Candid Chat #4
Michael e. Casteels and Puddles of Sky Press
Very fun interview with a one of a kind micro press publisher out of Kingston Ontario today. When asking other publishers who they think I should chat with Michael’s name came up over and over again.
The Gritty:
•Puddles of Sky is probably the most variable publisher I’ve spoken to. Michael jokes that no paper leaves his house if it’s not a publication. Things are inherited, repurposed, and the work inspires and conforms to the materials at hand.
•Print runs have been as low as 17, but ideally sit at 40 or higher, and are dictated by the amount of paper at-hand.
•PoS occasionally produces more traditional chapbooks, but that is not the focus. More ‘traditional’ printings, when they take place out of house, are funded by the press’s sales.
•PoS’s costs are somewhat non-existent, short unpaid labour, based on the really inspiring model Michael adopts.
•PoS occasionally puts out a submissions call for themes, and remains open to general submissions for work that fits the press’ ethos and style.
MC:
How many interviews have you done?
CL:
Um, okay, let me look at my little folder here. I talked to Ian LeTourneau at Emergency Flash Mob Press.
I've talked to three poets who have pretty much only published in micro. And then invariably they're all like, well, yeah, I used to make these little books. There's a lot of overlap. It's not very discreet. And then I've talked to two other micro-press publishers and two are scheduled to chat this week. And a few more tentative groups. A lot with short turnaround.
MC:
Cool.
CL:
When I started queuing up my sub stack or whatever, it was partly because I wanted to just review Canadian books that weren't brand new. Like even just a few years old, they're like 2022, 2023. I started building the review queue and I thought, well, I would like to have something that's easier and is steady and I can have a backlog and work on transcribing.
And partly that was just because I used to review chapbooks, and sneak them into a review of another book for a magazine or whatever. And people were always really, really grateful. They're like, “oh, you're talking about chapbooks, nobody talks about chapbooks.”
And they really are real books. And I think sometimes a book-length book, like a trade book, isn't necessarily more of a book. It's kind of several really good chapbooks slapped together and it doesn't make sense as a trade book.
MC:
For sure.
CL:
So yeah, I think I've been following you on Facebook for like a really long time because I probably I'm not really on Facebook. I wish I could tell you how I even assembled across Puddles of Sky.
MC:
Yeah, I was wondering about that actually.
CL:
Yeah, I Invariably somebody told me to submit to you and I didn't, or I did and I don't remember. Do you want to introduce yourself, what you do?
MC:
I'm a poet, writer, and visual collage artist. I make chapbooks, I run Puddles of Sky Press, I do everything for it from like getting the work, editing it, printing it, assembling it, I do everything. And really focused on sort of short, shorter length chapbooks, and very much handcrafted. So my main focus right now is doing all like rubber stamped publications and trying to make each of the chapbooks fuse the writing and the form together. That's one of my main goals in doing it that I think is maybe a bit different than some other chapbook presses or just presses in general where they might just have you know your standard form and they just put the work in there. I usually try to make each book a little bit different in size, shape, format, and often that goes along with what the poem is or what the work is.
CL:
That's really exciting. A lot of people I've been talking to aren't, or if they're doing hand assembly, it's a saddle stitch or something to that effect, they're definitely not printing themselves. They might getting it printed by a friend or whatever I guess. But you’re somewhat unique for the degree of tuning or the fine motor control of the production. What would the formal elements of the book reflect in the writing look like? Can you give me an example of a title, like how that fusion happens?
MC:
Yeah, I'll grab one here. It's pretty close.
A lot of them are very small. So this one is by Allison Chisholm. It's quite small. And I also do a lot of single poem chapbooks. They don't even have to be a collection. This one is about winter at a pier, and each of the pages are printed on this type of vellum or rice paper. So the words basically bleed through, so you can sort of see the next page as it goes through. The poems are one word printed on each page rather than printing the whole poem on one page, it’s spaced out depending.
