Wet Cement Press
grew out of one of those sarcastic suggestions that get thrown around when
people who have known each other a long-time ride together in cars. “We should
start a little press when you retire, our friends all have manuscripts, we
should just publish them already.” “Are
you crazy? Why would I want to do that?” Because…. The idea of publishing was actually a pretty
natural outgrowth of our writing lives,
as we all have experience in various aspects of the process already. I
think that like many small presses Wet Cement comes from out of nowhere, but
brings along everywhere we’ve ever been.
Thoreau Lovell,
our publisher, was for many years an editor (with John High, Michelle Murphy,
and others) of the Five Fingers Review. Michelle is also currently an
editor at WCP. Thoreau worked at the
library at San Francisco State for many years, and was able to retire
early-ish; only to quickly be ensnared in the labor of WCP. Thoreau really does
the lion’s share of work, typesetting, layout, distribution; Michelle does our
social media, and I chime in with editorial ideas, we also try to mix it up.
From 1989 to 1999
when Thoreau was working with Five Fingers, the review published a wide
selection of San Francisco based experimental writers; along with an eclectic
mix of international work. Published in 1990, Five Fingers Review Issue 8/9,
Mapping Codes: A Collection of Writing from Moscow to San Francisco was a
groundbreaking issue of translations and collaborations between Russian and
American writers that reflected some of the first waves of post-Soviet writing.
In 1994 Issue # 13, Children of the Cold War further explored some
of the landscapes that those of us who came of age in the 1970’s were
experiencing.
My own first
experiences with publishing were at Turtle Island Foundation in the early
1980’s. The press was in a house in the Berkeley Hills that had been built for Jaime
De Angulo, one of the first translators of native California stories, which
Turtle Island had reissued. I worked in a closet under the stairs, where I hand
packed each typed up order with cardboard and brown paper. Interesting people like
Malcolm Margolin, or Ismael Reed, were always appearing on the deck.
Multi-culturalism
was still a new idea then, and Bob and Eileen Callahan were publishing Zora
Neale Hurston, and Lucia Berlin, as well as poets like Bernadette Mayer. I didn’t
yet fully appreciate the scope of the work they were doing, but I fully
understood the seriousness with which they approached the process. Later I went
on to work in mainstream publishing in New York and at Harper Collins San
Francisco, but my experience at Turtle Island where publishing was seen as a vital
way to help shape an intellectual milieu was formative. The Callahan’s believed
publishing was first and foremost; about furthering an idea, and taking a
social stance. I don’t know if any of us believe books are doing that now, but
I think they are doing other things.
One of the things
we are always hoping to do, and I think this grows from our backgrounds too, is
to introduce different groups and points of view to each other.
Just after we
started the press in 2018, I briefly moved from San Francisco to Asheville
North Carolina and Thoreau came to visit. The discoveries we made in Appalachia,
of deep intact regional literature, and the amazing writers we met whom we had
never heard of, was I think a formative element for the press. It’s easy to
think in the Bay Area that we’re in the middle of it all, but in a way,
everyone thinks that.
So, if we can
bring the Southern blues haiku of Lenard D. Moore to Language poets in San
Francisco we’re happy. If we can magnify the voices of children living in the
Moscow subway to hipsters in Brooklyn, that’s good. And if we can find an
artist in Australia bringing us a unique visual poetics of love and war, we
want to show you. If we are going to publish a black man’s coming of age story,
we want it to be one that changes what you think that story might be, and if we
publish a Jewish poet’s memoir we want it to speak to the black man’s story.
Many fine small presses support a cadre of like-minded writers who practice in
dialogue with one another, but that’s not what we’re about. Our list is more
like a network.
In part because we
are “older” we have collectively read and listened to an enormous amount of
experimental/literary writing. There are many excellent manuscripts we read,
that simply seem like we’ve read them before.
So for us to really want to publish a collection of avant-garde poetry,
for example, it needs to be language doing something we haven’t seen
previously. Karen Donovan’s Monad+Monadnock, comes to mind. But what we
want to publish at Wet Cement Press and WHY is a question we keep asking
ourselves, and the why changes from time to time.
We are consistently
interested in hybrid work, whether a visual hybrid or a hybrid of forms or
voices. We like work with a visual aspect. With novels we like to hear about
lives in places we’ve never been, or working- class lives (Anthony Schlagel’s My
Dog Me for example). Unapologetically, we do sometimes publish our friends,
who are of course excellent writers.
Despite the
current norm, I’m not particularly interested in work centered on identity; or
belonging. The quest to be part of some dominant culture, that many of us have
never recognized as our culture to begin with, feels a little retrograde. As a
former punk Buddhist, it’s hard for me to not think of identity as the illusion
that’s always holding you back. Coincidentally the Buddhist strain in Wet
Cement is sort of interesting. We didn’t
consciously mean it to happen, but it’s there; prominently in the works of John
High, (Scrolls of a Temple Sweeper) but more subtly in several other books.
Our list as a
whole is really the only good answer to what we are interested in publishing.
We are open to change; we even think about changing our name.
We chose Wet
Cement from a random list of name ideas we emailed each other one summer
afternoon. We all loved the name at first, because it was sort of
anti-pretentious and DIY. The design for our books was also consciously simple
and stripped down; inspired by the French Editions Gallimard, and Pleiade,
we settled on white paper wrappers with something good inside. Soon after we decided
Wet Cement was a really terrible name for a press, and had our first identity
crisis. At the time I argued for keeping the name, because something about the
word cement, has its actual weight in memory. Holding onto, first-thought best
thought, is still something that I think guides us.
We also had the
idea that the press would put out books pretty quickly (we’ve since abandoned
that) while the ideas were still fresh, while the cement was, so to speak, sill
wet. The idea was not to be overly precious about the work, but to make a mark,
the way you carve your name in the sidewalk on a whim, and maybe a lot of
people walk by and see it, maybe the whim lasts a long time. That would be fun.
Barbara Roether writes and teaches in the SF Bay Area, though she has been known to
move around. She is the author of a novel This Earth You’ll Come Back To and
several small books of poetry. A collection of essays Reading in Place is
forthcoming. She is an editor and co-founder with Thoreau
Lovell of Wet Cement Press.
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