12 or 20 (second series) questions with Helen Chau Bradley

Helen Chau Bradley [photo credit: Surah Field-Green] is the author of Automatic Object Lessons (House House Press, 2020) and Personal Attention Roleplay (Metonymy Press, 2021). Their essays, stories, and reviews have appeared in carte blanche, Cosmonauts Avenue, Entropy Magazine, Maisonneuve Magazine, the Montreal Review of Books and elsewhere. They host the Strange Futures book club, which focuses on BIPOC speculative fiction, via Librairie Drawn & Quarterly.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

Personal Attention Roleplay is my first book. Too early to say how its publication will affect my life, but the writing of it has been a revelation, in terms of finally taking my own writing seriously.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I did publish a poetry chapbook before this book of fiction, but fiction comes first for me, it’s the medium I feel most comfortable in, possibly because I read more fiction than anything else. I continue to be compelled by narrative structures (or un-structures) and by characters’ inner workings, I am always experimenting with how to pull those elements together into something like a whole.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

It takes me forever to start a new writing project, whether it’s a story or a series of poems, or dare I say, a novel. I have to mull the thing over in my head for weeks, or months, or possibly years, before I can commit even the first word to paper (or screen). First drafts are more like fifth or tenth drafts, because I’ve thought about the piece’s shape for so long, so they do tend to predict the piece’s final shape fairly reliably. I’d like to write a story or a poem that changes shape completely, though. Seems like a worthwhile exercise.

4 - Where does a poem or work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

Up until this point, I’ve never had the confidence to approach “writing a book” from the get-go. It’s been a slow accumulation of shorter pieces into some sort of final product that I never would have imagined from the beginning of writing. Now that I’ve published a chapbook and a book, however, I worry that I’ll start approaching projects as “books” and that that will somehow hinder my ability to write anything risky or interesting. The idea of “writing a book” makes me overly aware of an audience.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I love reading in public. In a previous life, I was the lead singer in a band, and I haven’t lost that desire to perform. I also love hearing other writers read. Words spoken aloud ring differently than they do on the page.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

A concern I have is how to write characters whose material realities and backgrounds are deeply considered, without resorting to a tepid form of identity politics that I see being promoted a lot in reading and writing circles these days. As a writer of “hyphenated experience,” I do tend to write characters who have similar identity markers to me, but I never want my stories to be driven by identity alone, or to imply that because a person is, say, Asian and queer and nonbinary, that they would experience or view the world in the same way as any other Asian, queer, nonbinary person, or that they need to represent a specific identity “correctly.” I am deeply uninterested in didactic fiction-writing, or fiction-writing that is meant to “build acceptance” for certain groups of people. Otherwise, I am concerned with how to write queerness, and I don’t mean how to write queer characters, but more so how writing itself may be queer, in its structure. Gail Scott, for instance, is a helpful writer to me, as she has been thinking through and working with this question for years.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

As mentioned, I dislike didactic writing, writing that tells us what to do politically. I think that fiction writers, if we have any useful role at all, should be asking difficult questions, though. Puncturing the veneer of the status quo! Not in an edgy, shock-value kind of way, but in a way that illuminates power structures, emotional complexities, historical contexts, cultural dissonances. I think that asking questions is more important and more desirable in fiction, than answering them. I also think that humour is important in fiction-writing, that making people laugh or grimace, sometimes in self-recognition, might be an essential writing role: being a funhouse mirror?

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Essential! Once I feel I have a final draft of a piece, that I’ve gone as far with it as I can alone, I welcome collaboration with a thoughtful, incisive editor.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Being on the internet too much means wading through a constant maelstrom of conflicting advice about everything, so it’s hard to say. I’ve definitely heard people recommend reading dialogue out loud, so as to illuminate any excess or clichés, and I think that’s pretty solid advice.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to prose to reviews to songwriting)? What do you see as the appeal?

I enjoy moving between genres. If one form is feeling tired to me, it is energizing to turn to another form. I’ve been trying to work on a novel lately, and when it’s felt like drudgery to write prose, I’ve turned to a perfume-review-based poetry project that I devised as a distraction. Even reading in other genres helps—reading a lot of poetry has helped me shape my prose, to cut out what is superfluous, to make phrases sharper.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I am terrible at having a writing routine. My first book was written mainly when I was supposed to be doing something else (my day job). I am trying to figure out how to be a writer first, and a worker second, if that makes any sense, and a lot of the struggle has to do with discipline. I’m used to writing being a thing that I do to procrastinate on my actual responsibilities. If there is nothing I need to be doing except writing, how do I stop myself from turning away from that? When it’s the only thing left to be done, how to do it?

