The Digital Turn

Amatoritsero Ede in Conversation with Marty Gervais

Amatoritsero Ede: You began operations in 1969. In More than 40 years as a literary press you have definitely contributed to the development of Canadian printing. As one of the first presses in Canada, in what concrete ways have you impacted Canadian print production and publishing?

Marty Gervais: First of all, Black Moss Press when it started in the business, we used mimeograph. We had a battered old A.B. Dick Mimeograph which we cranked by hand and put out the first issues of Black Moss Press magazine. This was done in an attic apartment on Dougall Avenue in Windsor. The place was pretty cheap. My wife and I lived there, and I worked in a room overlooking the street. I bought unfinished doors and used those for desk space, and placed them on top of orange crates. The lighting in the place was pretty dismal, and we had no real heat, and so the windows in the winter would frost up, thereby cutting out whatever daylight we might have. But it was fine. I worked most of the night editing and running off copies of the magazine on the mimeograph machine. Later we went into debt, and bought an electric machine from Gestetner and used that printing machine for a few years, putting out some of our first books, including work by Dorothy Livesay, bill bissett and Eugene McNamara.

Despite the limitations of the Gestetner, we made the best of it. We used WEED/FLOWER press as our model. Ball produced some stunning work on a mimeograph and we felt we could do the same. And it really didn’t matter to the poets and writers — they wanted to be published. And we started getting work from writers all over the map. Poems came in from Al Purdy, Milton Acorn, and we got work from Charles Bukowski and Anais Nin and Earle Birney. I am not sure why they were sending this stuff to us, but we gladly accepted it.

A.E.: What kind of printing presses did you start out with, and did you replace them over the years?

M.G.: As mentioned above we started into the mimeograph, but never advanced beyond that. We decided to move the operation to professional printing. We dabbled in it for a bit, but found we were better at doing what we did best — editing, organizing and preparing work for a printer.

A.E.: In order words you adopted the usual division of labour within traditional publishing. To which professional printers did you turn?

M.G.: A little while after we struck an arrangement with Porcupine’s Quill and Tim Inkster to print our books in Erin, Ontario, we began to explore doing our layouts and designs. That’s when we invested heavily into Apple Macintosh. We purchased two Mac Plus machines and copies of QuarkXpress, and started laying out our own books and delivering these to the printer. We were among the first of the small presses to do this. Coach House was well ahead of the game, and it was partly their influence that sent us in that direction. We also began to print with Coach House about this time. We also hired designers. We were pushed in that direction really by Lionel Koffler at Firefly Books, our distributor. We realized we could no longer be the “small press” publisher who relies upon direct sales. We now had to prepare properly for sales meetings with glossy folders and book samples. It took some growing up in the business, but we were excited. We also wound up printing overseas when it came to some of our children’s books. The first of these we printed in Singapore was Scary Poems for Rotten Kids, and that book sold a half million copies. We also printed the kids work of bp Nichol and Ted Plantos and Robert Priest.

A.E.: In other words Black Moss, as the years progressed, confined itself to the editorial side of publishing. What is the relationship between analog and digital techonology in your current operations?

M.G.: Well, we are still producing books, but we do everything digitally. However, that said, we have also started an on-line magazine called OFFSIDE. The magazine is devoted to literary concerns and photography. We started this in January, and have already produced two issues. The world has been opening up to the digital dimension for the past 20 years. We cannot imagine what and how things will be transformed over the next 20. Will there be books? Absolutely. Will there be a need for writers and editors and designers and layout crews? Absolutely. We can’t turn back the clock. And anyone who thinks we can or should, they are living a fantasy.

A.E.: How does your in-house editorial process affect actual printing?

M.G.: The in-house editorial work is essential. We take care in the editing, designing, proofing and all the steps that lead up to the printer’s shop. We are meticulous and we care not just about the look of the book and how it is transformed onto the page, but we care about the language, the writer, the reader, and every person in between. It is a process that requires a deep respect. I think we learned this early on in our history. One of our first poetry editors was Joe Rosenblatt. He had just won the Governor General’s Award, and he took it upon himself to solicit and edit and shape our program. Since then, we have turned to our authors and hire them to edit books individually for us. In each and every case, our titles go through a rigorous editorial process, and part of that includes the harsh reality of cost. We budget for a book, and in some cases we stipulate how many pages we are willing to print.

A.E.: You are a writer yourself. Are there any strains on you in the double roles as writer and publisher? For example, do you subject your work to same assessment process independent of your own personal input before it gets published if BM were to publish it; or do you simply send your own work to other publisher rather than to BM?

