SMALL PRESS

XOXOX Press is a focused little enterprise, for which a primary goal is matching writers with readers. Despite book industry news to the contrary, there are lots of us out there. But, with the conglomeration of mainline publishing, we're harder to measure now—because we don't just read what the conglomerates push at us, and we don't just buy books through their chains. We also buy from places like this—thus culturally locating what the big orgs can't/won't/don't publish.

Bright, unique little books like these are native soil for many of our very best writers—down through the years, it's surely true. The choice to publish with a person or people—a small press, a university press—versus a larger, more dense organization, is one that some very good writers are making. Good readers, likewise.

Small press publishing has a long and fascinating place in American letters. From Walt Whitman self-publishing tender copies of Leaves of Grass in Brooklyn, to the early moderns and their little magazines, to John Laughlin's New Directions, bringing modernist writing to America and deepening the postmodern American response, to Bob Creeley's Divers Press work on Mallorca, to John Martin's simple and elegant Black Sparrow editions, small press has served to bring the larger publishing world up to speed by finding new writers and deep readers. Never more vital than today, when publishing is dominated by corporate arms of large media conglomerates linked to chain bookstores, small press has a place now, as before, for writers and readers who walk the edges of the new. Now as before, it's a rewarding route.

XOXOX Press connects a literal web of literary interests and pursuits. We aim to serve, bringing writers forth into book form for those who still, and always will, value the simple, complex, useful nature of bound pages. And in that effort, compounded by the Web, we join with others doing likewise—getting their work done and getting it out there for the world to have and hold. We're gratified you've joined us here at the working margins of contemporary culture.

A BIT OF XOXOX HISTORY

I first published under the Watusi imprint after producing two poetry titles in 1991, Ralph Fletcher's Water Planet & Tom Fletcher's Falling Thru the Earth, under their own marks. Watusi debuted later that year with more poetry—most notably Mike Newell's Aestivation and Gus Franza's Querdenker's World (both still in print, but just barely). Bill Munch's Homeless Mind, likewise.

I was living on Long Island at the time, doing the daily deadly commute, looking for an out. Found it in a small Ohio college town where I came to matriculate (and finally finish a degree) in 1994. I graduated from Kenyon College in '96, and stayed to do this small press work, along with my usual full-time job in tech writing and web development, nine years now with AT&T Labs. In all the sadness of seeing hundreds, thousands of colleagues lose their jobs in the past two years —a great American company culture dissolving away—XOXOX has been a ray of hopeful light. Many rays, actually. Each techie colleague lost yields to a new one— a writer, an illustrator, a bright designer—joining in this unlikely enterprise of small press publishing. XOXOX is revving up to publish a bunch of great little books in 2004, and more in 2005. Sweet—writ and well-made. Affordable. Packed with delights from new writers and some old pros.

AS FOR SUBMISSIONS

Due to our small scale, we're limited in our ability to read blind submissions. Best to communicate with blessed brevity thru this site, and we'll do our level best to keep up, being as responsive as all other work allows. Check out our Distractions page (Huh?) for some short, sharp Web writing—we will soon welcome submissions there.

2006 Titles

The Essential College by Bruce Haywood
A former Dean and Provost of Kenyon College looks back on his years there as a way of looking forward-finding value in the original tenets of a broad and deep liberal arts education, and proposing recovery of that approach to undergraduate education. Haywood laments a loss of focus in America's small colleges, but also finds hopeful counter-trends emerging. "At once an affectionate memoir, an eloquent sermon, and an incisive lament… for the enterprise of liberal education." Dan Laskin

Ecology of Being by Peter White
Search, struggle and redemption are realized with searing honesty in this guidebook to life and consciousness. The vice-chairman of a large New York bank who served with Leon Jaworski as a young attorney and went on to a brilliant career in law, banking and wealth management, Peter White offers life lessons and guidance to those who attain career success but experience emptiness in place of expected satisfaction. Radical introspection, prayer, meditation, service to others and self are his ingredients for a deeper realization of wealth, of power over good choices, and of life's true richness.

Flowering Bruno, A Dography by Charlene Fix
Bruno was a mutt pup found in a box on a church step in 1992. He lived his life among a loving family of humans, mothered by the poet Charlene Fix. She documented his life and their relationship in these 64 remarkable poems, accompanied here by 68 luscious illustrations from Susan Josephson. Bruno grew to a seventy-pound Elkhound-Keeshond mix, and traced his way into Charlene's heart in these poems. In them, one finds uniquely perceptive views of dogdom and of humanity among dogs. With book design by Madeleine Fix and a cover photo of Bruno (with flowers) by Sonya Fix, Flowering Bruno is a family tribute to a beloved four-legged friend—"a cherished companion, teacher and muse."

Both poet and illustrator are professors at Columbus College of Art and Design in downtown Columbus, Ohio. Charlene teaches English and Susan philosophy.

To Be a Man: Johnnie Wilson, Jr. by Susan Gluck Rothenberg
This new edition of a powerful oral history presents life wisdom in the words of a black man from the deep south who made his way in the world. An orphaned son who became a Negro Leagues ballplayer, a longshoreman and a landlord—from rural Louisiana to Galveston to San Francisco—Johnnie Wilson traces a life story that is articulate, colorful and rich with detail. His was a life worth living, and worth telling. Susan Rothenberg adds her story of finding Johnny, hearing his life, and turning it into this vivid document of time, place and substance. Together, their voices bring us a life lived fully and with care by a man who survived treachery and rose above it—well above it. "Johnnie Wilson's oral history, lovingly assembled by Susan Rothenberg, provides windows into large segments of American life seldom so carefully recaptured: rural black America, baseball, the waterfront and, above all, family life in the early twentieth century. Wilson was an "ordinary" citizen whose story I found simply extraordinary." Fay Vincent, former commissioner of Major League Baseball.

