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INTRO: A re-launch featuring current and former curators; intended to stoke inspiration from the past and exhibit commitment to the future of the literary community that’s developed within the walls at 85 East 4th Street. It will be organized by genre then chronological order of each contributor’s timeline in programming.

A note from Buku Sarkar.

In a new poem by Elizabeth Acevedo, a voice from the record player summons memories and unresolved feelings about the speaker’s father. Introduced by Margarita Engle.

A duet by Andrea Boccelli and Sarah Brightman punctuates assorted events in the life of a refugee family in Faruk Šehić’s “Women’s War.” Introduced by Aleksander Hemon.

Tope Folarin’s “The Goat” concerns a boy in a poverty-stricken family whose insatiable appetite threatens his household’s already precarious stability. Introduced by Helon Habila.

Vamika Sinha’s three poems depict speakers taking in the sensual joys of an open city, breathing air into the open mouths of dolls, and using pens filled with syrup. Introduced by Tishani Doshi.

Tiziano Colibazzi’s “Shoes” cover lots of territory: Italian footwear etiquette, Amsterdam’s Homomonument, and a Berlin pilgrimage. Introduced by Zia Jaffrey.

In two poems by Quenton Baker, nightmares fragment into law, flesh becomes lexical, and the dirt a dialect. Introduced by Ada Limón.

“The warmth that my lover left in my hands turns to ice as soon as they touch the first fish of the day”: unexpected transitions and sensations populate every paragraph of Birgül Oğuz’s “Revol.” Introduced by Victoria Holbrook.

An Aztec emperor’s chambers and the dreary quarters of a worker made ancient by his windowless office: two poems and two universes by Marshall Mallicoat.

At the outset of B.H. James’s “Dale,” we’re in a religious cult whose god is the original Karate Kid film. By the end, we’re in a memoir of marriage counseling, writing, and narrative structure.

In Shani Eichler’s debut story, “The Ties That Bind Us,” a secular Jewish family goes through an identity crisis when their daughter announces her engagement to a non-Jewish young man.

From his recent collections The Sailor and Turncoats of Paradise, Joobin Bekhrad’s six poems are written in a classical style steeped in Iranian mythology.

Dana Schein’s four paintings span from the spontaneity of artistic creation to pressure and melancholic boredom. One image depicts a student excelling in a piano lesson; in another, a man looks on the verge of losing consciousness from lifting the same instrument.

Frank strolls in a vanishing New York in Carl Watson’s novel excerpt, “A streetcorner in limbo.” Aware that nostalgia is just a scarecrow to ward off change, he can’t entirely resist it.

In Mike Corrao’s imagined apartment complex, there’s no reason to stay: landlines are severing, fires igniting, potential meteors dropping—yet no one can bear to leave.

Five poems by Josh Lipson locate his studies of Levantine language and culture as a passageway in which he may declare his allegiance to idle reverie.

The speaker in two poems by Dante Fuoco, calloused by waiting and the wind, runs late and turns the ticking of time into song.

With work by Elaine Equi, Katie Degentesh, Youssef Rakha, K. Eltinaé, Paula Bernett, Leah Umansky, Ace Boggess, Lynne Sachs, Olena Jennings, and Alex Dimitrov.

– Ben Shields

Four Poems by Elaine Equi

Three Poems by Katie Degentesh

Three Poems by Youssef Rakha (translated by Robin Moger)

Five Poems by K. Eltinaé

Five Poems by Paula Bernett

Two Poems by Leah Umansky

Five Poems by Ace Boggess

Five Poems by Lynne Sachs, from her collection Year By Year Poems (Tender Buttons Press)

Five Poems by Olena Jennings

“My Secret,” a poem by Alex Dimitrov

Writing about music is not, as the overused quote of undetermined origin goes, like “dancing about architecture.” It is, however, like writing about a different kind of language. This language exists parallel to, but just outside of, whatever other language(s) you speak, and can shape your identity just as much if you let it. In Issue 08 five writers explore different ways in which music and the things we build around it can inform and transform us.

