Baron Wormser: The Road Washes Out in Spring

The Road Washes Out in Spring: A Poet’s Memoir of Living Off the Grid – Baron Wormser – Brandeis University Press – 9781684581603 – 214 pages – paperback – $24.95 – March 7, 2023 – ebook versions available at lower prices

Baron Wormser is a poet and prose writer whose work I have been familiar with for many years. Back in the 1970s, he and his wife Janet, moved to rural Maine as part of the “back to the land” wave that had been inspired by hippies and the Stewart Brand’s influential Whole Earth Catalog and especially the writings of the now almost mythic Helen and Scott Nearing, vegetarians who pioneered simple living in the 1930s and 40s.

His memoir of that time was originally published almost twenty years ago and now there is a new edition of this meditative, almost poetic narrative of simple living.

Baron and his family lived in a house they built in Maine with no electricity or running water. Much like the Nearings, they raised (and canned) much of their own food, carried water from their well, and read through the long winter nights by the light of kerosene lamps.

As Wormser states early in this book, living off the grid was not meant to be a statement of anything. In fact, as complete novices to the life they set out to live, it turned out that they had built their house in a place that there was no electricity and initially they could not afford to pay to have power lines run to their house. As time went on, they embraced the simplicity of their rural lives and learned from their experienced neighbors, for whom life was not a choice and “lifestyle” would have been a meaningless term.

Wormser refuses any simple understanding or explanation for the lives he and his wife chose for the twenty five year period during which they raised their children and became integral to the local community. He writes about nature and the simple life without sentimentalizing anything, appreciates the good and faces the difficulties head on without failing to note the complexity of everything we prefer to think of as simple. He is a careful thinker and writer, and his poetic self is a presence at all times.  Here is a lovely excerpt from the book:

If there is such a thing as a mutable eternity, it is snow falling in the woods. I am thinking of a windless, steady plummeting. Nothing is moving except for snowflakes. You can hear the snow faintly ticking on the pine needle branches. You can hear it descending—a soft sift of air. You are held in the hand of something enormous yet gentle, something extraordinary yet calming, something evanescent yet quite palpable (from a Latin word meaning “to touch gently”). Every surface receives the snow in its way. A large, fallen, curled maple leaf collects the snow in its center. A boulder”s stored heat resists the snow at first. Then its surface turns wet as if it were raining. Then with un-boulder-like delicacy a thin frizz accumulates. On top of the garden gate a fragile white skein begins to perch. Little, almost derby-like hats grow on the garden fence posts. The mown grass around the house fills in gradually. The stiff, frozen blades seem like little heights. Then the snow, as it mounts, receives itself. Another landscape is created and for months we live in that landscape.

When I was in my twenties, I shared the impulse to “head for the country,” where I tried and failed to make a go of living on the land. I greatly admire and appreciate what the commitment that Baron and his family made to live in Maine for a quarter century. And it was a deep pleasure to read this memoir of that time.

In 2000 Baron was appointed Poet Laureate of Maine by Governor Angus King. He currently resides in Montpelier, Vermont, with his wife. In 2009 he joined the Fairfield University MFA program. He works in schools with both students and teachers. Wormser has received the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry and the Kathryn A. Morton Prize along with fellowships from Bread Loaf, the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2000 he was writer in residence at the University of South Dakota. Wormser founded the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching and also the Frost Place Seminar. His most recent book of poetry is The History Hotel, published by CavanKerry Press.

In other rooms and beyond those rooms
So much was occurring that went on happily
And unhappily, indifferent to protocols,
Brimming with anemones, half-heard melodies,
Averted glances. 

(from “Elegy for the Poet Adam Zagajewski”)

Author website

Buy The Road Washes Out in Spring

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Maureen Owen and Barbara Henning: Poets on the Road

Poets on the Road – Maureen Owen and Barbara Henning – City Point Press – 9781947951709 – Paperback – 176 pages – $18 – June 6, 2023 – ebook editions available at lower prices

This is a special book by two very special poets. I know I am biased. They are both friends of mine, and Maureen I have known for almost fifty years. This terrific travelog documents an amazing poetic journey they took in 2019, crossing the country in a small car, with stops for poetry readings, visits with other poets, cheap motels and funky meals from Brooklyn (where Barbara lives), first south, then west all the way to California and back to Denver (where Maureen lives).