CL:
And even the craggy ice, like the kind of like the ice settling on like a lake, I feel like you know you've got your layers, you've got all these stratum and you can see through it. I mean, I'm not brilliant, but if even I can infer that from a Zoom call.
MC:
Yes, yeah, and that's exactly the purpose behind the way that it was printed.
CL:
So what would a print run on that particular one look like?
MC:
That one I think is 60 copies.
CL:
So are your runs dictated by the supplies at hand or is it more forecasting?
MC:
That's a really big part of it now. It depends. I still do chapbooks that are printed and I print them at home and make them. Usually I try to do somewhere near a hundred copies because normally when you buy paper it comes in stacks of 50 or 100. So that's what dictates it.
With the Rubber Stamp projects, it's from an overarching project called Off Cuts and Loose Ends.
Over the years I've gathered a lot of off cuts and loose ends. It ends up being a shape that you can't run through a printer. Those are the rubber stamp ones, and that is all pretty much dictated by the amount of paper. I just did a a very small chapbook here, or chap-poem, a little one-poem, and it's 206 copies because that was the the amount of paper I had.
CL:
Yeah.
MC:
And then that can get a bit tricky just depending on, you have to find the right size of paper to fit the work, depending on how long some of these poems are or how short they are. And then finding, you know, enough, because I don't like doing really small print runs. I've done print runs of 17 copies, but then I go to a book fair and then I'm all out of them. So normally I try to get 40 or more, at least 40 would be kind of the low end. So yeah, trying to find enough paper that will fill those requirements.
CL:
And then I guess also the difficulty—I mean, maybe it's not difficult—soliciting or getting getting work submitted that it can happily fit on an off cut. I know a lot of people talk about pamphlets. I know Annick MacAskill, with OPAAT Press, is doing one poem pamphlets [OPAAT stands for one poem at a time]. As far as I understand it, the ‘pamphlet poem’ emerges from those leftovers, trimmings off of trade books, and now a lot of people make them just because they like the aesthetic style of it, even though people aren't usually working from scraps or donated materials at this point. I don't know about Annick in particular, other than seeing what the pamphlets look like online.
How does one come about these supplies that you have? Is it leftovers from your own production or are you like going to the dumpster behind a paper shop or?
MC:
A lot of it has come from from off cuts from my own projects. And I have had a lot of donations. So there's a poet publisher in Ottawa, jw curry, he did a lot of work with bpNichol. And he's been doing this type of like rubber stamp kind of work since, I don't know, the 70s probably? He's influenced my work a lot. I got a big donation of paper from him. And other writers, other bookmakers, whenever they just have odd sized things that they know they can't use then I end up inheriting them. I've got stacks and stacks to work through right now.
Thrifting is another good way. ‘Cause I like to get envelopes. Everybody likes that tactile thing with books and with chapbooks. But for me, I like when people have to really engage with opening pages or things that fold out. So I like getting envelopes and those are usually thrifted. Paper can often be thrifted. You can find really nice paper at thrift stores.
CL:
My mind is pop rocks right now. Because I think partly like 99% of the time when I interact with work like this, it's in a gallery setting and it's not getting called writing, right? sophia bartholomew and Hannah Doerksen had this postcard sized accordion fold out1. And it's a lot of writing and images as well. It spilled off of the plinth. The fundraiser/whole event was post-card sized work. Whereas some of the postcards on the wall were just postcards people had blacked out and re-doodled, this one sophia and Hannah did exploded out.
And then I suppose there's Anne Carson's box book, I can't remember the name of it. So I’ve seen stuff a bit like this before. But it sounds like you're in an intersection of DIY punk almost meets like extremely attentive, laborious, nicely done formal work.
MC:
Which is interesting because I did sort of get into chapbooks through zines. And that was very punk at the time. It was paper and glue, pasting it all together, and then going to Staples and ripping off as many copies as we could for the five bucks we had.
