Jenna Butler lives in Edmonton. She is the author of three short collections of poetry,
Forcing Bloom,
weather, and
Winter Ballast, in addition to an upcoming full-length collection from NeWest Press,
aphelion. Jenna is also the founding editor of
Rubicon Press, which publishes poetry chapbooks and broadsides.
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There are a lot of very cool chapbook presses out there, Rubicon among them, doing great work. Jenna agreed to answer a few short questions about this labor of love. I urge you to check out the
Rubicon site and look at the great chapbooks she has up for offer.
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- What was the first chapbook that you made? What inspired you to make that first chapbook?
The first chapbook I made under the Rubicon Press name was In the Laughter of Stones: MA Poets. Yvonne Blomer (Rubicon's assistant editor) and I were just completing our MAs together in England, at a university that had a strong international reputation as a creative writing school. But it had never encouraged its poets to create an anthology of their work before; it was expected of the fiction and lifewriting students, but not of the poets. So Yvonne and I created Rubicon and collected the work for that anthology from our classmates. There were 11 of us in the program, selected from around the world, so the first collection was very diverse. We even held our own launch night, which was a really good time, to get that great & varied poetry out there. When we finished our degrees and moved home to Canada, we took Rubicon Press home with us, although we have since held launches in England, and I take books back there with me every year.
- Can you describe what the chapbook/book making process has added/detracted to your own writing?
It's added a lot. I look at the creation of a book, including the writing of it, in a totally different way. In my own writing, I think in great detail of how I want to arrange the manuscript so that all the poems are cohesive and can contribute to a strong overall book design. I also consider possible cover images and visuals, etc, in case a publisher does ask for input. The process has become a completely holistic one. In terms of inspiration as a writer, it's a really wonderful thing to be privileged enough to read other poets' new work every day! You get to see writers at every point of their journeys, from new poets to those who have been creating beautiful works for decades. It's an amazing feeling. It hasn't taken anything away from my own writing except for time. Rubicon blasted off once Yvonne and I came home to Canada, to the point where we receive over a hundred manuscripts from around the world every month. Reading and book design takes a lot of time, especially since the press is run completely on our volunteer time. It's just the two of us, in two different cities, and sometimes the amount of work that goes into the press is staggering. I've had to set limits on when we read manuscripts, just because it could otherwise take 100% of our free time. But I have to say, it's a really wonderful reason to have to cut back...being just too busy!
- What are your current aesthetic concerns, constraints, ideals, goals in creating book art? What are your sources of inspiration?
One of my constant (practical) concerns with book design is that the books must travel well. Because we publish internationally, books need to easily survive shipping to Australia, India, Africa, etc. Sometimes they'll spend weeks, even over a month, in the post. So travel-worthiness is also a factor of our book design; I'm not going to create a chapbook that will be delicate and will fall apart on its way to a book launch in Vienna. Also, I try to keep the books beautifully designed, but low-cost enough that folks from all walks of life can afford them. Often, the poets we work with know an artist or photographer who can donate an image for the book cover. We've been given a lot of beautiful art this way, and it's so neat to see artists from different disciplines become involved in the creation of these little chapbooks. Our mandate is to publish not only great poetry, but to produce the collections that our authors envisaged while working on their manuscripts. We encourage our poets to have a hand in the design process, so this involves a lot of e-mailing back and forth between us and the poets with various layouts and page proofs for approval. This does take a lot of time, but the books really fit what the poets were imagining. Yvonne and I lend the editorial and design eye here, setting up layouts and providing suggestions and cover proofs that will appear to greatest effect. Again, it's that holistic process, seeing the book through from the writing to the final, complete product, and staying as true as we can to the authors' hopes for the way their work will be presented. It's our job as editors and designers to tighten the words and the book layout to generate as cohesive, and as beautiful, a chapbook as we can. Inspiration is found everywhere: poets' words, book designs from both chapbook and trade publishers that we think work really well, paper samples that fire our imaginations, donated artwork or photographs...the list goes on. People also send us their chapbooks just out of the blue, so we get to see a huge selection of what other writers and publishers are producing around the world.