 Table of Contents

“Etude #31” (excerpt, A Reading from the Book of Kelst), by Tobias Carroll

On Soft Rock, by Rob Roensch

At the Gates of Hell: Montreal, April 3, 2009, by J.B. Staniforth

A Slow Train Bound for Glory, by Scott D. Elingburg

Hard Tyme: A Hair Metal Haiku Story, by Ian King

In the introduction to Issue 07, Lisa Howorth ponders the Eleventh Commandment: thou shalt honor thy commitments.

Blake Butler’s deadpan “Bloodworld” pairs a narrator’s private perversities with his dreary day to day agenda. 

David McConnell’s “Huge,” which reads like a story by Schuyler or McCourt, tells of two musicians and how their unusual marriage turns even rockier after breast reduction surgery. 

In “Ella,” Christopher Stoddard’s story about the sudden dissolution of a yuppie Manhattan couple, the protagonist can only accept her commitment to a relationship once she destroys it. 

An astoundingly original modern rendering of folklore, Bruce Benderson’s “Pinnochio in Port Authority” inserts a children’s book character into the adult libidinal world. 

In Steve Anwyll’s “And I’ll Call You a Liar,” a man’s commitment to his wife entails revenge upon a vulnerable victim.

KGB Journal’s first visual art contributor Scott Neary revisits an Amsterdam encounter with James Baldwin in text and illustration. 

“A Seppuku of Centerfolds,” Tom Cardamone’s ficto-memoir of an East Village gay porn collector, is a gothic tale of connoisseurship and entombment. 

In Margaret Barnard’s “The Clam Shell,” the narrator describes the heartbreak and crushing banalities that always accompany the spiraling of a friendship.

“Rough Plans to Go Wrong” by Gary Indiana concludes the issue, speaking candidly about the negativity that follows aging and commitment to a single place. 

Editing

Some years ago I got into an online argument about the work of the editor. How does an editor find, support, and publish great writing? A kind critic, who then became an angry critic, wanted to attribute the success of a series of books that I edited to the strength of my “personal taste.” But my experience was the opposite. I’d discovered that, to the degree that I could silence—or even work directly against—my personal taste, I came under the spell of great writing. When a piece of writing bothered me, seemed persistently “wrong,” and made me unquiet with its existence, I knew I should pay closer attention. I tried to love it, and then I published it. On the other hand, when writing delighted or pleased me I would become suspicious. Granted, the compass here remained personal, but it’s significant that it was useful only in this inverted way. A skilled editor should not publish what simply delights her. Great writing is something else, something to which our tastes or pleasure can blind us. Great writing is indefensible, while taste points us toward that which we’re ready to defend or have cultivated reasons for. Great writing needs no reasons nor defenses—it simply demands to be loved.

A good editor is someone who loves what she reads. There’s no question of taste, no expert intervention, and no technique for making the writer’s work “better,” per se. Editing is reading with love, kind of the opposite of taste-making, with all of its measured discernment. Editing involves reading every day, paying attention, and devotion—as with raising children. Don’t listen to the experts. Editing has more in common with farming or the family doctor than it has with, say, agribusiness or Big Pharma. While these latter technologies pursue improvements in food and human health through expert interventions, the former pair lives with and loves food and people on a daily basis. Editors live with and love writing. Our interventions are contextual and various. We improve writing by paying attention to it every day and speaking back to it with respect. Love is not a highlight reel, nor some ascending sequence of pleasures and rewards, as it is sometimes depicted. Love is quarrelsome, tedious, often irksome, and full of surprises. I’ll go further and say that love is a quality of regard different from affection or admiration; I mean love in the sense that Hannah Arendt attributed to St. Augustine: “I want you to be.” In practice, it is the commitment to engage one’s subjectivity with the words the writer chooses as completely as possible. To hold and not withhold. Reading should be steady, searching (“the long, sullen hours,” as Patrick O’Brian said), and indifferent to pleasure. Again, think of children. They’re often beastly. We observe the Hippocratic oath, “first do no harm.” The work delights us because we are delighted by it.

