Apt. 9 Press at fifteen: SOME SILENCE: Notes on Small Press and APT. 9 PRESS: 2009-2024: A Checklist,

 

It is 2024. I am 37 yearsold. I have been writing poetry seriously for some two decades, and for most ofit I have also been engaged in some form in the world of the small press(whether as a reader, a poet, an editor, a publisher, a researcher, a bookseller).And yet, even after twenty years, it feel like I am just beginning in thisworld. (Cameron Anstee, SOME SILENCES: Noes on Small Press)

Tomark the fifteenth anniversary of his Apt. 9 Press, Ottawa poet, editor, critic and publisher Cameron Anstee has produced the limited edition chapbooks SOME SILENCES: Notes on Small Press (2024) and APT. 9 PRESS: 2009-2024: A Checklist (2024), each of which are hand-sewn, and produced with French flaps; both in anumbered first edition of eighty copies. Anstee’s chapbook and broadside publicationshave always held a quiet grace, a sleek and understated design on high-qualitypaper and sewn binding in limited editions [see some of the reviews I’ve postedon Apt. 9 Press publications over the years here and here and here and here andhere and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here, etcetera, as well as his 2010 “12 or 20 (small press)” interview].If you aren’t aware of the work of Apt. 9 Press, the “Checklist” offers bibliographicinformation on some fifty chapbooks he’s produced through the press since 2009,as well as two full-length titles, two folios and a handful of ephemera, and a furtherselection of his own chapbooks under the side-imprint, “St. Andrew Books.” Ashe writes: “St. Andrew Books is an (unacknowledged) imprint of Apt. 9 Press. I startedit in 2011 to make a chapbook of my own to coincide with a reading. At thetime, I felt it was too soon in the life of Apt. 9 Press to self-publish underthe name, so the imprint was conceived. I have used it for 13 years now toself-publish chapbooks and leaflets when the impulse hits.”

Aspart of his “NOTES / ON APT. 9 PRESS / AT FIFTEEN YEARS” to open his checklist,Anstee begins: “The origin of the name of the press is unsurprising—I lived at328 Frank Street (Ottawa) in apartment 9 at the time. I considered FrankSt. Press, I think I may even have registered an email address, before mypartner suggested Apt. 9. I loved it; it rooted the press in the room in which Iwould be doing the work.” I am amused at the thought that he nearly took FrankStreet as his press name, especially given he offered the same title to thefirst chapbook of his poems published through above/ground press, Frank St.(2010). The specificity of place follows a fine trajectory of other presses namedfor their locations, whether Mansfield Press named for the editor/publisher’s homeaddress on Mansfield Avenue, Toronto, the myriad of Coach House affiliations(Coach House Press, Coach House Books and Coach House Printing) set in an oldCoach House behind Huron Street, Toronto, Alberta’s Red Deer College Press,which emerged out of Red Deer College (renamed Red Deer Press once the universityaffiliation had ended), or even Montreal’s Vehicule Press, a publisher that firstemerged in the 1970s out of the artist-run centre Vehicule Gallery. We namedour Chaudiere Books, as well, with a nod to the historic falls. I’m sure thereare plenty of other examples. Anstee’s imprint, “St. Andrew Books,” as well, isa project begun after Anstee and his partner relocated from Centretown into theByward Market (on St. Andrew Street, itself named for the Patron Saint ofScotland).

Acrossfifteen years, Anstee’s Apt. 9 Press has produced work by a flurry of contemporarypoets, from the emerging to the established, centred around the beginnings ofhis own public literary engagements through Carleton University’s in/words(titles by Justin Million, jesslyn delia smith, Dave Currie, Leah Mol, BenLadouceur, Jeremy Hanson-Finger, Rachael Simpson and Peter Gibbon) to encounteringthe wider Ottawa literary community (titles by Michael Dennis, Sandra Ridley,Monty Reid, William Hawkins, Phil Hall, Stephen Brockwell, Marilyn Irwin, RhondaDouglas and Christine McNair) and further, into the wider Canadian literarycommunity (titles by Leigh Nash, Nelson Ball, Stuart Ross, Beth Follett, Michaele. Casteels, Barbara Caruso and Jim Smith), and beyond, into the United States(a title by New York State-based Arkansas poet Lea Graham). His bibliographic checklistis thorough, and certain entries include short notes on each particularpublication, offering history on both the publication specifically and thepress generally, each of which provide, in Anstee’s way, short notes as teaserstoward a potential heft of further information. I quite enjoyed this note heincludes for Ottawa poet Dave Currie’s chapbook, Bird Facts (November 2014):“Dave somehow convinced CBC Radio to have him on the air one Saturday morningto discuss this book, which is comprised of made-up facts about birds. Ahandful of very confused customers came to the Ottawa Small Press Book Fair andpurchased copies.”

