Red Mare is a passion project. When someone holds a copy in their hands, they have a textural entity comprised of multiple handmade elements, they have a visual element of a numbered block print, they have fiber, they have the poems.
Since it’s a poetry chapbook series, it has the fortune to be partially or completely housed in certain archives; this gives someone the opportunity to maybe, one day, notice the covers; it is true that when Red Mare attended small press or poetry festivals, the covers were seen all together: the majority are botanical, and, hopefully, identifiable. I never thought to title the cover itself, although it is a numbered print. Each cover is drawn from life—plein aire—directly onto the plate that will be carved. Red Mare is a labor-intensive project, an object of handcraft, and deliberate in the employ of materials.
I grew up with a certain reverence for books: my child library contained a variety of forms of books, including one that I mistakenly, at 7, cut, not realizing that it was an expensive German children’s book with doubled pages; another of nursery rhymes printed on canvas and sewn; my parents kept a few shelves of volumes next to my mother’s collection of music, which she played daily—folk and classical, Woody Guthrie and Solti Conducts. I was a shy kid who read a lot and liked art class. There was a little museum near school upon which grounds I would often take refuge. A school trip years ago had shown the old house as furnished in life, and that included cases of their garments, and the library—the intoxicating smell of the library.
Somehow, a later excursion inside Hull House brought me face to face with historical suffragette pamphlets—they were palm-sized, delicate volumes, pressed flowers. As a broke, raggedy student, I haunted used bookstores and then came across the amazing work of the Roycrofters, an arts and crafts movement print entity that often-featured amazing layout and design. An undergraduate seminar had a unit of the art of the book, including historical information and the wide variety of binding methods, paper making methods, with the requirement that the students make their own books. I used a short story from my fiction class in which the main character takes a meditative walk and made a technical error by mixing methods of binding and cover design. It was my first book.
The times then were technologically different enough, and there was punk: we made flyers and zines habitually. At one point, I lived in Chicago, and there was an all-night copy shop up the street from the then-in-the-know-only Wax Trax: stumbling in one midnight with some typescript and crumbled money, and there’s Lorri Jackson with a Look Who It Is. I had gotten into the habit of making a few dozen broadsheets and pamphlets for readings in New Orleans, which often had drawings on them, and occasional shadows from taping copies together for the master. Fortune found me fleeing to Florida. My efforts to find homes for my work had me at crafts festivals, and sometimes I would make little books of stories I had written to go with the paintings and whatnot. I was always making little books. I had continued it despite all the rest of my life during those years.
It came about that I finally was introduced to a version of the technology we know today, and began a correspondence –pre social media—with poet Marie C Jones, who sent me a chapbook to critique as a buddy thing. She was having a hard time finding a home for it, but it was good writing, a long poem—which is difficult to get published, usually. I said I would publish it, and that was the first Red Mare. There are design elements to that first edition that hold true to all subsequent ones: the block print cover hand sewn over a text of poems, and the layout of the pages. I did vary the pages for different editions in a specific manner-- male authors had double-sided text, but the women had their text on folded pages—until I stopped publishing male-identified authors with issue 19.
Red Mare is an indie—there’s no institution funding the supplies, and the labor ends up as altruism. This has been problematic a few times, as the editions use artist and handmade papers, cotton embroidery thread and so forth; these items requiring sourcing, ordering, and an investment in an edition that may or may not pay for itself. A small press learns that sometimes international authors can be problematic, or that sometimes formerly-buddy authors themselves can be problematic, and a thread-bare budget can snap the will to publish in such circumstances. A small press also learns that in-person book events also require financial investment that might too be quite the gamble. Because Red Mare is handmade, each copy is a numbered print, it does not survive the sometimes-rude handling of bookstores. To try and get the books out, they are listed on Etsy, and it’s the only online point of sale; however, it does allow them to be viewed as a series and sent to places I shall never see.
Perhaps the more dire financial threat the books faced was when there was a Covid canceled festival that refused to refund the table fee. There were further complications. Somehow, I got wind of an emergency fund from Poets and Writers and applied. One day, i was very surprised to engage in a detailed phone interview about the press and the fest, my costs, and my process (the block print process, the book collation and binding process, hand sewing, paper types, distribution, in addition to the delicate craft of layout and formatting). Sometime later, I was thunderstruck to get a check. It was when I published Jillian Weise, and she sold out, that the books broke even.
Through it all, the press kept its mission of eco-feminism, a philosophy that has been a personal guiding principle. Except for the first six or so, the press was an annual at June, a Solstice I always found personally significant. I decided to add the December Solstice and have been biannual since...I figure I have been making them for close to two decades now. Because eco-feminism, maybe sometimes called eco-poetics, to specify genre, is inherently multi-faceted, the expression of a particular author’s relationship to that way of being ,though not only a book, but an art print that was also an art book , with a particular binding style that made it an artist’s book...our current culture of tidy labels gets reminded it’s an academic sandcastle every time there’s a new edition. Oh, and each edition is numbered—number 28 will be next—something that still strikes as homage to the great serial publications of now a half century and better past, so I keep it as a consistent design element to the covers.
At the time of this writing, there’s a next author in agreement, an usual circumstance, and rather thrilling. The last author, 27, also sold out, and her feedback was about the book’s organic beauty and the sensual experience that only comes from handmade. I always take certain aesthetic risks, if trade show books are the industry standard, and there are individuations in the editions; I call them sisters. Since Red Mare publishes biannually, there’s always a search for female-identified authors; because it’s an out-of-pocket endeavor, pay is author copies and deals for events; nonetheless, inquiries can be made through social DMs. Every now and then, someone sends a gift to the press, and they get acknowledged and a copy, but not even being a nonprofit makes the press ineligible in current practice, for the diminishing alleyway of arts funding. My thanks to you now for any future time where you might look at the link of a new release, share such notification, or acquire a book even—it matters much.
Su Zi: Recent poetry publications include Flux (betweenthehighways), and Danke (Ethel); was a featured poet for the Storm the Mic – Disability Pride event, and appeared in person in Daytona for the launch of the Florida Bards anthology.
Other recent publications include an interview with Chester Weber for Driving Digest, and reviews for Automachination.
Zoeglossia Fellow 2023