And then from there it morphed into chapbooks that were more digital, digitally designed and still printed at home and handmade. And then it morphed from there into like the very unique chapbook.
CL:
So you're not sitting on InDesign three hours a day?
MC:
No, I try to avoid that as much. Some projects I do use InDesign, for the ones that are digital, those ones I do with InDesign, some of the journals, but I'd say the majority of the publications I'm doing now are all rubber stamped.
CL:
And so when you say rubber stamped, you're making a stamp and you're pressing?
MC:
I've got a little kit and then you end up with these little platens.
CL:
Okay, yeah, no, no, I totally know. I used to sell antiques and I had a Home Depot bucket of rubber stamp letters that somebody had just given us. And everybody goes through and picks out, you know, F-U-C-K, you know.
A lot of the time I found that stuff was rotten, right? It had been used to death or had been stored in a wet shed or whatever.
MC:
So you get the set, you get the all the typeface. And you tweeze, put them all in. So that also limits what I'm able to do. I can do poems that extend across here, I have to do two and then stamp one, stamp the other. The largest one is five lines.
So I can do poems that are longer than five, but if they get really long then it's just it's too many impressions per page, and then that type of work gets exhausting. So short form poems, minimalist poems are a focus, because of the the format in which I'm publishing.
CL:
When I was younger I wanted to make paper out of Wendy's napkins. If I ate Wendy's once or twice a week while I'm in grad school, because my timing between classes was weird and they give me this many2 napkins every time, what do I do with all these? What a waste. They pile up, why not make a book of it. I didn’t do that, probably good for all of us to not have Wendy’s napkin book in the world.
But there’s this very real, ecstatic material impulse of “this could be something,” you know? And it sounds like you're, not to be a hippie about it, but you're not letting things go to waste.
MC:
Literally. So these are all cereal boxes. So I'll use those for cover stock. These are all old letters. Those will all be used for a rubber stamp project. These are, you know, from guitar strings. Every time I string my guitar, I collect those.
CL:
It's so organized.
MC:
That's my paper stock. Every time I do a project, the paper gets cut smaller and smaller and smaller. So this will be a project at some point, and the paper keeps getting smaller so the books keep getting smaller. That's something my wife hates is that i don't let any paper go out of the house unless I'm printing on it.
CL:
One thing I'm asking a lot of people about is their cost. It sounds like your cost is wildly variable. If your paper might have costed this and then it's free from there on out as it slices down, it sounds like probably your overwhelming cost would be labor.
MC:
That's exactly it. I just finished some for the Ottawa Small Press Fair. These little ones I'm selling, paper was donated. I have the stamps, I have the ink. So all those upfront costs I paid. For this project I essentially didn't pay anything. Nothing for this specific project, but then they're all being sold for “one cent.”
CL:
Pennies.
MC:
For pennies, yeah.
CL:
[sarcasm]Well, everybody's got a penny on them.[/sarcasm]
MC:
Exactly.
So, then labor, each one of these is seven different impressions of stamps. So to sell that for a cent—it's very much the labor is where the cost comes from for all those projects.
I have done two or three projects where I've got them printed out of house. So I had one printed a couple years ago, it's a perfect bound book. I got it printed at Coach House printing in Toronto.
So it's a really nice paper. What then happens is all these little projects that are essentially free or pennies to to print in cost and my labor, all the money that I make from that goes back into the Puddles of Sky Press fund. So then when I have a couple hundred dollars then I can print a book like a trade book or a perfect bound book.
CL:
But you're not losing so much that you can't print these things.
MC:
Exactly. Yeah.
CL:
It's almost kind of more analogous to writing itself, where all you need is time, right? Which is not most art forms, right?
I guess time, and I think a fairly well organized paper system like you have aha.
CL:
Do you have a submissions process? Do you mostly solicit work? Is it mostly local people?