It’s that simple, like growing flowers. Who would ever think a cracked dry seed could bloom into a glorious flower? Not the impatient consumer of beauty, the ones dazzled by color and skeptical of small, dry things. But, if planted in the right soil and given love (and water) over sufficient time, the unpromising seed rewards us by emerging into the world as a beautiful bloom. The same is true of writing. The writer will give countless seeds to the editor and together they read and work and love and wait. Their love, like water, produces this transformation into beauty. Or maybe the seed is barren and it’s thrown away, mulch for the ground that will feed other seeds.

Every writer is capable of producing both greatness and trash. An editor helps them by reading and loving whatever they write, and—through contextual and various interventions over time—helping the work to become great. Some work is improved by throwing it away. But most writing will become great if enough time and love are given, first by an attentive editor, and then by the readers whose task it is to make great writing great. Proprietary myths of authorship (the same ones that justify paying some writers and not paying others) may lead us to think that great writing is made by great writers while poor writing comes from the lousy ones, but this is not true. Every writer produces both. Making writing “great” is the work of loving readers, beginning with the editor. Just as beauty blooms in the eye of the beholder, writing read by loving eyes becomes great. If our time seems afflicted by an absence of great writing, the fault is with readers (editors first of all) unwilling or unable to give time and love. For great writing to thrive readers must be capable of love (in many ways the opposite of having good taste, or any taste at all).

The Fellow Travelers series

I founded the Fellow Travelers series with Patricia No and Antonia Pinter in 2012. They ran the Publication Studio in Portland, Oregon, which I had founded with Patricia three years earlier. For most of its short history, the Fellow Travelers imprint was run solely by Patricia and Antonia, and the impressive list of titles as well as any future we might hope to build on it are evidence of their intelligence and hard work. PS Portland was the first studio in what is now a group of eleven on four continents, a horizontally networked “global” publisher comprising this set of hyper-local, cottage artisans. Each studio makes sturdy, perfect-bound books by hand and sells them to interested readers, one-at-a-time. In this way 90% of their investment is labor, and most of the rest is cheap machinery and supplies. There are no “print runs,” no warehousing, and minimal upfront costs. Poor people can do this. So far, the studios have published over three hundred original titles by writers and artists they admire. These include novels (by Luisa Valenzuela, Joon Oluchi Lee, Kevin Killian, Shelley Marlow, Siegfried Kracauer, Douglas Milliken, etc.), nonfiction (by Dodie Bellamy, Walter Benjamin, Claire L. Evans, Arthur Jafa, Travis Jeppesen, Ryann Bosetti, and others), poetry (by Dolores Dorantes, Peter Lamborn Wilson, Christine Shan Shan Hou, Sam Lohmann, Jessica Higgins, and others), and artist’s books (by Dan Graham, Nancy Shaver, Ari Marcopoulus, Shawn Records, Victoria Haven, B. Wurtz, Chto Delat, David Horvitz, and many others), in several languages.

In 2012, after it became clear that the model of one-at-a-time production could work and support a variety of small, idiosyncratic studios, Patricia, Antonia, and I chose to create a dedicated imprint publishing great literature in a modest, generic format that could become recognizable in the myriad, motley places where Publication Studio did business. This is the Fellow Travelers series. 

Our goal was to finesse the market into projecting non-popular books into the popular imagination, so we looked to Maurice Girodias’s brilliant Traveller’s Companion books of the 1950s and ’60s. Under the broader umbrella of his already-established Olympia Press, Girodias used the Traveller’s Companion imprint as a way to publish work forbidden by censors in Anglophone countries. By printing in Paris, they could circulate the censored work to English-speaking travelers who would take the books back home with them. Plenty did. Great new work, including Lolita, The Naked Lunch, and Jean Genet’s A Thief’s Journal, swept out of France and deep into the reading publics of the UK, America, and elsewhere. In the same way, we hope that the books we publish—which fail to clear the profit-making metrics of conventional print-run publishers—will ultimately find their ways deep into the very markets that excluded them. By printing and selling one book at a time, we’re able to publish any title that has at least one reader, and then grow its public from there.

