The Art of the Almost Said: Talking with Writer, Editor, & Poet Bob Hudson

We're joined in the library studio by our friend and publishing colleague Robert Hudson to talk about his boutique chapbook publishing and the soul of the indie press. 

Much has been made (and is still being made) about mainstream publishing, their dominance and supposed clout, and the validation of authors they offer. But listening to Bob, an insider who has always cultivated his little garden outside of it, it's clear there's much to be said for the thriving indie press and its indominable spirit. 

He shares some advice for writers, and we all discussed how we see the deconstruction movement feeding a resurgence in more authentic, and autonomous publishing. Come along.

Publishing Disrupted is at PublishingDisrupted.substack.com

Mick Silva is at MickSilvaEditing.substack.com

David Morris is at dvdmorris.substack.com, LakeDriveBooks.com, and Hyponymous.com.

Transcript

Mick 0:00

Hey everybody, welcome back to Publishing Disrupted. I am editor Mick Silva.

David 0:05

And I am uh literary agent and publisher David Morris.

Mick 0:09

And we are uh talking about all of the lovely disruptions in publishing that are going on today, uh both in the traditional market but also the independent. David and I have recently made some shifts uh professionally into the independent book market. So uh we like to discuss all those manner of issues.

David 0:28

Yeah.

Mick 0:29

Uh so if that's what you're looking for, that's what you're gonna get.

David 0:32

So what do you want to discuss today? I I really have no idea. We haven't really prepared anything. We didn't think to invite anybody on. I know.

Mick 0:41

We should we should just ask someone to come in. It's not good. Actually, we do. We have a guest here today. Who's a neighbor? A neighbor. Yeah, actually lives in in Grand Rapids, so that's always a pleasure. Yeah.

Bob 0:52

I could have walked up here. No, I'm just a mile up uh Bailey.

Mick 0:56

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh man. Yeah. He bikes sometimes, David does. Yeah. If it's got to warm up. If it's warmer. Yeah, I hope you can do that again. But that's the lovely part about it. Joined by. Joined by that's I'm sorry, uh, Mr. Robert Bob Hudson.

David 1:10

Yeah. Welcome.

Bob 1:12

Thank you so much.

Mick 1:12

Yeah, thanks for coming. Um, we're in the library studio here, so Bob's joining us. And uh yeah, we were figuring out the mics beforehand. And of course, we have no computer today, so we're just like, you know, we're we're kind of on a shoestring, but we're figuring it out. That's that's that's disruption right there.

David 1:29

Exactly right.

Mick 1:29

We're rolling with it. It's the metaphor for the larger industry. Um But no, in in terms of what we want to discuss, we already have discussed a few things before we started uh recording, but we wanted to save the best stuff for when we actually hit record. And and Bob, just first of all, thank you for being here.

Bob 1:47

Thank you for asking me.

Mick 1:48

I would love a quick overview of your publishing career, if if you can do that for us.

Bob 1:56

I started as a freelance editor and proofreader. I worked for the University of North Carolina for a while and uh Donley in Chicago. Uh R.H. Donley, by the way, not R R Donley. RH was the uh Airlines Guides people. So uh I I had the fortunate task of proofreading the airline guides. That was a lot of fun. And the mobile guide, too, by the way.

Mick 2:18

Cool.

Bob 2:20

Um then was hired by Zondervan. I spent 35 years at Zondervan as a uh production editor, which involved uh a little bit of everything, both uh a little acquisition, a little line editing, a little uh content editing. And retired in 2018. Uh my wife and I really, since we were married in 1984, we have operated a small chatbook press. Uh we've done several dozen books, uh chat books. We just registered with the state as an official business this week. Oh wow so we are a doing business as, and we had to set up a business bank account and set up a tax framework with the state government. So that's exciting. And I brought some samples of what we've got going there. And that's been fun. A lot of a lot of people assume that I've been doing a lot of writing since I retired, and that's not necessarily true because I was doing a lot of writing while I was editing and just never worked very hard at publishing it. So it looked like there was a whole mass of things that came out as soon as I retired.

David 3:34

It did. I that's what I thought. Yeah. I would be one of those people that assumed that. That's contributed a lot to it.

Bob 3:39

I mean, I've had a lot more time. Um I've done 16 books, and that's counting a couple of revisions of old books. Uh my Art of the Almost Said, which is a book about writing poetry, was just reprinted.

David 3:56

With which publisher?

Bob 3:58

Uh with Credo. Credo Communication.

Mick 4:00

Okay. Yep. Another local.

Bob 4:02

Ah right. And uh Zondervan is also doing the uh updated revision of the Christian writer's manual of style. It'll be the fifth edition now.

David 4:13

Yeah, uh, let's let's keep on what your different your your bibliography is, but I just want to pause on that for a second. Um Bob, you're probably the only person like like a like a person who has produced a major style guide for uh uh you know a literary culture or community in in the Christian writers manual of style. I have the fourth edition here in front of me. Because there's like Terrabian, that's like older, much like I don't know, you know, there are things like Roger's Thessor Thesaurus, and that that those people aren't around, but you're like somebody who is really like a -- you know, you spent a lifetime on on editing and then also proactively gathering what you know and researching things and compiling things, and probably had a million people give you advice on this as it was originally created, but as as time has gone on as well. Yeah. I mean, that's that's pretty badass.

Bob 5:18

Well, I have to give I only edited four of the five editions of this. Jim Baru Jim Baruar originally put together a very small Zondervan manual stock.

David 5:28

Jim, see, we know Jim too. Yeah, sure.

Bob 5:31

And I think his was 50, 60 pages long. And then I was asked if I wanted to take it over, and I was thrilled to do that. And now it's over 600 pages. No, it's over six hundred. Uh the next one is going to be in smaller print, so it's not going to run quite 600 pages. I was uh flabbergasted by what large print they had in this edition. Yeah. But I wasn't going to complain. Yes. But yeah, it did start back when I was working at UNC for their printing department. Okay. I was starting to compile style rules. Uh well, first of all, when I first freelanced in Chicago, I worked for a freelance agency uh in Elmhurst outside of Chicago. I started on a Friday, the boss handed me the was then 10th edition, I think, of the Chicago Manual of Style, and he said, Here, I want you to memorize this by Monday.

David 6:20

There's no person or name behind the Chicago Manual. Trevor Burrus, Jr.: It's a staff. It's a large. But you're the staff in this case, with a lot of people helping you, obviously.

Bob 6:29

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: So as I edited and proofread, every time I ran across a conundrum or something that I thought was going to trip up a proofreader or an editor somewhere, I would jot it down. That went into uh high gear when I went to work for Zondravan. So I started collecting stuff. And then especially after I was asked to do the uh the revised edition of Jim's original, um I just started collecting everything I could. Yeah. And asking advice of everybody I could.

David 6:58

Yeah. All right. So I derailed you a little. You were talking about the the the books that you've published, and you had some written while you were still working full-time. Yeah. You said you did a little editing, a little bit of proofreading, but you were doing a lot and you were managing other people doing it as well.

Bob 7:14

Right. I hate to say it, but uh this is one of the disruptions of publishing. Anybody who does a little bit of writing and works as an editor, about nine times out of ten, this is no disparagement to any of the authors I worked with, nine times out of ten I would say I could have written this book so much better than this. Or I I I would never have taken this tack, or I would never would have done it quite this way. And I didn't want to sometimes you impose yourself on the author and say, eh, you could really do it this way. Other times you know that's just going too far. There are some authors, and uh I could name names, but uh there are some authors that I know. You know some names too.

David 7:56

We'll just leave them on carefully now. But you've worked with some pretty well-known names.

Bob 8:01

I'll mention Philip Yancey. There are there's the one in a hundred authors where I go, this guy is a hundred times the writer than I will ever be an editor. This guy knows how to handle a sentence better than I will ever know. And I was fortunate enough to work with a few of those. Yeah. Um so you get you get both, and it's it's fun. But uh but the disruption is just being frustrated with authors. Some of the big names you can't rewrite, some of the lesser names I you would go ahead and almost ghostwrite their book for them.