It was truly an incredible trip, originally documented in a blog they wrote while traveling. This book collects those stories and features photos of the poets and the people and places they visited along the way.

I loved this story so much, I decided to publish it, and consequently this book is a collaboration of the two poets plus the exceptional book designer, HR Hegnauer and publisher City Point Press.

Here’s an excerpt from Pat Nolan’s wonderful introduction:

Although a road trip across North American calls to mind Jack Kerouac’s youthful meanderings of self-discovery, this reading tour was more in the manner of Bashō’s late life journeys through the backcountry of Japan. . . . The road trip was in a sense a pilgrimage of reengagement with their calling as poets, and a chance to reacquaint with like-minded friends, old and new, in a far-flung landscape of American poetry.

Venues would include upscale bookstores, coffee houses, museums, legendary used bookstores, botanical gardens, university classrooms, art centers, and artist coops—in short, a unique sampling of poetry environments tracing an arc across the Southern States, the Southwest, and up the West Coast before hooking back to the Rockies.

Framed as a personal challenge, the poets hit the road much in the manner of itinerant preachers and musicians, lodging at discount motels, funky hostels, Airbnbs, and with friends along the way. Adding a social media touch, Maureen and Barbara created a blog of their tour so that friends, family, hosts, and fellow poets might also share in their adventure.

It’s always a pleasure to spend any amount of time with Maureen and Barbara, so this conversation was truly special for me, and I hope for all of you as well who will be listening in.

As further full disclosure, let me add that we were also in Tucson when she and Barb came to visit, so I am a participant and contributor to the blog and to the book as well, making it even more fun for me to talk to both Maureen and Barb about it here.

Maureen’s most recent book is let the heart hold down the breakage   Or   the caretaker’s log (Hanging Loose Press)

Barbara’s most recent book is Ferne, A Detroit Story (Spuyten Duyvil)

Maureen’s website

Barbara’s website

Buy Poets on the Road here. (this link is to Bookshop.org, sales will support indie bookstores)

Barbara Henning (photo by Miranda Maher)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Publishing Talks: Interview with Michael Wolfe

Publishing Talks began as a series of conversations with book industry professionals and others involved in media and technology, mostly talking about the future of publishing, books, and culture. I’ve spent time talking with people in the book industry about how publishing is evolving in the context of technology, culture, and economics.

Later this series broadened to include conversations that go beyond the future of publishing. In an effort to document the literary world, I’ve talked with a variety of editors, publishers and others who have been innovators and leaders in independent publishing in the past and into the present.

These conversations have been inspirational to me on many levels. I have gotten to speak with visionaries and entrepreneurs, as well as editors and publishers who have influenced and changed contemporary literature and culture. I’ve also had the opportunity to speak with a number of friends and colleagues I have met over the many years I have been in the book business.

One such person is Michael Wolfe. We have known each peripherally for many years through independent literary publishing.

Michael is the author of ten books of poetry, fiction, and travel. In the 1970s and 1980s he owned and ran a bookstore and a book bindery in Bolinas, California, and was publisher of the renowned indie press, Tombouctou Books there. His authors included Lucia Berlin, Paul Bowles, Mohammed Mrabet, Jim Carroll, Joanne Kyger, Dale Herd, Steve Emerson, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Bill Berkson, Duncan McNaughton, Clark Coolidge, Phoebe MacAdams and many other wonderful writers, poets and translators.

These days, Michael is the Executive Producer and President of Unity Productions Foundation, a nonprofit media company that produces documentary films. “Stories of Muslim Engagement, History and Culture – UPF Films and Educational Projects Promote Peace and Understanding.”

Speaking with Michael about writing, publishing and his life was a great experience for me, one which I am pleased to share here. As time goes on, I treasure these opportunities to talk with brilliant, accomplished literary activists like Michael Wolfe.

Author website here.

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Publishing Talks: Interview with Kyle Schlesinger of Cuneiform Press

Publishing Talks began as a series of conversations with book industry professionals and others involved in media and technology, mostly talking about the future of publishing, books, and culture. I’ve spent time talking with people in the book industry about how publishing is evolving in the context of technology, culture, and economics.

