Small Press

Molly Gaudry has just announced a bunch of stuff, cool stuff, ambitious and viable stuff. She's working now as an independent publicist. Along with that, she's initiating a small press collective. Molly talked to me about this at AWP and it sounded like a great idea then, but it really was only an idea. In the last few weeks, Molly's run with that idea and has accountants and lawyers helping to get her started. I talked to her on the phone today, and she has innovative ideas for getting books to readers, and not just the small press and literary readership that contemporary lit has niched itself into. Molly's talking about, like, my mom reading Lindsay Hunter's Daddy's, for example. And why not? My mom would love that book. But she doesn't know that it (or Featherproof Books, for that matter) even fucking exists. If you publish books, you should send your favorite to Molly so she can maybe help you sell it. She'll kick ass at this.

In other news: it's no longer cold here. Maybe it will stay that way? It's been in the 70s. I wore shorts to teach yesterday. My students were awesome. They've been reading Nineteen Eighty-four. I know that's a book you normally read in high school. I'm teaching it in English 101. That's mostly because I'd never read it, and wanted to, and knew that I'd never get around to it unless I was teaching it cause I got a stack of to-read that's reaching the moon. I love those ridiculous hyperbolic comparisons you hear on Discovery Channel documentaries. They say things like "Jamie has so many books that he owns but has not yet read, that if those books were golf balls, and you put all of those golf balls in the Grand Canyon, they would fill the Grand Canyon to a depth of three feet. That's three feet of golf balls." My students had all this stuff they wanted to talk about with the book. They've really taken to it. They're all interested in what's happened in Egypt and what's going on in Bahrain, Yemen, Jordan--all over the autocratic world. These are the same students who, a week ago, didn't know what a season was. Next week I think we'll get to seasonings. Maybe we'll eat. Class starts at lunchtime.