Jaded ibis seattle

Rail: What a thoughtful and revolutionary way to view publishing. Can you extrapolate a bit on how you plan to create more artist participation in your agreements and what aspiring writers might need to consider before sending a manuscript off to Jaded Ibis? DD: We now have a Publishing Agreement Addendum that requires the writer, artist or musician to confirm their understanding of the structure, philosophy and practices of Jaded Ibis.

We want them to dream, dream big, and then let us try to bring their visions to physical and virtual life. Rail: You bring these visions to life in many formats. Each book is published in four editions - e-book, black and white paper, color paper, and fine art limited editions.

Many of your books also have an accompanying music option. Jaded Ibis is also on the cutting edge of technology utilizing many different platforms for publishing. This question is for both Sam and Debra: How did you come about your aesthetic vision and can you speak about some current projects and their various formats? Writer c. The full-color illustrated version of W e was published last year, and the ebook and black-on-cream print editions come out this fall.

Although his print novel contains codes in the margins by which to read the book three different ways, it can be a bit clumsy — lots of flipping back and forth. In the iBook edition, however, the reader just touches the screen to change the narrative version. Also, the iBook contains an interview with c. His novel, Book of Knut: A Novel By Knut Knudson , is a funny and wildly intelligent mixed media story about a mathematician who finds a novel Book of Knut written by her dead lover Knut Knudson and transforms it into an annotated mathematical textbook, complete with homework problems.

I showed him our books — especially the atypical color, dimensions, and formats like The Vicious Red Relic, Love , designed to be a guidebook — and urged him to reshape his color edition by considering every facet of the book as a narrative element. Halvor went back to Indiana and had his way with Knut , so to speak.

The color edition is fantastic! It employs quadrille graph paper for the background image of the pages, and crazy watercolors masking-taped to them. After c. Because his book contains music annotations and real math problems, he will be able to design an iBook as a real textbook, with math quizzes and music audio, video and a host of other tentacles growing from his brilliant mind.

Brain Computer Interface is another technological area that interests me for its unusual literary possibilities. Sam Witt: I have noticed lately that we are getting some fantastic queries from folks who are already matched up with an artist and looking for a publisher working outside the accepted — and expected — business model.

So the word is definitely getting out. Jaded Ibis has always had great books, but it is really starting to heat up now in terms of media attention and artistic reputation. Again, I credit Debra and our artists and authors for that.

I also have to say that the way Debra is bringing traditionally non-literary and technological influences into the mix is really appealing to a lot of people out there, both consumers and creators of literature and cultural capital. I just think there are so many people out there who are sick of the old copies, hit all the libraries, let it go out of print, strictly material-and-ink version of publishing, with all the dull uninspired books that come with it. But now I am being obnoxious.

That must be seriously gratifying. Was it difficult negotiating the process between the artist, and within the world of Apple, and on the e-commerce side? Scott Peterman who programmed the app-novel patiently and expertly guided the process of Jaded Ibis Productions becoming an Apple Developer. When I taught at Kansas City Art Institute, I always did the writing assignments I gave students so I could know how well they worked and how they could be improved.

But part of being a 21st Century publisher is knowing how to work with technology experts who are increasingly the liaison between publisher and writer. When the oversized snow globe arrived for Brief , and then the miniature artist easel, I was as gleeful as a kid opening a new toy. You state on the website that your business decisions are guided by an attempt to perpetuate literature that is intellectually, culturally, and ecologically sustainable.

This must be a difficult and costly though worthy endeavor. How is it working for you as a press and what are some of the benefits and pitfalls of following this policy? SW: I am certainly proud to be a part of a press that has sustainability at the heart of its publishing and distribution network, either through some of the subject matter our poets tackle or via some of our methods; especially the emphasis on electronic books and the other ways the press has been able to reduce our footprint.

I will let Debra speak more about the actual publishing techniques, but the collaborative model — what she calls a publishing mashup — is more than simply a metaphor for such things. I actually think that such a dedication to environmental, cultural and intellectual sustainability has helped us forge an important and appealing identity, as well as lead us to a kind of poetry and fiction that is concerned, thematically and in terms of methods of production, with the whole drive towards sustainability.

I should mention here that we are beginning to advertise and solicit work for an anthology of ecologically engaged poetry based around the question of what poetry means in a transhuman, cyborg world. I think we, as a race and a planet, are entering a radically new age that will be defined by entirely new concerns and urgencies. This is necessarily, I hope, going to produce incredibly new poetry, and we at Jaded Ibis are keen to position ourselves as a primary, relevant and even radically and appropriately new vehicle for such a poetics.