MC:
A little bit of both. I solicit work from people who I know whose work could fit in this format. And then I do have an open submission portal on the website. specific for these small form books. And then every once in a while when I do a journal, then it might be specific. One of the previous ones was all found poetry. So then that’ll be a very specific submission. I'll post it on the website and then just like share it through social media as much as I can. But generally, it's pretty open.
And then I do publish like people that I know, friends. That's where a lot of my submissions come from. Sometimes it’s people who know specifically what I'm doing, like one of the chapbooks I just finished, Jeff Blackman in Ottawa, he sent it to me knowing this is what I do, that his work would fit well with it.
CL:
One of those dream submissions where the person not only read the masthead, but actually made it for you.
Where are you based?
MC:
I'm in Kingston.
CL:
To me, Ontario is a giant simulation drawing a lot of power. Because I grew up in Alberta and then I lived in Atlantic Canada. And I don't know if people in Ontario know this, but it's just like Ontario is only one part of the country.
MC:
That's hilarious.
CL:
I don't know if I know anybody in Kingston, or I do now I guess, but I do know it is a place.
So you just did two markets in the last few weeks. Are your quote unquote publication deadlines usually for a market? What's the tabling experience like for you?
MC:
For myself, I usually set all my print deadlines for the fairs. And I don't go to a lot of fairs, but in Ottawa, there's one that happens twice a year, there's a spring and a fall market. So usually I set my deadlines for spring and fall. And then there's a couple other ones that I'll get to throughout the year. Sometimes if there's a fair coming up then I can whip up a small, one poem chapbook.
I do have a website. I sell some online every once in a while. I don't know how it happens, but I'll randomly get an influx of orders. I'll go three months with no orders, and then within a week I'll get four or five. It happens in a very weird way.
But primarily it's the markets that that drive the print deadlines.
For the last two fairs, I basically get the chapbooks and the publications as ready as possible. And then I will sit—because at the fairs you sit for five hours—I'll have the majority of the print run unfinished. And then I'll either sew all the bindings while I'm there, or at the fair I printed like 200 of these, so throughout the day I keep on working and then people can walk past and they see what you're doing and then they get pretty interested in it.
CL:
It's like going to a historical reenactments and seeing them make the butter. Not to demean reenactments, or small press aha.
CL:
So I guess I would just ask you, you describe yourself as a writer and poet. Would you be willing to talk a little bit about your day job if you have one? If you're a trophy husband?
MC:
I do massage therapy. It's a really physical job. I feel really good about it. I used to work in call centers where you’re working your brain all the time for eight and a half hours and when you get home you're depleted, and I wouldn't be able to write.
Whereas here, it's pretty mentally stimulating as well, but not in the same way. It's not deteriorating. I can go there, work, be more physically tired, but come home and still have that urge to be able to write because I haven't been exhausting my mind the whole day.
CL:
I think there's maybe even a relationship between, you know, physical therapy and you make things by hand.
MC:
Yeah. I'm a pretty avid outdoors person. I do camping throughout the year. That can often inform my writing. I also like collage. So again, a lot of very tedious cutting, slicing, gluing. So yeah, very much. I do use my hands quite a bit.
CL:
I really love collage too. Same with doodling. I saw Naomi Klein talk the other day and I doodled through it. Probably something to do with a neurotype, it helps me keep attention on another thing. Nothing really makes me laugh the way collage does.
Do you know Guy Maddin? He's a Canadian filmmaker. The last couple years he does these big Christmas collage sales. And he charges like $250 to $300 USD for some of these. And some of them are just like, he took a movie star and glued them to a record cover. Or half of Grimes’ face over Lenin’s face. And they sell out like crazy. It teaches me that less is not necessarily more, but it’s a lot.
CL:
Is there anyone you want to shout out? Anyone you want to slap with a white glove to declare war on?
