PRISM THREADED BOOKS

a brainstorm, a rough mission statement

PRISM THREADED BOOKS

I wish I had my own small press. It would be called Prism Threaded Books. It would be things I thought were good. It would be my editorial sensibility projected onto the world. I might just publish my friends. And myself. I would like to publish mainly novels. I like poetry a lot but I really admire the density of a well done novel that is also from an interesting real place. My standards would be high, or maybe another way of saying that is the standards would be ones that I would keep close to the chest so that nobody else could decay them from within with their acid saliva.

I can’t really describe what types of books I’d publish because I haven’t seen them yet. A possible example would be Adam Johnson’s Cialis, Verdi, Gin, Jag. Oh, if I could publish that book. I guess, if this makes sense, I would like to publish things that are similar to what you see in this newsletter, but written by someone else. I’d probably publish my own books, partially, but I would most like to see what is out there that is falling through the cracks that somebody like me, with my version and my values, could retrieve. The genre would be literary fiction and weird, not like Weird Tales but just hallucinatory somehow. Psychedelic but monochrome. Kind of funny and mind-bending. Lyrical. A bit druggy. A true, original, granular treatment of mental illness as it really manifests is key. I also have this fascination with artistically valid fiction camouflaged as genre contraptions. Like the junk food genre tricks you into reading it but inside there’s a literary nutritious core.

It would be the kinds of writing I see happening at Misery Tourism and Expat. Fugitives and Futurists. Apocalypse Confidential. It’s hard to explain, if I could point it out. It would be the kinds of things from these places that I think are of high quality, that touch me. It wouldn’t necessarily be transgressive or whatever, it would be dark at times but I want that beautiful color to be at the forefront. Alex Beaumais’ Dox comes to mind. Also anything that seems to resemble Bruce Wagner (although he is very dark, there’s glittering details and refinement in the darkness).

The title Prism Threaded comes from a poem I wrote about my ex-wife, about how with the very very tiny fine hairs on her face in the sunshine, there was a vaporous rainbow effect that you see if you look really close at things in sunlight. The very small reflective surfaces of tiny just barely this side of visible hair on a woman’s face. Or the sunlight hitting my sister’s hair at her old house when we were sitting eating dinner outside and I looked around at the sunlight and gloried in not killing myself because I would have missed the light. I called it “prism-threaded.” Like imagine something or someone using a thread made out of rock or glass that refracted light into a rainbow spectrum. Like a god or a powerful being that could play with substances, minerals, elements, do busy work with its hands to manipulate hard substances. So the title refers to the interaction of minerals and light and threading, manufacturing something, making a product out of minerals and light. Fabrication of elemental garments. The thread binds the material into one shape.

I have no idea how to run a press but I do have some kind of grasp on what kinds of books I think would be good. I don’t know about the business aspect of it at all. Managing money, contacts, production, scheduling, buying ISBNs, marketing and promotion. Web design, graphic design, book design. Anybody doing business with me would need to get that it was a labor of love and just my attempt to curate something that I think it worthwhile into existence. This is just a total fantasy at this point. But I feel like a focus is growing in me, a refraction point if you want to extend the prism metaphor to a dumb degree, a sensibility that could be put into shape. I’m learning about all the writing that is out there. There’s so much that could be sifted for the right size chunks through a sieve that I’m fashioning. The sieve would be spiritual, poetic, somewhat edgy at times, would have elusive but definite values, subtle, not wear its heart on its sleeve. Ideally books would be well-crafted and not hasty Amazon self-published monstrosities. Light is a crucial ingredient and light is a mystery and a necessary condition for sensation through the eyes, optics. Prism Threaded Books would “believe in the light.” I believe that God is like a hidden light that we can’t look at directly but only get from reflection, from surfaces and second hand concatenations, vinyl records spinning with a beam of sunlight hitting them projecting a clock of fire on the wall and you’re really stoned. It’s plaine to all eyes but a secret. I’m not saying this is going to be a religious press or something but it would reflect my own values which are not particularly atheist.

So there’s at least a bit of a vision.

I like the vibe of Gob Pile Press. I think Bram Riddlebarger’s operation has a really cool soft-spoken purity and simplicity and earthiness. A locatedness. It could just be because I loved his novel Golden Rod. If there were a location for Prism Threaded Books it would be the Catskills where I live which is very naturally beautiful, mountainous, yet also inflected with certain concepts and ideals from the proximity of the City. A cerebral, cultural quality. It’s kind of New England but it’s not. It’s Northeast. It’s isolating winters. Whatever. I also like what I’ve seen of 11:11 Press and Inside the Castle although I sense that it can get a little too cerebral or artistically hi falutin and vacuum. I need to read some more of them to catch the flavor. The world probably doesn’t need another small press. And I can’t 100% make the case that there’s some gap in the literary biosphere/matrix that I need to fill in with my light and rock-sewing. It’s just a thought. It might be a quest for control. A gatekeeping fantasy. Me thinking I know better than everybody else what’s good.

I wish I had a lot of money to start a thing like this as a home base.

This is all over the place but it’s just a dream right now.