M.G.: Every prospective book needs editing – and if I were to publish with Black Moss … and I have on rare occasions. You Tell Me was published a few years ago, but I sent it to our writer, John B. Lee, and he came back with a re-shaped manuscript, offered specific editorial advice, suggested line changes, word changes, even titles that needed reworking. I hunkered down and went through them, and of course, followed them almost to the letter. I respected what he had done, as I would expect other authors to respect the editors I hire. Still, I find myself in an awkward situation because when I send my work to another press to be published, I have no control over the process. I have to respect the decisions of my editors and those who are involved in choosing a cover, or designing the book. I am not always happy about the outcome, but I try to follow the dictum I set down at Black Moss Press. And that is, respect the people handling your book, and have faith in them. Mind you, writing a book is personal, and if someone says to you they love your work, but they don’t like a particular character or the way you painted a scene in a poem or a story, it’s like telling the mother of a newborn that the baby has beautiful eyes, but it’s too bad they were born with such a huge nose.

A.E.: And as a teacher of creative writing and a publisher, do you find yourself being not just the teacher but also a teacher-publisher, combining these roles in the life of an aspiring writer for example?

M.G.: I teach a course in Editing and Publishing, and to the classroom, I bring more than 40 years of blunders. I learned the hard way, and I tell them honestly, you learn from your mistakes, and I hope they make a lot of gaffes in the classroom. I encourage mistakes actually, because such wrong steps will open eyes. As for the creative writing part of it, I push these aspiring writers to embrace a whole new notion of the writing game. I tell them if they are serious about writing, they will treat it like a business. They have to put in office hours. They have to organize their time, set schedules, study the work in magazines and on the shelves of bookstores, and get connected to the real world. They ought to have a decent computer and find out what is happening in the world — join Facebook and Twitter — and be a part of this world. If you live in a shack by the sea, this may be your world, but the writing you do is for everyone. Walk into town. Meet the flesh and blood of your neighbourhood. Open your eyes. Open your ears. Open your heart.

A.E.: Do you ever publish the writers who you teach or have taught?

M.G.: I run a Writing Salon at the University of Windsor, and yes, I have discovered a few writers there, and have published them. I also “mentor” to aspiring writers. Mary Ann Mulhern is an example. She is a former nun who left that calling to become a teacher, and was terribly reluctant to write about her past life in the convent. I pushed her, and encouraged her to turn her poetry loose on that subject. The result was The Red Dress, an amazing revelation of life in the convent. But it is written with distance, and without a trace of bitterness. It states exactly what life was like in the 1950s and 1960s, and leaves it up to the reader to pass judgement. She has since written two other books, the most notable being When Angels Weep, the story of a Catholic priest who victimized 47 young girls. Mulhern is a classic example of what I try to do in my teaching — I mentored to her, and helped bring her work to the public view.

A.E.: I note that BM Authors have reading events outside of Canada - like the one at the Shakespeare & Company Bookstore on the left bank in far away Paris in 2007, and in Kentucky, USA, in the same year. This seems to be a unique kind of promotional strategy by any Canadian small press. Do you have an on-going international reading program for your authors?

M.G.: Yes, we are connected to reading programs in the southern States. We have read in Kentucky, Alabama, California, Ohio, Michigan and we return to France every summer to do readings at the legendary Shakespeare & Co. This is done through the connections I have made in the publishing business, and through the writers I know all over the world.

A.E.: Do you adhere to traditional marketing procedures or combine it with processes such as print-on-demand, CDs, e-books?

M.G.: We have cycled back to old models. When I started 40 years ago, we sold our books at readings, running from store to store, dropping off our latest. Distributors are having a difficult time getting their wares out, and this may be for a whole lot of reasons (the recession, the kindle etc.). But at our readings, and we draw large crowds (up to 300 at any one time), we sell tons of books. That’s the present. Have the work available at the right time. We never miss on that opportunity.

A.E.: What do you think of kindle books? Does this have any attraction for you?

M.G.: I think it’s great. Any way to get people to read is fine. Personally I love sitting with a good book and a mug of hot tea on an early morning, and losing myself in a book. But I also use technology to read newspapers from all over the world. I dip into the writings of columnists in London, England, or San Francisco, or New York or Paris or Frankfurt. I love media, and wake to its possibilities. I think the Kindle opens up our world to literature — it may have grave consequences for “the book” in the traditional sense, but we’re blessed that people still turn to the word.

A.E.: You have said that there will always be books out there and also that the Kindle has significance for the traditional book. What significances in your own thinking?

M.G.: As I say, people want words, and they turn to writing for affirmation. Movies and music and video games are part of the daily diet of our fantasies, but words, but especially books, provide a solid footing on what is real, what is true. There is still a deep respect for a book, and if someone you meet has written a book, there is a respect of a different kind. It’s all bound up in awe, in mystery, in credibility.

A.E.: Recently the Economist magazine (February 25, 2010) touted the new-fangled ‘Expresso Book Machine’ as a technology that will prolong the life of the book. What is your opinion of this, and do you have any plans to incorporate the POD possibilities of the Expresso into your publishing program?

M.G.: We already have turned to POD as a means to getting out reprints. But yes, I can see in the digital age, we will come to the stage where we will launch our books on-line and consumers will be able to hit “print” and the book will be sent to them. This is already happening with some vanity houses. But it can also happen for us, and why shouldn’t it?

A.E.: Thank you very much for taking time off your busy schedule to do this.