Ongoing notes: TIFA Small Press Market/Meet the Presses’ Indie Lit Market (part three, : Sadiqa de Meijer + Ben Berman Ghan,

[MLA Chernoff at the Meet the Presses Indie Lit Market, receiving copies of their brand-new above/ground press title]

Again, this blended sequence. [see my first post on such here; see my second post here]. Will we see you at the ottawa small press book fair on November 22? Will we see you at the pre-fair reading on Nov 21 at Anina’s Café?

Kington/Toronto ON: Presented as Kingston poet and non-fiction writer Sadiqa de Meijer’s Joanne Page lecture at Queen’s University, October 29, 2024, is the chapbook-length Fieldwork (Toronto ON: knife│fork│book, 2025), which becomes a curiosity, given how recently her collection of essays, In The Field (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2025) [see my review of such here] appeared. “I remember only one conversation with Joanne Page,” the piece begins, “although we saw each other before and after. This encounter happened at the edge of City Park in Kingston. She looked at me, squinting against the sun, and said, We read your essay, we all read it and thought it was really good, we were surprised at how good it was. She was on the organizing committee of Common Magic, a conference celebrating the life and work of Bronwen Wallace. I had submitted a piece about reading Wallace’s work during my early years of living in Kingston and had called it ‘Arguments With The White World.’”

This lecture feels, in many ways, an extension of that collection, offering her thoughts on writing, Page’s work and Kingston thoughts, and thoughts through and around writing and thinking, all prompted by the Page Lectures, and the work of the late Kingston poet Joanne Page (d. 2015). In case you were unaware, the Lecture series was originally founded by Phil Hall during his tenure as writer-in-residence at Queen’s University in 2012, with lecture chapbooks, the “Fieldnotes,” originally produced by Maureen Scott Harris (with lectures in the series by Don McKay, Phil Hall, Daphne Marlatt, Elizabeth Hay, Stan Dragland, etc.), a series since moved onto Kirby’s knife│fork│book. It is rather striking how far de Meijer has come as a writer of non-fiction prose over the past few years, able to weave such musical thinking across such a stunning prose lyric, one heartfelt and grounded in curiosity. As she writes:

This lecture was written. I wrote it in a series of rooms that have left their quiet tracks. The kitchen was sunlit and my mind accelerated. The chair was uncomfortable and I disputed myself. I answered the door and a phrase was lost to me. I used the fast pen, my fingers pushed buttons. Knowing the text would be read out loud, I wrote differently than I would for an essay, because you as the listening cannot insert your own pauses, or read the same line two or thee times over. I didn’t make them, describing occurrences from another millennium and country—writing is miraculous in its dissembling of space and time. I couldn’t tell you what I intended without it, because my mind is unpracticed in what an oral culture would require. We live where settlers attempted for hundreds of years to eliminate orally transmitted languages like Ojibwe and Kanien’kehá:ka, and this was also a violence against the profound linguistic capacities of their speakers. Writing is rigid.

 

Guy Elston (with Jeremy Luke Hill to the left) announcing Hill's 'Microchimaera' (Baseline Press), as the winner of the 2025 bpNichol Chapbook Award

Calgary AB/Toronto ON: The latest from Calgary writer Ben Berman Ghan, author of a novel, two collections of stories and a novella, is the chapbook of poems Behold the Dead (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2025), providing an interesting stretch of literary genre. Might a full-length poetry collection be far behind? Ghan’s poems stretch across narratives, allowing line breaks and silence between lines, attempting few words but across distances. With meditative elements of breath, staccato pulse and hesitation, composing open space as carefully as he places words. There aren’t many examples off the top of my head of prose writers that move into poetry—the late Alberta writer Robert Kroetsch, certainly, and Kemptville, Ontario writer Michael Blouin come to mind—and there are elements of Ghan’s lyric still firmly held in a foundation of prose narrative, although one he works to punctuate with open space, as the two-part poem “Annihilation” begins:

My body is a river

annihilated

in the hungry eyes of men.

 

Black waves hide a word, a body:

            Dissolve. 

                      Drown.

 

Becoming is the cruellest sensation. 

 

Bloody mouths

drinking in.

