September Notes

The latest news and notes from those inky fellows at Gaspereau Press, with sundry accounts of their authors’ exploits and their books’ reception out in the wide world.

News & Reviews

Annick MacAskill will read with Arleen Paré in The Living Room Series, Friday. September 9 @ 7 p.m., KFB East, Toronto, one night only. Limited seating. Masks welcome.

K.R. Byggdin interviews Annick MacAskill for the Writer’s Federation of Nova Scotia.

The Winnipeg Free Press reviews Shadow Blight by Annick MacAskill: “MacAskill’s resonant use of image and language in both accounts of grief, the mythical and the modern, establishes a plane on which the stories refract one another. In the first poem, Swimming Upwards, the long vowel sounds of ghost, boat, snow, tomatoes, coral, and hosts gradually shorten until the poem ends ‘one silver week, its arms outstretched —.’ Not only do the vowels close, but the poem ends here, on an em-dash, an uncertain abyss.”

Rob McLennan reviews Third State of Being by Cassidy McFadzean, noting “There is a curious language to her elegy, one that seeks a particular crafted phrase, accumulating line upon self-contained line until the lines begin to narratively collage into a larger shape. She writes her elegy slant against the loss of her mother, attempting to articulate points through the loss and the very notion of scattered, shuffled memory through shuffled language. Each step is both the same and not the same, all of which ends up in that particular spot.”

Fall 2022 Wayzgoose & Gaspereau’s 25th Anniversary

On Saturday, October 22, the Press will hold its annual Wayzgoose & Open House. Not held since 2019 due to the pandemic, this year’s special guests will include Scott Vile, Ascensius Press, Maine, and printer and publisher Keagan Hawthorne of Hardscrabble Press in Sackville, New Brunswick. We’ll also have a gaggle of dangerous poets involved, as usual: Sue Goyette, Sylvia Hamilton, Annick MacAskill, Matt Robinson, Katie Fewster-Yan, and Michael Goodfellow, Bren Simmers and Sean Howard.

Notes From the Shop Floor

I’ll be writing some sort of contribution for each of our Substack newsletters, but I’ll confess that I’m still trying to determine how best to use this space. If you follow our Instagram feed (@gaspereaupress), you’ll know that I mostly use that space to share daily photos (with descriptive, pensive captions) of the manufacturing process here at the press, especially of my own design, letterpress printing, and bindery work. I’ll try not to simply repackage the news-ticker of all that here. Instead, I hope to offer something a bit more expansive, such as notes on various aspects of the work of the press and short essays on subjects such as typography, book design, printing, and publishing in general.

For this issue, however, I wanted to note the return of our annual wayzgoose and open house on October 22, after two pandemic-cancelled years. We’ve been able to stay pretty productive here at the press during the plague, but we accomplished this by essentially closing our doors to the public and minimizing the risk of infection and illness. Being reclusive by nature (I’ve always self-identified as ‘a highly socialized hermit’), I can’t say as I minded this long period of quiet and privacy, and I was somewhat concerned that I might not actually want to resume the hosting of a packed public event like the wayzgoose. But happily, as I started sketching out a plan, the prospect of bringing back the wayzgoose excited me. It will be nice to have the community back in our shop again.

Traditionally, a wayzgoose was a dinner that a master printer held for their workers at the end of August, around St. Bartholomew’s Day. It is thought that the menu for this dinner often included a goose that had been fattened on the leftover stubble grain of harvested fields (‘wase’). In modern times, the word more often describes a general gathering of printers. Sometimes the word refers to the annual meeting of an association of amateur printers. Sometimes it refers to a fair where artists and letterpress printers peddle their wares to the public, such as the long-running wayzgoose in Grimsby, Ontario. Or it might refer to an organized design conference like the one held annually at the Hamilton Wood Type Museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin. There are many kinds of wayzgoose (wayzgeese?).

The Gaspereau Press wayzgoose is neither a fair nor a conference. It’s more of a community open house to which we typically invite a few special out-of-town guests to talk about their work. We also bring in some of our recently published authors. There’s a rough structure to the event, but the actual focus of the day is on connecting these cultural workers with the community. Over the past twenty-some years, our wayzgoose has evolved into a valuable community development tool. Getting people into a room and giving them an opportunity to talk to each other, exposing them to the processes and tools by which books are produced, helps us to nurture a sense of common cause and to strengthen the vital connection between those who make books and those who use them.

This year our inky guests are both good friends. Scott Vile is what I would call a printer’s printer, a friendly, productive, practical printer who has been a fixture in the New England letterpress community since the early 1990s. He studied printing at the Rochester School of Technology and worked a stint at the famous Anthoensen Press in Portland, Maine, before he established the Ascensius Press in 1989. Scott and I commiserate over printerly matters on an almost weekly basis, and it’s a delight to finally get him up here to Kentville for a visit. You can read more about Scott on the Ascensius Press website. Scott will be giving a talk on Saturday morning as well as demonstrating some printing during the afternoon open house.

In recent years I have endeavoured to invite both a seasoned printer and an ‘up-and-comer’ to each wayzgoose, and this year’s fresh face is Keagan Hawthorne of Hardscrabble Press, Sackville, New Brunswick. Keagan and his partner, Lacey, first started collaborating on broadsides back in 2014, and along the way they were helped by printers like Paul W. Nash (Bodleian Library), Jan and Crispin Elsted (Barbarian Press), and Adrian Robertshaw (Introvert Press). The pot moved from simmering to boiling when they relocated to New Brunswick in 2018 and installed a Vandercook proof press in their living room; the books and broadsides started coming more regularly. Gary and I have been doing all we can encourage Keagan and to help deepen his passion for making books. I’m delighted that he’ll be joining us at the wayzgoose this year. You can read about Keagan on the Hardscrabble Press website. Keagan will be giving a talk on Saturday morning as well as demonstrating some printing during the afternoon open house.

At the heart of all this bookmaking is the texts and the people who write the texts. Given the time constraints, we usually invite only a small number of authors to wayzgoose to read from their recent collections. But because it is our 25th anniversary this year, and because so many of our recent books are by writers from the region, we decided to invite eight writers and asked them all to give a microreading of just six or seven minutes each. What better way to celebrate the diversity of voices and styles published by the press? The writers include: Michael Goodfellow, Bren Simmers, Annick MacAskill, Katie Fewster-Yan, Sylvia Hamilton, Sean Howard, Sue Goyette, and Matt Robinson. They will be reading on Saturday evening, followed by a Q&A with Gary and me about 25 years of literary publishing (moderator TBA).

Thanks again for your interest in our work and the writers we publish.

Andrew Steeves