Well speak of the Devil! I’ve been accepted to Hatch Show Print’s winter internship program. I’ll be in Nashville for the month of January, working in the shop. Thrilled!

I am headed to Paris today, loosely in conjunction with Human Parts of Me Want to Eat the Flowers off of Trees being a part of the Colette show. This journal will be on holiday until I return on November 2nd.

Lastly, Jessica Hallock sweetly interviewed me about Human Parts of Me. Transcript below.

Jessica Hallock: Meat comes up frequently in Human Parts of Me…. What significance does the eating or handling of meat have for you, & also what significance the fine line between living vessel & lifeless carcass?

Jessalyn Wakefield: I grew up eating wild game. My family, at times, also raised and slaughtered our own animals. We lived out in the middle of nowhere, the dogs were always bringing home dead and rotting things. So carcasses were fairly omnipresent in my childhood. Even so, there was always reverence and fascination with a slaughter, or with my father bringing home something from hunting, or even the dogs dragging half rotted deer down the road that just never left me and hasn’t left me to this day. The significance is, I suppose, in the fascination and reverence that I experience at the sight of something dead. I cannot wrap my mind around lifelessness. And that by eating meat you take another body and make it part of your own. That eating meat, muscle tissue, specifically feeds your own muscles. That’s an incredibly powerful act to me. Flesh of my flesh.

That fine line between living vessel and lifeless carcass exists for me as Mystery.

JH: Early in the dialogue between the Angel & the Woman in The Waters of Jordan there are motions of voicelessness, of an inability to give voice - characters cutting off, falling silent, long spaces between phrases - that seem remniscient of Beckett, whereas in the stories this voicelessness is expressed more in obscenities, a failure to attend to dialogue, discontinuity in speech, etc. - do you feel this disconnect, or gap, between the voiced & the intended in your own life?

JW: It’s less voiced and the intended, that is, the internal and the external, and more about the internal voice and the internal comprehension of that voice. I feel a constant inability for my self to communicate with its Self. I experience a huge disconnect in understanding what I am thinking and feeling and experiencing, being able to name what is going on internally. I often have inappropriate emotional reactions to situations, or don’t understand why I have the reactions that I do, or don’t know what I am feeling or thinking about a situation at all. My interaction with the external is fairly naive and surface most of the time.

JH: Are the nausea & disgust (or self-loathing) encountered in your stories emblematic of a response to the absurdity of existence, or more a result of a distance from that existence? Or something else entirely?

JW: I think the disgust and the nausea go back to the previous question, having to do with the frustration and perplexity I experience at the closed off nature of my internal life. Experiencing strong reactions and being unable to deal with them because I cannot name them, experiencing a void when I know I should be experiencing a reaction. Etc. It all builds into a sickness, you know?

JH: What is the significance of the animals in the scene?

JW: Need. Submission and humiliation because of need.

Howard Junker, editor of ZYZZYVA, generously agreed to a brief interview about his letterpress history. 

Jessalyn Wakefield : Describe your experience with letterpress printing and hand composition of type. 

Howard Junker : I think I had a beginner’s printing press when I was about eight. The type was rubber. It took forever to make a word, so I didn’t get very far.

When I was ten, my Cub Scout den visited the NY Journal-American. We saw typesetting by Linotype and were given a few sample letters.

When I was 19, my family moved a half block from the Morgan Library so I began to look at illuminated manuscripts and the great printed texts in that collection.

Jump to 1981, when Ben Sonnenberg started a literary magazine called Grand Street, ostensibly to dissipate his inheritance-he was ashamed of the way his father made his fortune (public relations). Ben had it hand set. It was very beautiful and because he paid writers well and had good taste, it was a pleasure to read.

When I started ZYZZYVA in 1985, the first president of the board was a book collector and for the first couple years he did little profiles of fine printers: Harold Berliner, Robin Heyeck, Ward Ritchie, and Leigh McLellan. Tim Appelo wrote about the Sea Pen Press. Steve Corey, curator of special collections at the at USF, profiled Poltroon Press and Wesley B. Tanner. Eloise Klein Healy wrote on Susan King. Peter Koch wrote about himself.

The Bay Area has always been rich in letterpress, and I’ve visited the presses of Jack Stauffacher et al. And stop by the SF Center for the Book whenever I have a chance.

JW : Did you have an instructor or mentor who guided your typographic education?

HJ : I learned a lot from Sandy Kirschenbaum who was publishing FINE PRINT in town. And from Andrew Hoyem, who, when I had just started ZYZZYVA, had begun raising the bar for letterpress with the $1,000 edition of Moby-Dick.

JW : Do you feel that your experiences with older methods of printing have impacted the way ZYZZYVA is approached (or has been approached in the past), as compared with younger literary magazines? 

HJ : Sure. I care about the texture of type. I have it in mind as an ideal.

I love the way letterpress bites into the page. I wish our offset words didn’t sit on the surface as they do.

I love the way letterpress books are usually so lavishly empty, with such care taken in every dimension of the layout.

I try, rather clumsily, to be inspired by them.

I instructed our original designer, Tom Ingalls, to give us a classic look: no postmodern pull quotes, no text submerged in color, no huge illustrations illustrating nothing.

Generous margins. Footers. A customized Bembo. Bios as a postscript at the end of each text, not segregated in the back of the book as Contributors’ Notes. Lots of ads (all in the front of the book, right after the table of contents), as many as we can sell-and the last page devoted to a list of our advertisers: “ZYZZYVA is backed by:”

At first, we used just a few pages of art, originally in b&w (so the loss in translation to our b&w page would be minimized). The art is not illustration, but has been gathered from galleries, mostly, independently and stands on its own. (Of course, when a story describes a horse and we have an image of a horse….)

Now we have at least one page of art before and after every text. This has become a litmag standard. We include 20 or so artists per issue, about a third of whom do not have gallery representation.

JW : How was the first issue of ZYZZYVA printed in 1985? How is it printed today?

HJ : Unfortunately, we’ve always been offset. But in the early days we did a few letterpress blow-ins by Eric Johnson, Susan King, Gerald Lange & Robin Price, and Emily McVarish.