Every Labor Day Weekend at the Bumbershoot Arts Festival held at Seattle Center, Jerome (Jerry to his friends) Gold mans a Black Heron Press booth at the festival’s book fair.  In April of each year, he mans the booth at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books and also at the May Book Expo America trade shows, most often held in Chicago and Los Angeles.  Over the past two years, I have visited Jerry at all of these venues.  I marvel each time I see his booth at the new hard cover editions he offers yearly and at the backlist of books he religiously maintains.  I marvel at the way he has nurtured writers and keeps quality publications coming.

I have read and enjoyed many Black Heron Press books. The Bathhouse by Farnoosh Moshiri and Somebody by Laurie Blauner are novels based on true events and How I Learned That I Could Push the Button by Jerry himself is a collection of essays that compose a memoir of Jerry’s experiences as a Vietnam soldier and veteran.  Obscure in the Shade of the Giants: Publishing lives, Volume II is a compendium of interviews with diverse writers, publishers, distributors, and booksellers and publishers. Here are samples of the quality writing and information:

From The Bathhouse by Farnoosh Moshiri:

One day all the long-braided girls became bald.  They shaved our hair. Some of the girls wept quietly. I remembered the day they cut Roya’s braids and the way she reacted. I was grateful that she was not here today.  The old ladies looked strange with their bald heads.  I’d never seen an old woman without hair. But no one laughed. We looked ridiculous but it was horrible, too. Some of the women had bumpy heads, not quite round, strangely shaped.  I realized that when we have hair we think our heads are round, but this is not true.  There was a woman the back of whose head was flat like a board. We watched each other out of the corners of our eyes, trying to stare, not to embarrass anyone. The mood was not like the day we took a shower and laughed at our funny appearances. Losing our hair was worse than nakedness–it was losing face, being exposed. When Soghra and her assistant finished the job, swept the floor, and left with their electric shavers, we all covered our heads with our large scarves and sat quietly.  I thought that if Leila were alive she would make everybody exercise now. No one had Leila’s spirit. We sat still, listening to the monotonous sound of one girl’s weeping under her chador.

From Somebody by Laurie Blauner:

 The year men walk on the moon Lizzie’s nose changes its shape.  Her hair falls smooth and thick as rain to her waist.  A dark cascade falls across her new breasts and across her back. She parts the weight of her hair down the middle of her head. Everyone wears rings, bellbottoms, bare breasts without bras and no make-up.  Lizzie likes that, the natural look, although everyone looks the same, sort of. She talks to her best friend from high school for hours on her private Princess phone, watching movies on television together, gossip zigzagging across the lies. Sometimes they fall asleep in their own separate bedrooms with the receiver against their ears like bulky jewelry, listening to each other sleep as though they could trade lives.  It is comforting to Lizzie to be at her best friend’s house without moving from her bedroom the way a leaf falling to the earth forgets the tree branch. To share. All her friends try sex and multi-colored drugs. They want Lizzie to share. The horizon looks interesting with its blue water, striped and dotted towels positioned against warm sand, sunlight bathing suits, repeating murmur of waves.

From How I Learned That I Could Push the Button by Jerome Gold:

There is the old saw about having to regard your enemy as less than human so that you can kill him.  Perhaps that is true. But a corollary would be that you regard those of our own side as somehow superior not only to your enemy but to humanity at large.  This is, I suppose, because the sacrifices individual soldiers must make so that their squad or platoon may survive demand that the squad or platoon be worthy of this altruism.

My heart was breaking. A few battalions, here and there, clung to the slopes and the hilltops. They were all that were left of us. I did not feel hatred for the Russians. They were simply a force as the rest of the world was a force, aligned to destroy the only people on earth I cared about.

And I knew then that I could do it. I was capable of it. Out of love and blindness, I could destroy the world.  Had the war been for real, and had I nuclear weapons at my disposal, I was convinced that I would have used them….

On Wednesday I was sick.

From Obscure in the Shade of Giants:  Publishing Lives Volume II by Jerome Gold:

From an interview with Allan Kornblum of Coffee House Press:

What we do get sometimes–what you want in a literary press–is a book with a prose style that just knocks your socks off but also has something to say. What you wind up getting are books with something to say by writers who don’t have a compelling prose style, or writers with a compelling prose style who don’t have anything to say.  It is rare that you get a writer who has both and can really entertain the reader and can tie the thing up.  Man, it’s hard to write a novel all the way through to the end and tie the damn thing up.  I have read some books that started out well and then just sort of dribbled off. The author lost the timeline. All of a sudden you don’t know what day it is, what month it is, what’s going on in the main characters’ lives, and it just fizzles. But, as I said, I don’t think I’ve ever sent a novel back that I felt passionate about.

Taken with Black Heron books at each festival, I had never really asked Jerry Gold about why and how he had become a publisher and how he decides what manuscripts to take on.  This year after having the good luck of seeing him in Los Angeles and Seattle, I decided to ask. It wasn’t long before Jerry emailed me the following thoughts:

Why did I become a publisher? Who knows? Publishing used to be called “the accidental profession” because no one ever set out to become a publisher. That may be an exaggeration–almost no one set out to become a publisher. That’s a safer answer, though I’ve never met anyone — and I’ve interviewed close to 100 independent publishers — who told himself or herself as a child, “I want to be a publisher when I grow up.”

