Only Human--thoughts of a writer & publisher

Sometimes you have to start where you don't know where to start.

You have to get it all out by throwing most of it away and then dealing with what you haven't thrown away.

I'm going through my writing of the last 5 or 6 years. It's mostly poems, and some stories, and some writing that's genre unclassifiable. When I look at the stuff mostly I feel unworthy of the time spent making it, which brings up questions of self-worth. Much of it is thin, less than me, outright failure or, worse, not what I thought it was. So many of the poems have only one line, one image worth keeping, and some of them were the product of real time and real effort and genuine enthusiasm.

I'm doing this for two reasons 1) I'm trying to make a book of my writing that would include the writing I've done since my last book, Days by Themselves, was published in 2006. 2) going through Aunt Lois's stuff--my 92-year old aunt who had a fall and had to be moved out of her house in Palm Desert--has made me want to leave the least possible paper trace when someone else is doing for me what I'm now doing for Aunt Lois.

The book's going to be called Only Human. I even have the cover image (as shown above.) I think the book will consist of poems, prose poems, and some short stories. I've looked through about 75 poems, and have so far found 6 that I know I want to put in the book. Then there's a pile of them that have possibility, but need work, the kind of poems that I know a poem is in them somewhere. Then there's the much bigger pile that I'm throwing away.

Writing's so weird, because there's writing and then there's what to do with it. I don't send out my work much, and when I do I send it sporadically, sometimes to places that no longer exist by the time I've written the thing and decided to send it out. Once I've written something good I'm on to something else and sending it out is the last thing I want to do. I know I have to change but I don't know how. All I know is that I'll keep writing, whether I change or not.

Thinking about my writing is in lockstep with my thinking about my publishing company, IF SF. I use the word company because I can't think of any other word. It's more like a philanthropy based on friendship. I started it in 1999 when my mother died. She was a writer and it seemed like a good way to use a little of my inheritance and to honor her spirit at the same time. I was living in LA, knew some writers and artists whose work I liked. The idea was to publish stuff that deserved to be out there, but otherwise wasn't, by people who'd made a real commitment in their lives to making good work, or something like that. I realize how vague it sounds now but at the time that was the vision, and still is to some degree though it's changing.

I had an ad agency, so I had in-house designers. The agency was doing a lot of mass printing then, and printers were willing to do the IF books at cost or well below cost. I was able to break even on the books, not an inconsiderable feat.

The first IF book was by the poet, Tim Reynolds, a memoir essentially that Tim structured from A to Z. B, for instance, was a sketch of an encounter Tim had with Borges. The book had mentions of Pound, Eliot, Cummings, Frost and came up on the search engines, including Amazon. We came close to selling out. It was a small book though, with too many typos. I called it Whatever Happened, a title provided by the poet's sister Jessica who'd written an essay for a lit journal titled "Whatever Happened to Tim Reynolds?" Tim wanted to call it IMBRD, in honor of the computer program he'd written it on. After the book was published, he bought a big black rubber stamp and stamped the cover of the book IMBRD over the title we'd agreed on wherever he could find it in the little independent bookstores in LA.

IF became IF SF when I moved to San Francisco. I've done 11 books, with 3 in the wings. After the Tim Reynolds experience I always say to writers at the beginning, "something always goes wrong in the publishing process, you have to remember that this is in a large degree about friendship." Most of them get that--most of them know that a big part of making a poem or any piece of art is making the ego disappear--but a few of them choose not to and the books go bad. Only one or two, but still that's too many.  I can't seem to tell them what I tell myself, that a large part of my publishing energy is selfless, that I sincerely publish to encourage others work out of some sense of friendship or kinship, and usually at my own expense, but maybe I should.

There's a larger issue here, there's always a larger issue. Somehow I think I'm mistaken to believe that I'm selfless enough to presume that friendship or kinship is the core of the enterprise and mistaken to believe that the one whose work I bring out sees me this way.  As a publisher I get about 2 to 4 unsolicited manuscripts a week, some of them very intriguing, some I'd like to publish if I keep IF SF going. But if I'm going to continue to publish I have to throw out some pretty deeply held beliefs or find more writers and artists who feel the way I feel about the matter: that the work matters, of course, but not as much as the artist thinks it matters. And in the end, it's only a book.

Which brings me back to my own writing; the job I have of making it as good as it can be, making a new book of it, and then letting it go.