Top Culture
The little book that could
My four children and I have started making our gifts for birthdays and Christmas. This is not uncommon; many people make home-made gifts. But my sense is that we, as a culture, are doing so more and more. While my eight-year-old’s motivation is the sheer joy of creating something herself, I also see it as a rejection of the consumer status quo, perhaps the dawn of a whole new sense of exchange and value (or the recurrence of a very old one) and, as a consequence, a change in how we relate as a community.
Sometimes the most innocuous, the simplest, and the least valued things can change the world. In an era when excess and ‘going large’ has been revealed as a house of cards, and ‘business as usual’ has been exposed as unsustainable, our home-made art carries the vision of a new economy.
Art has often had a troubled relationship with the world of moneyed transactions and business savvy. Artists tend not to succeed in terms of income and capital gains. Governments have a difficult time calculating the value of art in our culture; it flies under the radar, appears in diffuse and transitory states, resists being captured in official records of profit and loss.
Literary readings, for example, are almost always gratis. Every reading I have ever organized (about 120 in the past 15 years) has been free of charge. It is not often you get something for nothing in this culture. What—$12 for a movie now? Bottled water! Oxygen in Tokyo! Shell out, buddy! But poetry? Come on in! Northword? Yup, take one!
Many people in and around Prince George have become used to me (and many other local writers) handing out small hand-made books of poetry. These chapbooks come out of a tradition of literary pamphlets that date back centuries (the earliest record being 1553). Traditionally they included all manner of popular texts, such as children’s stories, folk tales, and ballads. Chapbooks allowed authors to distribute their work locally to receive critical feedback and spark debate. Often chapbooks were the only literature found in ordinary homes, other than the Bible and newspapers.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, travelling peddlers, called ‘chapmen’, sold such booklets for next-to-nothing to working-class consumers. These chapmen were often roguish, nomadic figures living on the margins of society. In general, chapbooks were inexpensive publications designed for the poorer literate classes, ready to emulate the reading habits of the aristocracy. They were typically printed on a single sheet of low-quality paper, folded to make eight to twenty-four pages, though some were longer.
The chapbook has had a renaissance over the past 40 years and has taken on many different forms. Many still come in the cheap, easy-to-produce form of a few pieces of paper folded over once and stapled. You can write a few poems, print them up, and have them out on the street within hours of conception. What has also emerged is a tradition of finely constructed chapbooks with careful attention given to paper, fonts, design, and innovative shapes. Chapbooks of this kind are exquisite art objects, a tactile pleasure to pick up and explore.
And, of course, nowadays there are many chap-women as well.
My development as a writer was partly due to a chapbook press I started with a group of fellow undergraduate students at the University of Manitoba. It was called Dog Ear Press and then, after a turnover in the editorial collective, Staccato Press. I remember the first few books we produced had on the back the brazen statement: “Two dollars if you have it, free if you don’t.” The process of making those small books taught me a lot about writing and reading, but also about how art can escape the confines of conventional cultural exchange. We gave the books to people. Gifts.
In Prince George, the longest running and most famous chapbook production has come from Barry McKinnon’s Gorse Press, which has twice won the national bpNichol Chapbook Award. The Barry McKinnon Chapbook Award, now in its fourth year, celebrates the best Northern BC chapbook with a reading and $250 provided by the UNBC Arts Council.
Chapbooks tend to be functional, comfortable, unremarkable: an experience, a moment, a small connection. Above all, a chapbook is a relationship between me and you. Something more personal than what is found in a trade publication, where packaging, marketing and margins all conspire to distance writers from their works and, consequently, from their readers.
Money doesn’t have to enter the equation. This is the new economy. To bring my gift of poetry to your life is an honour above price. An act of wanting to be close. Here—this is for you.
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