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Other writers and artists. I read a lot, and I watch a lot of movies and listen to a lot of music. I never want to be creating in a void. Other artists are the only people, usually unbeknownst to them, who can unstick me.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

I’ve gotten into perfume during the pandemic, as a way to subtly differentiate one day from another. I spilled a sample of Zoologist’s Tyrannosaurus Rex, which is this gargantuan scent filled with bright flowers, smoke, leather, and incense, all over my kitchen table a while ago, and now my apartment smells like the late Cretaceous, which is fitting since we are now in the middle of another massive extinction event.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Music always makes its way into my writing. So does whatever I’m watching. So do the things I overhear on the bus. So do the things my friends say. Everything eventually makes its way in—look out!

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

So many. Renee Gladman, Gail Scott, Julio Cortázar, Yoko Tawada, Kiese Laymon, Hoa Nguyen, Jamaica Kincaid, Clarice Lispector, Silvina Ocampo, Qiu Miaojin are some favourite voices. I certainly wouldn’t claim to be able to write anything near any of them, but I keep them around, to help and challenge me. I also like to read gay smut (e.g. Straight To Hell), which is direct and filthy and keeps me honest.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Go to Hong Kong. 

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I actually love being a bookseller. I did it for five years and would have happily kept doing it forever, had it been financially viable.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I tried doing a lot of other things first, partly because I was too scared to write, even though I’d wanted to since I was a kid. So I guess it’s a deep compulsion, because finally, at 33 or so, I couldn’t stop myself anymore.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Minor Detail, by the Palestinian writer Adania Shibli (translated by Elisabeth Jaquette) is a book that marked me recently. Isabel Sandoval’s film Lingua Franca stuck with me, and made me search out all her other work.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I am slowly and painstakingly learning Cantonese, my mom’s first language. It is a humbling experience. I’m also working on a novel and a series of poems.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Assiyah Jamilla Touré, AUTOWAR

 

their architecture

unwhole, gleaning, their edges are soft
sanded and ground to softness
near skinless
their flesh is open and wet
worn past translucence 

hard and shining and whole
edges sharp with newness
they are columns, cathedrals
softnesses folded into geometries
untenable
light shines through

they cannot be held
or they will die

I’m fascinated by AUTOWAR (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2021), the full-length debut by Toronto-based poet and multidisciplinary artist Assiyah Jamilla Touré, following their chapbook feral (Montreal QC: House House Press, 2018). “i run on silences / i swallow them whole, eagerly / see? i seem to say,” Touré writes, as part of the poem “beckoning,” “a steady heartbeat taming my ear / is an assault / my recall is quartered / by any steadfastness [.]” Theirs is a poetry of direct statement composed via musical gesture; performative lines of breath-thought upon breath-thought. As the poem “acidfield” begins: “bones jutting up jagged planted in this garden / will we too be a garden on the ocean floor / an ocean so acidic, vast, roaring / the salt shearing everything in it to bone / bones for us to be too, tomorrow? / or something new where bones used to be?” There is something really compelling in the ways in which their rhythms line up, launching as a single breath from left to right, before the next one begins; each end of line an intake of air.

Touré composes a lyric of gesture and metaphor on the pure mechanics of possible survival, from being forced to create a father out of thin air and space, to navigating, as the back cover offers, “kinesthetic memory and longing, inherited violence, and the body as a geographical site.” “i am an approachable object—a carved wooden idol / if i am a deity i am of the rank closest to dirt,” they write, as part of the poem “idolatry.” Touré offers a shaped articulation of space and the body; one that utilizes performance as a way through which to speak of missing shapes, and the ability to reform, reshape and even regenerate. The poems are sharp, unflinching and even unrelenting, while holding, still, the ability to take the process and thinking seriously while simultaneously able to allow small bursts of quirky humour. Towards the end of the collection, as part of the poem “autodeity,” they offer: “every six months i shed my skin / and become new and pure, another / i spontaneously forget any language but my own / finally everyone admits i’m incomprehensible [.]”

Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part two,

[Zed Press]

See the first of my notes from our most recent fair here.

