Fourteen Thieves & Body Cams Book Release
Poet and Substack veteran X.P. Callahan has reimagined her press, Monday Editions as a “gift-economy micropublisher”, and I am very much honored to be the first of I predict many chapbooks published under that name.
The Fourteen Thieves & Body Cams is a two-part chapbook. The first part is a sonnet crown I began in this newsletter, entitled “the fourteen thieves”, while “body cams” is a collection of 14 original sonnets that have some thematic connection.
You can read the book release post at Monday Editions, and while there you should subscribe for additional updates about new work.
X.P. has done a fantastic job of this, and speaking as the first of many poets, it has been a real joy to see this book materialize. As per Monday Editions business model, I am the distributor of the books, for which I’ve spun up a small website to sell the chapbook. You may purchase a limited edition signed and numbered copy here.
These beautiful books are the reason behind . . .
Opening up paid subscriptions
As of this morning, I’ll be opening this newsletter back up for paid subscriptions. Any paid subscriber will receive a copy of The Fourteen Thieves & Body Cams. To those who have already been paid subscribers, I will be sending a copy to you very soon.
My intention is to begin my own publishing of chapbooks1 that take in the poems published on this site and bring them into focus thematically2, following the model X.P. has set with a micropublishing system. So 100% of the money from subscribers will go to this endeavor, and all paid subscribers will be noted as assisting in the publishing on the copyright page.
“As for Maynard’s poetic voice, it could pass for the mutterings of a pirate marooned in the Chaucer Collection at the British Library, if that pirate’s mental soundscape included a continuous loop of James Joyce’s Ulysses.”
— Waning Gibbous IV, executive editor, Monday Editions
Reading: Monday, June 16th
Lastly, Those of you who will be in Portland, I will be reading at Word Virus Books, 6518 SE Foster Road, at 7:00 PM, and books will be on sale ( all sales go to Word Virus Books ). I’m sharing the time with Bloomsday, since it is also my birthday. This reading will be an act of subversion3, so you should join.
There’s a possibility I might also publish a full-length manuscript, but since I’m stuck on how that gets done, other than deep focus on the project which I have no time for, I’ll be sticking with chapbooks for the foreseeable future.
There is a corner of the Substack world that is obsessed with the idea of “success” in writing, which I like to traipse around in. Material success seems far-fetched, but to understand one’s goals for writing is important. My own goals are to write a quality sonnet every week, and to organize those sonnets into chapbooks given to paid subscribers and sold on my website.
Any act that takes place in the physical world is now an act of subversion, because it is ordinary. It may be that not a single digital file gets uploaded to a server while the reading takes place. What will our robot overlord descendants think?!
A brief rant about what that means in Substackese:
I joined Substack because I liked the model of the newsletter — content that entered my inbox from which I could consume it and perhaps comment back. The first years of Substack brought community with those posts, and I found myself making online friends, something which had never happened to me before. Then Elon Musk brought a toilet and a bad dad joke into Twitter HQ and everybody ran for the hills ( was it a toilet? I forget the joke ). Substack pivoted hard to a sticky micro-content model, and I have a difficult time using their app because I’d rather read posts than I would tweets. I don’t mean to disparage the model, just that it doesn’t work for me.
Of course, when the new model came out, many people ranted like this. That’s why it’s a footnote. It doesn’t deserve much more than that.
I will be using the twitter-pated part of Substack as a way to announce this book and the reading, of course I would. And then I hope to be out in the physical world again, embracing people, coughing on people, falling in love or hate with other carbon creations.
Thanks James. This is the joy and challenge of being a poet at this time with means of production surely and completely in our hands. We are no longer dependent on presses, publications, contests or academic taste makers. A poet can add music or video to poems, create print-on-demand books, and build virtual poetry communities on Zoom. For the first time we are free of the "middle man" between us and our audiences. What's interesting is what we do with this new freedom.