Mick 8:37

Well, and it's it's a question of the return of effort on some of these books. Yeah. With with the independent press, I think has a a a bad image uh for that re well, largely that reason, in my assumption as an editor, that the the quality level of the author writing the material tends to be lower than the traditional market. I think that probably still holds for you know the most part. But the the quality level of traditional publishing has declined as well. And in r in terms of just the I guess celebrity publishing, and we've talked about this effect a couple of times, but um having a book like yours, uh it's a Christian writer's manual of style. Now it's going to the Christian audience, but it it's it's the standard in terms of what I still use as an independent uh you know editor for people, whether they're publishing traditional or independent. And in many editors, that's the case.

David 9:33

Yeah, it's it's a disciplined resource. You you know, there's a lot of people in religious publishing that will cap pronouns for deities and cap this and do this and do that, and and you're you're like, no. In a lot of situations, it's like, no, we that that's okay. You can do it there. Right. But generally speaking, even as a religious publisher, there's actually a system to follow, right? Not just folk style editing.

Bob 9:59

Yeah. Yeah. Only only two of the best selling Bibles uh cap the deity pronoun. The King James never kept the deity pronoun. Yeah, interesting. The NIV never kept the pronoun. Yeah. The NIV doesn't either.

Mick 10:11

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and yet people will die on that hill so often.

Bob 10:15

And of course, of course, Wycliffe didn't capitalize the word God. Yeah. Right.

David 10:20

There's a whole folks. There's a whole discussion about that one. We could.

Mick 10:23

We could have an entire I I just feel like people need to know this. Yeah. You know, with with the English language and the rules, uh, I mean, there's so many uh that that as personally as an editor that I get annoyed with, but if I knew the history of it and I recognized that this is a new argument, it's a new phenomenon to say, you know, cap the deity and stuff.

Bob 10:43

Well, we wouldn't argue. If I can insert insert this, I I probably got more hate mail about the capitalization of the deity pronoun than any other issue. And I would receive people denouncing me with the curses of revelation. That's amazing. Yeah. Seriously, insert. Surprising, but amazing. I have this image that when I stand before St. Peter at the gate, he's going to say, Bob, you did so much, we're so proud of you, you did so much for the kingdom, but I'm afraid we're going to have to send you to that other place because you lowercase the deity brown.

Mick 11:18

Or just actually a few months in purgatory, maybe.

Bob 11:21

Like a Pascal's wager kind of thing. Like I needed to believe. I should have just believed. I should have just capped it. Yeah. Just in case.

David 11:28

Okay, but but you're but you're a person of many talents. Um you you're a big and we've had this uh in common too, folk music. You're a fiddle player and a penny whistle player. Wow. And a contra dance band performer.

Bob 11:44

I play in a southern old-time string band. I play fiddle. My wife plays banjo uh for a band called Gooder Than Grits.

David 11:51

Yeah, perfect. Perfect.

Bob 11:54

That's amazing.

David 11:54

And you're um you're a big, you're a big Dylan fan.

Bob 11:58

Gonna see him Thursday night. Oh he's here in town. Oh, I knew he was coming. Yeah.

Mick 12:03

Oh, you didn't get in fast enough, see?

David 12:06

I don't know if I want to spring for a $300 ticket. They still have tickets available. Wow, that's fantastic. But that'd be that's not the first time for you to see Dylan.

Bob 12:15

Probably somewhere in the 30s, I think.

David 12:18

Oh, wow. Wow. Um and then I have I have a copy of your um book from Erdman's called The Monk's Record Player, which is a story about Thomas Merton and the perilous summer of 1966 when he was also spinning Dylan records there at the Gethsemane. In the Hermitage, yeah.

Bob 12:39

Uh-huh.

David 12:40

Wow. Yeah.

Bob 12:41

Jacques Maritain, the great French Catholic theologian, came to visit Merton. And what did Merton do? He sat him down and made him listen to bringing it all back home. Wow. It's perfect. It's what you do. Come on.

David 12:54

So you're a you're a Merton fan, you're Merton aficionado, you're you're a big Lewis, C. Lewis.

Bob 13:00

Not as much on C. Lewis, but I love I love Lewis. But uh yeah. I go through phases. I mean, my whole life is just who who I'm interested in now. I've not been reading Merton. I was part of the West Michigan Merton Society for a while and enjoyed that a lot. But uh that book you mentioned it, by the way, I worried that the Dillon freaks were going to come back at me hard over over facts and small details. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

David 13:26

Like capitalizing pronouns of deities.

Bob 13:29

Trevor Burrus, Jr. You know, are you know how could you be stupid enough to think that so and so is in that session for recording? It's fundamentalists everywhere. But it wasn't they were kinder. The Dillon folks were great. They gave me good reviews. It was the Merton folks that went after me. Oh my gosh. Hammer and Tongs, they were they were after me. Interesting. Wow. So and there were there were some legitimate details that I missed. Um anybody does that that does history or biography. Yeah, there's a lot to know. Yeah. But uh yeah, they were merciless. Wow. So I kind of I lost a little bit of interest in in Merton at that point. Sure.

Mick 14:07

Well, the followers tend to help people or don't help people. They're gonna learn learn pretty quickly that there's a lot of people who uh consider themselves part of the the in crowd.

Bob 14:20

It's what we used to call Faustian passion. That's my territory. That's not your territory. You're not invited in. Yeah.

Mick 14:27

So Yeah, and I think that's that's interesting. I mean, we we hit on a lot of different themes uh in publishing disruptions, uh, but the independent market, I mean, ideally, is a bit punk in my mind. What right? Punk being that it's it's independent, it's intentionally not joining the crowd, not joining the group. And I mean there's there's even pitfalls in doing that as well, holding that as an ethic.

David 14:52

Um pushing against boundaries, right? Yeah, not staying in the box.

Mick 14:56

That can cause that can cause some some disruptions of its own, right? Um we do need to have some sort of and I'm not arguing for traditionalism or establishment thinking. I'm I'm just mainly trying to point out that there's fundamentalists everywhere. There are fundamentalist punks, gatekeepers. And yet you follow your interests. And I think just to pick up on a thread that that like this, it it seems obscure. It seems even somewhat obtuse, right? To to make the connections that you're making. And yet what really appeals to me about you and the work that you've done is that you excuse me, you dig down into your could we call them hyperfixations? You said phases. Sure. Uh, and and go ahead and and follow that curiosity. Is that fair? That is fair.

Bob 15:42

I I proudly am a generalist. At my best, I'm uh, you know, a mile wide and an inch deep. At my worst, I'm what you would call a dilettante. But uh all of us are, right? Yeah, I don't know. I specialize a little bit in lots of things and I prefer it that way. I have friends, I have a good friend, one of my best friends is uh he is a Cummings scholar and is writing a major biography of Cummings, and he is a brilliant, brilliant guy. But that's his topic. That's what he that's what he knows. That's what he's d decided. Exactly. And and that's kind of where scholarship has a lot of scholarship has led. Sure. I I studied comparative literature in graduate school. And I think what I learned from that was that you can learn the Engl the basic English literature canon. The major authors and how you would teach them in class. But in comparative literature, you're adding at least two other languages, you're spanning centuries, genres, uh sub literatures like Breton literature as it relates to major French literature, or Scottish and Irish literature as it relates to and that gets really kaleidoscopic. Right. Right. It it's you can't know everything. And that's why that's what I loved about comparative literature. Yeah. Was that uh it had to be interesting. Yeah.

