David v. Goliath, lit small press v. publishing behemoth: will it work?

Hello editors,

I am an Erie PA native, living parttime in Berkeley CA and parttime in Western NYS--Chautauqua County and in the Penn-York Valley south oMy first novel in the Textile Trilogy was just released a month ago from sitio tiempo press, an imprint of Reinhabitory Institute.

What?! you might say if you are paying attention.

Reinhabitory Institute was founded to bring the principles and practices of the love and care of your home watershed into every neighborhood, school and home in the United States--and beyond.

What makes the first novel published by sitio tiempo "reinhabitory" is the subject of a blog on my website and without a doubt, for the editor with a nose for news, The Story: http://www.destinykinal.com/cms/blog/index/blogbyid/blog_id/105

Yes there's much more to the story than woman-who-grew-up-in-Erie-publishes-novel-to-critical-acclaim...though I'd be happy with that story...as would you. I'm told I do a terrific interview and yes, I would be delighted to come into the studio for a live interview.

The other terrific story is this one: traditional publishing is crumbling (5 giants owns all the trade publishing houses now, all focused on the bottom line.) Does it make for a good read, great literature? The clarion call has been sounded and scores of new paradigms in publishing are out of the gate. Without a doubt, the internet is making it a whole new game: book tours, book reviews, conversations about books--all are happening on line.

Our virtual book club will go up within the month as friends and fan read and want to discuss Burning Silk.

I once was a maven in the world of targeted marketing (I introduced the Fortune 500 consumer goods companies to segmentation by values and lifestyles (VALS), demographics and product usage--all mixed up in a lethal cocktail, back in the day.) i have never liked mass marketing. Target audiences for this book include French Huguenots, textile artists, American history buffs, native Americans, the GLBT community...and none of them have anything in common with
each other except that they will all enjoy this book.

Book sales, so far as we are concerned, is back to the personal network--mostly online.

The personal relationship between writer and reader is being restored by a most unlikely medium: the computer.

Question is: will it work? Will David be able to tilt with Goliath?

Another question: what will happen to bookstores?

Another question: what will happen to books?

Our strategy for this book on the ground is simple: reading, creating a stir (if possible) where I/the author has lived and has family and friends.

So from central NY/PA to western NY/PA, I will work my networks like I am doing now, supported by the staff at sitio tiempo press back in Berkeley.

After that, I will be reading around the SF Bay Area, then back to New England. Finally, in December, I will be down in south Florida. With my personal networks exhausted, and my online community expanding, we shall see if "the book has legs." And that will be the proof of the pudding for one small literary press. With our technique sharpened, we will introduce our next book--poet Jerry Martien's The Authentic Life, another look at the iconic Billy the Kid and the Lincoln County Wars, presaging what is happening on our borderlands today. Yes another reinhabitory novel (with a lesson for us to examine encapsulated in it) from sitio tiempo press.

Am I embarrassed by the sex scenes I have written?

A good friend and writer who will remain unnamed commented on the steamy sex in Burning Silk.
"I have been reading your book. I am a bit embarrassed by the sex scenes between the two women. Does anyone else feel that way? However, the very good writing helps one to feel that the writer knows what she is doing!"

My response: "Truth?--I feel a bit more than embarrassed about the sex scenes between the two women. I consider it an act of negative capability (or whatever we call that thing Keats described) that I not only achieved it--you should read my essay on how I did it from the Taos residency which I will post here up on my blog. Not only that I wrote it but that I had the guts to publish it. I stand behind it, discomfort and all. My question to my friend: did the hetero sex scenes embarrass you as well?"

Here follows the essay I wrote at a residency in Taos NM about writing Burning Silk and how I came to include the detailed erotic scenes that will always characterize the book...and make it controversial..

The Metises: designer people engineered by the continent

In fact, I STILL didn't know what my novel was about, after completing it in Taos NM at the end of 2005, dazzled by the compelling eroticism.

The journal I kept named the tribes I passed through, Hopi, Navajo, and the drama of the season of rituals of the Pueblo people.

