Small presses, big voices

Writers find publishers to support work that falls outside literature’s mainstream

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In a market dominated by corporate book publishers, it's up to independent small presses to provide an oasis for writers whose challenging approach to style and subject matter could easily fall through the cracks.

PORTRAIT #2 From "The Evolution of a Sigh" Nothing new only rain dropping by to remind me of my postmortem wish which is to come back not as a wall specialist doubling as a window display I'd rather be a chain smoker's cough ear wax or the letter "E" that completes "love" "despite" "goodbye" but if the guy in charge of dust gives me another go I'd like to come back as rain interrupt reunions and blind dates make rivers grow reschedule root canals give rock climbers a make-over cancel honeymoons prolong anti-climactic one-night stands and give the guy's bad-hair day the slick look it needs.

Hawaii authors R. Zamora "Zack" Linmark and Susan Schultz are familiar with the vitality and importance of small press. They've been published locally by Bamboo Ridge, and Schultz runs her own small press out of her Kaneohe home, Tinfish Press, noted for its emphasis on experimental prose and poetry from the Pan-Pacific area.

Now they reach out to a national readership with books published by small-press publishers on the mainland - Linmark's "The Evolution of a Sigh" and Schultz's "Dementia Blog."

Besides the inventive writing contained within, both books are packaged with strong cover images.

The cover art for Linmark's chapbook is titled "Stitch," by a young artist from Manila named Rex Tatlonghari. He said he first saw the work at a gallery with the unusual name 1/of.

"I could not get my mind off the image of the suture trying to break open (like a sigh), with the tears dripping from the stitch," Linmark said via e-mail from Montauk, N.Y., where he's working on a novel and a play during a monthlong residency at the Edward Albee Foundation. "So when I came up with the title 'The Evolution of a Sigh,' it was only appropriate that it be used for the cover."

On the Net: hangingloosepress.com singinghorsepress.com tinfishpress.com

Artist Gaye Chan, who has done previous work for Schultz and her small press, borrowed a box of old photographs to design a the cover for "Dementia Blog," which is mainly about Schultz's mother's descent into insanity caused by a brain disorder. "She took a snapshot of my parents in their living room and made my father (who died in 1992) utterly transparent, my mother only partially so, to indicate her forgetting," Schultz said via e-mail from Oregon.

"I find the cover painful to look at, but incredibly effective; dementia is a state of being erased."

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"Dementia Blog" by Susan M. Schultz (Singing Horse Press, 136 pages, $15)

Susan Schultz

Susan Schultz's book is made up of portions of a blog she kept during the summer of 2006 that comment on the onset of her mother's dementia. The sections are printed in reverse chronological order, the book closing with her mother's early bouts of uncontrollable anger.

Included are comments about her children, and how their growth intersected with her mother's regression - plus the political "dementia" she saw in comments coming from the Bush administration during that time - making the literary ambition of the material an expansion of the usually casual nature of blogging.

"Whatever is confusing about reading the story backwards is intended by the form," Schultz writes in her introduction. "The confusions offered by the form are similar (or at least apt metaphors) to the confusions of dementia." "Dementia Blog" is published by Singing Horse Press in San Diego, which, according to its mission statement, "will continue to support writers who pursue formally and intellectually challenging paths of expression and construction."

Schultz kept her blog online for six months, then took it down for editing purposes, "trying to hone the sentences down from what you might call 'diary style' into one that is more poetic, (that) leaves more out."

As for including her observations about the Bush administration, she said that "when (former Secretary of Defense) Donald Rumsfeld says, 'You won't find me saying anything too optimistic about Iraq,' I can't help but think that is not simply a lie, but a demented bit of language use.

"I'm also interested in the book in the way my children's acquisition of language seemed to cross paths with my mother's loss of it. Language de-acquisition, if you will.

"As a writer and teacher, I'm necessarily obsessed with language," Schultz said, "and with trying to get things right — whether they involve careful listening to the voice of someone who is losing her words or to someone who is manipulating the public conversation on an issue like the war."

