Vigorously Lazy

PANK, Mud Luscious and Annalemma are combing powers dark and light this February at AWP. Come join us for Divination in DC, a gathering of writers reading work that will change your future.

Congrats to Annalemma Issue #5 contributors Anne Elizabeth Moore and Dan Moreau for receiving notable mentions in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2010.

Anne’s essay “Reimagining the National Border Patrol Museum” and Dan’s story “The King of the Jews” were both selected by the series editor as outstanding pieces. I love this series and I’m very proud to have been able to publish both of these fantastic works. Well done, Anne and Dan!

I just ordered my copy like a proud papa (sniff).

This weeks image contributor Matthew Genitempo is part of Austin based creative collective Public School. Check out their store where you can find a generous helping of original screen printed posters they’ve made for bands you are probably a fan of. I don’t really have much more to say on this subject other than I really like Austin and I really like art and design and Public School merges these things in a way that makes me pump my fist something fierce. Well done, fellas.

Peter Cole of Keyhole Books has been showing his concern here and there over the last week about the state of small press publishing. Brief summary:The last two discussions I’m aware of concerned two things 1) the support structure of small press books, how it’s the same people buying the same things and how eventually this structure could collapse and the multitude of small press imprints out there will get washed away and 2) authors using small press imprints as stepping stones to bigger publishing houses instead of growing with the small press.

Pete, I feel you. The limitations of a small press are often frustrating and disappointing. But there’s a reason they call it small press. We don’t have marketing and publicity armies at our disposal that can go out and find an audience for a new title. Usually it’s just one dude working on it in his spare time, wearing all the hats.

Regarding the support structure, the problem is us small press publishers looking at the online writing scene and seeing it as a viable market, instead of looking for an audience outside of that scene. Regarding the stepping stone effect, Annalemma is in a somewhat different position. Traditionally, lit mags have functioned happily as a conduit for writers to travel beyond small press land. I’m hard pressed to find a problem with this. The reason small presses publish someone is because they love the writing, not because they think it will sell 10,000 units. If it sold a shit ton of books then they’d cease to be a small press. And if there’s a writer you publish that goes on to the bigger houses that wouldn’t be a boon for all parties involved?

Big time publishing works just like Hollywood. They spend a lot of money on a lot of titles (most of them garbage) in the hopes that one of them is a hit and can pay for the ones that flopped. By that point it’s just gambling, hedging bets, fully diluting that feeling that a small press gives you of presenting work to the world that is worth reading.

The point: There comes a time when you need to embrace where you’re at. Small press publishing will always be hard and never lucrative. To fight against that is a recipe for burnout. But there’s advantages to small press. We’re agile. We can shift course and pivot focus almost effortlessly. We’re able to experiment at relatively low risk. The prospect of something we put our hands on hitting the Bestseller list is laughable, but never impossible.

The greater point: you keep trying until it works or you run out of gas.

Thoughts?

After interviewing Justin Taylor earlier this year, I learned about The Word Made Flesh book he was working on. I got a Bible verse cut into me a while back so I took a pic and sent it his way and it made it into the book. I got a chance to see an advance copy last night and it looks amazing. There’s a running tumbler here, but if you’re into tattoos, books and hope to merge the two somehow, you’re gonna want to purchase this. It’s also going to be required material for every tattoo shop coffee table from now on. Well done, Justin and Eva, you put together a fun one.

Ever wanted to know what it’s like to run a lit mag in an age when doing such a thing is considered neither popular nor wise? Sign up for the Annalemma newsletter by typing your email address in the field at the top of the right hand column of this page to receive monthly emails on the business of small press publishing, discounts on print issues/subscriptions, and a genuine opportunity to connect with a genuine human being.

Click here to pre-order. This item will ship November 1st, 2010.

The purpose of this issue was to answer the question, “What keeps people moving when all signs are telling them to stop?”

Featuring words by Joe Meno, Patrick DeWitt, Roxane Gay, Amber Sparks, Matthew Simmons, Sasha Fletcher, Brian Allen Carr, Paul Kwiatkowski and more.

Featuring images by David Potes, Cali deWitt, Kristian Hammerstad, Margaret Durow, Patrick Savile, Jake Blanchard and Sam Brewster.

The cover is excerpted from the photo essay ZORA! by Ted Hollins. Ted’s photography captures 21 years of the Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities, held annually in Eatonville, Florida.

The festival celebrates the memory and influence Zora, and the endurance of the City of Eatonville, the first black municipality in the US. In the late 80’s Orange County officials commissioned a five lane highway to be constructed the city’s main thoroughfare. The project threatened the dissolve the community. Unwilling to relinquish their identity, the citizens formed a political action committee to prove to the county that Eatonville was of too much historical significance to destroy. This was accomplished by illustrating the influence of Zora Neale Hurston. Not only a titan of American literature, but one of the most important figures black history, Hurston spent her formative years in Eatonville and wrote at length about the city. Ted’s photography highlights the triumph of Eatonville and it’s will to endure.

