An email slips into my inbox and I drift over to the computer to see. It’s the editor of this magazine with a gentle reminder that my article is overdue. I should reply right away, but instead I look back at the corner of the living room that serves as a bindery. The baby monitor with its small glowing screen tells me that the baby is still asleep, but checking the time I know I only have half an hour – max – before I’ll be seconded back to the main work of the day.
On the bindery table there are stacks of covers from works in progress, piles of unfolded chapbook signatures, the makings of a letterpress-printed short story that was dated 2019 but has yet to be released, and a folder of manuscript submissions to be looked through. The rest of the livingroom-cum-printshop is in similar disarray: a jumble of ink tubes next to the letterpress, several galleys of half-set type waiting to be proofed, and a mountain of books, letters, notes, onesies and chewy toys obscuring the laser printer. This is the flow state of any number of the small, home-based chapbook presses in this country: everything in flux and a whole lot of balls delicately balanced in mid-air. Throw and infant into the mix and you’ve got chaos.
I’m at home on layoff from my dayjob at the local university library, taking over childcare full time from my partner. With a one-year-old who is just learning to walk, any work on the press must happen in these brief, nap-length stretches.
Today I was hoping to clear through some of the mess and get back to work on a few of the projects that have languished over the last few weeks of getting my dad-legs underneath me. I text a friend from town to arrange a coffee so we can discuss her chapbook manuscript. That reminds me to bring the edits on another chapbook to the reading I’m scheduled to be at later today. I owe a letter to my pal Kate, also a new parent, also proprietor of a small press, but I know she’ll understand my delay. I’ve just cut the cover paper for a chapbook by Moncton’s poet laureate, and somewhere on my desk two design proofs are hiding – one by a Vancouver poet whose collection meditating on the first couple years of fatherhood is good, very good, and even better if you’re in the throes of it yourself.
It’s a rare and marvellous thing to have work that places us in community with creative folks both near and far, a vital lifeline to my own creative energies that can so easily be swamped by the task of making a living, of making it through the day. Because as everybody in the small press business knows, the kind of living that is made by making creative community is not the kind that pays the rent or buys the groceries – but it’s no less critical to living, for all that.
This desire to build community was the driving force behind the founding of The Hardscrabble Press as a chapbook publisher in 2020. As a rural poet I felt isolated, having few opportunities to talk to other writers and expose myself to the conversation that is contemporary poetry. I wanted to have something to offer that conversation, a way of contributing back to the thing that had nourished me for so long. I began by printing chapbooks by poets I was already friends with, honing a design aesthetic that worked within the constraints of livingroom-based production. I was lucky enough to have previous experience letterpress printing, and could incorporate its tactility into my books. Eventually the reputation of the press spread beyond my immediate circle, and submissions began to arrive from farther afield, and from folks I’d never met before. It was both thrilling and humbling the first time a manuscript arrived in the mail and it was really good. Someone was entrusting me to make a book out of such beautiful and moving writing. It still feels like such an honour every time I have the opportunity to work on and shape something that is the result of so much care and attention from another person.
There is a cry from the monitor signalling an end to the space for this kind of reflection. I rush upstairs to watch the slow surfacing of a pair of bright eyes containing the light of 1000 suns.
The rest of the day is spent learning to walk, playing hide-and seek while attempting to chop onions for supper, stopping a set of small paws from pawing the dirt out of the houseplants, and refereeing a love match between a very willing baby and a very unwilling kitty cat. The reply to the editor will have to wait.