Thehistory of Apt. 9 follows a trajectory that coincides with Anstee’s personal interestsin writing, including his own critical and creative explorations, from the short,dense forms of poets such as Nelson Ball and Michael e. Casteels, widercommunity engagements across the scope of his own ever-widening landscape, tobibliographic and editorial projects he worked on, including around the work ofthe legendary and since-passed Ottawa poet and musician William Hawkins (a bibliographic folio, a chapbook reprint and editing a volume of his collected poems). While Anstee’s work with the press can be separated and is impressiveon its own, as with any poet-run press, his creative and critical work areessential to his work through Apt. 9 Press and vice versa; to attempt to fully understandone element requires an understanding of each element in turn (and how theyrelate to each other). Early on, as he writes in the essay-chapbook SOMESILENCES: Notes on Small Press:

In the earliest of thoseyears, when I was 18, during a second-year CanLit survey, Professor CollettTracey introduced me to Contact Press. I was immediately taken with the idea ofRaymond Souster quietly working throughout his life writing poems, and then fora decade or two in middle of the twentieth century, from his basement,making mimeographed books and magazines that re-shaped how poetry was writtenand published in this country. Shortly thereafter I began learning how to makechapbooks during my time working with In/Words, the little magazine and pressCollett ran. There were earlier moments too, such as when I was a teenager andgradually came to understand that my father’s collection of books was astonishing—booksby Beat and San Francisco and New York School writers filled the corners of ourhouse, books that were published by small presses run by editors who did itmostly because they felt these books should exist (though I couldn’t haveidentified them as small presses yet).

The lesson I took fromthese earliest encounters with books I found I cared about was that the act ofwriting can involve quite a bit more than simply writing. To write, in thesense of a lifelong practice embedded in a particular literary community, meansso many other things. I couldn’t have defined those other things when I firstencountered them, and honestly still struggle to articulate them today. In fact,through my first two decades doing this, in each overlapping role right up totoday, I have never been entirely at ease with the term small press. Ithas always felt elusive because it can mean so many different things to so manydifferent people, entirely dependent on the contexts of the conversation andits participants. That is something I confront anytime I try to speak about thesmall press or about what a writing practice is (about what my writing practiceis), given how intertwined and unstable the two are.

Anstee’sprose recollections are sharp, detailed and thoughtful; they are quite moving,articulating an essay-sequence of prose sections around elements of engagingwith small press, and his thoughts on small publishing generally, and his workthrough Apt. 9 Press specifically. “These silences are pressing for livingwriters and accompany the dead ones.” he writes, further along in the essay. “Youcan only let the work go I think, and hope that it finds the right hands in thefuture, that is, someone who will be sympathetic to it, who will open it andread it through and for whom it may spark a response, and who may come back andread it again.” Anstee’s prose through this piece, this chapbook, arecomparable to his chapbook production—sleek, carefully-honed and deeply precise—offeringmeditations around and through publishing. I know he’s already sitting on an as-yet-unpublishedcritical manuscript around small press (it seems criminal that such a work hasn’tyet seen book publication), but one might hope that he sees enough orders forthis particular title that it manages a reprint; it deserves to be read. Or, possibly,expanded upon. I could see this piece expanding into something full-length, anessential read on the specifics of literary engagement. Although, knowing theprecision and density of Anstee’s poems, perhaps everything he needed to say isalready here, set in a text that deserves even my own further engagement.

Books are great—of coursethey are!—but the idea of living a life in the small press or in poetry issomething else. There is no moment when you will have made it, no finish; thereis just the ongoing work of making poems, or books, or organizing events, orwhatever part of it you’re putting your own energy and resources behind. Maybe thatwork occasionally gets some attention, but it will pass so, so quickly. Publishbooks, and chapbooks, and leaflets, and weird little magazines, yes, as oftenas you want and are able to, but my feeling is that it is best to try to do sowith a hopeful eye on the much longer history you’re engaging with—the full scopeof which is forever out of sight—and with an understanding that your moment inthat history is both very small and totally essential, rather than on someimmediate pay off in public recognition or success (critical, financial) orwhatever other short-term validation is occasionally available.

So—and this is too easyto say—don’t be resentful that you didn’t get enough reviews, or didn’t winthat award, or weren’t published by that magazine. It matters a great deal andit doesn’t matter at all.