MC:
No no no, nothing like that. Shout out to jw curry, I guess. He's been a big influence, especially with where the direction is going now. And I think if people haven't heard about him, he's definitely someone to look up and find out about, because he's really interesting.
CL:
I'm a pretty big bp reader, so, I may have heard the name at some point through that.
Is there anyone else who inspired you to make this, or it emerges from your kind of zine moment?
MC:
I think it's been a natural progression from the zine making. Stuart Ross, he runs Proper Tales Press. He was helpful in the transition from zines to chapbooks. And then, the more kind of formal chapbooks, the regular size chapbooks, the shift from there just kind of happened more naturally.
CL:
Yeah, I saw Stuart at a Writers' Fest in Vancouver. I was in Vancouver for something else, and then Writers' Fest was on, and I just kind of moved some things around and went. And he had made a publication for the specific event. And he was offering them to people getting “The Book of Grief and Hamburgers” signed, and people weren't even taking them. I was like “I'll take two. I'll take two twice.” One that I could wreck and one I can tuck in a little binder full of stuff like this.
And then I saw him again a few months later, I was visiting somebody else at the Banff Center when they were doing a residency and he was faculty. And I’d done a little chapbook, a microzine of Hugh Thomas. Somebody else translated Stuart out of English and then Hugh translated that back into English; Hugh ‘mistranslated’ it. So it was a twice translated Stuart Ross poem and I just put that as the placeholder title on the zine.
I was like, “Hugh, I don't know what the title is for that one. The other one had a clear title.” But Hugh thought that was so much funnier so we kept it. And so I gave Stuart one of those when I ran into him.
And of course, he is like, “oh, hold up, here's something I printed off last night after I heard this really cool ensemble on the campus.”
Of course when I brought him a gift, he’s got an even better surprise to give me.
MC:
Yeah.
CL:
I really love his writing. Also his fiction and his non-fiction.
MC:
Yes, so I'm working with him right now. He's publishing my experimental novel that's coming out in March, and it's coming out through Stuart's imprint.
CL:
Which one is it again?
MC:
It's called 1366. It's an experimental fiction imprint.
CL:
Well, hey, this is what I'm saying when I say, ‘do you have anything to plug?’ I know this is writers, we forget what we even have in the pipeline.
MC:
Yeah, I'm glad that came up, yes.
CL:
This was great. It's really nice, especially when I talk to people I don't know at all. Not being in Ottawa, even just not being in Ottawa, it's not like every other person I bump into is a writer in Alberta.
MC:
Right?
CL:
You know, it's an interesting place to be a lot of things. So I just, I appreciate the conversation in and of itself.
MC:
Yeah, me too, I appreciate you reaching out.
CL:
I love getting to hear about how feasible it can / can’t be to do stuff like this. It can be as simple as collecting envelopes or cereal boxes. Now I got to go get a rubber stamp set.
I just made a rug that just says “bugle” the other day. Cause I had a little bit of fabric left on the frame and I thought I'll just write bugle.
MC:
Oh nice.
CL:
And apparently that's a poem. You can do anything. I don't think there's a vetting process.
MC:
Aha yeah.
Michael e. Casteels is a writer, musician, collage artist, outdoor enthusiast, and part time stay-at-home dad. He is also co-curator of the Arbitrary Islands Island Archive, a library on Lumpy Denommee's Island. His work has appeared in small press publications across Canada and internationally, most recently, the collage Westerns, ONDO (nOIR:Z, 2022) and The Man with the Spider Scar (Puddles of Sky Press, 2020). His first collection of poetry The Last White House at the End of the Row of White Houses was published by Invisible Publishing in 2016. Furthermore, the Lake, an experimental novel will be published in spring 2025 by 1366 Books, an imprint of Guernica Editions. He is the editor, designer and bookmaker at Puddles of Sky Press in Kingston, where he lives, as he has for the majority of his life, within walking distance of Lake Ontario.
Like twenty napkins or more, each time.