I have it on good authority that if you pay all his expenses, you, too, can have the publisher hand-deliver a copy. Or you can just preorder Surfing with Mel online.
Archives for September 2013
Local Promotional Tour for Surfing with Mel
Whoopsie!
Here Comes Everybody
We’re gonna need a bigger sidebar. Plus a Venn diagram. I mean, you got us, Korrektiv Press. And the upcoming title (available tomorrow!) from Labora Editions is Surfing with Mel, which started life as a Korrektiv ebook. And the editor over at Tuscany Press is one Joseph O’Brien, who blogs ’round here as JOB. Plus there’s that fancy chat between Korrektiv author Brian Jobe and Wiseblood publisher Joshua Hren. And I was arguing with Greg Wolfe at Image about Catholic fiction way back in 2008. (I sound pretty dumb in that debate, but what else is new?) I’ll list more connections as they are unearthed.
Slimed
Slimed! traffics in the R-rated behind-the-scenes shenanigans at the children’s network. “It was like being in a fraternity,” Summers explained as we watched a toddler clamber through a gaping mouth. “It was a bunch of grown-ups doing a kids’ show with zero supervision.” The game show filmed in Philadelphia, on the cheap and away from executives’ watchful eyes, and apparently many things took place on the sly. “One day — and I won’t mention names — I asked someone, ‘Why isn’t this girl at the studio?’ And they said, ‘Uh, I can’t tell ya,’ and I said, ‘tell me,’ and he said, ‘She’s getting an abortion. So-and-so knocked her up.’” Summers shot me a conspiratorial grin. “It was the eighties, you know? There might have been a little experimentation going on there.”
I feel like maybe he shouldn’t have referred to her as a “girl,” just to make it slightly less creepy a conspiracy. Or is he actually referring to one of the teenagers on a Nickelodeon show?(From Catching Up With Marc Summers)
Declaration of Principles
Over at Labora Editions:
I have loved books all my life. I take a romantic view of them, as one inevitably does with the things one loves, and my approach to publishing is colored by that view. Tuscany’s Peter Mongeau comes from a business background and rightly talks about the publishing market and “barriers to entry” and “distribution channels.” My background is in studio art, (ceramics, specifically) and I bring my ideas of form, function, the mark of the hand, and the importance of craft to my process of making books.
The other publishers featured in this post are, so far as I can tell, producing books according to the current standard practices of book manufacture, and that is perfectly fine. I was happy to pay for all of the aforementioned purchases; I can’t wait to get my hands on them, to have a chance to sit still and read. But the standard practice is not what appeals to me as a craftsman. The book is a kind of vessel, and I am as interested in the thing itself as in what goes between the covers. The content, of course, must “dazzle gradually,” so to speak, but my parallel aspiration is to create an attractive, durable vessel.
I think of it as craft publishing. Recently, in an email to Matthew Lickona I described the idea thus: “Like a microbrewery, except with books.”
Sherman Alexie
The Spokane falls where ghosts of salmon
Foreseen by Sherman fill their gills
With Catholic gilt and white man’s mammon
To pay for rehabs and oil pills,
Basalt and concrete worn by water
Flowing genocidal slaughter,
Coyote’s unrequited love,
Alexie’s push that comes to shove.
The towns of Wellpinit and Reardan,
The left and right arms that draw
You to Spokane’s hungry maw,
Release you now; but do not harden
The paths of your own tears that trail
Down windows in Seattle’s vale.
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