I read fast, and then I read slow, and I often set it aside for months and see what sticks with me. What surfaces when I pick it up again later. I know I’ve hit on a poem or part of a poem I want to print when it makes me feel something big and I can’t get it out of my head.

What good's a collaboration if I only share what I feel sure of? I took a deep breath and sent off both excerpts and got a resounding response from the entire SAL staff: You are not you for long. And goodness we aren't, are we?

I feel this poem speaks from a young and an old place at the same time and I love how it holds the two together. Unapologetically. It reminds me how we are always ourselves, holding our pain and joy, our knowing and unknowing.

SOLD! 23" Challenge guillotine paper cutter for sale. Asking $900. Sharp, clean, square: this small guillotine cuts big stacks of paper with ease. It's used often in a working print shop and the only reason for selling is that we're getting a bigger one!

I find a strange comfort in these lines even though I really don't know what they mean. This is what I love about poetry—it eases my need to know and cuts great swathes through my thinking.

What I’m most grateful for about the losses I’ve experienced in my life is their effect of making me suddenly, unexpectedly, excruciatingly present. The summer my older brother died I was painting a friend’s 2-story 4-bedroom house a soft pale yellow.

When I first read June Jordan’s “Poem about My Rights,” it was the first day of spring break. I was sitting at a coffee shop next to Expedition Press with my friend. We saw Myrna and she invited us over. On her wall in the shop there was a copy of the poem tacked up. I still can’t fully describe how powerful it felt, so full of emotion and honestly, I’d never read anything more mesmerizing. 

Recently I was interviewed by a 13 yr old who asked me what the hardest part of my job is. “Time!” I said immediately. “Good lord, time management. Knowing what to prioritize when.” A week prior a journalist asked me about my relationship to time as if I knew some secret about detaching from the fast-paced pressures of the digital

A year ago, at a windy roadside stop in South Dakota with a couple flickering bars of reception, I checked my email. There was a message from the manager of a gallery in downtown Seattle. She was wondering whether I wanted to join next year?

I first read the poem “Sweet Darkness” by David Whyte on a Friday, at the end of one of the worst weeks of my life. Husband demanding separation, step daughter screaming, mother gone missing.

It’s a simple practice. Write three pages, first thing every morning, longhand. Can't imagine not writing them.

I watched the election results come in with increasing sickness. I went to bed early and woke up numb. The rollercoaster ride since recalls the early days after my brother died: anger, shock, despair, and overall a grand penetrating sense of pure disbelief.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about my voice as an artist and my role as a publisher: how they inform and whether they inhibit each other. I feel a strong insistence that I should divide these actions and define them. Then I forget.

People often gawk when I give a typesetting demo, sliding each metal letter one by one into the composing stick, tilted at an angle to keep them in line, upside down and backwards.

I’m just back from two weeks in Italy, the first in Milan, the second at Tipoteca Italiana and then Venice. I am sitting here back in New York feeling a little sad, missing all the lovely new friends I made and knowing I won’t see them for quite some time. Oh time. But what a time!

I spent the last two and half weeks printing up a storm in the Wells Book Arts Center, at Wells College in Aurora NY. I camped out in the new press room with five Vandercooks, reams of Mohawk Superfine, a 3lb can of black ink, and tunes, snacks, and a water bottle.

Halfway through my cross country drive, I had the great honor to spend two evenings and a full day with the very talented tough-as-nails Jen Farrell of Starshaped Press.

I arrived at the Platen Press Museum in Zion, Illinois, at 12:30pm on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Paul Aken’s collection is truly a wonder to behold.

It’s here! We welcomed a 14×22 Colt’s Armory Press into the shop a few weeks ago. Feel lucky, blessed, lots of degreasing and rust removal ahead.

Big ol’ heart throbbing welcome to this 14×22 beautiful new beast, previously owned by Harold Berliner, now employed in the service of literary letterpress.

When it comes to publishing, I have only one criteria: I must love the poems. I’ve always known that so long as I love something, I can make something beautiful from it.