Cameron Anstee: To return to your question about forebears, I could go on all day! Some personal historical influences include Nelson Ball’s Weed/Flower Press, the books Raymond Souster mimeographed in his basement for Contact Press, and Barbara Caruso’s presspresspress and Seripress. Among active long-haul chapbook makers, I would point to Stuart Ross’s Proper Tales Press, rob mclennan’s above/ground press, derek beaulieu’s No Press (and Housepress before that), and the aforementioned work by jwcurry under CURVD H&z (among other imprints). And then among contemporary presses that I encountered around me when I first started out, the likes of The Emergency Response Unit, Ferno House, and Puddles of Sky have been huge influences on my own chapbook making life.
For me, the legacy of the handmade chapbook in Canada—and the lesson that I learned from the presses above—is found in the wide variety of ideas about what books can be that flourish in the small press. There is a basic idea of what a chapbook is, but it allows such a breadth of possibility and experimentation. Among chapbook publishers in this country, past and present, you can find books printed via letterpress, photocopy, woodcut, serigraph, rubberstamp, risograph, laser, and offset. You can find books that were folded-and-stapled, or hand-stitched, or perfect-bound, or gathered in some other form. You can find books, anthologies, broadsides, and other stranger objects that are more difficult to classify. Some chapbook publishers operate effectively as national trade presses, while others operate from the extreme end of the gift economy. The point, for me, is that the chapbook is a very malleable form, and one of my great pleasures in the small press is to walk through a book fair (remember in-person book fairs?) and see the range of aesthetic and production choices being made, to see how the physical forms of chapbooks respond to writing. I love doing the work by hand, and it is so exciting to see how different people approach it within the resources that they have available.
David Ly: This is quite different than, say, what Ashley does. Metatron occupies a unique position in the CanLit publishing landscape. You started as a chapbook press, but have since evolved to specialize in micro books. Ashley, can you tell me a little bit about how Metatron has shifted its focus over the years?
Ashley Obscura: For me, Metatron has always been an experiment in creating new ways of validating debut authors and creating value around debut writing collections, particularly with the help of contemporary media.
When I first started Metatron, I was really inspired by the pocketbook as a format for our collections. So Metatron started off publishing chapbooks in 2014, likely because at that time it’s all I knew how to design—I had picked up some basic page design skills while volunteering at my university’s newspaper.