 

Ongoing notes, mid-November, 2019: Don McKay + Diane Schoemperlen

[what the children and I looked like, at least last week; as always, note the 1998 Bay Photo Studio glossy on my office wall, when eldest daughter Kate and I had professional photos done]

Normally (or at least, the past few years) I would post something referencing one of my mother’s relatives, a number of whom were involved in military service (her paternal uncle, her maternal grandfather and a number of his brothers-in-law, as well as his father-in-law), but the hard drive with all of those pictures and scans are inaccessible right now. You can see links to previous acknowledgments with some of these people here. Even without a new post, I remember them, still.

Kingston ON: I feel incredibly fortunate to be able to receive copies from publisher Maureen Scott Harris of the small chapbooks of lectures from Queen’s University’s Page Lecture. Originally founded by then-writer-in-residence Phil Hall, the annual series acknowledges the now-late Kingston poet and journalist Joanne Page, and Play and Work in the Work of Joanne Page by poet, editor and critic Don McKay (A Fieldnotes Chapbook, 2019) is the ninth lecture in this annual series, “delivered on October 23, 2018 in Watson Hall, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario [see my review of the prior publication here]. As Harris writes as part of her introduction, both to the publication and to the public lecture:

McKay’s poems and essays are about us and our complicated relationship with the larger living world we inhabit, the need to learn where and how we fit within it. What it means to be human, how to trim our sense of ourselves to an appropriate scale. He offers us moments of encounter and exchange, dizzying openings into larger understanding, and stunned celebration and grieving. Names and naming, making, birds, rocks and stones, engines, wonder, paradox are abundant in his thinking and writing. Have I mentioned his apt and antic acrobatics, clownish leaps and tumbles, the wonderful jokes that animate the poems? His wit is a corrective to the high seriousness of Romanticism and our enthrallment with the world as site and occasion for attending to our own sensations, emotions, and reactions. Let’s try to see the thing itself, he says. We might approach tree, bird, rock with courtesy, introduce ourselves to them, and listen for what or how they might speak back.

I find it interesting that throughout the lectures in this series, McKay took it upon himself to focus on the work of Joanne Page herself, she for whom the series was named [see my 2015 obituary for her here; my review of her third collection, Watermarks, here]. It seems to be an entirely McKay approach, as well, getting to the heart of what most others may have overlooked: a Joanne Page lecture actually on Joanne Page—and a delightful and playful essay, at that. As McKay writes towards the beginning of his lecture:

            What possessed me to pursue this road scarcely ever taken? In part I was moved by a wish to emphasize the efficacy of poetry, through its capacity for redress, to use Seamus Heaney’s term. I knew that I would find no better vehicle to convey this point than the works of Joanne Page. This wish was partnered with another—perhaps its twin—to buck a current trend emphasizing poetry’s supposed uselessness. Joanne Page’s poetry, while frequently playful and even mischievous, does not aspire to what Heaney calls “the glissando of postmodernism.” It occupies, believes in, and exploits gravity, and perhaps nowhere more effectively than when it’s having fun. So, giving work the last word serves to underscore a point Joanne’s writing exemplifies: poetry matters.

This lecture series is always uniquely compelling. Now that they’re nearing a decade of lectures and subsequent publications, might there be a larger published collection of essays for a wider distribution and readership?

Windsor ON: The first title in the chapbook series “Writers at Rest: Authors on Their Pastimes & Hobbies” produced through Woodbridge Farm Books [see their “12 or 20 (small press) questions” interview here] is Kingston writer Diane Schoemperlen’s One Thing Leads To Another: On Collage (2017), a marvelous short essay on her ongoing work with collage, and the blending of visuals and text in both her artworks and writing. As she writes towards the beginning of the essay:

            From the beginning of my writing career, my fascination with the intersection of the written word and visual images has persisted. My first book, Double Exposures, published in 1984, was a fictional story I wrote to accompany a series of forty-eight old family photographs. These were rescued from my ferocious mother, who had threatened to throw them away. From a photo of my father and his friend looking like cool gangsters in the forties, to one of my young and beautiful mother posing in a barnyard with one white chicken and a hoe, to a nudie shot of myself as a big-eyed baby on my stomach on a towel on the kitchen table, the photos appear on the verso (or left side) of each two-page spread, with the accompanying story on the recto (or right). They face each other but do not intersect or overlap. They interact without touching, separate but still creating connections and echoes in both directions. I did not realize it at the time, but this book was my first step on a long and winding exploration of the symbiotic relationship between text and image.

