. The Paradise Project .
In March 2011, Hugh Barclay, book artist and owner of Thee Hellbox Press, a small independent letterpress, approached me to publish The Paradise Project, a collection of flash fiction. The book was launched in my gardens in late summer and is now available in a limited, numbered edition. Please contact Hugh for details.
My view of books, and writing, and words, is daily rocked by this enterprise. It is a remarkable process, one I want to share, and so these short essays trace the making The Paradise Project, which is a paradise project in itself.Collapse all | Expand all
Hugh, the printer, looks over at my son, the artist. They are bent over a small table strewn with squares of paper and gobs of ink in shades of yellow, green, puce. Behind them, hunched like a gargoyle, its flywheel an unlikely red, sits the printing press. All morning they've been inking my son's linoblocks, setting them into the press, pulling proofs, cleaning off the blocks, trying again.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if we had an easy job like a writer,” Hugh smirks.
How much of a book are the words on the page. The answer comes easily to me — all of it! These stories have been gestating for years. I wrote the first one a decade ago while I was working on The Holding, my novel about two gardeners. I’m not a poet, but now and then an idea stops me and out roll the words, carrying an image so succinct and polished that I think, Maybe this is what it feels like to write a poem.
“Stone” was like that, a thread that spooled out, not a break in the thought, though the words span a hundred years, more, course through a marriage, the tension between a man and a woman, within the woman herself, all in thirty-nine lines. The piece has hardly changed since that first laying down of words.
Hugh is a poet. His first experience of a hand-operated letterpress was the printing of his own book of poems. I haven’t read them. He hadn’t offered and I don’t know him well enough yet to ask.
His comment — an easy job like a writer — makes me cringe. It is an easy job, at least on those days when the words are there lining up, compliant, but feisty, too. Even when they aren’t, when I spend hours lugging commas from here to there, shovelling in new phrases, axing them out again, prying words apart, wedging in fresh ones, even then what survives always looks easy. The better the writing, the easier it looks.
So I feel guilty, with this easy job of mine. No dirt under my fingernails, no dangerous flywheels or finger-grabbing clamps. Words are just the start of this paradise project of ours, the spade in the soil, the glint in the eye. Without Hugh, my words are silent, whispered only to myself.
The book was Hugh’s idea. I’d been amassing these flash fictions for years, no idea what might become of them, until Hugh happened upon them and asked for more.
I’ve just sat down and read the manuscript and it is amazing. A lot of new pieces, at least to me. Some brought a tear to my eye, but you need to know that my bladder is too close to my eyes.
The first time I had dinner with Hugh, he burst into tears. I was alarmed. What had I done? What should I do? We were sitting in the city’s finest restaurant, a favourite, we’d discovered, of us both. The owner, Zal Yanovsky, had been a guitarist with the Lovin’ Spoonful, a Sixties band I’d danced to (on tabletops, if I remember correctly). The first time I met Zalman he was on roller skates, skooting around the tables, stopping at my side to ask if I had a cigarette.
“Do I look like a smoker?” I laughed. I was being taken to dinner by James Lawrence, founder and publisher and editor of Harrowsmith magazine, the back-to-the-land Bible of the 1980s that was about to go into book publishing and they wanted me to write their first book. None of them smoked anything but weed. I wanted to make a good impression — my du Mauriers were well hidden — but Zal had sussed me out. I opened my purse and offered him one, tossing smiles around the table in penance, shrugging. Who can resist a man on roller skates?
Now Zalman was dead and Hugh was crying and we were at the worst table in the place, the one in the middle of the room that everyone had to pass to get in or out or serve a dish of Mediterranean stew. We might as well have been on stage.
I leaned close to Hugh and put my hand on his arm. “You okay?”
He’d been telling me about the school children. Immediately after he published his book of poems, he went out and bought a letterpress. It was a whim, he said. Hugh follows his whims. He had a couple of adopted children and when they brought a note home from school — Parents! Get involved! — he marched directly to the principal’s office and said, “I want to help the kids print their own magazine.”
“You’ll need a press,” the principal said.
“I have a press,” said Hugh.
“Those kids,” Hugh was saying to me now, weeping at the memory. “I had to kick them out of the school at nine o’clock at night. Some of them still visit me. That was fifty years ago!”
His eyes were bright with tears, his face flushed. “They wrote the stories. They set the type. They did it all! Right from the beginning I told them, We’re on the same level, call me Hugh.”
He dabbed at his eyes with the flowered cotton serviette.
