Transcript of Nick's remarks from Siberia

The Crumpled Press started as a name that Jordan attached to a collection of his poems. Our mutual friend Alex saw it, and got excited about it, and his enthusiasm tends to be contagious, so pretty soon I was sending e-mails saying 'okay, I'd be really interested in playing an editorial role as long as you guys did all the work on production..." So now Alex is in Liberia, and Jordan and I are in Siberia, so obviously that didn't last. To reassure his fans, Alex is still very much a part of this venture, and we hope to have him back with us this summer.

My contribution to tonight's proceedings is a fictional narrative (and that's been a point of confusion for more than a few readers). I began working on this almost immediately after I finished school in January of 2003… picked it up, put it down... had it more or less finished about a year later. Eventually, after receiving what I liberally interpreted as encouragement from a few people at The Nation, I submitted it to Harper's. And waited. I can't remember how long it took them to reject it, but they did. Next I tried an acquaintance who's a founding editor at a new journal I think is one of the better publications around. After a few months he quite respectfully turned me down. In explaining his reasoning, he wrote that "alas the events of 9/11 haven't retained their freshness… I'm afraid that this ground seems a bit trodden over." About a month later, everyone from the New York Times Book Review to Salon was running headlines about the 9/11 novels, and how apparently enough time had now passed for literature to take its turn with the recent unpleasantness (as opposed to novels simply taking longer to germinate than, say, film). So there went that theory. And it occurred to me that I could continue submitting it, to the New Yorker (which, given its form, I didn't think would pick it up) and, I dunno, Bomb, and then gradually work my way down the list until maybe in a year-and-a-half I'd be lucky enough to get to see it languish in some obscure university literary journal, isolated from any political context and surrounded by Carver or Chekhov knock-offs, or whatever the flavor-of-the-month is out on the literary assembly line in Iowa. Or I could put up—'cause I hate to shut up—and it could be one of the premiere publications of the Crumpled Press... and languish in self-published obscurity. And really, what better to debut with? This was a piece that was on the verge of being crumpled up and thrown away, or at least left to gather dust in the back of my file cabinet. This is precisely the sort of otherwise neglected work Jordan envisioned the Crumpled Press as a home for.

As for the piece itself, I'm not sure I can ever say 'why' I've written something. It's telling that I started writing it almost immediately after I got out of school. I'd been studying and working non-stop from the Fall of 2000 to the Winter of 2002, and I started writing '9 1 1' as soon as I caught my breath. There are a lot of questions the piece tries to struggle with; mostly it's concerned with mourning.

Yesterday evening my friends and I paid a shiva call to an acquaintance whose mother just died. Afterward, a friend and I were talking about the tradition, considering whether the inevitable emptiness and loss that follow death would feel more profound afterwards than before all those people were there. This piece is about what happens when everyone goes home. When the 24 hour news cycle moves on. It's an effort to restore a voice that I thought had been long since drowned out, that the political struggles of the last few years haven't had time for, that would otherwise be crumpled and disposed of.

So what is the Crumpled Press? Alex, Jordan, and I have gone back and forth over the need for a manifesto, or at least a statement of purpose. The more we do so, the less convinced I am that we—or you—need it. It could be a manifesto against manifestos, against the sweeping condemnations and excommunications and firing upon one's own side that inevitably characterize such literary pissing matches. Whether in questions of theory or literary style, I've never thought there was one ultimate right answer or approach. Styles and theories are useful for what they draw your attention to, the questions they ask and answers they suggest.

So in that spirit, the Crumpled Press will offer fiction, non-fiction, poetry, theory of all disciplines… whatever crosses our desks. Writing that would otherwise be crumpled up and bound for the garbage.

Nevertheless, a few thoughts about the state of things: in 2000, Cambridge UP published 2,376 new books. Oxford, for their part, cranked out 2,250. I find it hard to believe, but the same source states that "the total output of all university presses in 2000 was 31 million books." Academia faces a crisis of overproduction, and the interweb isn't helping. Every week brings a new list of blogs you can't live without: political blogs, Democratic blogs, Progressive Democratic blogs, Working Families blogs… Lit blogs, international lit blogs… NYC blogs, Brooklyn blogs, Williamsburg blogs, Myrtle Avenue blogs… it's a little like living after the fall of Babylon, this infinite fragmentation of the discourse. The potential for schism and division seems endless... fertile, perhaps, but overwhelming, and the new means of literary production remain firmly in the hands of the upper class. The signal-to-noise ratio has swollen past all proportion.

Meanwhile, fictional literary production isn't faring much better. Each year brings stories of some new precipitous drop in readership. And poetry's off the commercial radar entirely (granted, the problem is not that poetry doesn't sell but that it can no longer reach a mass audience). Both fiction and poetry are subject to what Jordan refers to as the "pageant system." Writers audition continuously, show a little skin, flash a smile, and gradually try to work their way from small publications to the winner's circle. Along the way, a certain conformity is enforced.

Not that the Crumpled Press is entirely immune to this logic: this is to be naked self-promotion of the most modest sort.

So: we're staging a tactical retreat. Regressing to an earlier, artisanial mode of production. We embrace our weaknesses as our strengths. We offer you these limited editions, or perhaps more appropriately—as Jordan and I have joked—editions of limited means. Each one hand-bound and individually crafted with the most easily accessible laser printers.

Publishing at this scale forces you—well, me anyway—to consider: why bother? It recalls the medieval relation between patron and producer, in which books were commissioned and produced on a more or less individual basis. The Crumpled Press aspires to be a community of readers and writers. We hope that you'll join us.

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