Windsor/Toronto ON: The second chapbook by Toronto poet and self-professed “peach enthusiast” Terrence Abrahams is the peach poems (Windsor ON: Zed Press, 2019), a chapbook preceded by a wish (Penrose Press), and to be followed, according to his author bio, by “a forthcoming collection of prose poems, published with baseline press.” the peach poems is an assemblage of confident lyric hesitations, halting and exploratory, furthering the line and the line-break in tandem, through prose poems and the more traditional shapes of the lyric poem. These poems are physical, and subtle, yet striking in their posture, even amid uncertainty. “Your language was one I couldn’t speak yet,” Abraham writes, in the prose poem “May,” continuing “and yet I could / see it all over your body.”

riverbank

I sit thinking of all the little deaths

as if I haven’t thought already

of yours, worrying over

what hands might find you

when my hands

leave yours

nearby the dog

is sniffing out rabbits

like him you are wondering

how you can get in on the hunt

In a recent interview with Abrahams on Train: a poetry journal I found this bit particularly interesting, as he said:

I only recently read something Mary Oliver wrote in her essay collection, Upstream. She said, “attention is the beginning of devotion.” If that’s the case, I’ve been beginning my whole life, and I don’t plan on stopping. That keeps me going.

[Anahita Jamali Rad and David Bradford]

Montreal QC: From Anahita Jamali Rad and David Bradford’s House House Press [see their “12 or 20 questions” on the press here] is Stacey Ho’s Green Lines (2019), a chapbook consisting of the fourteen-part essay, the “Anti-Invasion Ecologies,” as well as “HOW TO DRAW A LINE,” a pair of lyric essays on ecology, refugees and metaphor, and how language is used to describe the migration of plant and human. As they write: “Sometimes the cultural categories that divide plant and humans dissolve to form a single class called foreign. This is a minority world anxiety evidenced in all forms of cultural production.” As the opening to the essay “Anti-Invasion Ecologies” reads:

This past summer I was trying out this art experiment which was roughly focused on land-based and intersectional feminist art practices. It happened on Mayne Island, Coast Salish Territories.

We were camping on a site that had previously been an old mill and informal dumpsite, which was in the process of remediation by its current inhabitants. Responding to aspects of this environment that had been impacted by humans, Syr Reifsteck dyed paper using materials introduced to the site through human intervention: rusty bits of metal dumped on site with Scotch broom and Himalayan blackberry, two plants often considered invasive to the region. Megan Gerbrandt pulled metal, broken glass, and garbage out of the ground, marking objects with protective symbols to create an installation that led into the forest. Seeking to “unsettle” so-called invasive species, Anthony Meza-Wilson broke down specimens of Scotch broom, separating the plant into pods, leaves, and stems to mirror colonial practices of deconstruction and classification.

I often overheard participants express their distaste for invasives,” whereas I’d always felt a deep affinity for such hardy, weedy plants.

12 or 20 (small press) questions with Anahita Jamali Rad and David Bradford on House House Press

House House Press is a Montreal-based publisher of poetry chapbooks, pamphlets and ephemera operating outside of the prevailing lyrical and experimental aesthetics.

Anahita Jamali Rad was born in Iran and is currently based on unceded Indigenous territory called Tio’tia:ke by the Kanien’kehá:ka, the traditional caretakers of the land. Her work is primarily text-based and explores materiality, history, affect, ideology, violence, class, collectivity, desire, place, and displacement. She has published a few chapbooks and one full-length collection of poetry entitled for love and autonomy (Talonbooks, 2016).

David Bradford is the author of Nell Zink Is Damn Free (blank cheque press, 2017), Call Out (k | f | b, 2017) and The Plot (House House Press, 2017). David holds an MFA from the University of Guelph, and his work has appeared in Prairie Fire, The Capilano Review, Vallum, and elsewhere. He lives in Verdun, Quebec.

[House House Press will be participating in the spring edition of the ottawa small press fair on June 22, 2019]

1 – When did House House Press 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?

AJ: In 2017, I wanted to start a small press as a part of a text-based poetics project. I wanted to publish texts that forge a poetics outside conventional understanding of poetry, texts that are made within communities and not for capitalist consumption (e.g. memes, digital debris, t-shirt slogans). I was interested in aesthetic formations that do not and/or are not meant to “get published,” and weird poetries by and for those who move through, are proximal to, or never cross the gates of mainstream Canadian art/poetry publishing. I was done with what mainstream poetry is and does, and I was ready to make the space for something else to emerge.

I met David on my move to Montreal and found that we had similar frustrations with the structures of power in the institutions that decided who and what get published, during a time when many of the people involved in those institutions were being exposed for their actions. I wanted to publish David because the work he was doing fit perfectly in with what I envisioned for this imaginary press, but after our conversations, I also wanted to join forces. I knew immediately that he was someone I could trust in all the ways necessary.

