So if I were a
cow thinking back on my small press loves, on my bovine small press influences,
if I were a squirrel. What if I were a rock. Or better yet, a staple, a
colophon, or a second year music student at York University in 1985. I was one
or more of those things and I encountered Stuart Ross on a bus heading back to
Wilson station. I was 21 and I recognized this bearded guy as the publisher of
Proper Tales Press. He seemed so impossibly cool, countercultural, and urbane.
He’s at least still two of those things now. And has the wisdom of
perseverance, a steady and indefatigueable belief in speaking to the dominant
culture from his own particular perspective, of mentorship and of honouring his
influences, enthusiasm and inspirations.
Soon
after, I met him on the bus, I brought my own tiny publications down to Meet
the Presses, a monthly small press get-together, bookfair and reading that
Stuart and Nicholas Power organized at the Scadding Court Community Centre and
I became part of this Toronto small press community which included Stuart,
Nick, Lillian Necakov, jwcurry, Karl Jirgens, Mark Laba, Kevin Connolly and
others. It entirely changed my creative life. My life in general.
Once
there was baptism in the public pool, a bunch of people up to their armpits in
the water, formally dressed and then dunked. That strangeness, surrealism,
community and inclusion felt appropriate to our event, too. We never felt we
were in over our heads, though. Because it was a wrld that we were making and
it was outside of mainstream concerns.
Stuart’
Ross’s Proper Tales was an exemplar and catalyst of that entire scene. I loved
how Stuart and his press published writers that he’d heard about from all over
(I learned about many US writers as well as those from all over Canada)—it was
always a sense of discovery. By being published by Proper Tales, new writers or
writers with considerable publishing behind them, all were invited to be part
of a community, part of an aesthetic and creative community, and thus, as a
reader of the press’s publications, a community that I was part of. The
chapbooks themselves had a sense of “house style” — even though they were
different, they shared some design elements in common and so all these different
voices entered into the larger discussion that was/is Proper Tales.
Proper
Tales was (is) a portral through which I was introduced to so many writers,
their writing, and even the techniques and influences of these writer. I
learned the remarkable fact that you could just publish the work you were
interested in, that you could gather works you found exciting under your own
imprint. And you could make the publication and design be in conversation with
the work, as well as, by implication, all the others you published, even if the
design choices weren’t ostentatiously or self-consciously wild, they were
sensitive and considered and had a very particular unifying energy.
Also,
you could publish yourself as part of the conversation with the other works, with
the readers. It all was an ongoing conversation. An ongoing community. It has
been for 40 years. So far.
And
Stuart sometimes sold his Proper Tales publications on the street. He told me
that once an older woman approached him and asked about his work. [Notice that
here I’m stealing Stuart’s great story.] Maybe that day Stuart was wearing his “Writer
going to Hell” sign. She bought a publication. Then he asked, “Do you write?” She
said she did. “Would I maybe have seen any of your work? What’s your name?” “Alice
Munro,” she said.
Once
Stuart was quoted in the Globe and Mail.
I can’t remember the quote exactly but it was something about how lack of
public funding couldn’t discourage small press.We’d all be seething and
squirming—or was it churning and burbling, bubbling and Gestetnering— beneath regular
culture, doing our thing regardless of financial concerns like funding or
markets. The idea was that this was a vital literature, a vital expression that
existed outside of the mainstream, outside of the market, outside of
capitalism. It was a rhizome, connected as if fungi, through an underground
network passing vital resources, information, news through the network and
efflorescing our strange beauty in surprising ways and places, always with an
ironic eye to “be[ing] ace, be[ing] trendy,” (to cite the Proper Tales’ slogan.)
That’s one of the proper tales of publishing for me.
For
me, Proper Tales Press is one of the constants of contemporary Canadian writing
and publishing. It is like the beaver. The moose. Snow. Wide-leg jeans. (Think
I wore them in 1979!) How could we imagine this place (writing, Canada,
publishing) without it? It’s a stalwart.
A tall wart: a visible tumescence on the otherwise much flatter, blander
landscape. (That was a terrible metaphor!) But I value such things
greatly. Am inspired by them. (Not
terrible metaphors, though them, too.) But this specialized publishing
lifeform, this particular publishing creature that creates its own essental
niche, that contributes to the critical biodiversity of our culture. Not as big
as a yak but important as a bee. Yeah: Pollination. Also, don’t try yak honey.)
And other presses can attempt to be or not to be as ace and trendy as this
press in the same way or a different way, but they know it’s there. It has had
an influence even if they don’t know it—but they probably do, or, for sure,
should—just like other primordial small presses (from blewointment to grOnk,
Weed Flower. or Contact.) And Proper Tales continues, burning and churdling,
Gestubbling and troubling from Stuart Ross’s current urbanity in a house labled
FLAMBOYANT in Cobourg, Ontario.
Happy
quadragenary, Proper Tales Press. You’re ace and trendy. And celebrated by
many, including cows. Rocks. Squirrels. 2nd Year University Students. Me.
The author of twenty-two books of poetry and fiction, Gary Barwin is a writer, musician and multimedia artist from Hamilton, Ontario and the author of the nationally bestselling novel, Yiddish for Pirates (Random House) which won the Leacock Medal for Humour and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award and was a finalist for the Governor-General’s Literary Award and the Scotiabank Giller Prize. His poetry includes No TV for Woodpeckers (poetry; Wolsak & Wynn, 2018), many chapbooks some with his own serif of nottingham editions, and A Cemetery for Holes, a poetry collaboration with Tom Prime (Gordon Hill, Fall 2019) and For It is a Pleasure and a Surprise to Breathe: New and Selected Poems, ed. Alessandro Porco (Wolsak and Wynn, Fall 2019.) A new novel, Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted will appear from Random House in 2021. garybarwin.com
He
is the author of the Proper Tales Press title Frogments from the Frag Pool (1989).
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