Bruce McPherson and Allan Kornblum go way back. Both were early pioneers in the small press movement of the 1970s, McPherson coming of age in the heady literary scene surrounding Brown University and Kornblum taking the path of the artisan—studying with the letterpress legend Harry Duncan in Iowa City and beginning as more of a printer than a publisher. Both young men chose offbeat names for their early publishing operations—Treacle, in McPherson's case, Toothpaste Press in Kornblum's—names that reflected the fact that small press publishing at the time was, if not countercultural, at least irreverent. But the one thing that has identified small press publishing ever since—and increasingly in contrast to commercial publishing—is commitment to authors. Two weeks ago those commitments—McPherson's to the work of the first writer he ever published, Jaimy Gordon, and Kornblum's to the writer he discovered in the 1980s and has published ever since, Karen Tei Yamashita—were rewarded by nominations for both writers for the National Book Award in fiction.
Forty Years of Friendship
McPherson and Gordon met in a poetry class as undergrads at Brown in 1970. By the time McPherson graduated in 1973 and landed a job in Providence, he had been following Gordon's quest to find a publisher for the novel she had written. McPherson says, "It became clear to me that Jaimy'd never convince a commercial house to issue a wildly comic Menippean satire whose setting was a universe fleetingly tangential to our own," so he decided to publish Shamp of the City-Solo as, he says, "a one-off." But McPherson was interested, too, in "dazzling at least a small corner of the small press world," which at the time was awash in poetry chapbooks, mimeography, and hand-stitched microeditions. There were few, if any, small presses publishing full-length novels. And it did dazzle—a little—at the time. But while the likes of Len Fulton's Small Press Review took admiring notice, the story of Hughbury Shamp, a reluctant prepubescent who becomes a student of three "masters" at the West Poolesville Depot on the Sumpsky Prospect, across the River Sump from Big Yolk—the city-solo of the title—was "excoriated" elsewhere, McPherson says. And his (and Gordon's) hope that the "White Knight Publishing Corp." would come along and buy reprint rights never materialized. In the years since, Shamp's reputation has certainly grown—Allen Peacock in the Boston Globe called it "one of the most beautiful novels in the language," and Gordon's comic gifts and inventiveness have been compared to Flann O'Brien and Angela Carter. And thanks to the Shamp, not only was a writer launched but a publishing house as well.
McPherson continued to publish books—concentrating on fiction and art criticism. In the early 1980s, he consulted his own three "masters"—publishing scholar Leonard Shatzkin, New York Times Book Review editor Mitchel Levitas, and PW's editor-in-chief John Baker—and sought their advice on "enlarging my reception as a publisher." He found that he was taken seriously under the press's more grown-up name, McPherson & Co.
Gordon, meanwhile, embarked on a career of teaching and novel writing. Her second novel, She Drove Without Stopping, was published by Algonquin in 1990, but went out of print. McPherson came to the rescue and reprinted it in 1993. Her third novel, Bogeywoman, was published by Sun & Moon in 1999, to some acclaim, but was never reprinted.
"Sadly," says McPherson, who has remained a close friend of Gordon's for 40 years, "although Jaimy is one of the most gifted writers of her generation, there are rather lengthy hiatuses between her books." Indeed, The Lord of Misrule —a Runyonesque tale set at a West Virginia racetrack—was stalled for years, until this summer, when McPherson sent Gordon a sample galley from an unrevised draft and said he wanted to publish it in time for NBA consideration. "Bruce said he had a hunch it could be a contender," says Gordon by phone from Kalamazoo, where she is teaching at Western Michigan University. "He had only certainties. I had only uncertainties. But when I saw the galley, to my amazement, I really liked it."
The nomination upped McPherson's print run from 2,000 to 8,000 overnight. And Gordon found an agent in Bill Clegg. When asked by phone how long he has been Gordon's agent, Clegg deadpans: "Five minutes." But he's been a fan of her work for years, since reading Bogeywoman, "which I loved." Two of his other clients, Salvatore Scibona and Bonnie Jo Campbell, had already urged him to consider representing Gordon, so when she called the very day of the nomination, Clegg said yes.
"Right now," says Clegg, "my number one task is reading through some of Jaimy's new work and working on behalf of Bruce to sell reprint rights."