After two years of conspiring and finally bringing the press to fruition, our goals remain the same, and we found that there is actually a desire for such a space and the works that come out of it.

2 – What first brought you to publishing?

DB: A lot of the frustrations Anahita mentioned—particularly, for me, the predispositions and biases of Canadian publishing community, and the kind of literary landscape, by emphasis and omission, its members have and continue to chart. There’s this old James Baldwin bit I remember Hilton Als once reiterated about being the black person at the white literary or art world party. It describes that look that would try to scuttle itself across the room to whatever other black person or two might show up. The look that asks, are they in on the joke?

I think, for me, I’m still asking that question all the time. I think Anahita and I are lucky to have come up in the poetry world at a time when there are dramatically more folks of colour in the room—and in the journals and on the shelves—than there were even ten years ago. And we’ve both been lucky enough to find editors and publishers and colleagues that value our work because they just value our work. But that joke is still wafting about, and maybe even a longer con than before: one about being collected, a virtue momentarily worth signaling, a whim, not too well examined, and easily discarded.

I guess what brought me to publishing, in this small way we’re doing it with House House, is that I meet a fair few people who’ve long been in on the joke. Writers of colour, but also people using poetry to do something a little weirder, or to fashion something that might help them inquire into whatever. I guess, for me, this is about a space where we can leave the joke out of it for a bit.

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

AJ: I come from a DIY background, making zines and self-made chapbooks. For me, it was a way to make something weird, whether that was in terms of content or format, and get it out there in the world to share with a community that was also into making quick and dirty weird things. It taught me to really consider all aspects of a published work, whether that was design, the kind of printing, paper, and how all of those things contribute to its accessibility.

I believe that making the work accessible is an important responsibility for small publishing, and getting the work out there is the driving force of House House. We want the people who want to be reading this work to be able to read this work.

For House House books, the “quick and dirty” aspect has been thrown out for a more rigorous process that takes a few months. We want the writers to come out of the process with an object they can feel proud of, something that truly represents their intentions. I believe the publisher is also deeply responsible for making the writers feel good about what is represented of their process when the object is out in the world.

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

DB: Sticking to very small chapbooks—roughly 20 pages or so. Very early on, we agreed we were interested in focussing on one-tract approaches and projects. Basically, tight little bursts, but also works that were contiguous and perhaps too long or particular for journals, too short and specific for full-length collections. Or projects that are just starting, still messy, tangibly in spurts, and which we could work with poets, writers, and artists to focus and deepen for a short breadth.

Another somewhat different thing we’re doing is seeking out some non-poets who have a rigorous artistic/scholarly/other practice that employs poetry-making/poetics to investigate their concerns. We’re interested—and have been working with a few practitioners that fit the bill—in what happens when we encourage those practices to double down on their poetries and give them a substantive poetry context.

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

AJ: Social media has been really helpful for us in allowing us to reach networks of people who are not in constant dialogue with poetry publishing. Because our writers aren’t all established in the poetry community, social media has allowed them to reach their respective communities. The literary community has also been very eager and supportive of the press as well. So we have been distributing the chapbooks in bookstores, at readings, and through our website as well.

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

DB: I’m just as little or intensely involved as the poet on the other end wants me to be, and just as involved as I need to be to help the poet get to where they’re happy with the project. But I’d say if I have a unit that’s my “dig deep,” it’s the project, not the line. I think a lot about how the most useful notes (and the ones that were the most work) I’ve gotten from editors have always been big questions and ideas particular to scope, not the little details. That says more about me as a writer than an editor, but it’s always proven very useful.

Nadia Chaney’s Reading Practice, for instance, is something we worked together on from scratch, and I very much edited for the project’s tone, conceits, strands, and overarching concerns, challenging her to hone those focuses as they grew. I line-edited too, but as sparingly as I could, and always trying to be mindful of the integrity of, and the reasons for, the little choices she made. Basically, I try to make sure any line or project edits I give skews toward the poet’s concerns, not my own sensibilities. Which I think is probably more involved and critical an editing style than it sounds.

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

AJ: We print about 150 copies per chapbook, and distribute at local bookstores (in Montreal and Vancouver currently), on our website, at readings, small publishing fairs, in person, and through social media.

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?

DB: Just Anahita and I! It can get hairy when it’s crunch time, but turnaround on decisions can be sharp. More of a kayak setup than the Titanic. I think it’s about flexibility for us, keeping it small and fun, and being able to stick to particular principles and approaches that can become difficult to hold on to at another scale.