Burning Silk is a contact story: French Huguenot silkmakers come to depend on their metises neighbors for the success of their venture.

Who are the metises? They are modelled on the Revolutionary War Original people of the Susquehanna River where I have had a home for 25 years. Queen Esther Montour was Dutch/French/Mohawk/Lenape. A sophisticated woman from
a line of women who made it into the white man's history books, Queen Esther and her sister Queen Catherine spoke several European and several native languages. The metises people, I have come to see, were this continent's attempt to produce a hybrid people who could live in harmony on this continent.

It served the new breed of English settlers coming up the Susquehanna to style Queen Esther and her band as "savages," in order to justify taking their land. Queen Esther and her band were driven from their homes at harvest time, their log houses burned, their orchards cut down, their crops destroyed, men, women and children fleeing north across the border
into Canada.

[Footnote: Yes I have read every account of the Wyoming massacre that has been published, that is, white man's history. New settlers killed Queen Esther's young son as he was travelling along the river. She went mad. What happened after that, no one knows but several white men were ritually executed by angry native people, among them a raging woman
identified as Queen Esther.]

Here is how I describe them in Burning Silk:

She had also not anticipated the impact their neighbors’ way of life would have on her family. None of the Duladiers had met an indigenous American before coming to this continent. To find a new race of people—the métis—sprung up here over the past two hundred years astonished them. The magnitude of this fact seemed like something they might have heard about before arriving.

Their neighbors, the Montour family, on whom they had come to depend for knowledge of this new land and its particulars, lived in homes with windows like theirs, of log and plaster and fieldstone, clothed themselves in a pastiche of European and deerskin clothing, furnished their homes in a stunning mélange of Louis Quatorze, Regency, and . . .

Bedouine, chic beyond any European woman’s dreams (if she had the eyes to see it, and the Duladier women did), as louche a chic as they had ever imagined. No doubt certain travelling Parisians found this rangy frontier style shocking Archives enough to take home and adapt to their own Bohemian lifestyles.

And the British? Little wonder that Marguerite’s grandmother was said to have run a salon on the distant Susquehanna that no European taking a tour of the Americas would have missed.

Sometimes, like catching a glimpse of herself in a window, and seeing herself as an outsider might, she understood how the Montours must see members of her own family: jarring and unnatural. Not belonging. Out of place. Their pale skin, coiffed hair, cinched waists, frock coats . . . all more than a bit stifling. The Montours were a fresh wind blowing, levelling pretense and piety. Not everyone in her family agreed with Catherine’s assessment, however.

La Madonne, source of all our success, we need the Montours. Need Regina. Why else would you send them to us?

She comforted herself the way a motherless child will: Soit tran- quille, my child. Breathe. Let your shoulders drop. Relax your jaw. There.

She lifted the cover of a small jewelry box her father Auguste had commissioned for her when she went through her first full volte with her mother, as apprentice. I must think of a gift to mark their first apprenticeships, she pondered, thinking of both Kristiana and Regina.

Tipping a velvet bag into her palm, she pulled out a snood set with seed pearls for her hair. Peering into the oval metallic mirror mounted near the window, and tucking the netted pearls around the contours of her braid, she felt her small rebellious spirit kindle in the act of adorning her corona. Too dressy for such a day, someone might say. Perhaps my conservative sister? At this late hour of her confinement, anything could be countenanced if it made her feel better. If Regina thinks it beautiful . . . Then she closed the lid of her treasure box, sealed the cupboard doors to her bed, and headed out to the day, to taste its flavor."

I cherish the possibility that we may still allow this continent to shape a new people, one who can live in harmony with each other on our home watersheds, this continent which we have so disrupted, this continent where we imported the worst of our European ways and now are exporting under the name of "globalization," a disease that feeds on authentic indigenous cultures, destroying them and supplanting the Golden Arches.

Matrilineality and honoring our foremothers

Today I had an extraordinary encounter with a foremother, an ancestor who stood firm in her vision during the years when deals were being struck and friendships betrayed.

