Sun Sets on Trafalgar

Sun 1 Mar 2026 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Leave a Comment| Posted by: Gavin

Because I cannot keep up with time I hadn’t realized March was coming up so quickly and now we are a day away from rights to Amalia Gladhart’s translation of Angélica Gorodischer’s Trafalgar reverting to the estate. I’d meant to make a fuss a few weeks before this so instead: here’s a day or two of the ebook being $2 at Weightless. I don’t even have enough time to get a price change in on all the other ebookstores.

Usually we buy rights to publish a book for the term of copyright and I keep the title in print and try and find new avenues of interest for them. (70+% of the average bookshop sales are backlist titles such as this.) However, translations are often licensed for a limited period of time so for Trafalgar we had seven years from the date of signing the contract (2012-19) and then I renewed the license for another seven years (2019-2026).

As of March 3rd, we’ll have six months to accept returns from bookshops and sell off our remaining stock. Then I’ll offer the author’s estate and the translator copies of the book at cost plus shipping. Any remaining copies can either be recycled, donated, or I can pay the royalty so that I can keep offering the book for sale on our website — which is how we are able to sell off our remaining copies of Ursula K. Le Guin’s translation of Kalpa Imperial and Sue Burke’s translation of Prodigies.

I love that every book of Angélica’s is different. You can see it in the three we published and then expand your experience with Amalia Gladhart’s translation of Jaguar’s Tomb. I’m very happy Amalia’s going to translate more of Angélica’s books. Kalpa Imperial, the first of Angélica’s we published, will be reprinted by Penguin next year.

Trafalgar is full of surprises. There are stories (some available on Reactor, Lightspeed, & Belletrista) that play on familiar history and most play with ideas from and of science fiction. It is more fun, strange, and occasionally uncomfortable than I was expecting. I look forward to seeing who will publish it next and seeing what they do with it.


Neither in Pittsburgh nor Baltimore

Wed 25 Feb 2026 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , | Leave a Comment| Posted by: Gavin

Being chronically ill gives insight into how the world will go on when one is no longer part of it. We’ve all moved on from social circles, jobs, schools, cities, towns, countries, and we know that life goes on in those places without us.

But to lie on the couch and see annual events — that in the past I would have attended — whoosh by is something else. This post was sparked by the mass of emails and posts on Bluesky about the upcoming AWP Conference and Book Fair*. I unsubscribed from their emails some time ago so I did not even know this year the conference is in Pittsburgh* Baltimore. (Damn! I could visit friends!)

If we were going to AWP, I’d have

  • spent some time last year setting up an event either at a local indie bookstore, or maybe a party with like-minded publishers and friends,
  • booked a hotel room or two as soon as I could last spring and gotten flights for Kelly and I. (As as aside, I was last on a plane in August 2021 and I have no expectation of getting on one any time soon.)
  • found a place to ship books: either to a friend in the city or to a UPS or FedEx store where I could go to in a taxi with my handy hand truck and then hand carry them into the book fair at the convention center.
  • put something silly in as our booth or table name: Small Beer Press Says Abolish Ice, Small Beer Press and Generally Quite Good Bookery, Small Beer Press and the Convention Food Experience, etc., etc.
  • maybe have written something on here about going but hitting that AWP tag above I see I often did not.

Kelly and I would have badges for the book fair and we’d try and table near friends. We’d wander the convention hall trying not to pick up too many books and journals — impossible task. Kelly might do a panel. I might have pitched yet another: “Tiny Presses and The Left Hand of Darkness,” “Publishing in the Anthropocene Idiocracy,” “Weird Shit Is the One True Way,” “Chocolate — or the Treat of Your Choice — with Zines Is a Must,” etc., etc. Would that painful panel be empaneled? Probably not, but it would have been fun to pitch.

10,000 people will descend on Baltimore. The city may not notice except for the huge number of bars which will suddenly have literary events; lunch places within walking/escape distance of the convention center will be happy; and hotels will be wishing that the conference actually brought people with income, not poets who are all crashing with friends.

Many people who once attended AWP won’t this year and many of them won’t miss it. Being in a convention center for 3-4 days is a lot. The organization, the mass of the poetic body politic brought together for a brief moment, never misses the individual.

Having a booth or table gave us a good excuse to go and a good place to rendezvous with friends and meet new people. Book sales would cover some of the rather horrendous travel costs otherwise I don’t think I’d ever have attended. It was a ton of work but we got to catch up with people in different parts of the country. Now my biggest travel is Kelly driving me to Boston for a doctor’s appointment and that usually takes all my energy so I can’t catch up with anyone.

I wrote a little of this each day and as ever with chronic illness, there’s no good ending. I’m here, not there, I miss it. If healthy I’d love to go and I’d wear a goddamn mask and use my nasal spray and I’d have been checking with AWP what the ventilation standards were. Even before I came down with this I had every Covid vaccine offered and masked in public — I thought I was protecting the rest of our family but it turns out I was the (first) unlucky one. Covid is a multisystem infection and we’re going to still be finding out ramifications for years to come.

A-tishoo! A-tishoo! We all fall down! (Wear a mask!)

[* Aha! It’s Winter Institute right now in Pittsburgh: 1,500 or so booksellers, writers, publishers, und so weiter! Kelly went a couple of times as an author and I really enjoyed the one I attended in January 2020.]


Jedediah Berry on Travel Light

Fri 23 Jan 2026 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

I was looking for something and came across this note on Travel Light that Jed sent me in September 2005 for the Small Beer newsletter:

Travel Light is a book that goes places you never quite expect, even when you’re the one who’s writing it.