'How'd I Get So Lucky?'
While at the University of Iowa in the 1970s, Allan Kornblum published seven issues of Toothpaste magazine, featuring literary work from the likes of Anselm Hollo, Alan Davies, and Ted Berrigan. He printed chapbooks and broadsides and settled on publishing as a career. When he and his wife, Cinda, decided to move to the Twin Cities area in 1983, they closed down Toothpaste and rechristened the operation Coffee House Press. They hit the St. Paul/Minneapolis area at the right moment. "At that time, one of our distributors, Bookslinger, began to evolve into Consortium, which was a slightly different animal from the original small press distributors, accepting only a small group of publishers that had achieved a certain degree of professionalism." Among those first client presses, along with Coffee House, were Graywolf, Milkweed, Copper Canyon—the cream of the small publisher crop then and now. Kornblum developed a list steeped in St. Mark's school and Naropa poetics (Joe Brainard, Anne Waldman, e.g.), along with an adventurous collection of writers living in America but writing about their immigrant experience, including Frank Chin. When, in 1989, he received a first chapter and query letter from a Japanese-American woman working as a secretary at a public television station in California, "from the first paragraph I knew I was looking at the work of a remarkable talent." When he got the entire manuscript from Karen Tei Yamashita, he read it aloud to Cinda on a car trip back to visit relatives in Iowa City. "I couldn't believe I had a novel that exciting sitting on my lap in manuscript. How did I get so lucky?"
That work, Through the Arc of the Rainforest, began an association that has lasted more than a quarter century and seen the publication of four more novels from Tei Yamashita—Brazil-Maru, Tropic of Orange, Circle K Cycle, and the NBA-nominated I Hotel, which has been welcomed with starred reviews in both PW and Kirkus.
Just as McPherson and Gordon have benefited from a close personal connection, Kornblum and Tei Yamashita have as well, if a bit more improbably. As Kornblum describes it, "Karen's grandparents immigrated from Japan, while mine immigrated from Eastern Europe. She's only two years younger than I am, so we heard the same songs, took the same drugs, and protested against the Vietnam war. In a way, I think of her as a younger sister. So it's difficult to separate the personal from the professional in this instance. And in many ways, that's not atypical of my other relationships with our authors. We want our authors to keep coming back to Coffee House."
In I Hotel, Tei Yamashita strings together a complete portrait of San Francisco's Asian-American community in the late 1960s and early '70s, setting 10 novella-like stories in a Kearny Street hotel. According to the PW review, "Despite its experimental and fictionalized nature, the novel reads more like a patchwork oral history.... this powerful, deeply felt, and impeccably researched fiction is irresistibly evocative and overwhelming in every sense."
The roots of the tale, says the author by phone from UC Santa Cruz, where she teaches creative writing, "have to do with politics and the legacy of civil rights struggle, but the narrative technique probably has to do with teaching Asian-American literature and thinking and reading it." Tei Yamashita says she was inspired by the Filipino-American writer Jessica Hagedorn as well as by the poet Al Robles, also Filipino, who actually was a tenant in the I Hotel. "Al was a community activist and wonderful poet; he saved the hotel from demolition. He was very important to this book. Some people may recognize him in it. Sadly, he died last year."
This is not Coffee House's first NBA nomination. Two years ago, Patricia Smith's The Blood Dazzler was a finalist in poetry. Kornblum jokes that he rented a tux then, but now his wife is urging him to buy one—"letting the literary gods know we expect to be back." And why not? Coffee House, whose annual budget has grown from $40,000 in 1985 to this year's $1.2 million, is on very firm ground. "Each time we grow," says Kornblum, "I wonder whether our next challenge will be to sustain that growth, or to build on it. In recent years our sales have been growing, despite the sagging fortunes of the publishing and bookselling industries. I believe this nomination will help us keep building."
On November 17, Kornblum and McPherson–who used to see each other once a year at the annual small press book fair in New York—will greet each other at Cipriani's on Wall Street at the National Book Awards ceremony. "Whatever happens," says Kornblum, "we are thrilled for our author, for Coffee House, for McPherson & Company, for Copper Canyon Press, which has a poetry finalist. This is recognition of the contribution that the top small presses are making to the literary community."
