Exactly one year ago today, while Dasha stayed home taking the opportunity to write in an empty house, our dog Walter and I drove north to the Adirondacks to go camping.
I was nervous, I never traveled solo with the dog before, I forgot a million things so I had to spend around $100 at the Dollar General when we arrived. Every night Walter and I made a fire, threw the blanket out on the ground beside the ring, and read, listened to music, drank a bit. I could feel the stress billowing off of me. The first night I still had my overactive mind, I was thinking of a million details about work, about getting our house ready for Theo, about the details of my own writing, but big picture reimaginings as well—where I’m situated in the world kind of bullshit. The second night was much nicer. I had a whole bottle of wine to myself and fretted less. I had foregone the campchair entirely and squatted barefoot on the ground beside Walter and thought maybe not at all. Everything felt joyful and possible. I listened to the first Jimmy Buffet record and you know what? It sounded good. Eno’s ambient albums while counting satellites felt like something entirely our own, not of any era other than today yet grounded in the old stories of frontier America. There’s more stars today than when I was younger.
Yes, lots of thoughts about America and what it is and means. The last day Walter and I hiked a trail that ended up being largely grownover—it took all my wits to navigate us from one end to the other, something like three hours to move a mile and a half up and down the flank of a mountain leaping over streams tripping on irrigation pipes while my dog ran confused around the woods, totally unencumbered. I was weighed down by an outofprint chapbook I had to find some way to make available and a long list of other ambitions besides. When I came back into phone service I texted Dasha:
New press idea just dropped
Non Canonical American Literature
In those woods I resolved that I would write and publish essays for the rest of my life so I can look back and see how I grew and changed. I’m tired of being reminded to think about audience and convention and sellability and I know a hundred other writers who write beautiful works but can’t find their place in traditional publishing.
Who are we waiting for? Strangers?
How hard could it be? I would learn over the intervening year—extremely. I would need a lot of help! I’m one of the most poorlysuited people to run a small press. I’m . . .
A reluctant editor (putting this generously)
Illiterate yet opinionated with regard to book design
Lazy about the logistics of publishing
It’s even hard for me to lean on others. As a person who’s built his entire life on various forms of independence (creative, fiscal, etc.) I struggle to ask my friends to help, preferring instead to be the one who offers. But what could I do? Lucky for me I’m fortunate when it comes to friends and family. Dasha Sikmashvili my wife happens to be the best editor I know (and what a writer besides). She’s the first person I asked for help. And well—easier to let her speak for herself, baby Walter in her lap:
Darina Sikmashvili - Editor
In fact, I stayed behind on what was supposed to be the last camping trip of the season because I’d been told earlier that morning at an urgent care clinic that I contracted Hand, Foot & Mouth. The doctor shrugged and told me simply that it was “going around.”
“Around where?” I was incredulous at this news and probably sounded like it. “I don’t have children.”
“But you are in the world, and in the world are children,” she replied. And when I asked her what I was supposed to do with this diagnosis, she prescribed liquids and rest.
Alone, I find a routine exceptionally fast. That weekend, I spent the mornings toying with sections of an essay about my breasts, my afternoons consisted of a walk and some kind of tedious home project, and in the evenings I’d begun to watch *Buffy the Vampire Slayer.* I think I drank ten bottles of mineral water between Friday afternoon and Sunday night.
The longer I write, the more I understand what privacy means to me. Initially, I told Josh to cut out that I’d gotten stuck home with HF&M, then of course I got down to drafting my own note, and I couldn’t keep away from discussing it. Maybe it’s that I wanted the anecdote to myself. I want to be true and precise, I want to surprise myself on the page. If I do too much constructing early on in the process, I lose not just interest but a sense of purpose; why record what I’ve already concretized for myself?
When I read, I feel a person materializing before me. Not the characters, but the author. I like to feel that I am actually getting to know someone in this roundabout, bizarre way. There’s relating to them, yes, but disagreement, and even repulsion is good. And rare! I know something special is happening on the page if there’s a little hesitation around continuing to read, like I’ve walked into the wrong room, opened a medicine cabinet full of prescriptions. It’s not pacing I’m talking about, or “propulsion,” but a certain self-implication. Those same pleasures and desires show up in my editorial feedback–I like a little gristle in the writing, and I like the sense of someone back there, trying to be seen and understood. People can really surprise you if you let them.
Despite its muchmaligned reputation in recent years I find nepotism attractive. In October our baby was born. Despite everything you may have heard about early parenthood I consider these months to be some of the most creatively fecund of my entire life. I scanned the books on my shelves for inspiration.
How Should a Book Be? Each evening before bedtime I read the favorites aloud to Theo—Frog and Toad, I Am a Bunny, my friend Adelaide Faith’s Pierrot zines she made for her own daughter. When I started examining books for their design values I learned quickly what I do and don’t like. Old Gallimards of course. New editions of Dalkey feel sexless at best, “fugly” at worst. (Like I said. Illiterate yet opinionated.)
Lucky for me I have talented (and indulgent) friends—among them Divya Mehra, a writer and designer who became a friend of the family when we returned to New York City. Around the holidays when my brain emerged from newborn fuzz back to logistics I asked her opinion on creating a design aesthetic.