One thing leads to another. slowly.

Through fourteen trade books that include works of short fiction, novels and creative non-fiction, Schoemperlen has explored an interesting line between collage and creation, and writing and visuals, able to employ an intriguing array of strategies equally in both forms, and overlapping, blending and colliding the two when required, making her one of the most vibrant prose writers in the country. For some time now, as well [see my 2016 interview with Schoemperlen for Ploughshares here], I’ve considered her to be a rare small press author (in terms of vibrancy, language and experimentation) able to publish with larger, more mainstream presses, so it is fascinating to see her write on some of how she builds both writing and visual art, and the relationship she sees between the two. Further on in the same piece, she writes:

I am composing this essay one piece at a time, as if it were a collage. One thing leads to another – for reasons that aren’t always clear and don’t need to be. Decades ago, I read somewhere that asking a writer to explain how she did it is like asking a centipede how it manages to walk with all those legs. After being thus questioned, the centipede was never able to move again. The same could be said of making collage. I worry about this.

Please don’t ask me what it means. I might say I don’t know.

I begin a new collage with hope and curiosity, eager to embark on a spontaneous sequence of discovery. As a person who has always liked to have a goal, a plan, or, at the very least, a detailed to-do list, I find this exhilarating and liberating. I enjoy making collages so much that often it feels like a guilty pleasure.

            Let’s face it. Sometimes writing is hard. Sometimes it makes me want to fling myself into the pit of despair. Gertrude Stein, in How to Write, said, “I return to sentences as a refreshment.” I would say the same about collage: I return to collage as a refreshment. Sometimes I return to collage as a relief. A collage has never kept me awake all the night. A collage has never made me want to bang my head against the wall. A collage has never ever made me want to tear my hair out. For this I am thankful. I have to admit I am rather fond of my hair.

Other works in the series, which connect to their ongoing writing retreats and residencies, include Dani Couture’s A River in a Drought Is Still a River: On Not Running and Alix Hawley’s Your Eye: On Photography.

Ongoing notes: Meet the Presses (part seven,

[Stuart Ross' Proper Tales Press table]

Okay, I clearly picked up too many items at this year’s Toronto’s Meet the Presses’ annual Indie Literary Market [see part six of my notes here; and my most recent post on what I gathered at the ottawa small press book fair]. Don’t tell Christine! I’m squirrelling items away all over our house.

Toronto ON: A further title from Gap Riot Press comes Toronto poet Andy Weaver’s latest, the chapbook HAECCEITY (2018), an extended poem that suggests it is part of a much longer work-in-progress. The piece is built, in part, as a collage, as Weaver writes at the end of the collection:

Many of the ideas, images, words, phrases, etc., throughout the poem have been borrowed, adapted, and carried forward from other works. The only type of text that I consciously tried to limit within the realm of usufruction was other poetry, though I freely allowed poetics and other writings by poets.

He does include a bibliography at the end, and it would be interesting to see further how individual lines and phrases emerged from such a list. Increasingly, over the space of three trade collections and multiple chapbooks, Weaver’s writing has explored experimental forms with a more formal language, akin to writing out Robert Duncan’s twists and shapes with Stephen Brockwell’s sentences. As his poem begins:

When I had journeyed half

of my life’s way, I found

I had lost sight of love, the path

that does not stray. The self

is obscure—even worse,

it inures us to a feeling

that our life is a rock slowly

chipped away by each day,

that we live as debtors withdrawing

hourly from a sum owned

by some other self to which

we owe an amount constantly

on the edge of being due.