Her mother's ailment has galvanized Schultz as a writer. "This project is important to me, not simply as poetic prose, but as a testament to what it means to love someone who is disappearing in every way but physically from one's life.

"My greatest hope is that the book proves useful to those whose parents suffer dementia and Alzheimer's, caretakers and others. I'm also hoping it might prove useful to other writers in thinking through issues we face as writers: how to observe without intruding, how to participate in an event without appropriating from it, and how to make meaning out of its loss."

EXCERPTS Thursday, Aug. 31, 2006: "We used to write elegies for the dead, and they became stars in our firmament. I write of my mother in her dying, not past it. The prepositions are always the hardest. These words are for her, through you. The poem is a vessel of blood." Wednesday, Aug. 30, 2006: "We can call her demented, though that is not who she is. I can say she has identities, but not one that governs her tongue. I can say she is still my mother, but cannot say how she bore me, because my amnesia preceded me as hers will follow her. She wanders like a wireless link, room to room, dusk to deeper dusk. The musk of the old folds over her, like a mask she cannot see for wearing it. Out is the word we think of next. Out of her mind, if not ours. Out of sight. Out of it. Off-line." "Whatever is confusing about reading the story backwards is intended by the form," Schultz writes in her introduction. "The confusions offered by the form are similar (or at least apt metaphors) to the confusions of dementia." "Dementia Blog" is published by Singing Horse Press in San Diego, which, according to its mission statement, "will continue to support writers who pursue formally and intellectually challenging paths of expression and construction." Schultz kept her blog online for six months, then took it down for editing purposes, "trying to hone the sentences down from what you might call 'diary style' into one that is more poetic, (that) leaves more out." As for including her observations about the Bush administration, she said that "when (former Secretary of Defense) Donald Rumsfeld says, 'You won't find me saying anything too optimistic about Iraq,' I can't help but think that is not simply a lie, but a demented bit of language use. "I'm also interested in the book in the way my children's acquisition of language seemed to cross paths with my mother's loss of it. Language de-acquisition, if you will. "As a writer and teacher, I'm necessarily obsessed with language," Schultz said, "and with trying to get things right - whether they involve careful listening to the voice of someone who is losing her words or to someone who is manipulating the public conversation on an issue like the war." Her mother's ailment has galvanized Schultz as a writer. "This project is important to me, not simply as poetic prose, but as a testament to what it means to love someone who is disappearing in every way but physically from one's life. "My greatest hope is that the book proves useful to those whose parents suffer dementia and Alzheimer's, caretakers and others. I'm also hoping it might prove useful to other writers in thinking through issues we face as writers: how to observe without intruding, how to participate in an event without appropriating from it, and how to make meaning out of its loss."

"The Evolution of a Sigh" by R. Zamora Linmark (Hanging Loose Press, 88 pages, $16)

The latest chapbook from R. Zamora Linmark is his second for Hanging Loose Press of Brooklyn, formed in 1966 and one of the oldest in the United States.

Hanging Loose also published Linmark's first book, "Prime Time Apparitions," and Linmark said he had editors who taught him a lot - "a rare specimen nowadays in the publishing world."

Linmark is a world traveler, with homes in Honolulu and Manila, so it's no surprise that his poetry reflects his rich experiences.

"I wanted to play with - and advocate for - the idea of the poet as having several identities or personae," he said. "I wanted to move away from the poet as having only one identity, a single voice, a singular form and style. Because of this, my poetry collections tend to function more like anthologies rather than a single-author volume.

"In 'The Evolution of a Sigh,' I explore this concept further. As in the first collection, I am also drawn to how city people - whose second language is English - inform, twist (and) give shape to their borrowed tongue. In 'Prime Time Apparitions,' it was Honolulu and Manila. In 'The Evolution of a Sigh,' it's Manila and Tokyo.

"But I don't stop there," Linmark said. "The challenge for me then is to elevate the playing to a socio-political level. In 'Sigh' I also bring it on an intimate level, (to) show what happens to the English language when a relationship breaks down."