Thursday, February 8, 2024: I’m reading at Fredericton’s vegan art-throb Abbey Café & Gallery for the Word Feast Literary Festival’s Poetry Bash. I’m flanked by two absolute giants of the game: Fawn Parker, who’s having an absolutely killer career year with Soft Inheritance and Hi, It’s Me, and Spencer Folkins, longtime if-you-know-you-know young guardian of the New Brunswick poetic tradition. With our emcee Jennifer Houle, we pack the Abbey’s gorgeously cozy performance space with patrons and powerful poems.
At this event I’m on tremendous painkillers after spending two weeks in a Montreal convalescence home recovering from surgery. By all rights I should not be performing right now because buddy that wound is fresh and there’s still a catheter tucked in my jeans, but it makes me feel like a fucking unstoppable badass. I don’t think I’ll ever yell my protest poems with that same exact energy again.
Spencer and I are in a workshop group called the Egg Poets. My first chapbook, Girl Dinner, was about to come out with Ian LeTourneau’s Emergency Flash Mob Press. Fellow Egg Poet Ambrose Albert’s new chap mal à l’aise had just come out with Anstruther Press, who also published Emma Rhodes’ Razor Burn and void vida clark-nason’s liquid birth. The only one in the group who hadn’t been published in a collected form yet was Spencer. But I knew he had a collection in him. I’d been editing his work for three years. So in the middle of my Word Feast set I took a second to gas up our supergroup and mildly threaten Spencer. “I know you’ve got 12 good poems motherfucker, start submitting manuscripts or I’ll publish you myself!”
I’d already been publishing chapbooks through Qwerty Magazine. When I took on a co-managing editor position in 2022, I decided to expand our production schedule to include two chapbooks a year through the Homerow Chapbook Series. But I was running into a problem: too many cool projects, not enough space to work on them. Homerow started as a way to get back to Qwerty’s roots of being by grad students for grad students, and I wanted to keep it that way as much as possible. But there were all these professional doors opening for me and no space to act on them in Qwerty’s capacity. So I said, fuck it, I’ll just make my own micro press!
Both Gridlock Lit and the Homerow series were born from a need to honor folding publications. I started developing the Homerow series for Qwerty when I heard Frog Hollow Press was closing. The idea to call my micro press Gridlock came from Grid City Magazine, which closed just last year. Grid City was an arts & culture mag covering all the cool shows going on in Fredericton. Fredericton is my hometown and New Brunswick is in my blood — I love this place with everything I have. My mom worked for Goose Lane and they published my dad’s first books. Both my parents were patrons of the arts scene, emceeing Harvest Jazz & Blues Fest shows and Frye Fest events. The New Brunswick Book Awards’ Alice Kitts Prize is named after my grandmother. I wanted Fredericton to be core to the press’s identity, so when I heard the guy running Grid City was ready to move on, so I thought the name Gridlock would be a nice tribute. Plus the word gridlock’s a crass in-joke but you’re not getting that explanation here.
So fast forward to Poetry Weekend 2024. I’ve decided I’m going to start Gridlock Lit, and because I have no chill, I’m doing it at the same time that I’m graduating from my Master’s, starting my PhD, launching my own first chapbook, curating the next issue of Qwerty, and wrapping-up work on editing a best-of anthology. Spencer shows up on the first day of Poetry Weekend and hands Ian LeTourneau, Jim Johnstone, and myself manilla envelopes. I already know I’m going to say yes but I still read each poem in the package and think about them as a collection. I make the announcement during my set: Gridlock Lit’s first release will be Spencer Folkins’ debut solo chapbook.
As for the other envelopes, well, you’ll just have to keep an eye out. I think you’ll be seeing more Spencer Folkins poems pretty soon.
