Meekling Press, into the Future
Meekling has been making and publishing weird and nifty books and objects since 2012. We started with a tiny little 3x5 letterpress, and with the help of our awesome community, we've made more than 20 publications, from hand-sewn chapbooks to floppy disk ebooks, to an accordion book that stretches all the way across the room, and a manifesto in the shape of a trash can. We've also turned our fictional lecture series, Meekling TALKS, into an annual tradition. We love making publications that play with the relationship between form and content and we're hoping to continue doing that while bringing it to a bigger audience. We're starting to travel outside of Chicago and make lots of new friends, and we're also starting to get all Legitimate, doing things like getting ISBN numbers and Forming a Business and getting better Distribution for our Books—stuff that will help us help our authors spread their words farther and wider.
Welcome to the Meekling Press 2019-2020 Fundraiser
We've got SEVEN books lined up for the next couple years, and we need your help to take this gosh darn press to the next level and get these dang bloody books printed and out into the world. With lots & lots of wild and woolly "Prizes," we're putting the FUN back in FUNdraiser...
The Books
Shit I've Cried About, by Smeyer: A compilation of the first 5 volumes of Smeyer's (aka Sarah Meyer's) zine of the same name. Lists, drawings, things to cry about.
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Shit I've Cried About is already out in the world! But only just and since it's a part of this whole generation of books we're including it here. You can get it by donating to this fundraiser, through the subscription package, or in a bookstore, or at the release party on October 21.
Proficiency Badges, by Carrie Olivia Adams: Girl Scouts, the woods, a battle, ice, and fire. This one's gonna be handmade and in a limited edition.
"I think we’d forgotten how red blood can be. How many shades it takes, how many textures. We ran thick, we ran like knit, like spider webs. We gave it by the bag, by the cloth, by the mouthful. I was dirty. We are more blood than water than salt than breath.
I wish I’d never been young."
Stan, by Marream Krollos: A breathtaking blast of Lispector-worthy voice, exploring the most primal and ethereal episodes of a woman’s navigation of desire.
“Everything good and everything bad is possible. You can disappear. Your body can be cut up into little pieces, wasted. You can be made to feel as if you are less than the animal you are. Your mind can be taken, used, destroyed. Your pride can be also. Your will can be taken. You can be made to want to die even though as an animal all you want is to live. But all good things can happen still. You can be given things still.”
Switch Wish, by Willy Smart: Water striders, spider’s silk, stalks, stems, movement, embodiment and tension. Narrative fiction progressing through associative flow, from stage makeup, to music festivals, to Freudian stages, etc.; an erotic novel in disguise.
"A pause doesn’t reset the scene: pressing pause doesn’t unlatch the play button—both functions are on at once. Let’s pause right there, my analyst says. Water striders are great because they do the pausing for me. It’s easier to do the pausing than it is to get paused. That’s why I’m out here. I’m practicing for getting paused. I hope to get paused. The spacebar, the largest button on my keyboard by far, is the hotkey for pause. It’s the biggest because it’s the one most pleasant to press and because its function is elementary. I need to be reminded that doing the pausing is only the initial waypoint toward the wish of getting softly paused, of being made to go under the sway of that function. I’m practicing because that’s what a pause is: a rehearsal."
Girl, Cow and Monk, by Kate Wyer: Interlinked stories unfold like slowly evolving surreal portraits: a girl and her cow on a journey along the sea, going somewhere far away from here; a monk, a vow of silence, and a rediscovery of voice. Tales united by longing and a deep-seated desire to take care.
"The cow pulls me some, I pull the cow some. We walk this way, if you call it walking. The easy shelf is gone; we wander the sandbar next to the deep pit of cliffs and caverns. To our right, it is now impossible to see the ocean’s floor.
Cow-cursing; water-hating; rope-hanging; eye-burning; sun-splicing; south-walking.
I’m quick to forget how solid land feels, and even forget the feeling of air on my legs. How to carry my own weight. What it is like to sit, cross-legged, or otherwise on something that supports me.
The water cools off the shelf and fear is cold too. No one ever said we would be safe out here, they just said we wouldn’t drown."
ALLTALK, by Suzanne Gold: Truly wacky spaceless conceptual poetry about writing and art and finding meaning in those things. An experiment in figuring out how a book experience can be more like that scene in Labyrinth with the Escher-like staircases and David Bowie in tight pants.
... difficult to excerpt as it's still in development, but imagine prints, illustrations, some kind of labyrinthine book form... "Leave the door ajar and thoughts creep in the night toward a conclusion//Clearly I can’t crave/What would normally tell me/I’m in step"
Household Tales, by Rachel Linn: Feral children, a polar bear, scissors and paper, a snowstorm, a disorienting free fall. This one's going to be a pop-up book.
"It wasn’t the bear that had scarred her, but it would do. She even preferred this animal because it was a mythic, previously unknown species—perhaps the only one of its kind. Her hands balled into fists and she punched quietly at the snowy walls of her hiding place, biding her time. She did not want to die, she wanted to kill."
Give Us Your Money, Please
We're raising funds to help pay for:
- Printing these books (that's the bulk of it)
- ISBN numbers, which will help get the books into more stores, etc
- Distribution costs (that is, paying a distributor like SPD to get our books out to bookstores)
- Website hosting
The Impact
Like many tiny presses, making books is a labor of love. Our profits from this campaign will allow us to go go to press with our next exciting season of books.
- Your contribution is integral to our ability to make books that are unique and uncompromising, to continue to publish work that we're truly excited for you to read.
- With wider distribution we will be able to make our books available to readers far beyond the city of Chicago, where we're based.
- ISBNs will allow us to sell books through our distributor, to be placed in bookstores, and to potentially receive more reviews.
- The last campaign we ran gave us the funds that allowed us to buy a 100-year old platen press central to our operations, and to produce the gorgeous, intricate special edition of Dan Ivec's On the Stairs, as well as of Erin Kautza's fierce lyrical poem Muscles Involved.
Risks & Challenges
Our ability to make these seven terrific books is contingent on raising the funds to print and distribute them. We are committed to making and releasing these books with whatever amount we raise, but the more money we raise now the more time we'll have to focus on book making later, and the faster we'll be able to go to print.
- As a small press, we're just trying to break even with our expenses. However, if we're able to raise more funding than we need, we will invest our profits in future books, our TALKS series, attending book fairs to get word out about Meekling's books, and to help us meet our goal of one day paying Meekling authors in more than books.
- If we don't meet our needs for the entire season, we will launch another campaign next year for the remaining books.
- To supplement this campaign, we're also planning to host a fundraising party in Chicago, IL.
Other Ways You Can Help
If you want to help but don't have $ to invest, here's what you can do:
- Spread word about our books and this campaign across the medias—Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, whatever suits your fancy.
- Tell your friends about Meekling, our books, and our TALKS series.
- Don't forget to use those IndieGoGo share tools!