Later this series broadened to include talks and interviews that go beyond the future of publishing. In an effort to document the literary world, I’ve talked with a variety of editors, publishers and others who have been innovators and leaders in independent publishing in the past, and into the present.

These conversations have been inspirational to me on many levels. I have gotten to speak with visionaries and entrepreneurs, as well as editors and publishers who have influenced and changed contemporary literature and culture. I started out in independent publishing, and early on learned how to set type by hand and operate mechanically operated printing presses that were even then becoming obsolete. I was never a very good printer and admire the poets and editors who have taken up the mantle of what is known as fine press printing to produce books that are artistically innovative and at times handmade.

Kyle Schlesinger is a poet and independent publisher whose work I have long admired. His press, Cuneiform (“Poetry, Typography and Artists’ Books) has established an incredible body of work since he issued his first book in 2000, Luisa Giugliano’s Chapter in a Day Finch Journal, published in Buffalo while Kyle was a student in the Poetics Program at SUNY, where he studied with Robert Creeley, Susan Howe, and Charles Bernstein.

Kyle first discovered the idea of printing through Will Hamlin, a Black Mountain College alumnus, while he was studying at Goddard College. He learned to print first in Vermont on an 1889 Prouty platen press with metal type. As he says on the Cuneiform site:

“We printed the literary review for Goddard College, instructions for using a compost toilet, Gertrude Stein stationery, and a few short poems. I remember building up the letters of William Carlos Williams’ “A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words” early on.”

This early experience quite evidently sent Kyle on the path to becoming a fine printer and book designer, and the hand work well suited to his personal design views, as he has gone on to produce a range of excellent writing expressed through fine design and outstanding creativity in book production.

After he left Buffalo, Kyle moved to Austin, Texas, where Cuneiform is now based. He teaches at the University of Houston, Victoria. Cuneiform produces books of poetry, artists’ books and even scholarly works, using letterpress and offset printing. Kyle and I had a great conversation earlier this spring. When it is possible to travel again, I am looking forward to visiting Cuneiform and seeing Kyle and the great Vandercook 219 proof press he runs in his shop in Austin.

Kyle and I share a number of connections, including poets  and old friends, Kit Robinson, Steve Benson, and Kyle printed for years on a press he got from another old friend, Michael Waltuch, as well as a shared interest in Black Mountain College and its many amazing poets, artists and craftspeople. It’s inspiring to see his work, that carries forward the meaningful traditions of poets in collaboration with artists in the making of books. We had a wide ranging conversation about his work, past, present, and future.

Visit the Cuneiform Press website – do consider buying some books or subscribing or even donating, as Cuneiform is a 501 (c)3 nonprofit, donations are tax-deductible!

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Fenton Johnson – At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life

At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life – Fenton Johnson- 9780393608298 – W.W. Norton – Hardcover – 256 pages – March 10, 2020 – $26.95 – ebook versions available at lower prices

So much of the pleasure of conducting this podcast for all these years has been (and continues to be) the discovery of new writers and books, that so deeply nurture my inner being. Discovering Fenton Johnson’s writing during the pandemic, where I have been spending most of my time alone or with just my immediate family, has been both apt and especially rewarding. I want to thank my cousin, Fred Hertz, for introducing me to Fenton and his work. I am especially interested in this book, as it is about the inner lives if writers, artists and musicians, their thought processes and creative lives, Fenton Johnson’s perspective on creativity and the artistic journey should resonate with us now more than ever.

Fenton is an outstanding writer, whose prose flows like a slow moving brook through the woods. I am really surprised not to have known about his work before now. Now, having read this most recent very personal memoir, I am adding his other works of memoir, and his fiction to my long term reading list.

But back to this book. In At the Center of All Beauty, Fenton explores the lives and works of nearly a dozen writers, painters and singers, those he feels most close to in his own life and work. He calls them “solitaries,” and links them to members of his own family, friends he knew growing up, his life, his lovers, his loves.  He rightly questions the dominant cultural narrative we all absorb that coupling is the highest and best way to live. Of course there is a long and celebrated tradition in the West of creatives who must separate themselves from others in order to be themselves, and this clearly is a crucial story for anyone involved in trying to create.