While “Fellow Travelers” sounds a playful echo to the Traveller’s Companion, its actual roots are more personal. In the U.S. in the 1950s a witch-hunt against suspected Communists, led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, extended its terror immeasurably into the American left by attacking a new category of suspicion for those who—like my parents—pursued anti-war and civil rights activism (without necessarily any connection to the Communist Party or Marxist ideologies). Their activism made them “Fellow Travelers,” we were told, and as guilty as the Communists. My parents’ best instincts and principles, the things they did that mattered most in the world, made them Fellow Travelers. And so, I have always worn that badge proudly.

The Traveller’s Companion series cover design (which is shared by the Fellow Travelers series) was itself an homage to the deeper history of pornographic publishing. Since at least the 19th century, purveyors of erotic literature have used the plain wrappers of “scientific research” to finesse their erotic contents past the eyes of censors. “The Journal of Orgies and Deviance,” “The Adult: The Journal of Sex,” and “The Atlantic Library series” all moved briskly across jurisdictional borders bearing only words on their covers, usually just the title and the author names (if the authors had names). The Traveller’s Companion cover is an almost exact replica of the Atlantic Library series covers. In turn, and in homage, the Fellow Travelers series deploys this same traditional design.

The Traveller’s Companion series, with its distinctive green covers, announced that state-based censorship could not stem the vitality of literature. The Fellow Travelers series, with its distinctively red covers, announces that even that most punishing force of our time— the so-called “free market”—cannot squelch the range and power of the literary imagination. Because we sell our books to one reader at a time, our economy, based on reading (not shopping, per se), can succeed so long as there’s one reader who wants to read (with love, we hope).

In 2016 Patricia and Antonia closed the Portland studio and handed the management of the Fellow Travelers series over to the network of studios, and in 2018 the studios handed it back to me. There are seven titles in the Fellow Travelers series so far: Golden Brothers by STS; Spreadeagle by Kevin Killian; Prick Queasy by Ronald Palmer; The Wolves by Jason R Jimenez; All Fall by Travis Jeppesen; Two Augusts In a Row In a Row by Shelley Marlow; and From Sleepwalking to Sleepwalking by Bertie Marshall. Forthcoming titles include new books by Rebecca Brown, Roberto Tejada, Breka Blakeslee, and Bruno George. The work we’re presenting in this issue of KGB Bar Lit includes the four future Fellow Travelers, and new writing from five prior Fellow Travelers authors (Kevin Killian, Jason R Jimenez, Ron Palmer, Shelley Marlow, and Bertie Marshall). 

The glib answer to “what do the Fellow Travelers books all have in common?” would be “they’re all great writing.” Which is true, in part. We have no seasons, no inventory to juggle, and no other time pressures. The books can develop in an editorial process like the one above, and be published when they’re great. The only force moving them out into the world is the force of our work together. As for other commonalities, the Fellow Travelers seem to be in love, queer, fond of others, and bookish. Their stories transpire mostly in the 21st century, but not exclusively. The future concerns them, and it looks compelling strange, if too-heavily policed. Gender is fluid, cats abound, and there’s magic (also food, pop music, children, and the ruins of the 20th century). Genre and form are as fluid as gender. I’ll stop summarizing and leave it at that. You can read, and I hope love, this great writing yourself.

Hometown: San Francisco, CA

Current town: Olympia, WA

What are you working on now?