Shiraz by Robert Hamburger In this novel by the author of All The Lonely People, A Passage Through India, Two Rooms and A Stranger in the House, a group of young Americans explore Iran in the late 1970's and witness the early disintegration of the Pahlavi dynasty and the rule of the Shah. In the days leading up to the taking of American hostages held for 444 days, these Americans come to grasp the implications of their own inattentive involvement and that of their precedents. They learn that the road to hell is often paved with the best of intentions, shaded by dark motives and bordered with elaborate misunderstandings. The sense of "stranger in strange land" is beautfully crafted by the author, whose story moves with the pace of a thriller.

But That Didn't Happen to You by Harry Marten
By turns heartwarming and sharply funny, this memoir-on-memoir explores the comic implications of telling one's life, of trusting story over memory, and of a family finding its place in America. Full of rich detail and well-wrought scenes and characters, this unique book looks inward and outward to find essential flavors in living, remembering, imagining and telling—the inventive acts that create what we know and share as reality—" family facts and fictions that speak of making peace with trouble, both ordinary and extraordinary, that recall identities lost and found in foreign and familiar places, that suggest ways of finding a path from Russia to America, from downtown to uptown, from generation to generation."

2005 Titles

Final Exam by P.F. Kluge
Fred Kluge's latest novel is a gifted fictional cousin to his nonfiction Alma Mater, a portrait of life at Kenyon College in the early 1990's. Teaching now at Kenyon, Kluge has crafted an engaging present-day murder mystery against the backdrop of this "new Ivy" liberal arts college founded in rural Ohio in 1824. Final Exam gives us town and gown in ways we've never seen—deep human roots entwining in an alternate subterranean reality, the underside of a small place with a history. Parting the curtains and polite politics of a beautiful campus, Kluge paints a vivid picture of human legacies with legs, of the long reach of gone men, and of a diabolical desire to kill a campus.

The Events at Vista Bay by August Franza
This novel takes the form of a fictional journal of one Roy Turner, recently retired from teaching and looking to sit at an easel and paint his world. Roy's daydreams of contemplative watercolor are broken by the intrusive realities of life at Vista Bay, an upscale retirement community that imagines itself beseiged by the surrounding, younger and poorer communities. The "Vista Babies" organize themselves into a standing defensive army, and in the midst of this class and generational warfare, Roy grapples with a nudist decorator and a wayfaring beauty from way out west on the way to recreating his life and love of same.

2004 Titles

Fielding Dawson's first posthumous collection reaffirms his endurance, starting as it does with an old chestnut, venturing then as Fielding always went, as he liked to go, "A man who almost never blinked, it seemed." (Russell Banks, in Brick.) Having published a 2001 collection with Fielding, I was looking forward to the focused rage of birthing another one—his excited calls and outside-the-envelope notations, always urgent. He pushed hard onward, and you had to push him back sometimes, just not so hard as to really hurt—as if knowing what would hurt was really possible. Not always. But we got along well, somehow, and I learned a lot from Fielding, and he took some satisfaction, I do believe, in what we got done. Susan Maldovan helped make things possible for us then, as she does, now with the whole load, and a fine grace.

Loranne Temple's short stories are incredibly sharp and tender, told with courage and a clear sense of human witness, and sure skill. If you ever get the chance, you should hear Loranne perform her work. Ask her to read Doozy. She will put you in a trance, guaranteed.

Susan Rothenberg followed a thread of casual human connections to the kitchen table of Johnnie Wilson, Jr., who had some stories to tell. One story, his own, he told with remarkable skill, shaping an arc of life-long good fortune (self-made) following murder and awesome childhood misfortune. Susan listened, recorded, transcribed, researched, interviewed and wrote, producing a wonderfully true and effective article of oral history.

Ed Schiebel began recording his barnyard, early mornings in early summer, just to see what he'd get. He could hear it all from the house, of course, and he'd noticed subtle and dramatic variations in each morning's chorus of birds, animals, trees and weather. After a number of tries he captured this, the rise of morning at Littlewood Farm—74 minutes of daybreak in rural Ohio, old as new, bright as day, a great background for anyone's morning, anywhere.

Patrick Meanor began writing The Wrath of Grapes near thirty years ago, locating his senses of humor intact, even during struggle. It's all struggle, I think Patrick would say, but he'd say it smiling. You'll find here a raft of things to consume after over-consuming—music, films, books and television as well as food. See if it doesn't ameliorate what ails you, whether by liquid or vapor.

Peter Rutkoff's father died when Peter was only seven, so the memories are faint. In 1949, Harry Rutkoff succumbed to wartime wounds, having been machine-gunned on a battle field in France five years before. Peter's yearning was always for his father's voice—as he says in his intro, he could never quite bring back the timbre of it, the sense of a soul there, speaking to him. But with his father's wartime stories, found years later, Peter had more to go on. They are a thread of Harry's experience and attentions, as slender as life can be. And in correspondence here is Peter's own story, rich remembrances of young eyes,finding the father that life would bring him.