Quite how the frog got there we never discovered, but it had calcified into fact in a dark corner of Kirsty?s bedroom. In our time here, we?ve had mice running along the curtain rails; one got fried at the back of the oven and stank the house out — we had to extract and refit the kitchen to get the corpse out. We?ve had mice in the walls, mice scrabbling every night, all night, in the rafters; one even got into the sock drawer during an autumn harvest and defied capture for a month.
It seems that Wilbraham mice hate the rain and bad weather and from fens and fields of blonde barley they come running for our place as if we had a neon sign declaiming MOUSE HOSTEL ? ALL KINDS OF CRITTERS CATERED FOR. We?ve had newts crawling down the hall, too, heading for the pond by some necromancy of internal navigation, and frogs and toads hurling themselves at the patio windows of an evening in some vaguely obscene sexual climax which involves body-slamming the glass. Watching the slimy creatures slapping against the windows and sliding down the dark surface like wet ghosts in muddled pairs was actually quite engrossing. Better than TV.
However, finding a frog with advanced rigor mortis in Kirsty?s bedroom was pretty much the most extreme amphibian incident so far. Kirsty?s room is the library, a stash of floor to ceiling literature which, upon the birth of Son No.2, rapidly became Bedroom No.4, a loss of such immense proportions I write with a tear in the eye and lump in the throat, a bit like that frog in the trap, no doubt. What was a miraculous den for writing in, with colleagues like Beckett and Blanchot, Habermas, Heaney and Hughes suddenly became a festering den of dried pizza crusts, yoghurt cartons, hamma beads, soft toys and glued-up off cuts of every kind of crepe paper, cardboard and soup cartons. Books rapidly disappeared as Sellotaped blankets were draped to create bedroom tents for eight year old Bedouins. Beckett?s Endgame was bookended with Polly Pockets and pink puppies. Life is full of such collision. Writing is an edge of life activity, decentered, destabilised, and backed into a corner.
Radio Nostalgia by Chris Emery
We?ve been absent without leave for about five weeks now. February was completely lost. I?ve been on a reading tour in Cornwall performing Dr. Mephisto and Nostalgia, and writing the next poetry collection, Boy?s Town. I had a terrific out of season tour of St Ives, Zennor, Gurnard?s Head, Madron, Falmouth, Menheniot, time to think and waste before heading to the inaugural Independent Publishing Awards in Brighton. Salt was shortlisted for an innovation award but lost out to (the impressively re-engineered) Faber. It was the night of a lunar eclipse, and that earthly shadow seemed more a goodly portent for where Salt is now heading.
At the IPG conference I gave a rather choking talk on ONIX which sounds like a brand of laxative except it?s actually a bibliographic language. The kind of conversational topic one saves for desperate dinners, to while away the hours over boiled meats and anaemic vegetables, saving an erudite anecdote on XML elements and entities for puddings and mints:
“Have you heard about PR. 8?is so misleading for the Chinese.”
But the audience were kind enough to stay awake after a momentous lunch at the excellent Grand Hotel, a lunch which ended with a litre of citrus-flavoured, sturdy cream, one of those desserts which seems to charge the arteries for some surgical investigation, like a barium meal except this one slowly congealed, slowing down all bodily movements until one felt one’s veins and arteries were filled with hardening rubber. A bit like doing a Gunther von Hagens live on stage.
Big up for the sassy, savvy Snowbooks who also were also shortlisted for an IPA award in trade publishing. (In fact, big up for all shortlisted businesses, the event was terrific and the competition fierce.) The morning after the night before, Em and Jen made a happy pair slumped in the conference seats, plotting and planning for next year?s assault. Good losers are such crashing bores. We, Snowbooks and Salt, were both beaten by Faber. Nothing unites like a near-miss for glory. Shins could have been kicked, but the super troopers from Faber are a nifty bunch and were well-deserving winners, if moving targets, at the conference. Now in a recent blog posting, Em has planted the dreaded genius label on Salt, but we would like to correct this misnomer in favour of Lords of Mess, as this post attests. Despite all efforts to both run a business and a home, avoid corporate stagnation and focus on the family, we have instead sunk into an abyss of gorgeous literature and domestic incongruence. I am certain that there is a magical correlation. As far as writing goes, there’s always squalor in the quill.
Janna Rademacher joins the Salt team
Janna Rademacher joins the Salt team
On to international matters, we?ve been looking for a new member of the team in the USA, and, as our great luck would have it, we?ve been fortunate to attract Janna Rademacher, the former MD and Marketing Director of the impressive and formidable Graywolf Press. Janna now joins as US Sales and Marketing Director in a move which will surely enhance Salt?s US publishing wing, which we will now expand and invest in, supporting our editor Janet McAdams in her work with our rapidly developing and hugely exciting Earthworks series. I?m not sure how Janna will come to terms with the family-focussed business of Salt, but I strongly suspect she shares the same trajectory; we are, after all, the complete opposite of corporate slog. Perhaps the frog in the mousetrap was a kind of sacrifice to the gods of mess. And publishing is, of course, a thoroughly messy business.