“Don’t worry,” he said then, picking up his fork to attack his stew. “Stupid Hugh cries a lot.”
Stupid Hugh has all the bad habits. He makes all the mistakes, causes all the trouble. Until I met Hugh, I didn’t realize I had an incompetent, wastrel twin, too. She’s the one who was handing out cigarettes and dancing on tables. These days, she spends most of her time inserting misplaced modifiers and splitting infinitives.
When Hugh points out a mistake in one of the stories, I know exactly what to say.
“Stupid Merilyn never learned to spell.”
Emily scoops something that looks like cooked spinach out of a small plastic bucket, and trails it over the water in the box.
It’s not spinach, it’s not water, and it’s not just a box.
Emily is a paper-maker. She is also an albino: her hair is as white as mine, though she must be thirty years younger, at least. Her eyelashes are white, too. And her heart is on the wrong side of her body. It beats on the right.
We met at my house one summer day, when Hugh drove her up from the train station. We had rhubarb cream pie and coffee, then we wandered the gardens, plucking flowers and bagging them like forensic samples: silene, bee balm, spirea, meadow rue, half a dozen sedums. In larger bags she took stooks of bright green day-lily leaves, burgundy canna-lily leaves, grey-blue iris leaves. A few weeks later, the three of us met at our favourite restaurant in downtown Kingston to review the paper samples she had made.
“The greener it is, the more fugitive it is,” she said. “Chlorophyll’s not a great dye. With the green stuff, I’m worried that it won’t be stable, that it will fade out over time.”
Hugh has commissioned Emily to make end papers for The Paradise Project. He had a notion of bits of flowers from my garden suspended in the paper, but the paper-making process rendered them uniformly dark and indistinguishable. The paper we all liked was a swirling cloud of green roiling down across a pale landscape.
“I have lots of lilies!” I said, and I do. Three great swaths of twelfth-of-July lilies, 40 feet or more, and several smaller clumps of citrinas, Catherine Woodberys, crimson pirates, gentle shepherds, stella d’oros, and many happy returns. This spring, I took my Japanese knife to my gardens and hacked down great swaths of day-lily leaves, stuffing them into garbage bags that I shipped by bus to Toronto. She hydrated the pulp and put it through her Valley Hollander beater, which doesn’t cut the fibre, she assured me, so much as fluff it up, tearing it into shorter strands which she keeps in yogurt containers in the fridge, mushing it into water when she’s ready to make paper with it.
“You’re looking for a fibre that will feather apart,” she tells me, ”something that will dissolve in water and suspend, but also bond with other fibres, not hang out on top on its own.
“Basically, you can make paper two ways: by dipping the screen in the pulp, which ends up with a very homogenized paper, or the Thai way, by draining pulp through a screen in a box, which is harder to control, but I seem to need to do things the hard way.” She says the last bit with a shy smile.
The box is a deckle box. It is oblong, with a panel down the middle, creating two spaces exactly the size of the end papers of the book. The bottom of the box is screened, to let the water flow through, leaving the fibre that will become the paper on the screen.
Emily has lined each compartment of the box with plastic. She fills each side with abaca fibre hydrated to a pale, glutinous liquid. She works quickly now, drizzling the green lily fibre into the soup. If the beaten fibre is short enough, she can draw with it, squeezing the fibre out of a ketchup bottle, though she prefers to work by hand, drawing the green swirls into the abaca with her fingers.
“Now for the magic part!” she says. She grasps one side of the plastic liner and like a magician with a tablecloth, whips it out from under the water, first one, then the other. Suddenly, water is gushing out of the bottom of the box, which isn’t sitting level. One side is draining faster than the other. Emily rushes the prop up one side.
“I met a boy,” she says, her eye fixed now on the evenly draining water. “My brain’s a bit of a mess.”
As the liquid drains, she swishes the box a bit, gently urging the fibre to interlock, creating stronger paper. She unhinges the bottom of the box. A thick wad of what looks like soaked kleenex lays limp on the screen.
“Everything that happens from this point on is recorded in the paper,” she says. I look past her to the hand-written sign on the wall. No Glitter! She follows my gaze. ”Glitter is the STD of the craft world,” she says.
She lifts the screen to the other end of the table where squares cut from old blankets are stacked. She’s soaked them and squeezed out the water. Now she upends the screen and in one deft flick, the gooey sheet of paper is released onto the wool.
“It’s called couching,” she says, pronouncing it kooching, as in smooching, though it comes from the French, couche, which means a lot of things, from diaper to social strata, though in this studio it means to lay the paper down.