I was first attracted by Sally Roesch Wagner's book Sisters in Spirit that documents how the Iroquois clanmothers made a terrific impact with their matrilineal way of life on our feminist foremothers from European stock. Her findings allowed my characters to move forward with what seemed the obvious outcome of their contact with each other: a high regard for the matrilineal way of life.

Sally's work must be acknowledged for her contribution to my thinking, in my next novel Linen Shroud, book two of the Textile Trilogy (where the impact of her research comes into play more,) here, on my website, and in all arenas where I present matrilineality as a possible return to an earlier way of life that may have been widespread on many continents and in many cultures, if the archaeological evidence is to be credited.

Sally was given the gift of directing the Matilda Jocelyn Gage Foundation, to re-introduce a woman who held the line for women's rights so consistently throughout her visionary life, seeing women's rights as a cornerstone which could hold a whole house aloft, a house that connects religious freedom, our ability of imagine a parallel world (she was the mother in law and muse of Frank Baum, creator of the Oz world,) the slavery that all of us are afflicted with even today (she was the first to refer to sex trafficking e.g.,) the influence of the Haudenausanee--paradigm in our time of a matrilineal culture that has held its identity continuously--and reproductive rights.

Who has heard her name? When Anthony and Stanton struck a deal with the Women's Christian Temperance Union, narrowing the focus on getting the vote, and away from women's rights, Matilda Jocelyn Gage was struck from the historical record of feminism. The break came on the issue of religious freedom. Today we are in the grip of the tyranny of religious fundamentalism.

A new lightning rod, a mecca for women's rights is springing up--not in Seneca Falls--but in Fayetteville, adjacent to the Onondaga and the Erie Canal.

Interview with Jason Wright publisher of Oddball Magazine

I'm attending a week's certification course in Literary Small Press Publishing at Emerson College in Boston MA with a dozen other small press entrepreneurs.

Yesterday, Jason Wright of Oddball Magazine interviewed me about my recently released book Burning Silk, doing it on his phone and then adding commentary (like this) on his blog. www.oddballmagazine.com (I think.) So today I interviewed Jason and am learning how to post this interview on my blog, schooled by my mates who are blog savvy.

(Video interview forthcoming.)
I also did a second interview with Margery Hannah who is working on a novel. Stay tuned for that interview.

Settle in and hear about Jason and his rapprochement with bipolar disease. His commitment to Oddball Magazine. And his strangely but pleasingly unshielded personality.

Green Jobs and the Edible Schoolyard

In response to the article in the April 28 issue of East Bay Express airing the controversy about the value of Alice Waters inspired Edible Schoolyard at King Middle School, Caitlan Flanagan writing in The Atlantic misses the essential point. Children whose families raise food in their backyards are privileged children, regardless of whether their parents also send them to exclusive summer camps and travel abroad. Even Luke Tsoi, author of the article, brings his cultural baggage, opining that “the truth of the matter is that California is in crisis right now with its failure to equip so many of its students with the basic skills that they’ll need to go on to college and become successful.” Our failure as a society is this, to offer ourselves and our children one measure of privilege, one measure of success.


My experience working with at-risk kids on the Susquehanna watershed replicates what Eichorn reports in the Edible Garden. Unsurprisingly, restoration work on one’s own watershed and/or tapping into our ancient agricultural heritage in a harmonious way—seed, water, harvest, prepare and share—restores the child. And restores the human. This unrelenting focus on standardized testing to the exclusion of pursuits that make us more human are shortsighted. But then shortsightedness is perhaps the most descriptive quality of human development at this time, the one that is driving our species and other species and the planet MAD: mutually assured destruction.

Green jobs, now in its infant stage, will be the harbinger of a future that is sustainable. What a pity that Recovery dollars have focused on shovel-ready highway jobs rather than (for example) restoring the estimated 25,000 miles of West Virginia streams that have been despoiled by mountaintop removal of coal. The brief respite we and our pollinators experienced last year with State Departments of Transportations’ frugality will surely see a summer of blasted median strips, as the chemical companies restock DOT supplies for poisoning our wild verges and streams.

I still believe that Green Jobs is on Obama’s checklist and that he will get back to a National Service Program for our young people. In the meantime, Edible Schoolyard isn’t a program, it’s a movement. It can’t be stopped by the shortsighted.

