Publishing – small press, micro press, book packager, co-publisher… Over the last 10 years GobQ has published Gobshite Quarterly – a multilingual quarterly magazine (now back I print after a long hiatus), co-published Curse + Berate in 69+ Languages, a multilingual dictionary of language from the dark side; a bilingual edition of Gato Eficaz, an early novel by Luisa Valenzuela; and Golems Waiting Redux, an account of the vandalism of local sculpture in downtown Portland in 2002.
The first time I ever held a manuscript in my hands was when Oriel Gray let me take Scraps of Paper home to read. It was her memoir, fresh and vivid. There was something about the unbound pages and the indented lettering (Olivetti portable) that made me shiver – some life or power fresh from her mind and hands came, straight and unmediated, to my hands and mind.
Though that manuscript became part of my furniture for almost 30 years, I forgot what handling real manuscripts is like. When RV Branham suggested starting a magazine I wasn't paying much attention, truth to tell. But when the manuscripts started coming in….
I'll never forget the day Vénus Khoury-Ghata's Words arrived at the Gobshite Quarterly office, as a mailed fax from Marilyn Hacker in Paris. It was a delirious experience: I couldn't focus on them, the sense of awe and strangeness and déjà vu was so strong; I couldn't stand quite upright. I put them down and picked them up again, read them, and finally took them to my own office – a quiet, west-facing room upstairs, with nothing but a desk, 2 chairs and 2 windows – even northern light on the one side and filtered western light on the other – and laid them on the desk, in order, and began again. They were so good, and so far outside the realm of English poetry that having them in my hands felt made me feel as though something I'd never known but always known was trying shake itself free of the categories I always thought in, or lived in.
We ran them all in issue 1, in French and English. (That is, we ran 14 in French and 13 in English: The New Yorker had bought one of the translations.)
In that issue we also ran "Sirens," a short story by Frederic Raphael (Two for the Road, The Glittering Prizes), which hadn't placed in England. It's a great story, another world-view shatterer. I couldn't believe it'd been "Good luck placing it elsewhere"-d. In England. Couldn’t believe it.
The 3rd most wondrous experience was an email from Palestine (long after we'd given up hope), allowing us to reprint some of Mahmoud Darwish's poems. (Typesetting the Arabic was an adventure – it was eventually done by one of the partners in a local printing business, who'd studied Arabic and been to Syria for a year as a Fulbright scholar. As we didn't have the right font at the time we scanned the page as a jpg and InDesigned it that way.)
Marilyn Hacker also brought us the French poet Marie Etienne. Writers from Cuba and Mexico and Argentina contacted us, looking for translators; translators contacted us, looking for publishers (Hungary, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Poland), and we found translators and published them.
On a visit to Portland Julienne Eden-Bušić chanced to see us mentioned in The Oregonian. She brought a treasure-trove of new Croatian, Slovenian, and Bosnian poets – Tomica Bajsić, Barbara Korun, Dubravka Oraić-Tolić and Ferida Durakovic, as well as prose-writers Edo Popović and Gordan Nuhanović. Tomica Bajsić's poetry was – seeing it in manuscript was just a rush, it really was. Seeing something that good, and new, already accomplished and huge with future possibility – fills you with hope and joy and repletion, all at once.
The other astonishing thing about publishing, perhaps particularly about Gobshite, was that the printed object travelled roads we'd never imagined. People kept saying they'd run across a copy in a train in Spain or some other obscure way-station. The Algerian poet Amari Hamadene contacted us after seeing a copy in an Algerian café.
And just as well the manuscripts shake the world and then travel beyond imagining, because the financial dance of publishing is awful. We were just beginning to get some ad-revenue when our major distributor collapsed, leaving us with pennies on the dollar, unable to return to print until very recently.
And we are beginning to return to print, using Portland printers and very small runs. Issue 12 came out just before last Christmas, featuring a short story by Lidia Yuknavitch, essays on the Occupy movement by Richard Melo and Joyce Reynolds-Ward, Occupy sketches by Shannon Wheeler, an excerpt from a lost Russian novel about the Revolution (by Anatoliy Mariengoff; we are hoping to co-publish the entire book when translation is complete), an etymological reminiscence by Katherine Dunn; short, surreal prose-poems from Denmark – all sorts of things that do not appear elsewhere in English, and certainly not in conjunction with each other. We intend to print issue #13-14 this coming autumn.
Though I usually function as factotum, reader of first or last resort, proofreader, poetry editor, image-bank, and bookkeeper for Gobshite I am preparing a couple of books for publication later this year. One is almost ready; the other, which will be larger, I haven't quite mentioned to the writer, yet… I'll drop by later this week, and have a word.