We felt a portrait of Zora, Eatonville and the concept of endurance would be incomplete unless her writing was showcased. Thanks to Harper Perennial and the Zora Neale Hurston Trust, the story “Sweat” by Zora Neale Hurston has been reprinted in its entirety.

As a gesture of respect and gratitude to the memory and work of Zora Neale Hurston, a portion of the proceeds from the sale of Annalemma Issue Seven: Endurance will be donated to The Hurston Museum, an organization dedicated to showcasing works of artists of African descent.

This item is available for Pre-order only. This item will ship November 1st, 2010.

The perfect place to keep Sleepingfish 8 is on the top of the toilet tank. That sounds like an insult but it’s not.

Avant garde fiction, experimental fiction, fucking weird fiction, whatever you want to call it, no one does it better than Calamari Press. Show Calamari an edge and it will hold you over it. Show them an envelope and they will push it. On the one hand it’s very respectable to say you’re the best at what you do, that no one does it quite like you. On the other, when you take things to the very cutting edge, you please the hardcores and alienate the majority. Calamari publishes a writing style that doesn’t pander to the casual observer. Nowhere is this more evident than in the latest release of Sleepingfish 8, its sporadically published journal.

Another virtue of the writing styles within is that they question what a short story even is. The pieces are presented without bylines, you get the title then you go. It’s a discomforting experience not seeing the name of the author before you delve into something they’ve written. You’ll want to force yourself to flip to find out who it is but you realize this is not the intent of the publisher, so you roll with that discomfort, as it’s all part of the show.

In Bathhouse in 5 Senses, Tim Jones-Yelvington traces the experience of a trip to a gay men’s bathhouse, not through any characters, but through tastes, colors, smells, sounds and textures. Matt Bell unleashes more grotesque children from his forthcoming collection Cataclysm Baby. Ryan Call’s story about an embittered, deceased farmer, told through the behavioral patterns of tornadoes. in The Lonesome Deaths of Bud and Sandy Dennis Cooper phones it in with two chunks of glib, admittedly funny, dialogue about a father murdering his children. Amelia Gray tells the story of a woman who eats literally everything in the house to cope with the disappearance of her man.

The most respectable thing about the writing is the out and out rejection of traditional narrative style. This is why the top of the toilet tank is the best place for it: Each piece requires such a drastic recalibration of your senses, that it’s best to take a step back after reading each story. Say, in between bowel movements. Each piece is one to two pages long, adding up to about 115 pages. If you go one piece at a time you’ll realize that it took you over 50 dumps to get through the issue, then you start to think about how many times you’ve moved your bowels in your lifetime and then you will realize the effect Sleepingfish 8 has had on you: it causes you to look at your life in a different way, which is when fiction is doing its job best.

Buy it here from Calamari.

Before we started work on this upcoming issue, Annalemma sponsored a photo show in Orlando featuring all Floridian photographers, where I was introduced to Ted Hollins, a photographer who’s been documenting the Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities for 21 years. The ZORA festival takes place every January in Eatonville, a town six miles north of Orlando, where Zora Neale Hurston grew up. I hadn’t actually read any Zora when I grew up in Florida. Eatonville is a predominantly black community and I grew up deeply entrenched in an affluent white community. I remember seeing banners and signs with the word ZORA! scattered along the outskirts of Eatonville around that time of year but I had no idea what the word meant or what it was advertising. It wasn’t until college that I read Their Eyes Were Watching God and a number of her short stories, effectively falling in love with the writing. It was an intense shift in my perception to see mention of the outlying cities and places where I grew up, but through the lens of young black woman in a poor community.

When it came time to choose the featured artist for Issue Seven: Endurance, Jen O’Malley (our graphic designer and curator of the previously mentioned photo show) and I started talking about Ted. It seemed like a perfect fit: Ted’s been documenting the endurance of Eatonville, a community that’s successfully battled with Orange County officials against encroaching development and gentrification, a community that inspired a titan of literature who went on to inspire a generation of writers. I also thought it would be a cool idea to reprint one of her stories in order to give a more full portrait to those ignorant of her work and influence like I once was. So I called up HarperCollins and asked for the rights to reprint “Sweat”, a story about a woman enduring the torments of an abusive husband, and what that abuse ultimately leads her to do.

And in an effort to express our gratitude to the memory and work of Zora Neale Hurston, a portion of the proceeds of Annalemma Issue Seven: Endurance will go directly to The Hurston Museum in Eatonville, an organization dedicated to showcasing works of artists of African descent.

Image: Ted Hollins

Behold, the cover of Annalemma Issue Seven: Endurance. The image was excerpted from the photo essay ZORA! by Ted Hollins. Ted’s been photographing the Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities since its inception 21 years ago. The essay focuses on some of the highlights of the event taking place annually in Eatonville, FL, where Zora Neale Hurston was raised. Ted is an incredible photographer and we’re very pleased to have his images grace our pages.

Going to print on Monday! More details to follow.