Sincerely,

Destiny Kinal

Publisher, sitio/tiempopress

What makes Burning Silk a Reinhabitory Novel?

In case you wondered...
What makes Burning Silk a Reinhabitory Novel?

I had been waiting for someone to ask the question. David Simpson did.

What makes Burning Silk a reinhabitory novel and further, what makes the book ideal to introduce sitio/tiempo press? The first book should set a bar.

True, Burning Silk is fiction, while most of our writings have been poetry and nonfiction. And it features a female protagonist and a strong sensory coda. And yet Burning Silk, the first in the Textile Trilogy, is a reinhabitory novel through and through.

Adaptation to the watershed

In the voice of a member of the silkmakers’ family, the book quotes Zenuemon of Japan as their guide: “Quality of silkseed and filament can only be improved by gradually adapting a strain of moth to regional climactic and geographic conditions.” The story documents a rare instance in the history of raising silk, of moving a domesticated silkmoth to a different continent, to acclimate to a different and unique home watershed. The Duladiers, a French Huguenot silkmaking family, collaborate with their native American neighbors on the Delaware watershed to find a native silkmoth to mate successfully with their domesticated one, a risky venture that could accelerate acclimatization.

Assimilation and differing ways-of-life

This not-very-subtle metaphor is echoed between the native and European families, who also have a metis child incubating in the womb by the end of thebook. And in a syndrome that has historically plagued metis communities, problems arise between the cultures. In the second book in the Textile Trilogy, Linen Shroud, conflict also arises between the Iroquois warrior societies and Quaker pacifists regarding participation in the American Civil War. And there’s a third element: the women of the silk worship a female deity, The Black Madonna, who--cruel when necessary--abhors war.

All of these conflicts are strongly reinhabitory, as we witness the differences in ways-of-life tear apart this family who has intermarried...and witness the victory of the industrial revolution over the traditional guild way of life

The third novel, Oil and Water, set on the early oil fields in NY/PA, dramatizes the triumph of the Petroleum Age over arts-and-crafts sensibilities as oil becomes the prevailing definition of modernity.

Part of the historical analysis we are calling reinhabitory involves seeing how these conflicts and struggles have formed the legacy we have inherited.

Matrilineality: agricultural societies

The proximity of matrilineal native neighbors–where everything, clan, property, land, name, comes through the maternal Archives line —lead European women directly on the path to Seneca Falls seeking similar rights and status. This buried history is
a deep reinhabitory issue which has received no attention anywhere that I can find, a task to which reinabitory fiction is well suited.

Reinhabitory fiction

My idea of reinhabitory fiction draws heavily on Milan Kundera's notion that the role of history in the novel is to reinhabit those critical crossroads in history where we buried certain values "in that vast cemetery of forgetting," and walked on with others. This definition is still a rough draft but it moved Jerry Martien to say he had a novel which he also felt was reinhabitory fiction. He describes it as a land use story.

“It re-tells the events of the Lincoln County War, takes it back to Billy the Kid’s origins in the myth of Pan, the old nature god, and forward to the assassination of his killer and biographer Pat Garrett in 1908. The story is documented by an El Paso reporter who’s a recovering war correspondent wounded in the Philippines, our first foreign adventurer in empire. It’s all the same war, re-enacts the same question, whether the land belongs to us or we belong to the land.”

We hope to raise $50,000 in the next six months, so that we can publish The Authentic Life in the manner it describes and move forward with other books waiting in the pipeline.

The Future

We plan to publish other creative reinhabitory works, such as plays that have been produced over the last three decades to enthusiastic audiences, and both children’s and young adult books.

We have extensive group experience in letterpress printing, access to print studio, and some extraordinary poets who would love to have limited edition printing of their work.

Art, music, architecture: it’s time to expand the range of bioregional thinking and practice. If the First Wave was defining bioregionalism, and the Second Wave was tying together the groups who grasped the concept immediately and imported it to their home watershed, may the Third Wave be marked by the imprint of sitio/tiempo press.