Mick 17:09

Had to be humble. There you go. I think you used the phrase. I I feel as though independent publishing is an opportunity, at least for me on my side, and I get this from David somewhat too, it's an opportunity to be humbler than I was before with my publishing. And I think I tend to think that there's a lot of hubris involved and and clout and relationships and who you know when it comes to the established traditional market. Right. And and so I'm I'm intentionally trying to get away from that more and more. I think I've called myself aggressively informal. Yeah. When it it's talking about a conversation with someone, I love that. But if if we're actually having to hit a lot of, you know, the expected talking points, even with a podcast like this, I feel like I want it to be free form. I I don't like the idea of having a structure or necessarily, you know, even hierarchies and things like this. And yet we, all of all of us in this room, have decidedly been part of a hierarchy, a traditional structure that says you learn these certain tact uh uh skills and and you develop your your skill in that uh area and then you become an expert and and that's what you stand upon. I can't argue for both things sometimes with my kids. It's very difficult because I'm saying I'm trying to tell them why it matters to get a four-year degree and then go on to graduate school. And does it still? I don't even know. Maybe it doesn't matter as much. But I will say, well, I think what matters is that you have taken your knowledge and dug down into it based on the curiosity, the hyperfixations, the phases that you're allowing to be your motivation, your your impulse to to follow, right? And that that's worth something there.

David 18:53

And and that creates like um like a small, smaller, uh but more engaged world for you, for the people around you, for the work that you're doing. Um I I would love to um talk about the disruption that you've experienced. And we you were sharing something with me before we went on on l live here and about how um you were publishing books that you wanted to reach bigger audiences. This I think plays right off of what you've been saying, Nick, and what we were in recent podcasts we've been getting at this. You know, you were publishing books to reach wider audiences, publishers that do that, like the like this Merton book. Um but then you discovered something and you made a shift. Can you talk about that?

Bob 19:36

I can. Uh almost from the beginning, as long as literature has been around, publishing or at least sharing literature has been disruptive. That's almost been the point. You think of Ovid getting exiled to the Black Sea because of a poem. I would love to have written a poem that upset enough people that I would get expelled from anywhere.

David 20:01

How much publishing like that goes on now? Exactly.

Bob 20:04

And and we talk about mainstream publishing. The disruptive thing about mainstream publishing is that it's not disruptive at all. Interesting. It's not generally, I mean, that's generalization. Yeah. But it's not really pushing the boundaries like the independent publishers are.

David 20:19

So a lot of cultural divert derivative. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Bob 20:22

The early printers, whether you're thinking uh Wycliffe with translation or uh Gutenberg and Schaefer with uh you know publishing the Bible in German. Uh these are these are disruptions that really echoed all across the world, or at least all across the Western world. And uh well, you think of the Japanese uh and the Chinese Zen poets who were rejecting society. They were disrupting the Confucian order because they so that's kind of almost why you have to go to independent publishing. Yeah. Is because it is where we were talking two before uh about Apocryphile Books, who's one of the publishers of four of three of my books now. They are so on the edges of what's possible. I was just quoting a couple of titles to David. They've done a book uh called God on Psychedelics, which I've not read, but I love the title. And uh The Resurrection, a gay vision. Um so they're they're pushing the boundaries and upsetting people. Um they don't get as much attention as a huge marketing department is going to give you. But they have that impact. So my my disruption with major uh publishers whom I loved working for but uh and learned a lot from is that they weren't willing to push the boundaries enough. Um and I could tell stories, but I'd better not. But instances where you know books were brought uh well, I can't tell one story. Uh you may know Lilius Trotter. daughter who was a major missionary in North Africa in the 1920s, was a disciple of John Ruskin's, almost married John Ruskin. She wrote a beautiful, beautiful book called The Way of the Sevenfold Secret.

David 22:17

Nice title.

Bob 22:17

Yeah. Which Miriam Huffman Rockness, who's one of the world's great Trotter scholars, she's done a movie, a documentary movie on uh Trotter. Uh she brought me and said would Sandra be interested in this was just after this was just before 9-11. There was a lot of interest in Muslim culture. Way of the Sevenfold Secret. Trotter wrote this for Muslims in Algeria at a time when it was death to be evangelizing Muslims in Algeria. She wrote this in the form of a Sufi mystical treatise as if Rumi had written it, but explaining the Christian faith. It's basically mere Christianity as Rumi would have written it. Sure. And it's a beautiful book I brought it to Zodar and they said no that's too that's too you know she's not well known enough and it's too out there. After 9-11 I brought it back. I said we have got to do this. This is such a beautiful book. It's an important book.

David 23:20

And again I was rejected but it was because probably me doing the rejection rejecting no I don't think no it was before you. Oh good all right. 9-11 was a long time you don't have to worry.

Bob 23:30

You would have seen it. So uh but it was that kind of disappointment where um they wouldn't do those kinds of things. I was vilified at Sondervan a little bit because early on I you remember the book uh uh in in blackprint what is it it's in it was a book about publishing but it basically said they did a research study that individual cowboy editors they called them did every bit as well in sales just choosing books out of the blue that they loved that they loved yeah they did well as well in sales as a committee and so I invented what I called the bonkers book that every editor at least once a year should have the ability to bring in a crazy book out of the blue that the bonkers books worked for a couple of years and then the hammer came down and they said no more bonkers books.

Mick 24:27

I I used up my blank check pretty quickly in in most of the jobs that way. Yeah yeah acquisitions is interesting because it did feel that way it's very arbitrary. I worked as a bartender and uh wait wait staff at a at a restaurant in London for about six months while I was trying to get off some of the the detritus of America uh in London. And uh it was it was great but I learned that you can't predict what you're gonna make that night because there's just no way to know who's gonna come in the restaurant or what game's going to be playing that brings people in or or not playing and then you just don't don't and it wasn't just games that were onto you. It was so many factors. And I think it was a a good early lesson in the fact that you can't especially as a retailer you can't predict when people are going to buy, how many are going to buy, why they'll buy and that that's what we're trying to do in acquisition so often in publishing. It's it's this crapshoot. And we've we've I mean everyone has to admit that they don't know how books sell. And ultimately we're trying to tell people that we do as as a publisher. We go out and we say we know how books sell yeah because we have these best sellers over here so we're gonna sell you too and I just increasingly got really uncomfortable trying to make that I guess it's a Pascal's wager in a way too. It's like you you offer them one thing and then slide of hand and give them something else and it's just it feels dishonest at a certain point.

Bob 25:53

Yeah. The other the other disruption was as you both saw in your time uh at publishers uh was just the increasing increasing pressure to publish celebrities who sometimes don't even really have a very good story in them. Or now it's become unless you have a major online presence, a podcast or a blog or a Substack or something that's just catching thousands and thousands of you're not going to get a book entry. And then you've then the editor's faced with okay I've got these 50 Substack writings that I'm supposed to turn into a book for this writer for this substacker. And that becomes a just a major headache. Yeah. And those are kind of who's getting published at least making the best selling seller list aside from your fiction writers.

David 26:48

In religious publishing it was like 20 years ago it was uh working with sermon manuscripts hiring a freelancer to aggregate to create a bunch of to pull a bunch of sermons together do the rewriting along a theme hopefully and then you would end up having to edit it. Right. And that that's actually doesn't happen quite as often as it used to. No. It still happens but I don't think it's quite it doesn't lead the way.

Bob 27:14

Well pastors don't have the kind of uh clout and and platform that they used to exactly your editorial committees are going to look at a pastor's collection kind of roll their eyes whereas a popular religious podcaster they're going to go ooh yeah that sounds good.

David 27:27

Or Instagram influencer or whoever. Exactly yeah so you so even you Bob have had some experience with publishing and then like publishing something really original like like this like this book you said you published some other things and you said they weren't selling as well. And then you decided why am I doing it this way? Why am I pushing this way and you started to go in a new direction. The chat book press.

Bob 27:48

Well I I my agent has been very kind so good has persisted with me. I have wanted to make money for my agent more than to make money for myself just because I've been pleased with what he's done. I thought my novel The Beautiful Madness of Martin Bonham was going to do that. That came out uh 2020 late 23 uh but 24 from uh Apocryphile the second book they did with me say the title one more time please The Beautiful Madness of Martin Bonham I took it to the major five put it in the notes yeah it's yeah great book I I I had shown it to the major five I got a couple of editors from the Christian publishers that said wow this is original this is creative I love this this is so funny it's one of the funniest things I've read but this is not the kind of thing our market is going to go for right you're you're writing humor with a spiritual twist and that just not good. No there's humor but there's no humor in religion sometimes fiction account but I was convinced that this was going to be the moneymaker for my for myself and my agent uh and I couldn't find a publisher Apocryphile was willing to take it uh because they are kind of out there and uh John Mabry the editor there just loved it.