Fenton devotes chapters to Thoreau at Walden Pond, Emily Dickinson in Amherst, the great Bill Cunningham photographing in the streets, Cézanne repeatedly painting Mont Sainte-Victoire and Zora Neale Hurston, Nina Simone, and several other exemplars of the creative solitary life. Each of these stories relate back to Fenton’s own journey, first growing up in Kentucky near the famous Gethsemane monastery (best known as home to Thomas Merton,) his father and mother, also both solitary souls despite their family lives, and then  later living in San Francisco in the time of AIDS, to now, where in late middle age, he finds himself solitary and at peace with all that it means to be both alone and completely connected to the world around him.

This book is full of wisdom, of beauty, and of language that helps us go beyond our daily perceptions into our own stories of self and meaning. You can read this book as a narrative or perhaps as well, use it as an inspirational spur to personal meditation on self and beauty.

It was truly a pleasure to read At the Center of All Beauty and also to have the opportunity to speak with Fenton about this book. To illustrate life during Covid-19, while we happened to both be in Tucson, Arizona this spring, Fenton delivered the book to me, both of us wearing masks, in the local post office parking lot, and we conducted the interview via Skype, despite being less than two miles apart from each other on the day we talked.

Aside from At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life, Fenton Johnson is the author of three novels: The Man Who Loved Birds, Scissors, Paper, Rock, and Crossing the River, each of which have been reissued in new editions. He has also published two previous memoirs, Geography of the Heart: A Memoir and Keeping Faith: A Skeptic’s Journey among Christian and Buddhist Monks and an essay collection Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays.

Geography of the Heart received the American Library Association and Lambda Literary Awards for best LGBT Creative Nonfiction, and Keeping Faith received a Lambda Literary and Kentucky Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction. He was recently featured on NPR’s Fresh Air and writes for Harper’s Magazine.

Fenton is professor emeritus at the University of Arizona and teaches creative writing workshops nationally. He is on the faculty of the low-residency creative writing program of Spalding University.

Support local booksellers! Buy At the Center of All Beauty from independent bookseller RJ Julia.

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Publishing Talks: David Wilk interviews Brian Birnbaum of Dead Rabbits

Publishing Talks began as a series of conversations with book industry professionals and others involved in media and technology, mostly talking about the future of publishing, books, and culture. As every media business continues to experience disruption and change, I’ve spent time talking with some of the people involved in our industry about how publishing might evolve as it is affected by technology and the larger context of culture and economics.

Some time back, this interview series broadened to include conversations that go beyond the future of publishing. In an effort to document the literary world, I’ve talked with a variety of editors and publishers who have been innovators and leaders in independent publishing in the past and the present, and continue to explore the ebb and flow of writing, books, and publishing in all sorts of forms and formats, as change continues to be the one constant we can count on.

There are many reasons to establish an independent literary venture, but usually the urge is based in the most basic impulse to publish, i.e. make public, work that matters, either to an individual, or a group of writers clustered around a particular geography or literary pursuit. Dead Rabbits is one such new venture. Its founders began by creating a poetry reading in a place that was underserved. The Dead Rabbits Reading Series was founded in 2014 by Devin Kelly (Sarah Lawrence MFA ’15), Katie Longofono (Sarah Lawrence MFA ’14), and Katie Rainey (Sarah Lawrence MFA ’14) as a way of providing a place for an emerging young New York City literary scene to exist and thrive in Upper Manhattan.

Out of that extremely successful undertaking – with a long list of readers with whom I confess I was not familiar – Katie Rainey, Jonathan Lee Kay and Brian Birnbaum subsequently founded Dead Rabbits Books (“Books that Matter”). Their first publication is Brian Birnbaum’s novel, Emerald City, with several more books planned and ambitions to establish a long term self sustaining publishing venture.

I’ve talked to many folks in publishing who have spent years at their work and thought it would be a useful counterpoint to talk to someone new, on the other end of the spectrum, is just beginning the struggle to publish and reach readers in new ways that have continued to emerge over the past few years.

