Adroit x Expedition 2020 broadside project

Where were you on March 1st, 2020?

I was at my shop in Kingston WA, tying up the loose ends on a big project with The Adroit Journal and my three interns at the time: Kiera O’Brien, Sabina Smith, and Will Fuller. I was working double time, making sheet after sheet fly through the press, stressing over the delivery deadline of March 2nd, working through the weekend.

We made eight prints for Adroit to take to the AWP conference that year: four broadsides and four small prints. Heidi Seaborn, Executive Editor of Adroit, picked up the prints on March 2nd. She was my last regular visitor to the shop for a long time. I remember talking about the conference and the sudden questions of whether it was safe to attend. I felt relieved that I hadn’t signed up but it still seemed natural to gather. In fact I helped put on an event for a local nonprofit just a couple days later, and I remember hugging neighbors and then stopping abruptly, delighted to see them but wondering about keeping distance. Or at least not hugging? Or wait, something about hand sanitizer? Everything was vague and nothing seemed that serious … until the following week. But that first week of March we were in a strange limbo, on the cusp of the unimaginable.

March 1, 2020: Whoa gettin crowded in here! Prints pictured are by Kiera O’Brien, excerpt of a poem by Franny Choi. Not pictured are the 7 other editions of new prints for Adroit hiding underneath those beautiful hand-carved linocut circles that needed full exposure to air and the heat left on all night for the ink to dry.

Beginning: always the words first

Like all projects at Expedition Press, this one began with deep consideration of text. Heidi had reached out about broadsides to bring to AWP, thinking creatively about physical ways for an online journal to engage in person. As we got to talking, I got the idea of including my interns in the project — it seemed a natural alignment, Adroit's dedication to emerging authors and younger poets, and my dedication to mentoring young printers. At the time, Will, Kiera, and Sabina were all actively working with me and I pitched the idea to them. They were very excited. I mentored them through the entire process, from text selection to finished print. Here are the texts we settled on — all powerful in their own right, and able to hold many more layers of meaning than I first anticipated. But isn’t that always the way with good poetry?

Here are the excerpts we worked with for this project, all of which Adroit published at one time or another, followed by an image of the design mockup of the print (find the "links to purchase" at the end of this post to see the finished prints that are still available!):

//

I’m tired of knocking on the doors of empires.

If I told you these words are
not in English, would you believe me? 

Though & because it confuses the tongue,
let me repeat this: the flowers are ours the flowers
are ours the flowers are ours.

Yes the earth turns & there is time between us,
but my universe is neither corner
nor as dark as you’ve called it. Do you believe me?

— Zena Hashem Beck, from “Dear White Critic /”  (print by Sabina and Myrna, with type by Mamoun Sakkal)

//

how you can look back
on a life & see only salt there

— sam sax, from “Fraternity” (print by Sabina)

//

… you drink light with your hands
all winter. There is a universe in which no one is lying

emptied in the street as the gas station burns, a universe
in which our mothers haven’t learned to wrap

their bones in each small grief they’ve found.
There is a universe in which there is no difference

between the past and the ground. Another
where the ocean pulls the moon.

— Franny Choi, from “Introduction to Quantum Theory” (print by Kiera)

//

the song unwound
from the words like smoke, formless,
worlds without end.

— Dorianne Laux from “Baptism” (print by Kiera)

//

there are white people in heaven, too. they build
condos across the street & ask the Mexicans to
speak English. i’m just kidding. there are no
white people in heaven.

tamales. tacos. tostadas. tortas.
pozole. sopes. huaraches. menudo.
horchata. jamaica. limonada. agua.

— José Olivarez, from “A Mexican Dreams of Heaven” (print by Will)

//

I assume
we all
dance among the dead, especially if we don’t know any
better.

— William Evans, from “Wildlife” (print by Will)

//

all my life I’ve been trying to remember

who I am. All my life I’ve been erasing
myself to make seats at the table

for everyone else. How can I demand
more from the world when I can’t even

ask for my name in love?

