Job Opportunities at Thornwillow Press

Thornwillow Press in the Hudson Valley of NY is expanding rapidly and is listing a number of new positions in all departments, with full-time and part-time posts as well as spots in their Training Program. We share their call for applications with hopes that it will come to the notice of anyone interested in living their best life in the book arts. Feel free to pass it along! For more information, email opportunities@thornwillow.com.  

Thornwillow is a printer and publisher of handmade limited edition books. We do all of the editorial, design, printing and binding at the press in Newburgh, New York. We’ve been at it for more than 35 years and are one of the leading fine press publishers in the world. Over the years, Thornwillow has published the work of John Updike, Toni Morrison, Louise Glück, and President Obama among many others. Thornwillow’s books are in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum, The Smithsonian Institution, the Vatican, and the White House. We are committed to teaching and perpetuating the related arts and crafts of the written word. We are looking to hire full time people to join our team at the press. Both experienced and enthusiastic entry level applicants are welcome to apply.  

 

The Bindery. We are looking for full time people to join our bindery. In the bindery we do every aspect of fine bookbinding in house from folding and sewing to making paper, cloth, and gold tooled leather bindings. We also make the clamshell boxes, marble and decorative paste paper in house. Experience is not necessary, as we are committed to training interested people and passing on the craft.  We are looking for people with enthusiasm, the ability to work with their hands, patience and determination, and a love of books. In the bindery we are also able to entertain applicants for part time positions.

 

The Press Room. We are looking to hire full time people to join our press room team. Most of our books are printed on a Heidelberg flatbed cylinder press, but we also have Vandercooks, C+Ps and engraving presses that we run every day. Experience would be nice, but is not necessary. We are prepared and happy to train. First and foremost we are looking for enthusiasm and commitment to learning a craft we love. Being mechanically minded and enjoying working with machines is important.  

 

Graphic Design, Fulfillment, Data Management, Book Keeping, Marketing, & Website Maintenance. We have full and part  time positions available in these areas. For all that we are dedicated to the perpetuation of traditional crafts, we are an ecommerce company. Through the internet, we unite a local and global community of book makers and book readers who together celebrate the written word. With this in mind, we are looking for people who have a love of handmade things and at the same time are excited by technology. We have books to design, a website to keep updated, audio and video to edit, photographs to be taken, spreadsheets to update, inventories to control, orders to process, customers to talk to, shipments to get out the door, invoices to send out, and bills to pay. Like any business, we have a significant flow of work that needs to be done. Having experience in any of these areas is a plus, but we are also willing to train. 

Should I apply for the training program, or for a job? Applying for a job requires a degree of experience. "Experience" usually, but not always, entails actual work in the field, not just educational or student work. Full time positions are salaried and commensurate with skill (usually starting around $35,000 for a candidate with a base level of proficiency). If the applicant does not have experience, candidates should apply for positions through our intern or training program. 

 

About the Training Program. For candidates with moderate or limited experience, but great enthusiasm and eagerness to learn, we have a training program that typically follows this course: The program usually starts with a three-month trial period during which everyone gets to know each other and the work. This trial period is paid a stipend of $500 per week. After the trial period is over and everyone mutually agrees to move forward, the starting salary is $32,500. As skill and proficiency grows, the salary increases. The expectation is that anyone going down this path is at least interested in staying with it for a minimum of two years and ideally more. To learn properly to become a good bookbinder or printer (or baker or taxi driver for that matter) takes many years and at Thornwillow with each step forward there are always new and exciting ways to continue to grow. That said, it is a lot of time and effort that is only appropriately invested in someone interested in sticking with it. 

Work Study Fellowships and Internships. For applicants interested in learning, but not able to commit to an extended period of time, we offer a limited number of Fellowships and Internships. These run for a minimum of 3 months and are tailored on a case-by-case basis. Fellows and Interns are  expected to perform real, useful work on a steady and consistent basis for the duration of their time at the press. 

Affordable Housing. We also have a few options for affordable housing near the press. Either a room ($750 per month) in a shared apartment with others involved at the press or an entirely separate apartment. Please inquire if you are interested.

On unpublished and unpublishable work

On Twitter, essayist Paul Crenshaw asks: 

What’s the collective noun for all your unpublished pieces, the detritus and debris from writing, the cast-offs and castaways languishing on their little file of an island?