“After my last relationship broke up , I couldn’t make paper,” she says. “It just wouldn’t couche.”
I’m delighted with the language. “Tell me more,” I say.
“Well, the other way of making paper is to have a vat of hydrated fibre and dip your screen into it. When you pull the screen up, you smack it agains the water to release the sheet. That’s called ’kissing off.’
“He plays the ukelele. How good is that?” she continues wistfully. “Last night he played ’When we’re dancing.’”
She hums as she sets up the press, which will exert 60,000 pounds of pressure on every square inch of the newly-made page. Because the pages are so small, they will be unforgiving, prone to distortion. She stacks wooden palettes inside the press, lays on the blanket, the sheet, another blanket, and more palettes, taking time to make the registration is perfect. Then she flips the switch and the press grinds down.
There are two pressings, five minutes and fifteen minutes. The sheet she lifts from between the blankets looks an awful lot like paper now. Limp paper on a very humid summer’s day. She bends close and scrutinizes what she has made.
“See that?” She points to an almost imperceptible indentation, a thin area surrounded by an infinitissimally thicker ridge. “That’s called a paper-maker’s tear.”
She places the freshly made sheets gently between blotter paper and triple-walled cardboard with a weight on top so they won’t shrink, then she arranges a fan to blow over them as they finish drying over the next 24 hours.
It has taken an hour to make a pair of matching end papers for the front and back of one book. Hugh is printing 350 copies of The Paradise Project. The prospect doesn’t seem to daunt her.
“Eventually,” she says, “after I make a hundred or so of these, I’ll figure out some tricks. And Trevor says he wants to help. Isn’t that sweet?”
“Everything sounds good to me,” says Hugh, after I lay out what I think we can accomplish today: choose the paper and ink, okay the images, set up a timeline. “However, I am a little worried about riding with a woman who is picking up a chainsaw.”
We are on our way to our first formal meeting about The Paradise Project. I picked up Hugh just before noon. We are due at my son’s farm just after lunch. It’s not a farm, really, though that’s what city people call a hacked-off bit of acreage like his, with an old farmhouse, a lop-sided barn, a scattering of outbuildings in various degrees of decay, testimony to the real farmers’ desperate attempts to make a living from cows, then pigs, then chickens, and finally, small-engine repair.
I’m feeling querulous. I’m not looking forward to spending three hours in the car with someone I barely know. And I’m concerned, just a little, about bringing my son into the project. I mentioned in passing that he was an artist and bam! Hugh anointed him illustrator.
The book project is running ahead of me, and I’m struggling to catch up. I’m used to an editor, a copy-editor, the predictable unfolding of production. Decisions about typefaces and paper stock and illustrations and how many books to print and where to sell them…that’s always been someone else’s business. I don’t mind being involved; in fact, I’m looking forward to it. But no editor? I feel as though my father has just taken his hand off the seat of my bicycle and told me to keep going. “You’ll be fine, just keep pedalling and you won’t fall. ”
I have no faith in my own words, and when I look at my son’s block prints, no faith whatsoever in my ability to assess whether they are brilliant or completely inappropriate.
My son is feelng tentative, too. “I know you want me to have the freedom to express myself, but I would love to hear what you think of the images,” he says gently, opening the folio of sketches. “Not that I will change them,” he adds with a smile.
We are sitting at the table in the old farmhouse he gutted last year, stripping it down to its essentials. The place hasn’t quite got dressed again yet. Scraps of green-checked wallpaper wave from the kitchen walls and the plugs hang precariously from a post, but we don’t pay any attention. We’re here to work. Hugh fans colour swatches over the “salad” paper he spread on the red-checked tablecloth.
My eye goes directly to a soft spring green. Erik is fingering a muddy olive. My heart sinks. Hugh nods enthusiastically.
“Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh,” he says, bobbing his head up and down. “That’s good. That’ll work.”
I say nothing. I trust my son. He has been painting seriously since he was twelve. His career as a visual artist was settling into a permanently rising trajectory when he lost all his work and nearly his life and the life of his new wife and daughter in a fire ten years ago. This year, he has started to paint again. Small things. A series of cyclists to raise money for a cancer marathon.
We’ve worked together before. When he was thirteen. we travelled to the Mayan ruins at Yaxchilan and Bonampak on the Usumacinta, the river that divides Mexico from Guatemala. I wrote a travel piece about the trip and the magazine illustrated it with his watercolours of Mayan glyphs.
Now he is telling me that this muddy olive is perfect for the text. He points to a weird mustard colour that he likes for the images that will underlay my words.