Toronto ON: From Maureen Scott Harris' annual chapbook series of lectures comes Daphne Marlatt’s On the Threshold of the Page (A Fieldnotes Chapbook, 2018), the text of “The Sixth Annual Page Lecture delivered on October 24, 2017 in Watson Hall, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario,” with an introduction by Stan Dragland. I’m quite pleased that Harris has taken on the publication of these lectures, which so often might become ephemeral productions, slipped later into collections of the individual authors’ essays, if at all, without any sense of not only the immediacy of the event, but the acknowledgment of the series, which also include post-lecture chapbooks by Elizabeth Hay and Stan Dragland, among others. The annual lectures were actually founded by Phil Hall, who continues to curate such, during his tenure as writer-in-residence at Queen’s University, named for the late Kingston poet Joanne Page. As Marlatt’s lecture begins:

Would you give a talk on the page? This open invitation from Phil Hall immediately raised questions for me: whose page? mine or another’s or even other writers’ in the plural? Having spent much of the past year going through forty years of my own work with my editor Susan Holbrook for a collected poetry, Intertidal, the answer to that question seemed a given. But then a further question arose: as a poet, do I approach the page now as I used to twenty or thirty or even forty years ago? Is what was at stake then, at stake now, in writing a poem? I’ll try to answer such questions in this talk.

Ongoing notes: Meet the Presses (part three,

[the announcement and presentation of the annual bpNichol Chapbook Award]

See parts one here and two here. Might there be more? Probably, given how much I returned home with. I’m hoping soon to start making notes, as well, on some of the items I gathered at our more-recent ottawa small press book fair…

Toronto/Ottawa ON: From editor/publisher (and poet) Maureen Scott Harris comes Ottawa writer Elizabeth Hay’s The Original Title (A Fieldnotes Chapbook, 2016), a gracefully-produced chapbook in a run of one hundred copies comprised of a short talk originally delivered as part of the fourth annual Joanne Page Lecture Series at Queen’s University in Kingston. As Harris writes in her “12 or 20 (small press) questions” interview: “Fieldnotes operates pretty much within the gift economy—chapbook authors get 10% of the print run. I try to recoup design and printing costs. If I do better than that the money goes towards the next publication.” An utterly charming essay, Hay speaks to drafts and regrets, and the elements that fall away from a novel during the revision and editing process. This includes elements that an author might still be attached to, such as the revelation that her novel Late Nights on Air had originally been titled The End of Shyness before shifting to Dido in Yellowknife, “and then Late Nights on Air after a friend told me everyone would call the book Dildo in Yellowknife.”

After finishing Late Nights on Air, I went to England for a month and while I was there the page proofs came to me. I went over them and it seemed I had constructed the novel out of four words. Lovely. Tease. Tender. Soft. And in that order I plucked them out of the book like unwanted hairs from a chin. Searching for alternatives to “tender,” I overused “soft,” then I plucked out an infinity of “softs,” for they had multiplied when I wasn’t looking. I replaced the “softs” with feathery, lush, altered, lingering, quiet, calm, warm. I could have built a nest with all those discarded softs.

            During that month I went several times to the British Library’s Treasures Room, and using headphones I listened to James Joyce’s odd little voice, light, boyish, insubstantial, reading from Finnegan’s Wake. Then to Yeats’s rolling delivery, repetitive, easy to parody. And to Seamus Heaney, a great natural reader. And to Virginia Woolf whose voice sounded surprisingly old, librarian-like, with a bit of a singsong to it. She talked about craftsmanship, about how every word is stored with the echoes of older uses. Just as each book, I’m suggesting, is stored with the echo of earlier intentions.

Calgary AB/St Catharines ON: From Calgary’s No Press comes Andrew McEwan’s Can’t tell if this book is depressing or if I’m just sad (August 2016), a small, hand-sewn chapbook produced in an edition of forty copies. McEwan’s poem is comprised of lines collected by a twitter-bot, @UN_REVIEW, which gathered references to “book” and “depressing,” suggesting prior machine-produced works such as Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler’s apostrophe (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2006) and update (Montreal QC: Snare Books, 2010), allowing a machine to collect lines that then may or may not be further selected. A machine may have constructed this poem, but it was not, precisely, machine-made, given that McEwan gave the directions; think of all the painters who did the physical labour for Andy Warhol artworks, for example. That’s the same, right?

This book is depressing, from beginning to end.

This book is so depressing why do I keep reading it

This book is damn depressing

This book is actually depressing as hell, why did I have to choose this one

The fact I can’t get interested in this book is just depressing

This book is really depressing! I need to stop but I can’t

This book is depressing me. So close to the end… just gotta finish.

Given the potential infiniteness of such a project, might there be a larger version? But oh, the grief in seeing so many lines on Twitter about how particular books are depressing certainly weighs.