— Fatimah Asghar, from “Ways I Am Tired” (print by Myrna)

//

“here I am dying at an average pace”

— Kaveh Akbar, from “Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Inpatient)” (print by Myrna)

//

Eight prints! It was a lot of work. That last one was my selection, from the very middle of Kaveh’s poem, and for some reason it struck me as very funny to have by itself on a business card sized piece of paper. It still does, but in a different way now. The other six prints were intern-driven, one broadside and one notecard each. I made sure they were actively calling the shots and physically doing the work every step of the way, no matter how complicated or beyond their current ability. Because of that, the project ended up being a lot more work for me than I anticipated, since I was guiding students through things that would’ve been much faster to do myself. But that’s okay because I like work. 

Where Are They Now?

Kiera O’Brien completed her MFA in poetry at the University of Pittsburgh in 2023. She now lives, writes, and works in Santa Fe, NM, the city where she was born and raised. She’s lucky to have a day job collaborating with words, students, and artists at independent art book publisher Radius Books. Since interning with Expedition she has acquired two excellent cats and completed her first full-length collection of poetry. 

Will Fuller lives with Kiera and their two cats in Santa Fe, NM. A painter and printmaker, Will maintains an active studio practice while pursuing a masters in counseling. When he’s not in the studio, he is learning all he can about native plants and his local watershed. Together, Will and Kiera create under the moniker Loud Object, "occasional experiments with text and image, undertaken on the page and off."

Sabina Smith lives and works in Minneapolis, MN where they love to soak in the freshwater lakes.

Mentoring through complexity to grit

For me the Adroit project was all about supporting my interns. I felt so much pride in their work, and wanted them to feel it too. To feel able and professional and useful. To make their own work, starting with the text selection. To work with words that moved them, not just me. So many good conversations came out of that project. Kiera’s linocut, the challenge of what color ink to use, whether to let it be a little rough on the edges or try to get it super clean. Balancing those things, wabi sabi style. 

Myrna showing Kiera how to feed a bigger sheet on the Golding Jobber press. Photo credit Will Fuller.

I remember Will’s idea of the gold line, and suggesting the over-the-top approach of doing it in foil, which required him to travel even further than he already was and work with one of my mentors, how wonderful it was to connect them but also a little nerve wracking because who knows if they’ll get along? I also remember Will almost in tears when we sent off the selections we wanted and got a no for one of his, and one of Kiera’s got nixed too — beautiful ideas that didn’t resonate with the editorial staff. And so we talked through the nuances of how to navigate client-collaborator relationships, different from straight-across clients. When to push back, when to let go. 

Will and Kiera setting type in the composing corner at our previous shop in Kingston, WA.

I remember the complexity of Sabina’s project, printing in Arabic! And for whatever reason we insisted on doing the English half of the poem in metal type — but then getting the plate for the Arabic, sending off proofs of the metal type to my friend Mamoun so he could match the weight of the Arabic type to it. So the two languages could balance. And the huge challenge of getting them to line up as two separate press runs, unified in the same ink. I also remember Sabina wanting to use the most beat-up type possible for their Salt print. 

Sabina printing the Salt notecard on our Golding Jobber press.

And for all, the cringe and challenge of sending first proofs. Of having agonized over the design, and then sending it off to editors and authors you admire and haven’t met. It’s really hard to do. Takes a lot of guts and, if not confidence, I guess grit. And that grit is something I am really interested in passing on, teaching about, making space for students to claim. I still have to muster it every time I send a design proof to an author or editor — it’s such a private act, designing. Making art. And then to bare it and send to someone else who has a deep relationship to the words but possibly not to the design process whatsoever; and may have only a moment or two to look at it and shoot back a response — it’s a tender, uncomfortable place to hang out in, that space between hitting send and getting a reply.

Myrna and Will in the Kingston shop. Photo credit Kiera O'Brien.

Looking back, it’s wild to think these prints would have never been finished, this project would never have been able to be done in close collaboration had the deadline been just a few weeks later. It was a joy to work so closely with Will, Sabina, and Kiera those days and weeks and months — there was much laughter amidst much serious consideration, so many interactions in person you just can’t muster through a screen. From here, I think those packed-full well-peopled days in the shop bolstered me for the dearth of human interaction that was to come. I’m grateful to Heidi for the idea of the project, and to Will, Kiera, and Sabina for jumping into the deep end with me and coming up for air with beautiful work to share.

//

Links to purchase

Get copies of the Franny Choi, William Evans, Dorianne Laux, and José Olivarez prints from Loud Object.

Get the Fatimah Asghar and Zeina Hashem Beck broadsides from Expedition.