Editor’s Note: One Year
Friends,
Community Mausoleum is one year old today. I don’t know what to do about it other can keep going, but I’m writing to say thanks and to think for a minute on the occassion. You can read about that below if you want. Or stop here. Thanks. It’s stupid to throw yourself a birthday, but I really believe in being embarrassed.
When I started this project last year I only knew that I wanted to start a press. I knew that I wanted, and saw there was a need (I know, I know, define “need”—read the first Editor’s Note for that), for yet another disaffected and idealistic fool to decide to start publishing yet more writing that would never be published through the otherwise established and respectable channels of literary publication and distribution. I wanted to make a living in death, which is to say a defined area of small press activity, focused and serious in effluvial spite of the known non-ROI, and I was curious about whether a network could form in the multi-bodied orbit of emergent and conflicting thought-feelings I was having about time and money vis-a-vis literary production, encapsulated best in a single syllable I still can’t find a convincing way around: Doom. I was and am that fool.
In those first days I felt a lot and knew a whole lot less. Still, in spite of knowing, and knowing better, feelings are what define and continue to guide this project’s procession. If certain aspects have seemed unseemly or less than legible that may be because feelings, real as they are to us, the ones who feel them, are also, in my own experiences at least, hardly ever seemly and barely even legible. Is this an apology? No, sorry.
What I knew I felt then and still feel today is that literature and literary-cultural production, at least in the small corners of these ideas where I find myself lucky enough to work and get to exist, did not have to feel the reductive ways it so often can, did not have to be as hopeless in the ways it so often is. Even in our liveliest and most inviting sub-corners, down the reverberant if narrow halls of independent small press. It did not have to be so boring, did not have to be a race, did not have to be so special, did not have to be correct, did not have to be a job. Each person who realizes this is the last person to realize it. But I am noticing now and might be becoming more adept at understanding as I age into deeper states of befuddlement how feeling and being are such dear cohabitants, becoming virtually identical states. We already know the stakes in this negative economy. We can calculate all the probabilities. We can all bet on the futures. What if we embrace the doom?
As best as I can still articulate, the thinking-feeling-being-doing of Community Mausoleum and Coma is an ongoing experiment: To find possibility in entertaining both of literature and its production’s (are they friends?) dual and dueling impulses to hurry and go slow. To balance opposing instincts of urgency and deliberation, rejecting the idea that any of us need to rush this shit while simultaneously finding ways to be quicker and more ablaze than the better-regarded and -resourced channels can ever afford to be. It is also an experiment with money, stemming from an ambient sense (which may just be informed by my own personal experiences with literary projects and institutions, and should thus be regarded as a matter of thoroughly subjective opinion; though if you feel me feel free to holler) that money usually finds ways of limiting the prospects of an idea before it expands anything truly worthwhile. Perhaps too simply, Coma wants writing that wants to be written. It does not want writing that wants to be paid for. I remain curious about where this petulance and its attendant questions can lead, because, just in case you’re asking or thinking about it now, no, writing in this context is not work. That’s what makes it interesting. The press on the other hand pays royalties to its authors because Community Mausoleum titles are made objects—not data hosted on a server where I purchase space once a year using a debit card linked to my bank account which is periodically replenished through a variety of part-time editing and adjunct teaching jobs. Community Mausoleum books have a cover price because they cost money to print. When a book is sold, half the cover price goes to its author and half goes back to the press’s print budget for future books. There is no other overhead. That’s econo-nomics. Just in case you were wondering.
On May 1, 2024, I was wondering two things. The first was if I could publish my friend Eric’s chapbook Icewalker & Dirtworm. The second was if I could publish one thing at Coma every week for a year. In the days since, Community Mausoleum has produced three chapbooks—Icewalker & Dirtworm by Eric Wallgren, Important Groups by Hilary Plum, and demonstration forest by Kelly Clare—and one site-specific performance-text zine thingy tied to a public reading called “Find Your Ontological Center” which occurred in a Cleveland parking lot a week ago. On May 1, 2025, I am not wondering but can tell you with certainty that this summer the press will release its first full-length collection, a perfect-bound book of poetry with a spine called Study for Swimming Hole by Maxwell Gontarek. More books are planned, and they’ll be announced soon. Coma remains ever-open. Send some work if you haven’t yet. Look out for replies if you have. Be in touch if you want to. None of this is required. None of it is going anywhere. You can read all 54 of Coma’s year-one publications on the website: Poems, stories, essays, and reviews of small press books by Austin Miles, Eric Wallgren, Joshua Wilkerson, Jon Conley, Jenkin Benson, Christian Wessels, TR Brady, Walt Hunter, Brianna Di Monda, Henry Goldkamp, Joe Hall, Ben Roylance, Delilah McCrae, John Trefry, Evan Williams, Sarah Edwards, Glenn Bach, Carrie George, Matt Hart, Brandan Griffin, Philip Harris, Umang Kalra, Alex Benedict, Maxwell Gontarek, Alyssa Perry, Conor Bracken, Nick Greer, Olga Mikolaivna, Zoe Darsee, Emiliano Gomez, Kelly Clare, Cameron Mcleod Martin, L Scully, Andrew Judson Stoughton, Alex Tretbar, Angelo Maneage, Rob McLennan, Miri Karraker, Eric Tyler Benick, Alexandra Salata, Madeleine Schmidt, Calean Ernest, Zach Savich, Yuyi Chen, Tom Branfoot, Dominic Dulin, Ann Pedone, Jon Woodward, Daisuke Shen, Nate Logan, Jace Brittain, PJ Lombardo, Sam Heaps, and J. Arthur Boyle, in chronological order.
There are better ways to end whatever this note has been, but in the spirit of the above assemblage, and feelings, and the vague warmth with which we now turn toward our doom, I’ll just say thank you, friends. It’s been a sheer and staggeringly brilliant delight to get to work on this stuff over the past year, to collaborate and connect during our bravest moments of these increasingly bravery-requiring times. It is heartening to see so many other new publishing projects and experiments continuing to emerge alongside, to read them and to know them and you, and it is exciting to think about where we are all headed, what’s being dreamed and what’s getting better, despite.
So here’s to the next year, then another and another, whenever that is. Let’s go together. Not too fast. I’ll hurry if you will. See you there. No rush.
Time is on your side.
Zach Peckham
May 1, 2025
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