David 29:08

It's got a cool cover as I recall. It's got a fun cover.

Bob 29:10

Yeah. And Brian Borger of all people at the 2024 he's the owner of Eighth Day Books Byron Borger um he was when he was giving his talk at the last festival at Calvin uh I don't know if you caught that he said publicly his favorite book of the year was The Beautiful Madness of Martin Baum and this is a guy who reads hundreds and hundreds of books and of course my table got swamped I got sold out in about two minutes. Yeah wow so I'm I'm going to have lots of copies of that's a good good story.

Mick 29:44

Sometimes it takes a while with for for those books I'll just say sometimes it takes a while.

Bob 29:48

I'd still love that book. I'd love to write a sequel but how do you write a sequel for a book that the first volume didn't sell well and that's one of the the challenges it it was a wonderful book.

Mick 29:58

I read it uh Carolyn McCready our friend read it as well and loved it and we're editors we we see a lot of work but that but I will jump in and say that's a lot of like a lot of indie fiction happens with publishing more than one book in a series these days.

David 30:11

Yeah that's true.

Mick 30:12

So you publish the new book you get new readers plus your old readers but the new readers go oh there was a there was a prequel to this especially if that newer book is a little more let's say commercial I don't know that term but like genre I guess that would have some conventions of normal fiction in it. This this one that I'm remembering had uh a lot of literary a lot of references you even said something in your note was it at the beginning or the end well style of fiction you're writing yeah the narrative uh the narrator of the novel is a is a professor who doesn't know how goofy he is and that's part of the humor.

Bob 30:50

Uh so a lot of his frustrations with life and literature come out in the footnotes. It's a it's a novel with funny footnotes end notes at the end.

David 31:00

Is that autobiographical Bob? Some of it is he's he's goofy but he doesn't know it.

Bob 31:04

I this is oddly enough it goes back to Zoderman. We all are I love it. That's yeah I am as goofy as they come but it a lot of it does go back to my work in publishing because there's always a tension between the trade side and the academic side. And so I was kind of playing on that that this English professor has problems with this uh theology professor about how to love God. And that's where all the the humor comes from. But right yeah I was really frustrated that these books weren't selling and at this point since I'm kind of regularly getting rejected by the major publishers anyway I thought why don't I just self-publish or POD publish a variety of ways a large variety of channels that I have just the stuff that I love and the stuff that's really close to my heart. For instance I'm right now I've I've uh recently published I've been working on a set of short stories in blank verse. Now you know there's a huge market for blank verse poetry right of course.

David 32:09

Yes.

Bob 32:09

So explain what that is then blank verse is the verse style iambic pentameter that Milton wrote in it's kind of one of has a long history in English literature and it's just it's very nice because it makes language flow, it makes language lilt, but it also doesn't become so obvious like rhymes you're always straining for a rhyme at the end of the line, that kind of thing. So I'd planned a set of four and I got two done and I got stuck on the third so I decided just to go ahead and publish the first two in a volume that I a chapbook volume this is from my own Perkiprice called Sinners in a Glass Ball two short stories in verse and uh I'm now furiously working on the third volume which has been fun. What is a chap book? A chapbook is a single if you know book publishing it's a single signature it's basically just pages folded together and stapled a signature and book publishing is a chap book.

David 33:12

So but a signature um traditionally was a they would they would print they would print on a wide press a one piece of paper. Right.

Bob 33:21

Right fold and cut and it would be anywhere from sixteen to thirty two and for mass markets as many as sixty four pages on a single sheet of paper. Folded and cut and then bound together with other signatures and that becomes a book.

David 33:36

What an what a fun way to just think about a book.

Bob 33:38

Isn't it one and then this book from Perkipery press which is called Making a Poetry Chatbook I go into a lot of detail making a poetry chat book everybody I go into a lot of detail about how to make a chat book and how that relates to a signature in book publishing. So I've got these other channels these other outlets which have been fun. The titles of these Two Sinners in a glass ball are kind of are kind of fun. The first short story in there is called Moving Day in Creation it's about a boy who uh finds himself alone on a farm when the beast of the apocalypse is making his approach at the after his parents have been taken up in the rapture and he's been left behind. Yeah. So it's called Moving Day in Creation. That's great. The second one completely different is called Standing by the Shroud of Our Lady of the Vale both of these were based in dreams but uh the Standing by the Shroud of Our Lady of the Vale is about a really creepy art restorer who has run across this Renaissance painting an unfinished Renaissance painting by one of the great masters and he has this really creepy way of resolving what to do with this unfinished masterpiece and it's it's kind of fun.

David 35:09

So these are these are beautifully designed too you've got a thick stock on the cover you've got a colored end paper that that encapsulates the signature itself and it's staple bound. That's a chapbook it's like it looks like it's like four by five or something like that.

Bob 35:26

It's basically just 10 sheets of paper stapled together at the uh corner. And where do you produce them not that we need to go into the weeds of that well we we for a long time did it all ourselves uh we printed it off our home computer printer uh we stapled you can do that we have a stapler that does this in fact this is our my stapling uh and then we would cut them laboriously with an Xacto knife I now am going up to the printer today to have yep the rest of the copies of these trimmed uh it's a printer here in Grand Rapids for about $200 printing cascade.

David 36:01

Okay. There you go you got got your call out Cascade there you go we're in Cascade Township right now I think no it's Ada Township they're over on old 28th Street. Yeah that's great.

Bob 36:11

So we used to do it all ourselves but uh it's as time runs out in life you are willing to pay people to cut your lawn instead of cutting your own lawn you know what I mean? I'm at that moment right yeah so that was the transition you're talking about just deciding I can do this myself.

David 36:28

Talk about um community as you've done this. You know have you have you been able these seem to me to be wonderful things to read in public or to be at conferences. We we're gonna see each other at the Festival of Faith and Writing later this month. It's now April here in Grand Rapids at Calvin University.

Bob 36:45

If I could borrow that back there you go there is a huge subculture of chapbooking in this country and I confess that I am not a player in that I know a few people one one of my favorite people I had to got to spend some time with in on Ackle Island Ackle Island Ackle Island off the eastern coast uh western coast of Ireland um this man uh I'm I'm blanking on his name all of a sudden but he publishes basically this is a chap book that's hardbound. Right. He does what he calls a visual poetry it's all color.

David 37:27

That's your book though is it this is not mine.

Bob 37:29

No this is this is from a publisher called Red Fox Press in Ireland that's called Walter's Doolin Yeah and these are uh man's drawings quick pub drawings of people and musicians in pubs and this guy Red Fox Press is just doing some amazing work and I love what they're doing.

Mick 37:47

So in here he's got drawings uh that he's made in pubs well while listening to people play music.

Bob 37:53

And he and his wife he has a a much young a younger wife uh Asia Korean and they do all their own printing all their own binding uh everything themselves in this little quaint hut yeah on Ackle Island in Ireland not far from where they fill uh filmed the uh banshees of what is it? Oh yeah in in Inish Oh yeah yeah yeah yeah it's the same place where they filmed great movie such a great movie so that book goes with it definitely just looking at it. He did a book on uh on that on the scenes from that movie where those were shot and some drawings of some of the So you're talking about culture of chat books as you thought of this book yeah culture of chapter connections yeah with people there also there's some other people I have some samples of here of some creative things people are doing just with paper. Wow I wish we were a video I'm not into fold out books myself but this woman again who's super cool very skinny name I've creative fold out book yeah yeah that's just fun this one got probably handmade yeah this one got folds out into a flower they're more like art yeah yeah yeah rather than words almost like an ornament this one is and you've already uh this one is kind of cool it opens two ways so that it's it's just wild.