One of the team members at Pen & Anvil -- and why DO so many people have access to our social media account? -- pinged my handle in a reply, taking the view, I suppose, that this is the sort of question I'd have fun in answering. They were right! Here is my reply: 

I resent that you think I think about this a lot. Though, I do. Viz: Jeofails. Compost. Hellboxlings. Bad jokes. Benthic snow. Sequestra. Woundikins. Pendlings. Beneficiaries of no one's orphanotrophism. Dead squibs. Pulp cabinet. Diple heap. Hobobooks. Ye olde parapraxial hoard.

Of course I think about this a lot. Most of my writings are stillborn. My rate of return on personal poetry submissions is.... not a number I wish to quote here. Those writings that do survive the rigors and wrenchings of gestation and birth most often turn out to be not suited for life. Those, I allow to wither and perish -- sports, errors of the lineage. They would only be rejected by editors, rightly so. Kill your darlings, friends, and weep not for unadopted children. Writing is a brutal art. 

Do check out all the replies in Crenshaw's original thread -- some really lovely metaphors and phrasings are on display!

Stross on tech-free fiction

 Prolific novelist Charlie Stross earlier this month weighed-in on the habit of "serious" novelists to omit many basic features of the modern world:

My take: any “literary” novel that doesn’t exist in a world with magic internet mirrors in every hand, strange plagues exploding out of wet markets in Wuhan, and invisible killer robots haunting the skies above Kandahar, is historical nostalgia for a world that went away in 1990.

User Pickwick invites us to characterize such boring fiction as "grimdull", contrasting with e.g. "grimdark" and "grimpunk."

The deadwhitemaleness of school curricula and the YA canon

From the timeline, on that bird site, of Massachusetts poet Johnny Longfellow:

Try imagining all the public tax dollars that land in the coffers of the copyright holders of canonical texts. Then, you'll understand much of what underlies and drives toxic YA lit debates regarding which texts are deemed worthy of inclusion/exclusion within school curricula.

Imagine, too, the profits made by publishers who republish and promote works in the public domain for use in school curricula, minus any need to pay agents, authors, or their estates. So too, the profits made by those who create supplementary texts to accompany such works.

Yet, such factors are little discussed in YA circles, lest they distract from the seemingly well-intended and righteous topics of pedagogical practice, the inclusion of traditionally marginalized voices, and what values are transmitted to children/young adults via the humanities.

Emily August reviews Cat Dossett

We have learned of a generous review of one of last year's Komma Series chapbooks, Odysseus & Eden by Cat Dossett:

Y’all, just yesterday I was musing about starting a utopian society organized around poetry. Lo and behold, today I picked up this little morsel of versitude from Pen and Anvil Press’s Komma Series, a series of micro-chapbook publications. Check out the series mission statement:“The bite-sized booklets of the Komma Series are a mouthful of literature each, intended to be read in a single sitting. When you’re done with one, pass it along! Look for them lying around in Boston, Portland, or New York City. When you see one waiting to be read, go ahead and pick it up. Give it a home in your hands for a ten-minute lit snack. Then when you’re finished, leave it behind for the next person to find, in an ATM lobby, on a train station bench, in the coffeeshop, at the pub.” 

Cat Dossett’s Odysseus & Eden is the 18th publication in the series. This smart, ruminating collection brings together three fascinating persona poems from the perspectives of three different mythical women: Penelope, Ophelia, and an unnamed Garden of Eden resident who seems to be Eve. These are feminist retellings that humanize and complicate three of western patriarchy’s most blamed and besieged female archetypes. The famously loyal Penelope, whose characteristic virtue is that she remained faithful to her absent husband Odysseus for twenty years despite over a hundred love interests, here finally unleashes her libidinal rage in a surprising way. Eve—the legendary scapegoat blamed for an entire humanity’s fall from grace (eye roll)—is reimagined as an embodied sexual subject who transgresses erogenous, rather than culinary, boundaries. And Ophelia, who we’re used to seeing as the tragic, long-suffering victim of Hamlet’s self-interested scheming, here compassionately contemplates her own history of mental illness.

The main theme Dossett draws from each tale is erotic betrayal, and the recurring image that links the poems together is blood, which smears and pools across the poems like an accusation. As a result, readers see these grossly twisted “love” stories for what they truly are. 

Dossett highlights the ways in which women have historically been sacrificed for the preservation of various kinds of kingdoms, and the ways those sacrifices are naturalized and glorified by being codified as myth. Like the best myth and fairy tale revisions, these poems helped me reexamine and deeply reconsider what our treasured cultural legends are truly encoding and passing down. 

