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.