Mick 39:17

Yeah see this is why Sherry my wife wanted to hear from you.

David 39:20

Listeners if you're listening and I hope you are um just imagine crazy shaped geometrically shaped books that your imagination could run wild with and that's what these people have done.

Bob 39:31

Exactly and you uh have already discussed apparently last week uh the zine culture which is huge right now uh it's a single sheet of paper you only need to print one side fold it and with one cut you can literally make an eight page magazine they're called zines yeah and uh there's a woman uh one piece of paper one piece of paper printed just one like a thicker like a thicker stock and then you fold it and it turns and it really does look like a mini book. And it doesn't need to be uh fancy uh the woman online who is just kind of one of the great mentors is Braddy X Bree B-R-A-T-T-Y-X-B-R-E. At Bratty X Bree she is the zine queen uh in this country and she's doing some amazing work.

David 40:24

I've noticed on a few of these that like there there's no author or or copyright credit or publisher credit.

Bob 40:31

I know I think they probably don't need to worry uh as I tell poets they say oh should I register my chapbook of poetry with the government and I say who's honestly going to steal your poetry and who's actually going to make money with your poetry.

David 40:46

But even no website you know to find out more. I know but I'm just thinking that's on purpose in a way it's like it's part of the art form.

Bob 40:53

I think so and to bring it into the 21st century here's a guy that does chatbook with a flash drive a flash drive attached to it.

David 41:05

Trevor Burrus That's more like the late 20th century flash drive. Yeah that's correct well this this is current because it has the uh it's actually the C plug for the C USB C a little bit more I've never even seen a USB C flash drive see I'm the one who's in the late 20th and I've never plugged it in to see what's on it I assume it's just more information relatively inexpensive to put with your book.

Mick 41:31

I love it though because it does create a community of people who are just interested in maybe glorying in the obscurity a bit.

David 41:38

Aaron Ross Powell So you have all these by other people where are you why are you why do you have all these?

Bob 41:43

I I if I can make one kind of digression. I'll I'll do I'll show you some more of our chat books.

David 41:53

I did a series of six chat books for my wife's I'm taking a picture that we'll put on the sub stack idea I'll take a couple pictures.

Bob 42:01

So Sinners in a Glass Ball was one of our recent ones I did six chat books of my wife's poetry which turned into three print on demand books of her poetry.

Mick 42:14

Okay I think you'll like that title title is When I Got Drunk with my mother Poems about growing up Southern by Shelly Hudson and then the title of the second book When I Smoked Pot with my daughter now you're talking poems about parenting and this one just came out this week of passage for every parent. Yeah whatever you love you are poems about the rest of life.

Bob 42:39

Oh that's great. So we uh kind of co-published those with uh the Schuler books chatbook publishing they print through Ingram Spark uh who who does a pretty good job yeah no these look great glossy covers smaller probably still offset publishing though are again two more that just recently our Purkipri press published uh revisionisms these are my translations of the last fifty years I've translated poetry here and there. Nice and this is uh it's a tram sample but uh Tristan Corbiere was a Breton French poet and just uh the major poet of the century. I think he's better than Baudelaire and Rambaud and Merlin put together. Oh my goodness. So those are just six of his poems. When he knew he was dying of tuberculosis he wrote these poems to himself as a child who was dying.

Mick 43:35

Side by side with the French. I love that the translation so you can see how badly I did come on now I I have to mention Nicholson Baker in his uh books uh I'm forgetting the name of his character in these books but the the anthologist is one I just listened to on audio. My wife and I are listening to these but Nicholson Baker talks about poetry and he's invented this character uh who is A professor in English. And he's talking about all the ephemera and things that go along with uh writing that kind of a book, so I think you'd enjoy it.

Bob 44:14

But it's Perkipuri pre perquipperi press. Perkipperi press. Perkippuripari. We chose that name because it is odd and people ask about it. It's based on the Latin word perkippare, which means perception. And we had to spell it with a K because if you spelled it with the C as they did in Latin, everybody said perciperi press. And that just sounded, I didn't like the sound of that. Perkippery. So perquippory. Perkipper.

David 44:44

Perkippary. That's very cool.

Bob 44:45

One of our best sellers. I mean, we usually print in issues of 25 to 50 copies. So we're not talking bestsellers. Our best seller has been this book called Bugs. Bugs.

David 44:58

I'm getting pictures of all these books, everybody, by the way. I said podcast platforms. We'll put a link to our substack. Great. Where you can see the pictures.

Bob 45:13

This is printed in a type font called Infestia. Wow. Which is made up of bug parts.

David 45:21

Oh my goodness.

Bob 45:23

Yeah, look at that.

David 45:24

Look at that typeface. The typeface is Infestia.

Mick 45:28

Wow.

David 45:29

Yeah.

Bob 45:30

Wow. Which I can no longer find. We did a hundred copies of this, and these have sold. I've only got about ten copies left.

Mick 45:37

People are super into bugs. Yeah. I know a group you could sell a bunch of those to here in town.

Bob 45:42

Well, I'll have to think about a reprint.

David 45:46

A cunning huntress in her own mind, the old cat, stalks a ladybug. Haikus?

Mick 45:51

That's one page. Yeah, they're all haikus. So, yeah, a collection of 50?

Bob 45:56

I don't. I think it's 20 haiku in there.

David 45:59

Just mine bugs. Mine is the only candle burning at this hour. The bugs celebrate.

Bob 46:06

There's also the issue of one-offs. And this is a book I made for my wife. This is a unique copy. This is not in an addition. Handmade bark paper in a box. Wow. And then it's a special craft paper. But these are again more haiku and drawings that I did for her.

Mick 46:29

Written in Japanese.

Bob 46:31

Yes. Oh, okay.

Mick 46:34

I was going to say it didn't look like hiragana.

Bob 46:36

I was like, I think I copied them from somewhere, and these are just English looking like Japanese. So and I copied the images, but I hand hand copied the images. So the most passionate traveler seeks that place most distant from himself.

Mick 46:52

Just that. Just that. So this is the most passionate traveler seeks that place most distant from himself. So I I feel this coming back around to what we were what I was trying to um emphasize about your curiosity leading you, your hyperfixations, the phases you go through. You have, I mean, I don't know how many books you brought. This is going to be a record. Yeah. Probably what? At least 25 books here, maybe 30. Yeah.

Bob 47:24

That you could put into a backpack.

Mick 47:26

That you hand sell to people that that you're you're allowing your interest to guide you and to guide you to the connections with people that you're looking to make, right? Using books. Yeah. That's a very different, let's say, business model than traditional publishing is set up to support.

Bob 47:48

That is. Um I'm not even sure it's a a business model. There you go. Let's talk about that. We've only just set up as a business. Uh I'm just doing this because I'm passionate about it. And since we were having a lot of money coming in, money going out, we thought we would set up as a business. So we are officially, as of this month, uh as of last month, a business. Uh one thing that comes up is uh you mentioned ephemera. Um I brought this stack specifically because I collect chatbooks as well. Um a beautiful one from TikNathan from the 1968. That's amazing.

David 48:27

Wait a minute. That's from 1968? Yeah. Oh my goodness. Yeah. And uh Can you just hold it up? Probably Is this going to be an alternative podcast, everybody? You're gonna have to. We're gonna give you pictures.

Bob 48:41

You have to get the picture if you're standing beautiful, though. It is. It's just gorgeous. Um a first edition of T. S. Elliott's Cultivation of Christmas Trees, which is a hardbound. Hardbound, but tiny. Look how small. Maybe eight pages.

Mick 48:57

Um by Ferrar Strauss and Oh, Kudahy.

Bob 49:01

Oh, that's even back when literary publishers did kind of fun things, 1956.

David 49:07

I want to be careful with these things. I know.

Bob 49:10

Uh Robert Bly uh was good at commissioning small chapbook presses to do first editions of some of his poetry.

Mick 49:18

Sure. Okay.