12 or 20 (small press) questions with Maureen Scott Harris on Fieldnotes/MSH

I think of Fieldnotes/MSH as an imprint rather than a press, and myself as an amateur (in the root sense of that word) working on the margins of the small press world. Under this imprint I publish (erratically) occasional broadsides and chapbooks. The broadsides (so far) are my own poems and I circulate them to friends and colleagues to celebrate National Poetry Month. The chapbooks are prose, texts I’ve come across one way or another that I feel deserve an audience. Fieldnotes operates pretty much within the gift economy—chapbook authors get 10% of the print run. I try to recoup design and printing costs. If I do better than that the money goes towards the next publication. 

Canadian poet and essayist Maureen Scott Harris was born in Prince Rupert (BC), grew up in Winnipeg (MB) and lives in Toronto (ON). She has published three collections of poetry: A Possible Landscape (Brick Books, 1993), Drowning Lessons (Pedlar Press, 2004) awarded the 2005 Trillium Book Award for Poetry, and Slow Curve Out (Pedlar Press, 2012), shortlisted for the League of Canadian Poets’ Pat Lowther Award. Harris’s essays have won the Prairie Fire Creative Nonfiction Prize, and the WildCare Tasmania Nature Writing Prize, which included a residency in Tasmania at Lake St. Clair. In 2012-2013 she was Artist-in-Residence at the Koffler Scientific Reserve at Jokers Hill, north of Toronto. With other poets and environmentalists she is currently plotting poetry walks that follow the (sometimes buried) rivers and streams of Toronto. Fieldnotes/MSH is her own enterprise.

1 – When did Fieldnotes/MSH first start? How have your original goals as a publisher shifted since you started, if at all? And what have you learned through the process?

Fieldnotes began in January 2002 when I decided I wanted to publish a broadside of my poem “The Drowned Boy.” For some time I’d wanted to do something to mark National Poetry Month. I bought a big rubber stamp that says ‘National Poetry Month,’ stamped envelopes with it, and sent the broadside out to friends and colleagues. My initial intention was to publish a broadside every year for poetry month, but I only managed to keep it going for another year.

Then in 2010 I heard Pedlar Press publisher Beth Follett speak in the Hart House Library (University of Toronto) about the future of the printed book and its readers. Beth is always eloquent. The audience was excited and inspired by what she had to say, but it wasn’t large. It seemed to me—and several others—that her talk should be published. I thought about it for a few days, and decided I could publish it as a Fieldnotes Chapbook.

I had no immediate intention of publishing anything more. But when Beth’s YesNo appeared and was launched people began to ask me what I’d publish next. I didn’t want to invest a lot of time in publishing and I don’t have a lot of money for it either, but I decided I would consider occasional publications, guided by my own responses to what I happened upon. I’m interested in talks and lectures, things that might disappear beyond their occasion. I’m also mainly interested in prose. 

That said, the second Fieldnotes Chapbook was in fact a collection of poems written in response to a sculpture exhibition by Susan Low-Beer. It appeared in 2013.  Fieldnotes came into that late in the game. With several other poets I’d been invited to view a series of Low-Beer’s sculptured heads and write something in response to them. The poems were assembled, edited, and the book designed when the group went looking for an ISBN. I was asked if it could appear as a Fieldnotes chapbook  and said yes.

Late in 2014 I read an unpublished essay by Kelley Aitken about the Penone sculpture that once graced the Galeria Italia at the AGO. I’ve mourned that work’s disappearance, so I decided to publish the essay. It launched in January 2015. I’m now working on the next chapbook, Stan Dragland’s Page Lecture (delivered at Queen’s University about a year ago) on the poetry and prose of Joanne Page.

Last April I revived my poetry month broadside and I expect to publish another one in 2016. I’ve learned that it takes time and energy to publish, but it’s also satisfying. I expect Fieldnotes will publish erratically in the future as it has in the past. And it will continue, if it does, as I come across material that I think deserves an audience.

2 – What first brought you to publishing?

I’ve been interested in small press publishing since the late 1960s when I was in what we then called library school. My favourite course, taught by Douglas Lochhead, was the history of books and printing. During it we pulled some prints on the Massey College presses. I also did a project on little magazines and literary ephemera for my humanities materials course. From a library standpoint such publications are hard to learn about and to collect; there was a growing interest in them that paralleled the growing interest in Canadian writing.