I am completing a novella called Escaping, a novel which explores entrapments of language and meditates on an impossible desire that is ignited by such entrapments: the desire to escape relation. The characters are teachers, artists, administrators, youth, family members, poets, and finally a hermit. I’m playing around with hearing language “out of place” in this book, as a way of witnessing and becoming more awake to the primacy of unspoken rules, habitual “language games” at work in every discursive setting, in every relationship. The arc of the book finds the four main characters “escaping” in one way or another by the end. I’m also writing essays and talks, and composing curriculum for teaching. This week I have been writing up the results of a day-long workshop on interdisciplinary collaboration at Evergreen State College, where we nearly always teach on teams comprised of people from different fields.

Care to share a moment, a person or a story from your past that made you want to become a writer?

Like many writers, I was a bookworm as a child, often preferring to read, over playing outside. I loved reading so much that I didn’t think there was anyone more interesting or powerful than an author. I had the feeling that to be a writer was to be a kind of deity. Turns out it is the opposite of that! 🙂 I read Dostoyevsky with particular fervor as a teenager. I was fully absorbed and awed by “the classics” with their elaborate plots and complexly layered sentences.

If you could change one thing about publishing what would it be?

I have a friend who is so well supported as an artist in France, that the government even paid for his family to have a vacation because it’s healthy for them! It sounds improbable, but it’s still the case that there are states that support artists. If there was one thing I would change about publishing it would be that there was robust governmental support at federal and state levels for artist infrastructures, including publishing, and stipends for artists so that one could live and work full time as an artist, instead of having to hold multiple jobs while trying to foster your work. One has to sort of escape into it, or escape out of it, find a way against all odds. In Principle of Unrest Brian Massumi shares a concept he calls “surplus value of life.” In contradistinction to “surplus value” surplus value of life is qualitative. This concept is a way to value, or revalue, that which cannot be monetized. He writes that “Anywhere a non-monetized surplus-value of life is generated there has occurred what I term . . . an escape to the immanent limit. Escapes can be deviations, perversions, hijacking, hackings. They come in many varieties.” It’s strange that we have to use the language of economics to practice valuing what doesn’t count in capitalism. For example, in ecology the vocabulary of economics is often used to put a value on that which is priceless, in the hopes that by naming these entities in the language of economics, at last their “value” will register, be recognized, so we have terms like “natural capital” which cut apart what are continua, innumerable entanglements and symbioses that characterize this biosphere, reduced to prices.

What kind of writing excites you?

I am excited by writing that functions at once as art and philosophy, and that works carefully and in an unexpected way at the level of the sentence. I am excited by writing that jokes compassionately and writing that I am on the very edge of understanding, that oscillates in and out of clarity, and that can’t be exhausted in a single reading or even multiple readings, and that takes formal chances. I like writing that is in conversation with many different kinds of worlds, texts, arts, experiences, and approaches to the page. But of course, one doesn’t always read to be excited. Sometimes one reads to be informed, or to be bored, and that’s also very necessary.

What advice do you have for writers just starting out?

Once I had the good fortune to be in a “master class” with Grace Paley. I’ll pass on this great piece of advice she gave: if you’re having trouble writing well, write badly on purpose. Take workshops so you can be in conversations about writing, so you can hone your criticality and broaden your sense of what’s possible, so you can make friends to compete with and admire. Workshops are good, despite rumors to the contrary. It’s a shop where you can get accustomed to the fact that writing is work: the workshop. You don’t have to do too many of them but at least do a few. It’s where you will start to get a feel for the tools of the trade. It’s salutary to be in spaces where things are unfinished and in process, open and on trial. Publish other people, write about their work, foster what you care about, cultivate worlds for writing, don’t be cowed by received spaces, be they the long-running reading series in your town or the industrial trade fair. You too can start a series, publish a journal, or organize a conference. If you take responsibility for the editorial and curatorial process, publishing will be demystified. Your life as a writer will not be quite so confusing because you’ll understand better the various parts of the process. Check out collective and community arts based editorial projects such as Encyclopedia Project Vol.3, L-Z which (full disclosure) I coedited.