Author: Philip

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Start Small, Make Mistakes

“This tiny size is a good place to start–with a small desk in your living room and a clear idea of what you want to publish.”

Joe Biel, A People’s Guide to Publishing

My desk is a drawing desk from a high school art room. I picked it up on the side of the road about twelve years ago. One corner of its scratched surface taunts, “EAT ME.” Across the way is an inscription honoring “KEN N DAWN,” may their love endure forever. Small desk, check.

The words "Eat me" in all caps, scratched into the wood veneer of a desktop.
A daily provocation from my work surface

And I do have a clear-ish idea of what I want to publish: zine-sized little companions, how-tos for transformation or staying put (or both at the same time). Voices of ministers (broadly defined) who are making space for other voices. For your voice. Clear idea, check.

I want these voices to sound playful, poetic, practical. One thing I’m looking forward to is putting together a publishing program over time: a mosaic of different voices all showing by example that there are a thousand ways for light to shine through us.

Why books, why pamphlets? (A question I keep asking.) Here’s a few more reasons: I’ve been grateful for the conversations I’ve gotten to have with people I’ve never met, people who have died, people someone else made up. Grateful for the serendipity of finding the right words at the right time–that book in the library, or waiting on my shelf, or given to me by a friend passing through town. I’ve been grateful to sketch my reactions in the margins with my own idiosyncratic pencil notation, which somehow still conveys meaning back to me years later.

I want to publish works that are small enough to fit in your pocket, and that open up vast worlds for you to find belonging, adventure, and rest in. That are pleasant to look at but not too nice to scribble in. That facilitate impossible conversations. Onward.

The words "Ken N Dawn" scratched into the desk surface.
Memento of a lost love
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Minimum Viable Pamphlet

Some pamphlets I've folded in various sizes, with various margins, some with French folds, some without. Notes on one of them remind me that I folded three sheets at a time and trimmed the inner vellum by a quarter-inch.
Some pamphlets I’ve made in different shapes and sizes.

I honestly don’t have a great reason why pamphlets, why books. Or not a single, great reason. I just like them. They’re fun to me. I like holding them in my hand and marking them with a pencil, and of course I’m not alone in this.

So yes, I’m exploring publishing, which means the behind-the-scenes stuff: finding authors whose voices I want to help amplify, helping them shape their words into a compelling and useful form, deciding what physical form that will take (and having some other company print it), and connecting that physical thing with people who find it similarly useful and compelling. In short: acquisition, editing, layout, production, and marketing.

At the same time, I’m also exploring bookmaking: folding, scoring, creasing, playing with paper and printers and staplers. Blades and bindings. Fun stuff, physical stuff.

Call it prototyping. I certainly don’t want to make all books by hand that I’m going to publish. One of the fun things about business is scale: making enough of something at once that each thing is affordable. Enough that it can reach a lot of people, be recommended and passed along, gotten as a gift. Enough to spread a little of what seems to be missing sometimes: love, hospitality, playfulness, depth. (Or whatever it is you’re hoping to spread in the world.)

There’s this idea from Lean Startup methodology called Minimum Viable Product (MVP). It’s one step above slapdash, and has to do with putting skin and bones on an idea and seeing how the world interacts with it. Then, it will be time to iterate: change this or that aspect of the product, and send it out into the world again.

That’s part of what this blog is for: to show the process, regardless of the end result. (Where even is the end?) It may be a risky move–should I do all the creative, iterative work in private, and then pretend like the finished product just sprouted up fully formed? I, for one, tend to forget that no creative thing is like that. It’s always a process.

And as someone who values connection over content (and I loooove content), I’m hoping that this ongoing log (web-log, blog) of the process will connect with you, if you are interested in doing something at all similar. Like any creative pursuit, this one (including the learning, trying, failing, iterating, re-doing, learning, etc) is a little terrifying. Destabilizing. Delightful.

Onward.

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Advent 2

A new moon this past Friday, the new church year a week ago. Six months flew by, and it’s time for another blog post. No time like new.

I’m grateful this morning for the livestream of Mother Bethel AME Church in Philadelphia. Pastor Tyler asked us to examine how we value time. It’s more than money, and more finite.