Much later, and for about 10 years, I worked at Robarts Library as the CIP librarian, doing the catalogue copy for forthcoming books; through that job I met many people in publishing. Then I worked for Brick Books as production manager for several years. Working for them I learned how small publishing unfolds and, given computers, it seemed pretty easy to make a broadside.  

3 – What do you consider the role and responsibilities, if any, of small publishing?

I think each small press must determine its own role and responsibilities. That said, I think the responsibilities fall in two directions: to the writer and to the reader. I want to produce chapbooks that embody or hold their texts appropriately and as beautifully as possible, in tribute to the work that goes into writing them—and I also want to extend the life of what might otherwise not be seen or heard.

4 – What do you see your press doing that no one else is?

Hmmm—perhaps rejoicing solely in the serendipitous.

5 – What do you see as the most effective way to get new chapbooks out into the world?

In my experience the launch of a chapbook is the most effective form of distribution. I believe attendance at small press fairs is also good, but as an introvert I find an afternoon of crowds completely exhausting and so don’t participate regularly. Word of mouth. I don’t use social media because I don’t know how to use it effectively, and I don’t want to spend time on it. 

6 – How involved an editor are you? Do you dig deep into line edits, or do you prefer more of a light touch?

It depends on how much editing the work requires. I’ve done both light and more involved editing.

7 – How do your books get distributed? What are your usual print runs?

Mostly by the launch, some by mail. My chapbook print runs have been 100 copies—though the Page Lecture will be 200.

8 – How many other people are involved with editing or production? Do you work with other editors, and if so, how effective do you find it? What are the benefits, drawbacks?

So far I’ve worked directly only with authors and designers. I do the editing and copy-editing myself, though I sometimes consult with friends who have those skills. And of course I work with the printer.

9 – How has being an editor/publisher changed the way you think about your own writing?

It’s shown me that I don’t necessarily have to wait on anyone else to publish something that I want to see published.

10– How do you approach the idea of publishing your own writing? Some, such as Gary Geddes when he still ran Cormorant, refused such, yet various Coach House Press’ editors had titles during their tenures as editors for the press, including Victor Coleman and bpNichol. What do you think of the arguments for or against, or do you see the whole question as irrelevant?

Fieldnotes began as a vehicle to publish my own poems—though the poems I used for them had already appeared in journals. So I’m clearly not opposed to self-publishing. That said, I would in general prefer not to publish a chapbook of my own work, unless it was work that had been published elsewhere and so had the benefit of editing.

11– How do you see Fieldnotes evolving?

I don’t see it evolving beyond what it is.

12– What, as a publisher, are you most proud of accomplishing? What do you think people have overlooked about your publications? What is your biggest frustration?

I’m proud to have brought into a larger public arena some writing and thinking that might have stayed ephemeral or in the manuscript drawer.  As for frustrations—distribution is the historical issue for Canadian publishing. If there were more hours in the day and I were more social I might figure out a way to do this better. 

13– Who were your early publishing models when starting out?

Brick Books, with its attention to both editing and authors, offers a wonderful model for publishing, as does Pedlar Press.

14– How does Fieldnotes work to engage with your immediate literary community, and community at large? What journals or presses do you see Fieldnotes in dialogue with? How important do you see those dialogues, those conversations?

Fieldnotes is really a peripheral enterprise, not particularly in dialogue with anyone. Though I do like to talk to, for example, Carleton Wilson and Nicholas Power about the small press world.

15– Do you hold regular or occasional readings or launches? How important do you see public readings and other events?

I hold a launch for each chapbook, at which I invite the author to read or to speak about the project.

16– How do you utilize the internet, if at all, to further your goals?

I haven’t utilized it. At best I might post a note on my Facebook page.

17– Do you take submissions? If so, what aren’t you looking for?

No.

18– Tell me about three of your most recent titles, and why they’re special.

Fieldnotes has only published 4 chapbooks, and of those, only 3 are ones I can claim. I’ve already described them above in my answer to the first question. But I’ll say something about the broadsides. I met Alan Siu of Sunville Printco Inc when I was working for Brick Books; he prints, and has designed, for them. Alan has done all my broadsides, and is currently designing the Page Lecture—he’s generous and a delight to work with.

12 or 20 (small press) questions;