Bob 49:19

Uh I like the uh this is uh the one that I'm showing Mick now is uh a Robert Bly book of poetry. It's bound in cardstock, but it's done like a dust jacket to a hardcover. Yeah, it folds over in the front.

David 49:35

It's got the leaves. So you keep these in a fire safe box. Yeah, I was gonna say you're letting people handle these.

Bob 49:42

I keep these in the barn. A second printing of the first edition of Jack Kerouac's Scripture of the Golden Eternity.

Mick 49:52

Oh these are these are valuable, Bob. Come on.

David 49:59

Staple bound. 95 cents, it says on the back.

Bob 50:05

I mean, these are ephemera of ephemera, and of course, as time goes by, they're more valuable than Exactly. Uh these are just Robert Crayley and a Diana Prima. I I love the Beat Poets. That's one of my fixations. This one I won't have you pronounce on. This is a broadside. A broadside, for those of you that don't know, is a sheet, a single sheet of paper, printed on one side. Uh and this is uh an original broadside by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Wow. Oh my gosh. Who was? He was the owner of City Lights Books in San Francisco. He was one of the guiding lights of the whole beat movement. He knew and published everybody. Wow. He was the one who uh first published Alan Ginsburg's Howl and had to face the obscenity trials uh after Howell was published.

Mick 50:57

Well that makes sense with the title, I think. Yes. Find some interesting stuff here. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Bob 51:02

And to go on, there's uh picture of that. Some original poetry by Theodore Dreiser in a chat book format.

David 51:09

This one by Lawrence Ferlingetty is spelled F-U-C-L-O-C-K. Does it have anything to do with the F U C K word? Yes, it does. Yeah. If you open it up, you'll see.

Bob 51:23

Two first editions of Thomas Merton. Uh his Tears of the Blind Lion done it was first done as a chapbook. Wow. Thomas Martin. And his Praying the Psalms.

David 51:34

This is G-rated. I'm working on it right now.

Bob 51:38

But but man, these PGs.

Mick 51:40

So many cool little books.

Bob 51:42

Aren't they fun? Yes. Ernest Hemingway's collected poems in a pirated edition from San Francisco. This is 1960. Wow. A pirated edition of his poetry for 50 cents. Wow. Originally 50 cents.

David 52:00

Hemingway who used to live in upstate Michigan. Oh, that's right.

Bob 52:04

Wow. This is not particularly exciting, but somebody uh Wow, Thomas Merton praying the Psalms.

David 52:12

I'm amazed at this.

Bob 52:14

And James Mitchner's uh essay about William Penn. It's neither here nor there, but that's kind of fun to have a Michner. And one of my favorites, uh another beat poet named William Wantling, whom I've loved since high school, talk about being edgy. Um this is a very creative, it's an elongated, if you can imagine, a book that stands upright. It's taller than it is wide, which is most books, but this one is taller than you would expect it to be. Um it's his heroine poems. He was in prison for heroin addiction. Heroin haikus. And uh these are his heroine haiku and it's such a creative presentation. Love the Sick Fly Eleven.

David 53:03

The Tears of Blind Lions. The Tears of Blind Lions by Thomas Merton. Wow. That's one of his volumes of poetry. What a wonderful title.

Mick 53:12

I'm gonna tell you something, Bob. I think this is true, and probably Ivy would even um confirm this. We'll have to ask her later. You might meet her at the uh Calvin conference. I loved it. But um Zine Culture. I'm I've been mispronouncing that my whole life, Zines. Zine Culture is is quickly catching up with the chat book sort of analog versus digital movement, and a lot of people are going to be interested in what you're sharing. I wish this was video. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's fascinating to me because the the conversation increasingly is now about what the internet is doing to us as a culture and personally to our minds and our brains and our hearts, but also to our community. Yeah. Hollowing it out, making it more artificial, um, digital, and people still talk about the singularity like it's this wonderful thing, but none of the younger generation is is on board with that. We don't want AI. It's actually kind of ruining a lot of the things that we used to love.

Bob 54:15

Well, that's that's kind of what I wanted to get into too. And I won't I won't go through these books individually, but the these are some of the best of what I think are in the last 30 years cutting edge of creative, really creative chat books. Yeah. Things that are done. And we're talking about the book as an art artifact, as an object, which is not going to happen online. Right. These are things that are collectible in the fact that they are beautiful not only in content but in presentation.

David 54:48

Yeah, you can't show these, you can't do justice to with these on an Amazon listing.

Bob 54:52

Exactly. I mean, some of these are just so beautiful.

David 54:55

Right. Exactly. Oh man.

Bob 55:00

And this goes back to like William Morris. Here's an original William Morris, the uh Kelm Scott Press. Hardcover.

David 55:07

Uh that may not be a chapbook, I think it's a probably quite valuable.

Bob 55:12

And uh Relativist looking. This was done, I think, by Longmire from uh Morris's uh printing equipment just after Morris died. Oh my word. Uh it's called Art and Beauty of the Earth by William Morris. Wow.

David 55:28

Where do you find these books?

Bob 55:30

I just browse through old bookshops. I used bookshop just gets my spend a lot of time in bookstores.

Mick 55:36

I do.

Bob 55:36

I do. So and there are just a lot of fun things here. Um little mysteries. Using marbled papers, doing hardcovers. But it's what uh we've been calling the artisan book movement. It doesn't have to be chap books, it can be regular bound books. A lot of people are doing some really amazing things with larger books. Yeah. But these are artifacts that people want to keep. The content is beautiful and the packaging is beautiful. And that's something that you don't run into a lot, even with the major publishers. Sometimes they have attractive covers, they have catchy covers, they have marketable covers, aesthetically pleasing. Right.

David 56:22

One extra process like embossing or foil or something.

Bob 56:27

But you go to an art museum and you know, there are half of the paintings and drawings and prints and etchings you see there, you're going to go, that is so gorgeous, that is so beautiful. And you don't get that as you go to Barnes and Noble a lot. You do it sometimes. But these you go to the old bookstores and you go, oh my gosh. I have what I call 100-year books. That is, I go to the bookstores and I find books that are 100, 150 years old, and I think, wow, people were doing such amazing things 100 and 150 years ago. And this book has lasted since then. How many books I worked on at Sondervan are going to be Yeah.

David 57:07

I actually They're not in a recycling bin.

Bob 57:09

When they went to the non when they went to the acidic paper, this was back in the about 20. I don't know if you were there, David, but they had to, for financial reasons, go to acidic papers because they had done non-acidic for a long time. And I gave my story about the hundred-year books. I said, How many of the books I'm working on now are going to even be here physically years from now? And I was told, mmm, 30 years is going to kind of push it, they're going to start yellowing. 50 years those pages are going to start getting really brittle. You've seen, I have books, paperbacks especially, that are just yellow, and if you bend the page, it's going to break. Right. Um, if I could just read a little piece, uh I'm not dominating too much. I'm talking way, way too much.

David 57:56

No, this is a treat.

Bob 57:57

This is from the introduction to my making a poetry chapbook. Um Poetry chat books are experiencing a revival as a result of inexpensive digital forms of typesetting and printing. As in the 17th century, chap books are still the literature of the street. They are the people's voice, the sacred texts of the ephemeral, the pulpit of the church of what's happening now, the revolutionary's boombox, the mad poet's megaphone, and they make really nifty Christmas gifts. So that's from the introduction to making a poetry chapter. Yes. A lot of this, I also have a book uh called uh The Art of the Almo Said, which is a longer, it's a full book about writing poetry. And that these two came about, Art of the Alm Said and Making a Poetry Chapel came about because I would, as Representing Xander, I would go to a lot of writers' conferences. And the most uh despairing people at the writers' conferences were the poets who were not writing very good poetry, who had no outlet for their voice. There were a number of problems. First of all, a lot of them were trying to evangelize through their poetry, which doesn't work. Uh poetry is not a good medium for evangelization, which I think has to happen face to face anyway. They had not read modern poetry. They a lot of people writing poetry don't read contemporary poetry. Isn't that interesting? They have to do that if they're going to write contemporary poetry. So I wrote those, this one and the other one. This one to give them a voice. They can print their own chapbooks.

