Meg Brandl, one our student interns, wrote an amazing write-up about part of the Slash Pine crew’s trip to Lawrence,KS and St. Louis. Rereading it this morning, I came across this beautiful nugget I’d like to share with folks:

The trip was a microcosm of a secret society we were getting a glimpse into—a network of poets and prose-writers and book artists and people who love words and writing, who hold readings and drive cross-country to read to a room of maybe fifty people for less than ten minutes, who open their homes to friends, who set up dinners and arrangements for people they’ve never met in person before, only read and exchanged emails with, who stay up until 2 a.m. making empanadas and spiced wine for their guests just because they’re that nice.

This point seems especially timely to me, as the editors of Slash Pine make our first pilgrimmage to AWP and hold a join reading with Lame House Press and DoubleCross Press. In regards to the latter press, the editor, MC Hyland, I knew back in Alabama, but rarely saw her. Oddly, we now keep running into one another in different cities every few months at various reading events. She writes emails full of suggestions on fundraising and event planning and book making, all with a flare and verve that makes me envy her brain.

As for Lame House Press and its editor Gina Meyers: I love her books (Nathan Hauke’s new book In the Living Roomis absolutely beautiful), but I never have met the editor face-to-face. Yet, there was something about being linked by the same enterprise–grassroots poetry community-building, I’d guess one could call it–that made it easy to write her and ask if she’d like to co-sponsor a reading.

And I think back to the folks who were kind to me as writer these past couple years, folks who could’ve just flicked me away like a fly because they didn’t know me: Matt Henricksen of Cannibal Books whose press and reading series opened my eyes to how poetry could make people come together–share a meal, meet new friends; Matt Hart of Forklift, Ohio Book, Nate Pritt’s of H_NGM_N Books, and Bruce Covey of Coconut Books who drove god knows how many hours to read at a poetry festival thrown together by a complete strange for zero renumeration. And more recently, Jen Tynes of horseless press, who has agreed to come from Denver to have her own work read back to her by our undergrads.

My larger point is that there are a thousand logical reasons that my path should’ve never crossed their paths–beyond the electronic world anyways. And yet my path did and I hope it will continue to for many, many years.

Having beers with a new friend here in Tuscaloosa, I offhandedly said good writers don’t have to be good people. And he looked at me with great earnestness and asked, why, why shouldn’t we be held to the standards of making good art and being decent human beings?

Presses you need to know: http://lamehouse.blogspot.com/, http://doublecrosspress.blogspot.com/, http://flesheatingpoems.blogspot.com/, http://www.horselesspress.com/, http://www.hubcapart.com/ink/index.php, http://www.h-ngm-n.com/

Been a few months, eh? This is our first real post since we moved off Blogger and onto WordPress, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been busy. Unlike when Slash Pine was on blogger, our new use for the blog will be to bring up issues that we find interesting as a press/reading series and to also give special glimpses into existing or forthcoming events, books, or submission policies that a static web page doesn’t give.

One thing that is new this semester and that we are loving: our first batch of undergrad interns–16 of them to be exact. We’ve broken them into groups and let them decide what areas of our venture they’d like to throw their energy into. Some are making our new chapbook, The Saw Year Prophecies, and a book arts anthology for the 2010 Slash Pine Poetry Festival; some are learning first-hand about the labor-intensive practice of grant writing; some of them are preparing for our Fall hike event.

In that last paragraph, did I say they were the ones learning? Well, they are–but not as much as Patti White and myself (Joseph Wood) are learning from them. There are twenty-year old students tied into the regional arts community who know about arts promotion than I ever did. There are students throwing out truly innovative ideas about what a book cab be. There are other students showing us how to write code for this here website. And on and on.

I can not speak for the other overseer of this internship, but I can say, my knowledge about event planning and book production and technology has increased tenfold–because of my students. I can not believe how much they’ve offered in terms of energy and enthusiasm. Hell, six of them drove seven hundred miles and did this.

All I know is that things are happening down here in Alabama–a place, where most people think, the arts are rather dead. But they’re not at all–and their greatest catalysts are nineteen to twenty-one year olds with a balance of curiosity, energy, and excitement. What a pleasure to learn from them.