August Notes
A Note About Spring 2022 Releases:
New books are out this spring by Annick MacAskill, Katie Fewster-Yan, Michael Goodfellow and Andrew Steeves.
What people are saying about the poems in Shadow Blight:
“[P]erhaps Shadow Blight is less a collection than a single poem writing out an experience, pulled into and wrapped up as a lyric suite uniquely broken, collected and packed. “—o how beautiful / the poets make our catastrophes—” she writes, to close the poem “Dryope.” And yet, through the grief there is a kind of hope, examining the stories of mythological women and connecting them to her own experience, one that allows for the loss to become less isolating, and less singular.” — Rob McLennan
→Listen to a discussion between Annick MacAskill and Andrew French on the podcast Page Fright.
What people are saying about the poems in Naturalism, an Annotated Bibliography:
“[A] poetry of intense scrutiny at the natural world & at the smallest pieces and tools with which we make & navigate our temporary, mortal spaces in that world. The method is most often fragment yearning toward sentence-hood, the effect is a palpable imperative toward a completeness that never quite erases the brokenness (‘a bruise gone dark’) we all carry variously inside us. These are also love poems to being alive, also reminders that to live responsibly, committedly, is to honor the past, the concrete evidence that others lived—mostly quietly, mostly small—before us.” — Carl Phillips, @pinestereo/Instagram
“[A] descriptive layering of landscape across the connective tissue of his self-described ‘small waterfront acre,’ rippling slowly out from that central, singular focal point of roots, observation and interaction.” — Rob McLennan
Upcoming Readings and Events:
Gaspereau authors Alexander MacLeod, Anna Quon and Elaine McCluskey will be at Afterwords Festival in Halifax, Sept. 24th to Oct. 2nd.
Michael Goodfellow and Christopher Patton will read with Luke Hathaway at KFB in Toronto, August 21st.
Letterpress Books and Broadsides:
Alongside Gaspereau’s trade books, Andrew Steeves is usually at work on short run, limited edition publications that he sets in wood and metal type and prints letterpress. This summer he finished handbinding a little book that excerpts a passage from a 1924 essay by the famed Boston printer D. B. Updike on the subject of mechanical typesetting that he’s entitled Machines vs. Handwork.
He’s also handset, printed and bound an essay of his own called Notes on Printing & Publishing Literary Books, which is available both in paper wrappers and in a small run of cloth-covered hardcovers. This essay sums up much of Gaspereau Press’s philosophy of publishing as well as giving some practical advice to writers.
Andrew’s also working on Halifax poet Matt Robinson’s annual poetry broadside commission, a collaboration that has been ongoing for more than a decade. You can find broadsides from previous years on Matt Robinson’s website.
You will find these and other letterpress projects prominently featured on Gaspereau Press’s Instagram feed with plenty of process photographs and detailed captions.
This summer, Gaspereau Press also released (as a trade book) the second volume in an ongoing bibliography of Andrew’s letterpress projects. Ab Incommodo: An Annotated Checklist of Limited Edition Letterpress-printed Books and Broadsides discusses projects undertaken between 2017 and 2021. Ab incommodo of course translates, roughly, to “out of inconvenience.” The bibliography includes many black and white photos of the works, as well as detailed accounts of their making.
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A Note from the Publisher
We’ve established this Substack (with the help of Michael Goodfellow, who will act as its editor) as a way to keep readers and writers abreast of what’s going on with the press, its authors and their books. Much of the content will be presented from a ‘third person’ perspective and will, in fact, be written by others, but I intend to make frequent contributions to speak directly about the work we are doing here at the press.
August is always a busy time here, and we are hard at work in the shop on the fall releases. I would say that for all the talk of things finally being ‘opened up’ this year, we have experienced more delays and complications in 2022 due to supply chain problems and the general state of fatigue that blankets everything than we ever did during the heart of the pandemic, and this has had an impact on our ability to manage the publication schedule. Many of our books were delivered late or took more time in editorial than we anticipated, and we have had problems sourcing some of our dust jacket papers, but we’re confident that all the scheduled books will be released before the end of the year.
Books to be published in the coming season include new poetry collections from Sue Goyette, Sean Howard, Leesa Dean, and Sylvia Hamilton, and a collection of stories by Lisa Fishman. We also have new non-fiction volumes due out in three different series we have been publishing: Sue Fisher & Margot Stafford’s Beaver Books for a Dime is due out as volume three in the New Brunswick Bibliography Series; Ray Cronin will be adding a book on the Mi’kmaw artist Alan Syliboy as volume seven in the Gaspereau Field Guides to Canadian Artists series; and the long anticipated second volume in Jonathan Fowler and Earl Lockerby’s Diaries of the Acadian Deportations series will tackle the journals of John Winslow.
We’re also planning for the return of our Wayzgoose and open house this fall on Saturday, October 22, so long as the pandemic situation remains manageable. We will have bookbinder Don Taylor (Ontario) and Keagan Hawthorne (Hardscrabble Press, New Brunswick) as our special guests, but we may also add Scott Vile to the roster (Ascensius Press, Maine) since he’s threatening to come and it would be a shame to waste the opportunity to put such seasoned hand to work. We’re also planning to present an evening of readings from a gaggle of Gaspereau writers. Stay tuned for more details in September.
Thanks for your continued interest in Gaspereau Press and its authors. And thanks for subscribing to this Substack.
Andrew Steeves
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