Dead Rabbits is emblematic of a new generation of writers and editors that is in many ways wrestling with the same challenges that have faced every generation before them, but the current environment is also very different than it has been at any time in the past. Social media creates unmatched opportunities for communication and at the same time a vast array of issues for any new enterprise trying to be discovered. It seems there are more poets and independent presses than ever, all competing for an audience of readers for whom poetry is yet another option for consumption alongside every other media form. Which makes this a very interesting time indeed. Good luck to Dead Rabbits, (in all their various literary ventures) – this is a group of young literary adventurers who seem to have some very good ideas as well as access to some very good writing. Anyone interested in the current literary scene should listen to this podcast.

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Publishing Talks: David Wilk interviews poet and editor Tom Montag

Publishing Talks began as a series of conversations with book industry professionals and others involved in media and technology, mostly talking about the future of publishing, books, and culture. As every media business continues to experience disruption and change, I’ve been talking with some of the people involved in our industry about how publishing might evolve as it is affected by technology and the larger context of culture and economics.

I’ve expanded this interview series to include conversations that go beyond the future of publishing. I’ve talked with editors and publishers who have been innovators and leaders in independent publishing in the past and the present, and will continue to explore the ebb and flow of writing, books, and publishing in all sorts of forms and formats, as change continues to be the one constant we can count on.

Tom Montag is a poet, critic, editor and publisher whom I have known for many years. I love his biography, which emphasizes his pure identity as a midwesterner. Unlike so many Americans, he has lived in the midwest for his entire life, and his work identifies deeply with where he lives. He does not need to declaim his role as a true poet of place.

Tom was somewhat famously the editor of Margins: A Review of Little Magazines and Small Press Books during the 1970s, was active in the Milwaukee literary scene, and was an editor and feature writer for Wisconsin’s Fox River Patriot during its heyday from 1977 to 1979. With his wife Mary, he edited and published the Wisconsin Poet’s Calendar from 1982 to 1984, which was subsequently handed to the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets to continue.

Tom spent the better part of his work life at the family owned Ripon Community Printers in Ripon, Wisconsin. During those years, he wrote pithy sayings from a character he called Ben Zen. Four collections of the BZ poems were published between 1992 and 2000.

His memoir, Curlew: Home is about his first fourteen years spent on a farm outside Curlew, Iowa, and about his sense of loss in revisiting the community forty years later. Kissing Poetry’s Sister gathered eleven of Montag’s essays about writing and being a writer, including his long piece on creative nonfiction.

After he retired from his Ripon job, he spent five years creating “Vagabond in the Middle,” an attempt to determine what makes us middle western. He has been collecting stories from residents of twelve communities across the middle west, true stories of their families, their lives, and their connections to the places they inhabit.

Tom and I have worked together on publishing projects at Woodland Pattern in Milwaukee, and we’ve presented together there and at the Lorine Niedecker festival in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. Tom’s writing and editing has meant a great deal to me over the years, we are linked in so many ways, yet have such different backgrounds, and it was a great pleasure to speak to him here about his lifetime of work in writing and publishing, though to be sure, we barely scratched the surface of what we could have talked about.

SOMETIMES

Sometimes
in the weeds

a loveliness.
This moment

among all
the moments.

Rain when it’s
needed. Tom,

stop wanting
anything more.

 

MY FATHER,
holding the Y
of willow

lightly
in his hands,

walks the land.
The willow

leaps
for something

we do not
see: Here,

my father says
to the man,

drill here.

Tom is the author of many books and has edited anthologies as well. His most recent large scale collection is In This Place: Selected Poems 1982-2013.

There are two really good written interviews with Tom in the Wombwell Rainbow and the Mocking Heart Review. You can learn more about Tom and his work here and you can keep up with his prodigious output of poetry at his outstanding blog The Middle Westerner where you will regularly find him posting poems that will endure.

“Exploring the heart of the country; or, as Nancy Besonen has said, “Tom Montag is defining the character of the Midwest – one character at a time.”

Thanks Tom, for being who you are.

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Maureen Owen and Barbara Henning reading in Tucson, Arizona

What a great trip! Starting January 18, 2019, with a reading at McNally Jackson Bookstore in Brooklyn, New York, poets Maureen Owen and Barbara Henning, started a cross country journey together (you can view their trip itinerary here).

