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.