Putting It Together: DIY Chapbooks

 

About once a year, I try to make my own chapbook. I have a halfway decent printer, although I still mourn my old HP, which served me well for ten years. The new HP requires an internet account with HP, and like all so-called updates, has added unnecessary steps to accomplish what should be simple tasks. I don’t buy that “improvements behind the scenes” crap either. Built-in obsolescence at its finest. But I’ve figured it out pretty much, and as soon as that color ink cartridge arrives (cheapest at Amazon, though I’ve minimized my purchases there) I’ll be ready to go.

There are programs out there to make my life easier when it comes to doing layouts, but I fumble through it pretty much manually. Last of the great eye ballers, I should write down more of my method while I’m doing it, but no. That would be no challenge! The layout is horizontal, and I create two columns. I fool with the margins and gutter, whatever that is, and print up a lot of test pages before going into full production. Hence, my press runs are quite small. I just don’t have the patience to create 500 copies of a 20-page chapbook. And actually, thank goodness it is a chapbook, because I still haven’t figured out how to number the pages. With a work this brief, it’s unnecessary, truly.

I do have fun with the cover, and that’s one of the big attractions for me to do it myself. The illusion of total control. I’ve been dabbling in collage and other visual expressions, but they’re really not clicking for me. With this chapbook, I’ve defaulted to a simple design that has served me for several volumes: white cover, black title and author lines in various fonts, and a photo added from my phone or elsewhere. I feel like I cheated a little with this one, since although the poems are from a monthly series I did in 2015, the photo dates from a year or two later. It’s cropped from a larger image, and was taken in the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. It seems to suit the mood, and grab the eye.

I’ll have the place to myself this weekend, so we’ll see where all the daily chores of living a decent human life fall on the list. I may just focus on this, and give myself something new to offer on April 30^th, when I take part in a Poetry Month marathon at the Woodstock Library. In person. Real people. I can hardly wrap my head around it.

The After-Times: Poetry During a Pandemic, and Maybe Beyond

 

When COVID-19 was recognized as a threat to an unvaccinated population back in March, 2020, my employer, a seasonal retreat center gearing up for another round of workshops, sent the staff home for about two weeks, to be on the safe side. My Beloved and I picked up a bottle of minty hand sanitizer at the Dollar Store for safety’s sake. Two weeks soon became five months, and I was finally furloughed at the beginning of August, after working remotely. I'd watched the call volume drop sharply as the season’s opening was pushed further and further out, then finally cancelled. 

 

 While some writers thrive under pressure, I am not one of them. I had my freelancing experience back in the mid-2000s, when I’d saved up a few bucks from a miserable gig at Cosmodemonic Communications. I got by well enough, but it wasn’t the time to begin a freelance career. I’ve come to learn I need the security of a 9 to 5 to free myself up enough to be creative. It does cut into my time to do so, but it’s the only way for me. 

 

 After I was furloughed, I panicked. I tried to continue my routine- short walk at 12:00 noon, my own low impact version of yoga in the morning. Despite adequate unemployment support, I still worried I’d be out on the street in a heartbeat. A friend offered me some job coaching time, which I needed for sanity’s sake as well as to bring my own employment worthiness up to snuff. It turned out I was a far more marketable commodity than I thought. I picked up a couple of unpleasant gigs over the months, and with every new set of tasks, every new computer program, I realized that I actually missed my retreat center work. 

 

 I was called back in March of 2021, a year after this unimaginable era had begun. Again I worked from home until the beginning of July, when those of us remaining on the payroll (about half as many folks as before) reconvened on campus to birth this ‘bridge’ season. Half as many classes and participants. All must be vaccinated. Incredibly, there was kickback about this, from staff and guests alike. I gained a private office, so many had been let go. I work better and harder, and get to crank WQXR between calls. I go home exhausted. I sleep in fits and starts. I worry about the second round of the virus. 

 

 I spent a good deal of time while working from home organizing files, discarding that which no longer thrills me. I began a project to scan my old newspaper clippings onto a flash drive, which will itself probably be obsolete in a few years. I finalized my Ziegfeld poems, and sent strong query letters to a dozen college presses. I compiled a chapbook of fairly recent poems, and almost printed it before I spilled a cup of coffee on my old laptop on Memorial Day. I could reconstruct the work, much of which was backed up onto a flash drive of its own. It was the harsh reality of how dependent I was on technology to practice my art that seemed to shake me so. 

 

 In the last year I’ve had to replace both the computer and the printer. The printer in particular is the latest version of my old reliable HP, but a shittier design and now with a Wifi mind of its own. The madness between us never ends, and it has come close to ending up in the street several times. The chapbook remains unpublished. I am stymied about the cover art, usually my favorite part of the home printing process. A so-called arts festival I’d planned to sell at turned out to be a scam, and live readings are still few and far between. I let go the rush, and settled into civilian life for a while. 

 

 I’ve been writing a monthly column for Albany Poets (albanypoets.com) in the last few months, and my last piece talked about the possibility of retiring from the Poetry Life. It’s still a tempting notion. I felt I had nothing left to say, and that few others had much to say to me. Even the silly tricks of erasure and freewriting produced nothing to jog a poem from my noggin. My routine, especially without regular readings in the flesh, provided little stimulation for the arts. I gained back the 20 pounds I’d managed to carve from my frame as quickly as it had come off. A monthly group of poet friends continue to Zoom, and I’ve always managed to scrape up something to share, but I never felt the need to produce much more. 

 

 I had no regrets. I’m happy with what I’ve written so far. If I was to pass away tomorrow, there would be files and clippings to keep my loved ones occupied until grief exhausted itself. But one occurrence did inspire me again, an odd one. I am in the habit of googling exes, as so many of us are. I determined that one of mine had passed in March, of what I could not tell. It was the most bare bones obituary I’d ever seen, and sad for someone who’d been so interested in so much around him, and himself. As my Beloved pointed out, there was no one left to write his story. I wasn’t grief-stricken myself. Too much time had passed, and it had been a good break for me. But the idea of no obituary must have finally touched on a poetry nerve. I wrote a poem, one that I’m pretty happy with. I’ll run it by the Zoom group next week to see if it can stand on its own, without a knowledge of intimate history behind it. And maybe it will see the light of day sometime.  

 

 

Online or In Hand?

I used to be tremendously prejudiced against online literary magazines, likening them abstractly to online dating services. In the early days, websites were awkward, intermittently updated, and just not "real" to me. I was a strict traditionalist, and continued to submit to publications that only published "real" magazines, on paper or, in the case of Home Planet News, newsprint.

Truthfully, I still have a hard time sitting down and reading a whole "issue" of an online 'zine, but my harsh opinion of them seems to have softened a bit. As the technology becomes more user friendly, the looks of them has improved, and if I had a tablet, I might even be tempted to crawl into bed with a couple one night, Roommate be damned.

I am certainly aware of the tremendous start-up and maintenance costs of keeping a literary magazine afloat. There is still something about the feel of paper in the hand, the seductive variety of papers hanging in the art supply store, that inspires me to bang together a homemade chapbook every year or so. But that’s not for profit. That’s not even with an expectation that I’ll break even when the cost of supplies and labor is figured in. It’s art. It’s an expression, made all the easier by my handy dandy HP printer.  

I suppose the Web is here to stay. I might as well make myself comfortable. Look up a few attractive candidates. Reminisce about the old days, when it took more than pressing a few buttons to send your poems out for the world’s consideration. On the other hand, isn’t it nice to get an email response in just a few days, yay or nay, rather than a few months?