Appropriately, their story and journey began in Brooklyn, where Barbara lives, and this amazing cross-country jaunt ends in Denver two months later, where Maureen lives.

The two writers have been blogging about their adventure here – their writing is terrific and fun, it is always fresh and lively, truly poets’ reportage, and reading their travel log will make you feel like you are along for the ride with them. They are having alot of fun and meeting and talking with some wonderful people along the way. They are getting to see some beautiful parts of our country too. Their two months on the road will feature 16 public events, and innumerable anecdotes and stories. It’s really fun to follow along with them as they travel, and when they are done, this will make a really interesting book.

I had the good fortune to be in Tucson, Arizona, when the two writers arrived there on February 14. Maureen is an old friend and colleague, so it was wonderful to get together with her, and to meet Barbara for the first time. When I went to hear them read for the POG Poetry reading series at the Steinfeld Warehouse Community Art Center, 101 West 6th Tucson on Saturday, February 16, and I recorded the event for this Authors Voices series here on Writerscast.

Local writer Steve Salmoni introduced the event. Poet and publisher (Chax Press) Charles Alexander introduced Maureen, and artist Cynthia Miller introduced Barbara, who lived in Tucson for a few years and has many friends there still.

It was a great event, and a wonderful opportunity to hear two terrific writers, both of whom engage with their audience and their writing. I’ve known Maureen for a long time, and believe she is one of the best poets of our time. Getting to hear Barbara Henning was a treat for me, as she is also a terrific writer of both poetry and fiction. I’m very pleased to have the opportunity to present this reading here.

Poet Maureen Owen was born in Minnesota, lived and worked in New York City and Connecticut, and has been living in Denver for a number of years, where she has long taught at nearby Naropa University. She was the founder of Telephone magazine and Telephone Books, worked at the Poetry Project in NYC, and is the author of a number of wonderful collections of poems.

Barbara Henning is a poet and fiction writer, born in Detroit, who has lived mostly in New York and Tucson since the early eighties. Aside from being the author of a number of books of poetry and fiction, she was also the editor of a book of interviews, Looking Up Harryette Mullen, and The Selected Prose of Bobbie Louise Hawkins. She is professor emeritus at Long Island University, where she taught for many years.

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Gordon Ball: East Hill Farm: Seasons with Allen Ginsberg

East Hill Farm: Seasons with Allen Ginsberg – Gordon Ball – Counterpoint Press – 416 pages – paperback – 9781619020177 – $18.95 – December 11, 2012 – ebook edition available at lower prices

It’s been a great pleasure for me to be able to interview  writer friends and editors about their work for the Writerscast and Publishing Talks podcasts. I first met writer, film-maker and now professor Gordon Ball soon after moving to Chapel Hill, North Carolina at the very end of 1973. I knew almost no one in North Carolina, but in those still counter-cultural days of boomer history, it was relatively easy to make friends, especially within the fairly small community of like-minded poets and writers that laid-back college town oasis attracted.

Gordon Ball was in Chapel Hill for graduate school, after spending several years as the amanuensis and farm manager for Allen Ginsberg at his funky farm refuge in Cherry Valley, New York. How Gordon got to be there, and what happened during his time among the heroes of the Beat Generation and the hippie revolutionists who followed them is the subject of his excellent and enjoyable memoir, East Hill Farm.

Allen Ginsberg was unique, as a poet who became a cultural icon, a political and spiritual leader whose writing has influenced millions of readers. East Hill Farm was his attempt to build a refuge from city life – “a haven for comrades in distress,” especially friends whose lives were being ruined by hard drugs like iconic beat poets Herbert Huncke and Ray Bremser, who both spent time at the farm in the late sixties. Gordon recounts his first hand stories of the refugees who arrived there as well as the many local upstate characters who helped make the dilapidated farm into a livable home and a functioning farm of sorts. This story is emblematic of so many “back to the land” excursions from the sixties, when hippies from the cities and suburbs arrived uninvited in small town farm communities in places like Vermont, Maine, northern California, Oregon and of course, upstate New York.

But he also tells us about his own journey, his family, the loves and losses that he experienced in this heady era when millions of young people all around the world revolted against the constraints of post-War modern capitalism, all trying to find a different way to live. His experiences and those of his compatriots help us understand how that special moment in our history was lived, and perhaps also, why it could not last or lead to the kind of social change its participants believed in and hoped for.

