Community.
    • EAP’s Poetry Editor Speaks!
    • Contributors.
    • EAP Press.
  • EAP: The Magazine.
    • EAP: The Magazine Archive
  • Tod Blog.
  • Jam Today.
  • Contact Us.
  • Cart.

Everyone Needs to Make a Living, Nobody Needs to Make a Killing.

April 1, 2023 by Exangel

I ran into an EAP contributor the other evening at the first Happy Hour for Ashland.news where I’m a board member. He asked how long EAP: The Magazine had been going—seemed quite shocked at hearing ‘since 2009’. He commented that it had never been, as he said, ‘monetized’, and this seemed to make him feel some bemusement. So I thought this might be a good time to revisit why EAP: The Magazine, and indeed, Exterminating Angel Press, were formed. Particularly since I’m hoping to celebrate more and more EAP contributors in this Todblog as they have more and more successes—and the successes, coming out of widely different sensibilities, are so ‘different’ from each other. Excerpted this issue, Dawn Raffel’s The Penultimate City, from her book “Boundless as the Sky,” is a tight, imaginative literary vision of our world and what it comes to be. Terese Svoboda’s Dog on Fire is a romp. And Nick Engelfried, in both his book and his project to record environmental activism, Movement Makers, writes as passionately as he lives his own commitment to the environment. See his introduction, When Youth are the Adults.

Congratulations are also due to Denis Bell, on the occasion of a reprint of his A Box of Dreams. Onward with your short stories, Denis!

And of course Zhinia Noorian writes about Persian culture. Brian Griffith tries to figure out why humans believe what they do and how. Bruce E.R Thompson is EAP’s house philosopher. Jim Meirose is EAP’s house surrealist. David D. Horowitz, its house essayist. I myself am writing “My Life with Dogs,” which is no more really about dogs than the Jam Today series is about recipes.

Then there are the poets.

Widely different visions. Yet they all come from the same root: a belief in humanism, if we define humanism as what it means to be truly human. A belief that all beings are connected. A belief that the transactional path can only lead to disaster. A belief that a system of dominance and hierarchy must be replaced by the more human one of connection and mutual aid.

If you look at all the contributors to EAP: The Magazine, and all the books published by Exterminating Angel Press, you’ll see they all come from the same root. Root and branch. Where the press started originally was in my vision that books were separated artificially by abstract subject. That my hope was to join with others who saw that all humans, no matter where, how, what class, what race, what religion, came from the same root, and return to that root for their nourishment. And that the work that goes down to that root is the only work that can be called ‘great’.

Abstraction so often cuts us off from the nourishment humans need. And that was what EAP, in its own small way, was meant to combat.

I, as an editor, wanted to encourage as many green shoots that grew directly from that root. This is why we don’t do ‘exclusives’. If you’re an EAP contributor, we think you should be read as widely as possible. And we want to help in whatever way we can to make that a reality.

So I’ll often encourage writers who are still a bit uncertain in their voice, if I can see where that voice comes from. I’ll put them next to polished writers, who know their source and delight in letting it play in their work. It’s not about an analysis of what’s ‘good’ writing or ‘bad’. It’s about whether someone writes deeply from the heart, and is honestly trying to understand the mysteries of that heart, both for themselves and for their readers.

With that in mind, I never wanted to ‘monetize’ EAP: The Magazine—it would mean warping that idea to wring out a little extra dosh. Better I make my own living elsewhere, and leave this as a creative place for myself, and others, to play with ideas they may not have developed (yet) enough for other outlets.

As for Exterminating Angel Press, we never made any money. But we never lost any either. If you know indie publishing, you’ll know what an achievement that was. And is. Thanks to Mike Madrid and Marissa Bell Toffoli for joining in that vision.

As we say at EAP: “Everybody needs to make a living. Nobody needs to make a killing.”

Welcome back.

Filed Under: Todblog Tagged With: EAP: The Magazine, Exterminating Angel Press, mutual aid, todblog

Primary Sidebar

Cart.

Check Out Our Magazine.

In This Issue.