The pitfalls I see are only in not adapting quickly enough to this new world — unless you are referring to the ultimate pitfall of environmental decay, species extinction, the ravages of new pathologies, cities under water, and so on. Yes, we think so, too. But we believe that high art and culture also need to be sustained. And when I talk about energy, I mean everything from electricity lighting warehouses and shredding books, to fuel for shipping trucks, to trees cut down for shipping pallets, to human resources.

Trying to reduce our carbon footprint and sustain ourselves as publishers of new literature has its obstacles, and most of them come from the book review industry. Later, Frances Dinger joined the team as media relations coordinator. Kellen is now responsible for finances and business development. She earned her Arts Leadership degree from Seattle University.

As of , she is the publisher and deputy director of The Believer Magazine. An all-night literary rage full of beer and cigarettes. It is the event for local talent to shine. Readers listen to their favorite local authors in a festive atmosphere.

Venues welcomed the Lit Crawl warmly. Readers and authors came and went all night. Only the precious few absorbed all the fun. The attendees were way above the expected number. They gathered in a huge cluster of readers and authors and enjoyed themselves with drinks and dancing around the city.

Exactly, 58 individuals funded the festival in Though minimal planning was put into the festival, it was a huge success for an amateurish event for writers. Post written by Jeannine Harbinger. Aside from writing about festivals all around the world, her work has taken her to places like Credit Glory and The Atlantic. APRIL offers an excellent opportunity for readers, authors, and publishers to network.

Independent literature has expanded thanks to the internet but it still has its risks. She dedicates a masturbation guide for women including an explicit diagram labeling parts of the female genitalia to "those parents in the Kansas Blue Valley School District who are incapable of intelligently discussing with their teens the topic of masturbation.

Di Blasi also applies this "why not" attitude to Jaded Ibis Press, which started in part because she was tired of hearing about talented writers whose books were rejected from small publishers. I'm stunned that some of these were declined. Jaded Ibis is a response to the atrocious waste of the publishing industry. Di Blasi is disgusted by the long-standing publishing model, in which companies put out a hundred thousand copies of a book that then sells ten thousand copies, leaving the remainders to be shipped back for eventual pulping.

Jaded Ibis's books aren't published until they've been ordered, cutting out the monumental wastefulness—from the miles of felled trees to the toxic ink to the fossil fuels expended in transporting every box of books to and from the publisher—that goes into the production of every book.

Most of the books contain some sort of nonlinguistic visual element; Di Blasi is a strong proponent of the visual arts and holds an open house in her Pioneer Square offices every Art Walk. In addition, every Jaded Ibis book will have a "soundtrack" created by a recording artist as a kind of musical response to the book. Upcoming contributors include DJ Spooky, and the soundtracks will be released in anthologies on a semiregular basis.

Right now, only two Jaded Ibis e-books are available, and current technology has required those to be published in what Di Blasi calls "basic black and white. There's an odor to time. Further, Jaded Ibis will publish a "fine art limited edition" of every book in its catalog. According to the — Jaded Ibis catalog, the fine art edition of Janice Lee's upcoming lyric novel, Daughter , will feature an "autopsy kit containing handcrafted surgical tools and various medical artifacts, including casts of octopi body parts in apothecary bottles" in a wooden box whose secret compartment contains "the novel printed on transparent 'skin' and laid upon a bed of sand.

Yet another book will be etched onto a sturdy disk that is then submerged into a plexiglass box filled with K-Y Jelly, because the author wants the reader to have to stick their hand in something slimy and disgusting before reading the book.

Di Blasi considers the fine art editions to be a political statement that marks the beginning of a rehabilitation process for writing as a product of value. In part, she sees it as a callback to the pre-Gutenberg days, when only the wealthy could own a hand-copied book because the months and weeks of intensive work made them rare objects of desire.

And they only make 7 percent of that [in royalties]? She says this cultural desire to make writing into something cheap or free "perpetuates the belief that there's no value in the arts," which is why local governments are cutting funding for humanities in schools.

You can want it to not be a commodity, but once you say it's not worth anything in a country where everything is valued in terms of money, you're basically biting off your own ass. The Jaded Ibis books that Di Blasi has already published are experimental fictions of very high quality.

David Hoenigman's Burn Your Belongings is a dense narrative of choppy sentences that elude the human desire for story at almost every turn. When read aloud, mantralike, the thick walls of text take on the feel of religious chant, a prayer to weariness and sickness and anxiety.

At other times, they flutter with moments of happiness and love, and feel exponentially more like real life than anything Hemingway or any naturalist ever put to paper. In the margins of each page is a different vibrant color collage by Yasutoshi Yoshida.