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

AJ: Editing is actually my favourite part of writing. But the desire to edit can actually get in the way of my producing new work, so it’s nice to get that impulse out when working with other people who have already written something. Seeing other people’s work in various stages is also invigorating and inspiring. Editing is both an impetus to keep writing, and a productive break from my own work.

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?

DB: I think the drive behind that kind of self-publishing can come from various places—some ok, some not so ok. For myself, I was asked to publish with KFB long before I edited for them, and while it was a little different with House House, I feel good about the decision because it was someone else’s idea. I see some editors with separate relationships with their publishers as editors and poets, which I think is fine. I see other people doing it in a totally vain, self-serving way, which I can’t take seriously.

So, on the one hand, right now I’m not sure I’ll do it again, simply because I’m in a position where I approach other presses easily enough and I’d rather publish other writers. On the other, I’m really happy with the chapbook, and am so proud my work is included in the space and roster we’re building up. Like Anahita said, this chapbook—with its self-erasure techniques, auto-archival debris and colourful visual work, etc.—was a perfect fit for the project, and may very well not have been much of a fit anywhere else. So while I don’t think I’ll be publishing myself again any time soon, this is where this weird little book could land, which is kind of the whole point.

11– How do you see House House Press evolving?

AJ: House House should change in ways that are unexpected and unforeseen. We want the press to be a space for weird things that don’t work for “normal” presses, and that means we don’t know what that is until it comes our way. The most important part of this press is that we are open to those weird texts. In terms of production, however, we do not intend on publishing more than 3 books twice per year. We want to stick to this in order to allow for this very important flexibility, be true to our own capacities, and maintain the rigorousness of the process for the writers.

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?

DB: The particular breadth of the projects we’ve taken on has meant the majority of what we’ve published may not have found another venue, at least not in the same form. I’m pretty proud of that—working to fashion a readymade space for work without a readymade space. To provide a circumstance under which the value of that work becomes obvious.

A frustration, or maybe more precisely a concern, that maybe comes with all that is how hard it has sometimes been to get writers to sit down and get the thing done. Most writers have a lot of other pressures in their lives, and there’s no great surfeit of time to sit with and prioritize these projects, or even to think of these projects as something worth finishing. So I’ve found myself having to keep after writers, and keep reminding them we’re not just filling a slot, or doing them a favour. That we have a real stake in what they’re doing.

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

AJ: There are many great small presses out there that publish poetry doing interesting things (such as Belladonna*, Ugly Duckling Presse, and Timeless, Infinite Light) but the desire to make House House was because there was no other press out there that created a space quite like the one we are looking to create. We are hoping to get away from poetry as such, poetry for poets, and even poetry by poets. The magazine 0 to 9, for example was an originary model, for me, as a way of thinking outside of what can be considered publishable.

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

DB: I think our immediate community is our writers and whoever makes it out to see what we’ve been up to. I think I could see we were on the right track when so many of those folks weren’t just poets but other kinds of established artists, and big readers looking for something different. One of the main ways I hope we keep engaging with them is to keep our taste engaging theirs, and to keep offering up these rigorous, unusual little works that deliver a jolt of something not quite expected.

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

AJ: We’ve now had one *soft* launch and one *hard* launch of our first season. We’re launching 3 new books in late spring, so there will surely be readings for those. Two of the writers are not based in Montreal, so we’re still trying to figure out how to organize a launch that will work with their schedules. It’s important to us have the writers and their books interact with the public in a direct and intimate way, so hopefully, we’ll have a few more casual readings in our future.

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

DB: Just letting people know and see what we’re up to, and that we’re excited about all of it. That basically means showing off projects and events on Instagram and nuts-and-bolts stuff on Facebook. And we both hate Twitter, so...

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

AJ: We don’t currently take submissions. There are quite a few writers with whom we are excited to work for now, so we don’t see any openings in the near future.

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

DB: We’ve only got the three right now, but luckily they’re all special! I mentioned a few things about that above, but:

feral by assiyah jamilla is a publishing debut of any kind from a new, but so settled, black voice, and what for me is a singular take on black radical and queer poetics.

Nadia Chaney’s book, Reading Practice for Rust and Holograms, is also a debut poetry publication from a seasoned poet, performance artist, and independent scholar, a first commission for us and a coordination of theory, sci-fi, and found poetry concerns under the rubric of one explosive sequence of procedural fictions.

And my book, The Plot, cobbles together very personal and very fleshy mixed-media and self-erasure hybrid poems, exploring the relationship between processual debris and family traumas. The kinds of materials that were incredibly unlikely to make their way into a journal.

12 or 20 (small press) questions;