“Like ghost images,” Hugh says.
“Exactly!” says Erik.
They are speaking the same language, a language of colour and design that is foreign to me, though I can appreciate the sound of it, its cadences.
I push back my chair.
“It’s up to you,” I say, throwing up my hands, just a little.
They both stare. They aren’t used to me having no opinion.
“Really,” I insist. “You decide. This is your bailiewick. I have nothing to contribute.”
I’ve been wrong so often, I know enough to keep my own counsel. My son leafs through the folio, showing us sketches for the block prints he will carve. I struggle to disguise the shock I feel at the images. I had imagined delicate plants twining through the pages, a vision that was dispelled by the first trial print he emailed to Hugh and me: a scissor slicing through a stalk.
Secateurs, I wrote back. In the garden, a cutting is made with secateurs, not scissors.
Hey! I’m the artist!
Right. I just thought you’d want to know. For accuracy.
It’s not an illustration.
Of course not. The scissors are great.
Now the scissors are in a big brawny hand that reaches up from the bottom lip of the page. The drawing is muscular, vaguely threatening.
But it’s The Paradise Project! I want to tell them. All the people in these stories are making paradise, in their own way. It’s a positive thing!
“I took the theme of tools,” Erik is saying. “The things people use to make their paradise.”
I make encouraging noises, but in my heart, I’m not convinced that his images won’t overpower my words, shift their meaning. I’m not used to competing for a reader’s attention. Won’t it be confusing? How will anyone know what I meant by the words, without the filter of the image?
A story is a pure object that exists, pre-exists, in a way. As a writer, I give it shape, walk the reader through it in a way that will show it off in its best light. In all the books I’ve published, nothing shook that conception. Design, printing: it was all in service of the story, the words.
Now in this new universe, the story is no longer mine to tell. Erik is telling it through his images. Hugh is telling it through the choice of type and ink and paper, and the way the tortoises are arranged on the page. The stories are no longer mine: this is a collaboration.
When the first prints arrive in my email inbox two days later, I’m glad I kept my mouth shut. The images are beautiful. The colour is perfect, just a shade darker than the page. It’s as if the characters of the story have come alive and are muscling up through the fibre, struggling through the words into life.
I just returned from dinner at Swiss Chalet where my mind was focused on Erik’s work, which I find totalling outstanding. One of my personal tests for artwork is being able to recall the work to my mind’s eye long after seeing the work. I can do this with every piece Erik sent in his email.
I think you will agree that our interviewing and reviewing the work of the other twenty candidates was time well-spent and that we have made the proper selection in Erik (<;) …Oh! and all the paper has arrived, hoping for type and ink tomorrow.
With an old kitchen knife, Hugh scoops two dollops rich burnt umber ink on the disc of the press. The ink looks black, but I know from the hours we spent comparing colour chips that this is not black, which is all colours, but rather Pantone 497, a darkness that approaches black through a spectrum of reds that skirt past yellow but take in little blue.
The disc that is being inked is the size of a pie sufficient for a family of eight. It has two parts: an inner circle and an outer ring, both perfectly, exquisitely flat. Hugh flips a switch and the disc moves towards the vertical at the same moment a lattice of rollers rises up to lick across the surface, smoothing the dollops of ink into two streaks. Up and back, up and back. Each time the disc moves towards the rollers, the outer ring shifts a few degrees in one direction and the inner circle rotates a bit the opposite way, so that the rollers lick a different part of the surface with each pass. Within seconds, the entire disc is slick with ink, damp and glistening, but still the rollers lick, lick, lick with admirable persistence.
In Gutenberg’s day, the ink was spread by a press man holding a leather pouch filled with rags. He’d rock the pouch over ink spread on a stone and then he’d rock it back and forth over the type. “Definitely an acquired skill,” Hugh points out. The first book he helped print – his own book of poems – was printed on a flat bed press, not unlike the one Gutenberg invented as a variation on the basic wine press. Hugh inked his poetic type by hand using a brayer, a small roller.
“Getting even coverage and the proper amount of ink for each impression took practice – and yielded a lot of seconds,” he grins.
The press he is inking now is a letterpress, mechanized to improve speed, but otherwise not too far removed from the original invention. “Gutenberg’s fingerprint is still evident in letterpress in that the modular type design has not changed,” Hugh explains. His press is an 8 x 12 Chandler/Price, built around 1890 as a ‘jobber’ press for printing invitations, stationary, and the like. He acquired it from a local printer, Jackson Press, located in downtown Kingston. “It had been badly used and required a complete rebuild. I promised the press back in 1981-2 that it would never be required to print anything that was not an art form. To my knowledge I have kept that promise.”
