Publishing Talks: David Wilk interviews Dan Halpern

In this series of interviews, called Publishing Talks, I have been talking to book industry professionals about the future of publishing, books, and culture.  This is a period of disruption and change for all media businesses. How will publishing evolve as our culture is affected by technology, climate change, population density, and the ebb and flow of civilization and its economics? Publishing Talks interviews help us understand the outlines of what is happening, and how we might ourselves interact with and influence the future of publishing as it unfolds.

These interviews give people in the book business a chance to talk openly about ideas and concerns that are often only talked about “around the water cooler,” at industry conventions and events, and in emails between friends and they give people inside and outside the book industry a chance to hear first hand some of the most interesting and challenging thoughts, ideas and concepts being discussed by people in the book business.

In May, 2010, Dan Halpern was honored by the Poetry Society of America along with the Academy of American Poets and NYU’s Creative Writing Program on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the Ecco Press (the publishing imprint of which he is the founder).  Aside from being well-known as a successful publisher of quality literature, Dan is himself a poet, writer and editor of a number of important anthologies.  Along with his mentor, Paul Bowles, he founded the literary magazine Antaeus (out of which Ecco originally was born).   He is currently the editorial director of Ecco Press, which is now an imprint of HarperCollins. He has received many grants and awards, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

While I do not know Dan well, we have some friends in common and shared experiences as editors of literary magazines and a deep interest in poetry.  I wanted to talk to him for the Publishing Talks series, as he has been able to maintain his deep commitment to publishing important literary work, continuing to write and edit himself, within a commercial context during a period of massive change in the publishing business.  I think his perspective on books and writing, past, present, and future, is a valuable one, and instructive for many of us in the book business whose expectations are being severely challenged by the state of the current book marketplace.  Dan’s commitment and dedication to writing, ideas, art and culture inform his outlook on the past, present and future of publishing and books.

Galen Rowell and Peter Beren: California the Beautiful

978-1599620749 – Hardcover – Welcome Books – $19.95

Galen Rowell was an incredible photographer, documenting and interpreting nature all over the world.  He was an accomplished mountain climber, so he was able to reach places that most other photographers could never go.  He died tragically and far too early in an airplane crash in 2002.  I’ve been familiar with his work through many books, calendars and exhibitions, but really did not know a great deal about him.  Peter Beren, who I have known through the book business, has authored and edited numerous books, including The Writer’s Companion, Vintage San Francisco, and Hidden Napa Valley. He was the publisher of Sierra Club Books and founding publisher of VIA Books, and now lives and works independently in San Francisco.

California the Beautiful is both a photography book and a literary meditation on California as a place of transcendent beauty.  The geography of California has engendered some of the great nature writing of our time, and much of that work is featured here.  Peter talked at length about the genesis of this project, his work with Galen Rowell, the way Rowell worked and Peter also read some of the wonderful selections of writings that are included in this book.

California the Beautiful is both a portrait of the state’s diverse natural beauty and, through the incredible voices of its writers, a testament to the ever-renewing spirit that it has come to embody. Aldous Huxley, British author turned Hollywood resident, described the California dream as “this great crystal of light, whose base is as large as Europe and whose height for all practical purposes, is infinite.”

Among the other authors offering praise are Maya Angelou, Mary Austin, Ray Bradbury, Joan Didion, Gretel Ehrlich, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, M.F.K Fisher, Robertson Jeffers, Jack Kerouac, Clarence King, Jack London, Henry Miller, John Muir, William Saroyan, April Smith, John Steinbeck, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, Nathanael West, and Walt Whitman.

This is a beautiful book that inspires an almost altered state in the reader, as the saturated colors move from eye to brain.  But the photos and the writing made me want to get in my car and drive straight west to see some of the places there that absolutely must be experience first hand by every American.

An excerpt of California the Beautiful is available at www.chptr1.com.