David 59:46

Yeah.

Bob 59:47

And then uh The Art of the Almo Said was a way to convince these writers that they needed to read more poetry. They needed to get out of this um evangelization mode of poetry. I'm going to convert people through this poem, and it's just not going to happen. It was really sad to see. So uh, because people don't read poetry. Jack Lex Jack Lex's daughter tells that story. Um he told his daughter one time, he said, I Jack Black, you said Jack Lex. Uh John Lex, he was a Jack Lex. Uh poet. Uh Jack Lex, yeah. He he and Lucy Shaw were kind of the major poets back in the Lucy Shaw just passed away. Just passed away. So Jack uh told his daughter, he said, I'm really worried that I just I haven't mentioned Jesus enough in this new collection of poetry. And she said, Oh, dad, don't worry about it. Nobody reads your poetry anyway. There you go.

David 1:00:45

People need to be relieved of that guilt. Yeah. Just do the poetry and then see what happens.

Bob 1:00:50

Well, I I what I say in the Art of the Almost said is write your poetry to the extent that you yourself are covered by the Holy Spirit, to the extent that you are honestly indwelled by the Holy Spirit, your poetry, whatever it is, is going to be indwelled today. If you try to make your poetry look like you're one percent more saintly than you are, it's going to come off as fake.

David 1:01:17

And we don't want that. No, that performative word.

Mick 1:01:20

Yeah. Performative is sort of the first stage spirituality, I feel. And then eventually you move on to stage two. I think it's a backwards stage third stage. Potentially is. Um and and a lot of people stay there for life. And yet if you can dig in more deeply on your interests, let's say literarily, uh, you're gonna find a whole lot more stages there into your spirituality.

Bob 1:01:47

That's a question I'd like to ask you too, because you're the experts on this. Um the whole deconstruction movement was really a breath of fresh air and relates to a lot of what we're talking about here. But it's kind of kind of hit its limit and is passing out of the scene a little bit. What what do you find is the next stage? What's replacing it? Where is where's the culture going?

Mick 1:02:10

You remember, you remember, and I I don't mean to step on your toes of all. Sort of didn't nothing emerged. We like to say, like what was that? It was a blip. And I think uh similarly, our culture, and maybe even more quickly on deconstruction as a term, it gets thrown into the bucket with a lot of things like wokeism and uh you know there's a lot of politicization at the top of the case. It gets appropriated by different circles. It gets appropriated circles. Yeah. So I think it's still relevant. I think this is going to continue. There's just another term that we don't know yet. Deconstruction is useful because it does talk about deconstructing, or at least in my view, deconstructing the initial impulse, that first stage spirituality that's looking for a structure, looking maybe even ostensibly for a hospital. Let's call a church a hospital. People go in and they're looking for something. They may find it, they may not, but at a certain point you need to grow in your spirituality. We talk about discipleship and community, and in context of a loving community, you want to see a spirituality growing. A lot of people didn't find that. They found the opposite, they found trauma. And so the trauma is this that's the word that I hear when people say they're deconstructing. Well, they're experiencing, at least, at the very least, mental trauma, if not also spiritual, emotional, relational. All of the ways that you can experience trauma is contained in this one word for people who have found a spiritual uh difficulty in their lives that creates this impasse. They can no longer either go to church, identify as Christian, talk to God, even pray. They don't understand anymore because what they were met with when they went in for a hospital was the opposite of healing. It was more trauma. And so that deconstruction then becomes something that they identify with. At a certain point, and you know this well, you're gonna have to de-identify with that pain in order to release it and let it go. Because you see a lot of people holding up their pain as their identity. I have been hurt, I need to be comforted and heard by everyone in the in the room, and that that becomes a very difficult conversation to have. People need therapy at that point. But deconstruction will continue. I had a whatever we call it.

David 1:04:31

A very relevant conversation about this with a potential author yesterday. Um who uh I won't go into all of it. Uh I'll just say that you know, they grew up in an environment that restricted this person. She's a woman, so it had that whole layer attached to it as well. Not allowed to go to college, for example. D you know, had said some other things about that. I was like, wow, that's really rich information, but uh about the experience. Um and you know, uh just being that more like it was her version of being the submissive person. Um and uh, you know, has done a lot of work on being critical and being doing the deconstruction analysis and venting the feelings along with that. And uh, you know, the conversation moved around to how are we growing? And it's you know, how do I become a person? Because I I was held back from being learning how to be a person. It's just for example, cultural references. When you're inside the Christian bubble, you don't actually know what's going on outside in the rest of the culture sometimes, which is a little weird. Um and this person talked about um sort of having to come into her own again, and that's a very common theme uh going on in this movement. And people are kind of detaching from church. Church is changing, the framework of religion in the United States is changing. The relationship between the relationship between institutional religion and being connected to something sacred is being redefined. But this person, and we talked, and I said, what's really missing these days, and I've said this probably right on this podcast, is what we're really missing these days are are people who from from who are going on this journey and exploring these questions, waking up in a way critically, and realizing, you know, life isn't as it was. Well, what is life supposed to be? What what life can I have? Well, who am I? And that's what to me I would love to see more of is people writing beautiful things, beautiful collection of essays about how I discovered myself. You know, I think back like, you know, I I I'm not a big literary person, I'm a psychology person, but I loved reading Annie Dillard. And she would write sentences like, you know, I'm before God and I have to fall on my knees. Like, whoa, what does that mean? I have to fall. I mean, I'm just paraphrasing, but or or Barbara Brown Taylor, who's going to be at the festival later this month here. Um there's that scene in her first book, leaving church, where she's standing at the back of the Episcopal Church where she just gave a sermon, waiting to greet people, and she's just breaking down into tears and doesn't know why. I mean, I'm just I just remember being so moved and compelled by that. And I think that's what I would like to see is I don't want another psychology subject matter expert. I don't want another um, you know, celebrity book. There's there's I don't want another really strong advice book. I'm tired of advice. I want something that's gonna move me, um, which you you're doing in these chat books for sure. Um, but that's that's where I think things need to go. And I and and I think, and we had a great conversation, this author and I, and and I've I hopefully she got inspired and encouraged to give her the freedom to not necessarily talk about that hard-hitting topic, critical topic, another book about Christian nationalism. It's like, okay, here comes another one, you know. Yeah, we need to document all these things, we need to understand it. And that's gonna and that's gonna continue. Honestly, we're not done deconstructing until we're done deconstructing. Right. But what I'm also hoping for is where's where can the beautiful writing come from? That that feels spiritual, that feels like it's pointing towards something sacred without the usual evangelical tropes and so on. What what can we like what can we talk about in terms of our own stories that is just noticing things, like an Annie Diller was really good at noticing things. Um yeah, so that's that's where I that's that's my take. I'm sorry. That was a little long there.

Mick 1:08:46

I love it. Where where's the question come from for you?

Bob 1:08:50

I worry and um challenging that inner voice uh from my evangelical days challenges me. Why are you writing about two-thirds of what you're writing? Because it doesn't seem to relate to faith. In my mind, it all relates to faith. Right. Right. Um as you'll see like in The Sinners in the Glass Ball, one is kind of ripping apart is deconstructing that whole left behind end times mindset, which I grew up with and I just have grown to despise. I I hate to say it. Don't hate to say it, I say it. Um and the second poem is uh really kind of uh it gets much more personal, and I probably can't I can't go into the detail about that. But it's it's a it's a creepy, a creepy poem. But both of them I define them. Existential. Yeah. I define both of those poems as stories about individuals dealing with spiritual life and death. Yeah. And because there is a kind of spiritual death that we're all struggling to keep away. I mean, I'm more afraid of spiritual death than I am of physical death in life. Yeah, there's your C.S. Lewis. Yeah. So, and that's what the whole sinners in a glass ball concept is is about. So, yeah, I raised in an evangelical church. My parents got religion late, only when I was in junior high school. Uh I was one of those early con converts, 1976, that thought you had to be conservative and Republican. I was reading, although I was reading a lot of Solskja Neitzen and Lewis and Chesterton and those kinds of people who were Bill Buckley. They've never fit well in that paradigm. Yeah. And uh who are at least good writers. I mean, they're all really first-rate writers. But I finally had to give that up, partly through my wife, uh partly through just the disgust I was feeling with a lot of the pressure I was getting from her very, very conservative church where I met my wife. Sure. Uh, which had which was on the edge of being an abusive church, in my opinion. I again won't name names. But uh anyway, so that's that's kind of where that came from. So I am now I'm just freed up. The poem, the third poem in the Sinners series, which nobody's going to read. I'm taking I'm venting, it's called the Milton Haiku. And it's about a scholar who's desperately trying to write a lecture on Milton and suddenly realizes that Milton was basically a contemporary of Boschow and how much he prefers Bosho, and how much he really realizes he hates Milton, how much he thinks Milton misunderstands. Yeah. Um, Milton has this almost heroic Satan figure who becomes a romantic hero for the romantics later. Interesting. And uh so anyway, I I'm I still have a lot of edginess about my evangelical upbringing.