The press takes up one corner of Hugh’s studio, a converted garage in front of his house in a leafy suburb of Kingston, Ontario. The space is split into two rooms: one is filled almost wall to wall with a huge table on which are stacked the finished signatures of the new book. In the other room, the typesetting table, a wall of trays of type, and the press, which is about the size of an old-fashioned woodstove.
The studio is crowded today: all the people who worked on The Paradise Project have gathered to see the final pages printed and put the press to bed.
“The first time I came here, the place was hanging with arms and legs,” Antonino Mazza says as we wait for the press to ink. Antonino is a poet and a translator, a Calabrian not entirely rerooted in Canada. He worked on one of Hugh’s first books: a translation from the Italian of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The First Paradise, Odetta, published by Thee Hellbox Press in 1985. Hugh and Antonino met in The Italian Pastry Shop in downtown Kingston; at the time, Antonino was teaching at Queen’s and Hugh was working full-time building innovative orthotics, the ink only just beginning to seep into his veins.
Antonino is here with his wife Francline because their son, Mico, spent part of the summer with Hugh, typesetting the last few stories in The Paradise Project. Mico looks at the press as he will one day look at the person he loves. “He let me run this thing when I was 14, and ever since, I’ve wanted to come back. It was a big mistake. Now I never want to leave.”
“The goal is addiction!” Hugh declares to no one in particular.
He has turned off the motor. Now he leans over the press, inserts a piece of thick creamy paper just so, and gives the flywheel a turn with his hand. The inky disc rises to the vertical, the rollers pass over it, and on their downward thrust, smear ink over the bed where my words are set in mirror image in cast aluminum. Then in a movement as smooth as Fred Astaire, the inked type moves forward, the paper moves forward too, and they kiss, smack, a quick, chaste kiss that springs them apart, my words transferred now to a page, a piece of paper that can be picked up, read, folded into an envelope, mailed around the world.
“Too much ink,” Hugh grumbles, swiping his fingers across the letters. They don’t smudge, but some of the e’s are filled in, and the upper-case W too. Hugh wipes the type down, runs the press a little longer, prints a few tests, then declares it ready.
He reads from a list. “Antonino, you’re first.”
We each get a turn. We are printing the last page of The Paradise Project. Not really the last page – it’s number 48 – but in the origami that is the folding of the signatures, this page has become the last.
After Antonino, Francline, then my son’s wife, Tania, and their two girls, Astrid and Estelle, then my husband Wayne. Next, Mico gets a turn, followed by Richard, a young man from the neighbourhood who typesets for Hugh, and my son Erik, who carved the linocut images that underlay the text. The label on his shirt bobs as he bends to the paper. We’re all wearing our shirts inside out.
“Where does that tradition come from?” I ask, expecting another Gutenberg story. Hugh has dozens of them. Sometimes he says he feels he is in the reincarnation of the man who almost 600 years ago, came up with what is considered the most important invention of the second millenium.
“Well, you need to know,” Hugh begins, as he begins so many explanations. “You need to know that this tradition started a couple of weeks ago when I got out of bed and put my shirt on backwards. I thought, we should do this when we put the press to bed. And somehow I got all of you to do it!”
We all feel a little foolish with our buttons rubbing against our bellies, our ruffles tickling our chests. We laugh. “A thousand years from now,” says Mico, “people will always wear their shirts backwards when they put a press to bed and they’ll wonder how that tradition got started.”
Finally, it is my turn at the flywheel. I turn the signature upside-down as Hugh instructs. There is a small pencilled number on one corner. 297. “Put the number on the left at the top,” Hugh instructs. “Centre the page between these two lines.” There are faint pencil marks on the plate. I do my best to centre the page, then give the flywheel a whirl. I feel like a contestant on Wheel of Fortune.
297. 298. 299. 300.
I print my four pages, and Hugh pulls the big lever on the side of the press. We’re done. The Paradise Project is printed.
I lift the last page off the press. It looks the same as all the others. I peer at it closely, thinking there should be something to indicate its special status and notice, in one corner, a faint smudge, the shape of a fingertip.
“Oh dear,” I say, showing the smudge to Hugh. “Should we print one more?”
“That’s okay. No problem. We’re not striving for perfection here. That fingerprint, that’s what makes this copy distinct, personal. We should charge extra! Imagine what it would be worth, a book with Gutenberg’s fingerprint!”