No, I didn’t write Travel Light. But when Small Beer Press decided to release Naomi Mitchison’s wondrous novel as part of their Peapod Classics series, it fell to me to rewrite it—retype it, to be more precise—because no electronic version of the text existed. And somewhere between the death of Halla’s adopted dragon/father and her arrival on the mean streets of medieval Constantinople with only Odin’s magic cloak to help her, I realized I had no idea what was going to happen next. And I was giddy about it, all the way through the last chapter: I couldn’t write (read) (type) fast enough.

There is so much that is familiar about this fairy tale novel. There are dragons and heroes, and an exiled princess. There are unicorns, Valkyries, and corrupt priests. But in Mitchison’s world, the princess is better off with the dragons than with the heroes (even the tragic ones), and when the Valkyries offer to recruit her, or when she learns the truth of her lineage, she still must find her own way.

Travel Light is a classic, but only on its own terms, as all true classics must be. It is a surprising tale and a first-rate adventure, and always thoughtful in the telling. As Halla learns and unlearns each step of her journey, Mitchison greets us with the cheering knowledge that the wandering itself is what counts.


Mail Call

Thu 22 Jan 2026 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

Well, yesterday I checked the mailbox at the Small Beer office and there was a rather large stack of mail — lots of LCRW submissions, a couple of checks, a copy of GQ magazine(?), Rain Taxi, and so on — going back to late October. Darn it. That does explain why submissions seemed to drop off in the last couple of months but it also means I’m further behind than hoped.

At least it will give me a good reason not to read the news all the time. If we escape the fascist takeover, it’s not just the leaders who need to be charged, it’s all the people from there down to those organizing the paperwork and including those who every day are choosing fascism — hello Republican senators — and chose to follow orders and do nothing.


Read the Fire Safety Pamphlet First

Wed 21 Jan 2026 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

I recently added cooking columnist Nicole Kimberling’s Cook Like a Hobo from the pre-Reckoning LCRW 33 guest edited by Michael J. DeLuca.

You can read more of Nicole’s columns here as well as in the print (or ebook) issues of LCRW. Current issue has her writing on hot water pastry which one of these days I’ll try. I love her columns. If you’re not familiar I recommend the first one on brownies and this one on How to Seduce a Vegetarian, which gave me some tips I still use, so I guess it worked on me.


2 Weeks into Q2 2000

Tue 20 Jan 2026 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

In something I was reading the writer mentioned this year started the second quarter of the 21st-century, which gave me one of those I am living in the future frissons. So the new issue of LCRW is the first issue of a new quarter. Maybe a quarter century is the length of time we should look back at, instead of a decade, a year, three months, a fortnight, yesterday. Back to LCRW. We just bought the first story for the next issue. Despite no longer publishing books I’m still not particularly quick at reading submissions. I catch up, look away, and am months behind. Since Northampton is in the middle of a couple of snow storms, maybe I will catch up.

I think I fixed the LCRW subscription page. At some point this year I hope to move off PayPal but as ever it is low on the list, and my lists are being gone through so much slower than they used to be. I am still very amused that it took until last year — thanks to Jenny Z. for asking — for me to add the subscription option with a chapbook but without chocolate. Talk about my own blind spot.


MLK Weekend & Ayize

Sun 18 Jan 2026 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Meant to post this earlier and may update with a Monday event but if you are in San Francisco this looks like an event worth attending:

Ayize Jama-Everett (The Liminal People series) is part of a celebration this afternoon at the San Francisco Public Library (100 Larkin Street):

Divine Forces: Exploring the Power of the Orishas
“A transformative in-person event blending the power of Yoruba spirituality with cultural exploration and collective healing. Featuring Hugo and Nebula Award winning author Tomi Adeyemi and panels with renowned writers and scholars like Sakena Young-Scaggs, Ayize Jama-Everett, Kemi Ashing-Giwa and Clarence A. Haynes.”

3:30-4:15 PM “Black Diasporic Religions” Sakena Young-Scaggs in conversation with Ayize Jama-Everett , moderated by Dr. Stanford Carpenter.
“How the worship and understandings of Black Diasporic Religions have evolved across the African diaspora, focusing on cultural continuity, folk ways, popular understandings, media representation and transformation.”

 


Cook Like a Hobo

Fri 16 Jan 2026 - Filed under: Free Stuff to Read, | Posted by: Gavin

This is LCRW Cooking Columnist Nicole Kimberling’s seventh column for LCRW originally published in LCRW 33.

Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 32 coverI think almost all of us have, at one point or other, attempted to cook with a campfire only to discover that our skills fall far below modern expectations. So, what makes the campfire so difficult? I cooked in a restaurant with a wood-fired oven for over a decade, which means I spent hundreds, perhaps even thousands of hours igniting, tending and using cooking fires.

Here are the main difficulties:

  • Fires are hot. A camp-sized fire can still singe all the hair off your arms from six feet away.
  • Fires are unpredictable. Even if you cook with a wood fire every day for years it is still hard to know how the wood will burn or what sort of bed of coals will develop.
  • Fires are time-consuming. They take ages to mature and require much more fuel that you imagine they will to maintain.
  • Fires are dangerous. They cannot be switched off and can easily extend beyond the boundaries that you, in your human hubris, have blithely decided they will be content to respect.

Read more


LCRW 51

Fri 2 Jan 2026 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Out into the daft, daft world: a zine.