  • Who Was Dorothy?
  • Those Evil Spirits.
  • The Screaming Baboon.
  • Her.
  • A Tale of Persistence.
  • A Conversation with Steve Hugh Westenra.
  • Person Number Twelve.
  • Dream Shapes.
  • Cannon Beach.
  • The Muse.
  • Spring.
  • The Greatness that was Greece.
  • 1966, NYC; nothing like it.
  • Sun Shower.
  • The Withering Weight of Being Perceived.
  • Broken Clock.
  • Confession.
  • Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse.
  • Sometimes you die, I mean that people do.
  • True (from “My Life with Dogs”).
  • Fragmentary musings on birds and bees.
  • 12 Baking Essentials to Always Have in Your Poetry.
  • Broad Street.
  • A Death in Alexandria.
  • My Forked Tongue.
  • Swan Lake.
  • Long Division.
  • Singing against the muses.
  • Aphorisms from “What Remains to Be Said”.

In The News.

That cult classic pirate/sci fi mash up GREENBEARD, by Richard James Bentley, is now a rollicking audiobook, available from Audible.com. Narrated and acted by Colby Elliott of Last Word Audio, you’ll be overwhelmed by the riches and hilarity within.

“Captain Sylvestre de Greybagges is your typical seventeenth-century Cambridge-educated lawyer turned Caribbean pirate, as comfortable debating the virtues of William Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, and compound interest as he is wielding a cutlass, needling archrival Henry Morgan, and parsing rum-soaked gossip for his next target. When a pepper monger’s loose tongue lets out a rumor about a fleet loaded with silver, the Captain sets sail only to find himself in a close encounter of a very different kind.

After escaping with his sanity barely intact and his beard transformed an alarming bright green, Greybagges rallies The Ark de Triomphe crew for a revenge-fueled, thrill-a-minute adventure to the ends of the earth and beyond.

This frolicsome tale of skullduggery, jiggery-pokery, and chicanery upon Ye High Seas is brimming with hilarious puns, masterful historical allusions, and nonstop literary hijinks. Including sly references to Thomas Pynchon, Treasure Island, 1940s cinema, and notable historical figures, this mélange of delights will captivate readers with its rollicking adventure, rich descriptions of food and fashion, and learned asides into scientific, philosophical, and colonial history.”

THE SUPERGIRLS is back, revised and updated!

supergirls-take-1

In The News.

Newport Public Library hosted a three part Zoom series on Visionary Fiction, led by Tod.  

And we love them for it, too.

The first discussion was a lively blast. You can watch it here. The second, Looking Back to Look Forward can be seen here.

The third was the best of all. Visions of the Future, with a cast of characters including poets, audiobook artists, historians, Starhawk, and Mary Shelley. Among others. Link is here.

In the News.

SNOTTY SAVES THE DAY is now an audiobook, narrated by Last Word Audio’s mellifluous Colby Elliott. It launched May 10th, but for a limited time, you can listen for free with an Audible trial membership. So what are you waiting for? Start listening to the wonders of how Arcadia was born from the worst section of the worst neighborhood in the worst empire of all the worlds since the universe began.

In The News.

If you love audio books, don’t miss the new release of REPORT TO MEGALOPOLIS, by Tod Davies, narrated by Colby Elliott of Last Word Audio. The tortured Aspern Grayling tries to rise above the truth of his own story, fighting with reality every step of the way, and Colby’s voice is the perfect match for our modern day Dr. Frankenstein.

In The News.

Mike Madrid dishes on Miss Fury to the BBC . . .

Tod on the Importance of Visionary Fiction

Check out this video of “Beyond Utopia: The Importance of Fantasy,” Tod’s recent talk at the tenth World-Ecology Research Network Conference, June 2019, in San Francisco. She covers everything from Wind in the Willows to the work of Kim Stanley Robinson, with a look at The History of Arcadia along the way. As usual, she’s going on about how visionary fiction has an important place in the formation of a world we want and need to have.

Copyright © 2025 · Exterminating Angel Press · Designed by Ashland Websites