#TheSealeyChallenge, day 28.  

The reviewer, Emily August, is an Assistant Professor of literature at Stockton University, and she came to Dossett's work as part of the Sealey Challenge, in which participants commit to reading a new book or chapbook of poetry every day in the month of August. If you'd like to receive a complimentary copy of one of our Pen & Anvil poetry publications for your own Sealey Challenge reviewing in 2021, drop us a line. 

Chateaubriand on the pelagian

 “Between the sea and the land is a stretch of pelagian country . . . 

... where the frontiers of the two elements become indistinct. Skylarks from the fields fly with sealarks. The plow and the fishing boat, a stone’s throw apart, furrow the land and the water alike. The sailor and the shepherd borrow from one another’s tongues: the sailor says ‘the waves are flocking,’ and the shepherd speaks of ‘fleets of sheep.’ The multicolored sands, the variegated heaps of shells, the kelp, and the silvery fringe of foam rise up to the blond or green edges of the wheatfields. I forget now on which Mediterranean island I saw a bas-relief depicting the Nereids pinning scallops to the hem of Ceres’s robe.”  

(from Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, the autobiography of François-René de Chateaubriand, 1848)

 

Seeing past the limits of majority status

Over the past few years, a number of linkages have appeared to which connect New England and Nigeria in the network of Pen & Anvil collaborators. This relationship is the product of several factors, not the least of which is the 2016 publication of a portfolio of ten African writers in Clarion magazine. (A tip of the hat here to editors Samantha Arnold and Emma Forbes for that work.) And the links in that network are growing all the time as we continue to share news of publication opportunities and new magazine issues and book launches, and engage in the chatter of social media.

This background suffices to explain how it is we came to turn our attention to a Facebook conversation between young Nigerian authors. The conversation is paradigmatic of similar questions and answers being exchanged in literary spaces all over the map, as awareness of structural inequalities in the arts (as in all domains) creeps a little higher in the hierarchy of social concerns.

The original post was authored by a young writer who expressed frustration with the "hypocrisy and double standard" applied to the depiction of cross-gender characters. He writes:

In many writing groups, male writers continually ask fellow writers to "teach" them how to write female characters without annoying them or offending them. And I always think: No one has ever asked males to teach them how to write MALE characters without offending us! It appears to me that it is okay to portray "this gender that betrayed Jesus" any way we want, but an innocent description of a woman's breasts is objectification.

Anyone who has been in a mixed-gender workshop environment has likely heard expressions of this sort of frustration. There certainly are differences in how the act of depicting a gendered character in fiction is evaluated depending on the gender identity of the author. Is there any way to account for these differences, without coming to the pat conclusion that an unjust double standard exists?

Into the conversation comes Chukwuebuka Ibeh. Based in Port Harcourt, the capital city of Rivers State, Chuk is a long-time Pen & Anvil contributor, with bylines in Clarion, Charles River Journbal, NERObooks, and Ampersand. His reply to the question above was so cogent that we asked his permission to reproduce here in full. He writes:

Generally, when writing about (or from the perspective of) a minority, as someone who's not part of that minority group, it is reasonable enough that you get insights from actual members of the group. This is because your own privilege as a member of the majority could blind you to the realities of the group you're writing about, and you end up feeding into a stereotypical, drawn-from-the-closet, cliche narrative in your portrayal.

Now, specifically, when cismen write about women, there's often a tendency to present idealistic portrayals that most actual women are unable to relate to. You're a writer yourself so you should know what a cringeworthy storytelling is. (Straight) male writers almost always fail when describing women, as they are so fixated on the physical appearance (which is often inaccurately described) and fail to take into cognisance the complex emotional makeup of the character. They come to the script with basic, internalized ideas of what a woman "should be": soft, tender, curved, malleable, nice breast, shapely hips etc etc.

It's NOT exactly the same thing as a woman writing a man. There's a visibility of sorts that come with being the majority. You are basically the mainstream and so is your story. It's why queer people are more likely to write straight people better than vice versa, why black people are more likely to write white people better, etc etc.

This is a great answer! It doesn't punch up or down; it speaks across the table to a fellow writer, and invites that person to be a better writer (and a more compassionate human) by overcoming a natural inclination to prioritize one's experience of the world as most normal. The original poster agreed, writing as a reply: "Visibility, majority: these are the convincing words."

All well worth quoting and sharing. You can connect with Chuk on Twitter, where he posts as @ChukwuebukaIbe4.