A white and brass clock face with black roman numerals on a brick wall. A black rectangle below the clock contains the inscription, in golden letters: Son, observe the time and fly from evil. Ecc.IV.23
© BrokenSphere / Wikimedia Commons

I think of the clockface and inscription on Old St. Mary’s Cathedral in San Francisco’s Chinatown: “Son, observe the time and fly from evil.” It’s not enough–what are we supposed to fly towards?–but still, a good place to start. Not ignore the time, but observe it. Look how fast it goes. And do something now–not out of desperation or a manufactured urgency, but with a sense of gratitude that anything is possible at all.

As I’ve mentioned on this blog before, I’ve been playing around with publishing little booklets, and eventually not-as-little books. It’s entrepreneurship, design, craftsmanship, decision-making, community building, web developing, and more. It’s a lot of things that a lot of people know about already. But I don’t know as much yet.

I’ve been helped and heartened by the examples of Joe Biel and Elly Blue at Microcosm, and Anne Trubek at Belt. These are publishers who write and talk about what they do in a way that makes me think I could do it, too. That there’s room for more voices in print, and that I can help make that room.

But I realized that these folks write from the perspective of publishers who are publishing. Which is great. Very helpful and inspiring. But I thought it could be fun to be similarly transparent, and much earlier in the business life cycle. So others can see a little more, hopefully, about how one publishing company comes into being.

Observe the time. Six months flew by. What will we make of the next six? Stay tuned…

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Slow Blogging

As months go by, I keep thinking: “Maybe I will post on this blog once a month…once every two months…once every five months….”

…once every six months…

After all, much of the real work is happening underground. If content is meant to mushroom up, what mycelium is nourishing and connecting it?

Where are the examples of slow and methodical rhythms of thought and experience? What liturgies are possible in this virtual world, to turn us back towards the physical, the spiritual?

Back towards each other?

Not that I want to be a god or a hero. Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone.

Czesław Miłosz
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Space for Joy

“The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.”

Audre Lorde

How do I create spaces for joy in my daily life?

How have others–artists, writers, friends, mentors–created spaces for me to experience joy?

How can a book be a place of hospitality?

What joys can I share with people who are different from me, with people who disagree with me?

What space am I asked to make for others?

What space am I called to take up for myself?

How have I experienced joy as a bridge across differences?

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“Take This World, It’s Yours To Grow”

Feel the fear inside your chest,
watch it ebb and flow.
The darkest hour dies at the dawn–
first clearing’s yours to reap and sow.

-“If I Could Talk To A Younger Me,”
Béla Fleck & Abigail Washburn

The banjo plucks that introduce this reflective ditty call me to attention like a meditation bell ringing: time to stop focusing on anything else. Time to focus on this, here, now.

How is it that what comes so naturally, what feels so fun and easy, can feel so difficult? Words collect themselves inside me, like worms in the compost heap of images and experiences. But sometimes what’s actively happening looks almost exactly like nothing. I become impatient, wanting a name for what’s growing.

But impatience pushes playfulness away, and play makes space for what’s alive.

How can we playfully make space for the good things growing in ourselves and in others?

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Little Steps Forward

Shortly after attending the Hudson-Townsend Publishing Institute, I discovered Joe Biel’s book A People’s Guide to Publishing. The founder and CEO of Microcosm Publishing, Biel’s Guide is an approachable introduction to founding a publishing company with both DIY panache and business savvy. It was the summer in the middle of my full-time MBA program, and I was pursuing my writing with a mentor instead of a more standard MBA internship. Biel’s book pointed me toward delight and possibility, toward playful engagement with business tools as movement-building resources.

As I learn to relax into my own voice as a writer, I am also listening for others’ voices to amplify as a publisher. What movement am I called to, what–dare I say–ministry?

Onward.

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Playing with Publishing

A year ago July, I stocked up on cardstock and vellum when the Pat Catan’s craft store in Tiffin, Ohio was having its going-out-of-business sale. In May, I had attended the Hudson-Townsend Publishing Institute at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The whole process of publishing captivated me: from acquiring manuscripts, to editing, design, production, and marketing. As we folded papers together to create our own chapbooks–nothing, really, inconsequential–I felt a spark of delight. This playfulness with the physical form of words; this attention to communication, both through words and through design. Sign me up, I thought. I want to be a publisher. But what does that look like? What does that mean?