Writ Large Press

One of the things we wanted, needed, to have before finishing up the layout of the book was a blurb. A few blurbs would be even better, of course. We wanted to have a few quotes to print on the back cover and after thinking about the people we wanted to give galleys to, we decided on three.

Kim was both nervous and excited to ask Chris Nealon, a wonderful and unique poet who was her professor at UC Berkeley. She dreaded the idea that he might find her book to be, well, not so impressive.

I reached out to an old friend, Mike Sonksen. Mike is an old friend and known all over Los Angeles as Mike the Poet. He literally is everywhere, hosting and running readings in theaters, bookstores, cafes, bars. That’s of course when he’s not teaching poetry at a charter school or driving his bus around town for his one-of-a-kind tour of Los Angeles. He is also a great performer and fine writer, whose own book, I Am Alive in Los Angeles, Judy and I reviewed for our short-lived column on Suicide Girls. He is the hardest-working man in the business.

The third person that received the galley was Jack Grapes, a poet and an editor (of ONTHEBUS) and perhaps most importantly, a teacher. I am pretty sure everybody who has been part of the Los Angeles literary world knows, or at least has heard of, Jack. He has taught hundreds and hundreds of writers everything we know about writing. Kim and I met years ago in one of his writing workshops. She, as I had years before, found herself in his class as a teen. Judeth also took his workshop when she moved out here and she and I published many of the writers in the class through our literary magazine, Wednesday. I felt the same nervousness waiting to hear back from Jack as Kim felt waiting for Chris Nealon’s blurb.

When Jack emailed a blurb over to us, I was completely overwhelmed with — I don’t know what I was feeling. Relief. Pride. Ecstasy. A bit of sadness at finally feeling like we were little babies no longer and we were all learning to stand on our own, to claim our places in the literary world.

The others soon wrote. Both Chris Nealon and Mike the Poet gave it sparkling reviews. The fact that three such different types of poets and teachers found “Who’s to Say What’s Home” to be so compelling, challenging, and moving, gave all of us a great deal of comfort and confidence.

Each time I pick up the book, which is often, I turn to the back cover and read the blurbs again.

The poems in this collection will knock your socks off, and if you’re not wearing socks, they’ll bring you to your kness. Every generation produces a poet of unique sensibilities, and Kim Calder is that poet, a bright new light announcing her presence with this book of poems. There are only a few poets who can bring such use of language and the heartfelt sense of loss to bear on the work at hand. As a first book which portends many more to come, it ranks with Sharon Olds’ Satan Says, Dorianne Laux’s Awake, and Richard Jones’ Country of Air. You will be reading Kim Calder’s poems for many years to come, and they will change your life. — Jack Grapes

I think that this is close to what I felt when I first Kim read about ten years ago. I think that maybe, we have done a very important thing by publishing this book.

It has been something to hold the proof copy, our first proof copy, of Kim’s book, our first book. On the day it was supposed to arrived via UPS, I took the elevator down about six times to the building office just to check if UPS had dropped the package off there.

We’ve been pretty much geeked like this with each next step in the process…with the exception of one: proofreading.

Originally, we had five people read through the manuscript. And we caught a few errors and corrected them right away, all of us happy at how clean the manuscript was to begin with. With each subsequent step, however, we got a bit more lax on it, until at the end, by the time we set up our digital files with the printer to order the proof, I was more obsessed with the poems, the flow of the book, the overall quality and vision of the collection, to focus entirely on the details.

Well, that carelessness has cost us a few dollars because we will have to reload the digital files with a couple of corrections. I can sit here and tell you that in the big scheme of things, the money (80 bucks) won’t be a big deal. But Writ Large Press isn’t Penguin Books and we need to be careful with every bit of resource, which means each dollar spent, each penny.

After the pure joy of having the proof wore off, I noticed an error inside and Kim caught a mistake on the cover. They were truly minor–an extra space on top of one page inside, a missing dash on one of the blurbs on the back cover–but they were mistakes that should have and could have been caught. I can chalk it up to being overextended as a two-person team or say that we’d all just looked at the book too much for too long and had become too close to the material.

But ultimately, what we’re calling it is a lesson, a tripped up baby-step. A reminder that Art, above all things, is not careless.

So other than the monetary loss, everything is go. The corrections are being made, with one last, last look through to check for errors, and we’ll be ready order our first shipment of books to have for the launch at La Cita.

And, after all that, it is truly a beautiful book.

Yesterday, we received the proof copy of Who’s to Say What’s Home from Lightning Source.

We spent a good amount of time going through the pages, checking for errors, and mostly staring at it from all angles. To paraphrase our dear friend Michelle in New York, it is beautiful and perfect. (Okay, there was one slightly misaligned page that we instantly corrected, but still perfect!)

Today I’ve been sitting here, feeling sort of sick with this nasty cold that’s been going around forever. We’d also received a box of books from Amazon yesterday and I thought I’d start on one of them, the new Junot Diaz novel.

But I didn’t. Instead, I’ve been reading through Kim’s book, poems that I feel like I’ve read a thousand times each over the past two years or so of editing. And I am amazed that even now, each poem feels so new, as powerful and original as the first time I held them in my hands.

Next: ordering the first batch of copies and getting the word out to local press!

Wish us luck.