Guest Post: Why Doing It Your Damn Self Might Just Make You Happier by Hosho McCreesh

Below is a guest post and essay by poet and painter Hosho McCreesh regarding his latest release, Chinese Gucci. Hosho McCreesh is currently writing & painting in the gypsum & caliche badlands of the American Southwest. His work has appeared widely in print, audio, & online.

 

Why Doing It Your Damn Self Might Just Make You Happier

To understand the how and the why of Chinese Gucci, I first have to start with compromise. To a certain extent, it exists in almost all facets of life. As children we pitch almighty fits when things don’t go our way. Hopefully less so as adults, though maybe not. Handling the vagaries with grace, accepting the limitations of the world and ourselves, working within the confines probably makes life more tolerable in the long run…but goddamn if some of the spice ain’t gone too. Yes, compromise exists…but it shouldn’t exist in our art. Or my art…which is admittedly small potatoes…but it’s what I’ve got and I love doing it.

Publishing is a thing I have been part of for almost two decades, and still a thing I know very little about. New Mexico is pretty far from where most things are published, so as an outsider looking in, all I can do is guess about how it all works. And from where I sit, publishing is a large and collaborative industry…which can be another way of saying one filled with compromise. Big presses are owned by giant conglomerates and they have relationships with all the mechanisms of supply and demand, wielding extraordinary power to either promote or ignore products. Spreadsheets and market research quantify what is worth the resources, and what isn’t. Chasing the hungry ghost of mass-appeal means avoiding risk in favor of the more obvious, commercial, and genre-heavy “comps.” I get it…it’s a business.

Except it’s not.

Writing and publishing books is to throw your fates in with the artists, and dreamers, and freaks, and weirdos, it’s an attempt to say something while stumbling about this strange mystery called life…and hopefully connect with fellow human beings on a familiar and meaningful existential plane. The point is not to bow to fads or focus groups…or compromise the vision in the hopes of attracting a wider readership. We’re all going to die someday…and when we do, it won’t be bottom-lines and sales reports we’ll mourn…it’ll be the human who was but no longer is, it’ll be the laughter un-had, the stories never told. And the compromises made all along the way…is that what will define our life’s work? To hell with that.

Here’s what they never tell you about the small press: it’s better than traditional publishing in a few very specific ways. It’s largely free to take risks the large press couldn’t dream of taking. And not just in terms of content either. It can take huge risks in production because small numbers and humble sales are always the expectation. It also means that small press stuff can quickly become collectable when a writer manages to make a few waves, or lands a book at a bigger press. And small press stuff is often intimately and directly tied to its creators…autographed copies, special editions, freebies or giveaways, even original art or paintings or collages…these things can also be had, and often for a song. Stephen King can’t possibly autograph all the hundreds of thousands first editions of a new book he puts out…it would be a staggering amount of work.

I don’t have that problem. I can paint covers (as we did for the Marching Unabashed Into the Weeping, Searing Sun… hardbacks from Bottle of Smoke Press), and I can type an original poem on one side of a nice piece of cardstock, and my correspondent and fellow poet Chris Cunningham can type an original poem on the other side (as we did for the hardback edition of Sunlight at Midnight, Darkness at Noon). We can make a clamshell that hides a laser-etched flask in a hollowed-out hunk of wood under the hardback editions of a drunken opus (A Deep & Gorgeous Thirst), and by god, I can hand-make twenty-six different collages to use as individual covers for a signed, lettered special hardback edition of my debut novel.

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Making the Collage-Cover Hardbacks for Chinese Gucci from Hosho McCreesh on Vimeo.

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So why did I decide to put out Chinese Gucci myself? Because I wanted to get together with family and friends over a long weekend and laugh as we made something artistic and beautiful together, as we took a break from the normal and the everyday and the mundane, and — just for a day — re-etched our stories on the cave-walls of time by making something together, reminding ourselves we are here and alive and we have the chance, right now, to create…and I didn’t want anyone or anything to be able to stop me.

~H. McCreesh