Mick 1:11:57

Well, and and I guess the disparity, right? It it creates a conundrum and you have to explore it. You have to figure it out. It's something that's in you that says, I I'm not going to allow this to rest. I'm not just gonna go to my office, make my money, and call it good. I'm gonna actually explore what it is I feel my heart and my mind are telling me.

Bob 1:12:18

And the last poem in this set of four is about racism. It's called Shaving a Dead Man, uh, about a white fiddle player in the mountains who's called upon to shave the body of his dead black friend, and is therefore shunned from the local community for having befriended this guy and been part of the funeral ceremonies for this guy. And it's this old fiddler's reflections as he's dying on his deathbed. So it's bringing out a lot of the conundrums about race that I was raised with.

David 1:12:53

Fiddler in the Appalachian Mountains. Yeah. Did you you said you worked for University of North Carolina Press. Is that where you're from?

Bob 1:12:59

I wish I could say I worked for the University of North Carolina Press. I worked for the printing department, which published all the internal publications. I wish I worked for the press. Um No, I'm I'm from Chicago. My wife is from the mountains of North Carolina, and that's how I uh I ended up down there. Appalachian. That's why you go there sometimes. Exactly. Yeah, we've got a we've got a place in Winston, Salem. Yeah. In Old Salem. Uh, and her family is down there.

David 1:13:23

But the uh the fiddler, the mountain fiddler shaving Shaving a Dead Man.

Bob 1:13:29

And uh it's that's kind of an inside joke for fiddlers as well, because the original title of that tune was a very racist title.

Mick 1:13:38

Okay, okay, that's great. Um seemingly obscure. You're you're hitting on something that I think is a theme too. It's seemingly obscure to do chat books or to, you know, glory in the uh like nobody knowing your name necessarily, but that's that's what punk is for the kids. Yeah. They're calling this. Um and I and I think if you can make those connections recognize that this is just the human spirit trying to survive. Yeah. In a digital world, that becomes life or death, that becomes existential. A lot of kids uh ultimately uh fall to despair because they don't find this sort of like what seems too obscure for them to even give credence to or or start investigating. And then if you don't investigate that, I've I think the soul starts to to die. At least it decays. And so we need to hold up the banner for digging into your interests, your hyperfixations, whatever those may be, right, and follow that heart, follow that mind's curiosity into that new frontier that you're too afraid to go into. Let's let's explore that together. It's okay. Other people have done it before you and will continue to.

Bob 1:14:47

One final word is that I was asked to be one of the presenters at the Last Christmas Society. And my presentation was on losing readers. Um I was I presented all the statistics for all of the demographics that readership has gone down uh steadily, and it's miserable. It's like below 30% for the under for the teenage and under. I mean, it's getting really miserable.

David 1:15:16

Amount of time spent reading. Yeah.

Bob 1:15:18

Yeah. Well, and even the illiteracy rates. People that can't function at an eighth grade reading level as adults is just getting really depressing. And so I asked the Chrysostom folks, what do we do? And uh none of us had really any substantive ideas on how we combat that. But that's why I go back. I know the rest of my life is just to be tending my own garden with these kinds of writings and publishings, getting as many of them out there as I can, and maybe it catches somebody's eye.

Mick 1:15:50

Tend your own garden books.

David 1:15:51

And you you will when you meet people, you give them books. I have books because you we had lunch and you gave me books or I wish I brought you some of our chat books. I Oh, I'm good. Hit me at the conference. But you but you you do it on a person-to-person basis. You're sh you show up at conferences or just the one kind of now and now it's pretty much Galvin owned.

Bob 1:16:13

Which is only by annual every other year.

David 1:16:16

Yeah. I wish I could do more. Website.

Bob 1:16:19

We're setting up a website now that we're in official business. Gotcha. So we will do that.

David 1:16:23

But uh But your website personally is Yes, is up.

Bob 1:16:27

It's RobertHudsonBooks.com. Robert HudsonBooks.com. Okay.

David 1:16:31

And what can they find there?

Bob 1:16:33

They can find all my everything except the chat books. Right. Right. So we're going to keep the uh pro Kippri press. That's more person in person.

David 1:16:40

You've got to come to Grand Rapids and meet Bob. Yeah. And then you might get a I'll bet you'll get a chat book.

Mick 1:16:44

But at least if you've listened this far, that means you need to get a copy of Martin Bonham. The beautiful madness of Martin Bonham is a wonderful book. And I I think it's going to do more. The story's not all told there. I think it's going to do more uh in in future years as people start reading it. And it's it's the kind of book that you need to read. People, there's no such thing as Christian literary fiction because it's it's in my view, uh it's it's suppressed by the genre fiction. And if you can find some now and then, literary Christian fiction, it does exist. It's out there. Bob wrote one, it's really good.

David 1:17:20

That's where the word Christian is not a bad word in that sense. Right. This is this is meant to be.

Mick 1:17:25

This is a category that's just woefully underpublished.

Bob 1:17:28

Well, I'm I'm hoping you'll find it really funny too, because that's mainly what people tell me is that they just laughed out loud frequently in the book. I went one of the books that I've been thinking of doing, one of the larger books I've been thinking of doing, is basically kind of curious classics of the Christian faith, where I want to look at more of the humor, more of the not light reading, but the accessible reading. Right. Like we were saying, nobody reads Paradise Lost. I mean I mean, scholars have, your English look majors have, they've read Paradise Lost. Um who reads the Institutes? Right. Cover to cover. Cover to cover. But there are a lot of fun things out there. And so I wanted to write that. So I went to a bookstore that specialized in Reformation literature, and I sat down with one of the managers and I said, what in this store is really funny? Is really charming and kind of light and uplifting, but still really edifying? And the answer was I'm afraid the reformers just weren't into that thing today. Correct.

Mick 1:18:32

There you go. It it was just uh I I don't know, it wasn't seen as viable. That's an unfair question. Right. Yeah.

David 1:18:40

It's a ridiculous question. We're not answering it. Yeah.

Bob 1:18:43

I haven't meant to catch them off guard, but uh there it is.

Mick 1:18:46

Yeah. Yeah. So so you do need to uh expand, reader, or or listener, I'm sorry. Your listeners, you need to expand your interests, allow those interests to expand you in t in return. And I think this is something that uh I'm gonna come back to from this conversation. Thank you. Thank you for being here. Thank you so much.

David 1:19:04

Yeah, I feel like I'm looking forward to this and definitely enjoyed it. Thank you.

Bob 1:19:07

You didn't get to your quiz. No, let's skip it.

David 1:19:10

This all right that's just back into like the editing stuff.

Bob 1:19:12

But well, I am so appreciative of uh everything you all do. Uh you you are doing God's work here in uh in your podcast. Thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Mick 1:19:21

Yeah, well, we'll have you back. This is exciting. So everybody uh check out Bob Hudson, look at the links below, and you will be able to find him there. Thanks for being here. Talk to you next time.