My friend Les Galloway and I formed Black Heron Press in 1984 in order to publish his novella, The Forty Fathom Bank. I still regard it as a small masterpiece. Having learned a lot about the mechanics of publishing by putting out that book, I decided to do another, this one (The Negligence of Death) by me. I didn’t realize until a year or two later how difficult it would be to stop publishing. After all, orders continue to come in even after the first wave of sales abates.

What is my mission? I don’t know. Some people have told me that I’m zealous about publishing, and perhaps I am. But I’ve never tried to define my mission. I once asked that question of Randall Beek, then the CEO of Consortium Book Sales & Distribution (one of the premier book distributors in the U.S.)–he couldn’t answer it either. I think there is a mission, but it’s at so deep a level of myself that I don’t even want to try to articulate it. What is Black Heron’s niche among presses? I think we’re best known for the quality of the fiction we publish. I’ve received calls over the years from editors at multinational publishing conglomerates, telling me how envious they are of Black Heron in that we can publish a book of a certain quality that they can’t publish. I don’t want to say who has called because I don’t want to embarrass anyone, but I was gratified by the calls. One vice-president of a multinational started ranting about how he would like to publish a book such as Charlie and the Children, which Black Heron published, but his own marketing people wouldn’t allow it. And I’m thinking, as he’s talking, “But you’re God; if you can’t do it, who can?”

By some people, at least, I am considered an authority on independent publishing because I published two books on independent publishing: Publishing Lives and Obscure in the Shade of the Giants: Publishing Lives, Volume II. I do not consider myself an authority. I do not think there is anyone who really understands all the intricacies of publishing, whether corporate or independent. If there were a group of people who did understand, every book they published would be financially successful and critically acclaimed. Few books merit critical acclaim and hardly any are financially successful, no matter who publishes them.

Has my journey in publishing been satisfying? I’ve gotten a great deal of personal pleasure from it. Publishing has connected me with the entire world. In one way or another, books I have published have gotten to all regions of the world; I’ve had letters from people who have read them (in English) in Russia, in most countries of Europe, in Thailand, India, Australia, South Africa, Nigeria, Hong Kong, Korea, and Latin America. Also I’ve gotten to meet a number of people I think very highly of, both personally and professionally. I do feel that in an undefined way Black Heron Press, as small as it is, has played a role in shaping writing and culture. And, of course, I get to read manuscripts that even if I have to reject them owing to lack of money or time to publish them and they may never get published, are wonderful.

My advice to writers? Write what you want. Write what will give your own life meaning. Lower your expectations of fame and money. If necessary, learn how to self-publish. Question your own values. Give up your spouse, your house, and your children. Well, maybe you shouldn’t go that far, but question yourself as to what you are willing to sacrifice for your writing. What makes a book viable in the quality-fiction market? You mean salable? I don’t know. I’ve had some financial successes, but I can seldom anticipate which book will do well. I don’t think anybody can predict which literary work will be profitable.

What makes me want to publish a manuscript? There is no formula that I can detect, but sometimes I will start to read a manuscript that makes me catch my breath with the first paragraph and then just doesn’t let up. This happens occasionally. It’s an emotional response to the writing. I’ve published a number of books that had this effect on me recently: Somebody by Laurie Blauner, and before that, The Bathhouse by Farnoosh Moshiri. Now, even thinking about The Bathhouse brings back that initial sense that — well, I remember thinking as I began it: This is an important book. And I remember thinking before I had gotten very far into Laurie Blauner’s book, “This woman is a master.” I don’t want to get technical about these books. The reaction, for me, was of an emotional nature, and that is what I search for in a book.

I do publish some nonfiction. In nonfiction, I do not hope for an emotional response, although Jim Sallis’ Gently Into the Land of the Meateaters did get that response from me. But usually I look for what I would consider an important statement in nonfiction. Le Huu Tri’s Prisoner of the Word, the only book published in English about the experience of prisoners in the Vietnamese “reeducation camps” is such a book. It says a lot about the use of propaganda on an audience hungry for information; it says a lot about political behavior and the desire simply to survive, physically and morally, even if it’s something that most people don’t want to hear. Did I help the authors of The Bathhouse and Somebody revise their books? No. Neither book needed revision, if by revision you mean reorganization or restructuring. I did line edit and copyedit both books. But both Farnoosh and Laurie had achieved a high level of skill before they sent me their respective manuscripts.

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Since the time of this interview, Black Heron sold paperback rights to The Bathhouse to Beacon Press, whose mission statement includes words about the press promoting freedom of speech and thought, diversity, religious pluralism, anti-racism and respect for diversity in all areas of life.  Regional presses such as Black Heron look to further their authors with book contracts with national presses, and this one with Beacon certainly affirms Jerry Gold’s first reaction about the importance of the book.  Gold is soon publishing The Crazy Dervish and the Pomegranate Tree, a collection of stories by Farnoosh Moshiri.  His newest title is a memoir composed of essays he has written.  How I Learned That I Could Push The Button is a compact history of the effects of the American war in Vietnam on the author.  In his words, “Certain themes arise again and again – the perceived threat presented by the other, the permeability of borders that separate like from other, the tension between loyalty to one’s fellows and obligation to the greater entity that we call nation or country or society, the distrust of abstraction and of those who use abstraction to manipulate others.”

If you are looking for good literature with a humanist, social conscious, read more about Black Heron and its booklist at http://mav.net/blackheron/.