But what a great experience it was. And so much of what happened there will not be lost or forgotten because of this book.

“I couldn’t stop reading East Hill Farm and learning so much of what really went down on that farm in that so crucial period in the lives of the Beats. I visited the farm just twice but wish I had had Ball’s innocent yet so perceptive eye.” —Lawrence Ferlinghetti, author of A Coney Island of Mind.

“In the late 1960s, poet Allen Ginsberg bought an isolated, broken-down farm in upstate New York as a retreat for himself and his worn-out, burned-out friends. Ginsberg hoped to create an Elysium where they could escape from the urban pressures and drug addictions that had laid Kerouac, Corso, Orlovsky, and Huncke so low. Only a masterful story-teller like Gordon Ball could turn a depressing tale of poets at rock bottom into a triumph of the human spirit.”—Bill Morgan, author of I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg

Gordon Ball photographed Allen Ginsberg and the Beat Generation for many years. As well as being exhibited at five conferences on Ginsberg and the Beat Generation, at one-man shows at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art and other venues, Ball’s photos have appeared in many publications. Gordon is the author of 66 Frames: A Memoir and a volume of prose poems, Dark Music. He lives in Lexington, Virginia, taught at VMI and now is teaching at Washington and Lee University. Author website here.

East Hill Farm is a charming, warm memoir that will be a compelling read for anyone who wants to know what it was like to live through the sixties with a cast of some amazing characters, many of whom helped create the culture we still experience today. It was great fun for me to reconnect with Gordon after so many years, and to share his experiences and memories through this wonderful book.

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David Wilk interviews Steve Clay of Granary Books

Publishing Talks began as a series of conversations with book industry professionals and others involved in media and technology about the future of publishing, books, and culture. As we continue to experience disruption and change in all media businesses, I’ve been talking with some of the people involved in our industry about how publishing might evolve as our culture is affected by technology and the larger context of civilization and economics.

I’ve now expanded the series to include conversations that go beyond the future of publishing. I’ve talked with editors and publishers who have been innovators and leaders in independent publishing in the past and into the present, and will continue to explore the ebb and flow of writing, books, and publishing in all sorts of forms and formats, as change continues to be the one constant we can count on.

For the past several years, I’ve been talking to editors and publishers of independent presses about their work, including a number of important literary publishers.

Steve Clay is an old friend, who has been involved with poetry, art and publishing for about the last forty years or so. Steve is the publisher of Granary Books, through which he has done some extraordinary work with an incredible range of poets, artists and crafts people. He has been the instigator of literally hundreds of important standout works of art.

He calls himself an editor, curator, and archivist specializing in the American art and literature of the 1960s,’70s, and ’80s. Steve is also the author, with Rodney Phillips, of A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing 1960-1980 (1998) and editor, with Jerome Rothenberg, of A Book of the Book: Some Works & Projections about the Book & Writing. He lives in New York City.

But this outline of his work barely scratches the surface of Steve’s work.  In our conversation, I tried to give him the opportunity to talk broadly about the scope of his creative work. He is truly an exemplar of the powerful nexus of writing, editing, and publishing, the “making public” work so critical to art and those who make and experience it. His work is a gift I urge you to spend some time to discover and explore on your own.

A good start is to visit the Granary Books website. Then go to the absolutely essential From a Secret Location: Poetry, Little Mags, Small Presses, and transient documents from the mimeo era and beyond.

There is another useful interview with Steve conducted by the brilliant poet Bill Corbett for the Paris Review here.

When Columbia University, which purchased the Granary Books archive, opened their first exhibit from the Granary archives in 2015, Mark Dimunation, chief of the Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress said about Steve: “Beginning in 1985 he has concocted a mix of poets, artists, printers and craftspeople whose work defines an era and fundamentally shapes our understanding of the artists’ book.”

Enjoy!

 

 

Pre-Face image from A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960–1980 (The New York Public Library and Granary Books, 1998), based on Bernadette Mayer, Studying Hunger (New York and Bolinas, CA: Adventures in Poetry and Big Sky, 1975). Cover photograph of the author by Ed Bowes.

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