Divya Mehra - Art Director
In early December of last year, I got a message from Josh: “I keep meaning to text you. Are you interested in book design? Or are u a web gurl.” I was in India because I am always in India in the thick of winter, when the air turns smoky and my eyes sting with dust particles and contrary to popular belief, it is cold in the part of the country where my parents live. Leaning against a set of boxy heaters, I replied, “I am interested!”
What came to mind: the classic NYRB, the Optima of Cusk’s stories, Corral’s bold sans-serif lettering and objects on her covers, the variation on Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume cover system (the Faber & Faber version’s realignment of letters), CTI record covers (music counts too), Penguin Crime’s green (Josh told me about this one), menus, that wonderful 80th Anniversary spine design by FSG, the classic blues (but it’s already been done! It’s all already been done!). I came back to New York and we talked: spare but overspilling, top-quality but not for your mother’s dinner table. (We looked at porn magazines together. Aesthetically.)
Caesar was the subject of our first cover design was first up. Can Caesar be sexy? I painted. I photocopied. I colored all over his stately face. I wondered if we shared a resemblance. The Parsons School of Design bins filled with statues and the deranged scrawl Colossal hardly legible, my colleagues paid no attention. This was normal behavior. I wasn’t happy with the results. This, too, was normal behavior. We went bigger, then pared it down. Josh sent me Dmitry Samarov’s George Washington piece that makes up the imprint’s colophon. I looked at George and thought I looked more like our first president than I did Ceasar.
We settled on a light green. A cream background. Fairfield, a serif typeface, after @Nicholas Rombes’s Zona syllabus. A photograph of a statue in which Caesar’s bicep outshines the rest of him. An off-kilter arch (or keyhole or niche, depending on what you see). NON CAPISCO in bubbly letters I scrawled on my iPad at six in the morning before falling back asleep. Taken from the text of Colossal, Part 1, “I don’t understand” in Italian finds itself on Ceasar’s bicep. A bus ticket blinds his eyes.
Design and writing share some common principles: balance, repetition, harmony, contrast, tension and release. They both involve visualization. But the delirium of design is different from that of writing. I still don’t know how to express it, but one day I will put it into words.
My friend looked at me very seriously last night and said: you don’t look like George Washington, Divya. It was a fair enough assessment. I am a South Asian woman and I am not, nor ever was, the president of the United States, though I think I’d be half-decent at it.. I’m a web gurl, now book gurl, amongst other things and excited to serve up some non canonical American designs.
We went through so many versions of that first cover. How painful to discover after countless days in front of a blue screen (recommendation: work at a hookah bar where at least there’s something else to look at)—we hadn’t even considered the spine. Specifically the little image at the bottom of the spine. For those of you who don’t know, all would-be publishers have the challenging task of designing that little publisher’s logo called the colophon.
In the introduction to Dan Sinykin’s modern history Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature, the colophon is described as “an emblem that contains within it a collective, all the people who work to make the book we hold in our hands but whose names we seldom know.” No colophon no collective.
Around this time the Chicago artist/writer (and friend to Zona) Dmitry Samarov posted an image from a new project he had undertaken. I heard an echo of what we’re trying to do at Non Canonical American Literature:
Dmitry Samarov - Colophon
Digging through the dozens of cardboard boxes in the back closet of the bookstore, I came upon two oversized folders containing portraits of US presidents. I researched what the folder might fetch on the market and it didn’t come to too much.
The folder was published to commemorate the bicentennial. There are thirty-seven sheets starting with Washington, ending with Nixon. Kind of like baseball cards but the size of a small poster. The backs contain a bunch of the president’s stats. I have no idea what the practical purpose of this set was. Did the publishers imagine patriotic families gathering in suburban living rooms to take turns reciting highlights from their favorite executive’s career? It’s the kind of thing that has “collectible” printed on the cover, ensuring it never will be.
My first and only thought after taking the presidents home is to cut up and deface them. Though nothing I can do to their stillborn visages can match the feeling of dread I have before having at them with the Exacto, glue, and markers. It’s a real rogues’ gallery. Maybe it’s only the perspective from the present-day quagmire but I have trouble imagining that anyone looking at this collection of mugs would feel anything but disgust and revulsion. It’s a real parade of creeps.
I’ve done twenty-four and have thirteen to go. I’m thinking of putting them all up in a row in the window cases at the Rainbo Club in September. It is the two-hundred-and-a-halfth anniversary of the country this year. Not much to celebrate but I keep making more things to put up on walls anyway. Perhaps George’s mangled, cut-up visage as a mascot for a new press dedicated to writing that’s fallen through the cracks will serve as a bit of silver lining.
It seems so easy at first. Who says I can’t throw some files up online or print books then hand out copies. Most of my favorite authors have done it. The writers I most admire today are doing it— Chelsea Hodson’s Rose Books, Lucy K Shaw’s Shabby Doll House, Gina Nutt’s Terrazzo Editions, Chris Stuck’s Black Heroics Press Co. Even Virginia Woolf did it. But it takes so much more than a single person to form a collective.
Our books won’t conform to today’s literary canon—whether established by the Big 5 or the Nonprofit Industrial Complex, any of those oldheads too concerned with the logistics of running a business or soliciting grants to remember they must publish good literature or die. We will publish literature that is idiosyncratic in form and content, contrary to expected patterns of identity, and free from sales-driven, algorithmically-determined hedges of genre. You all hold me to that.
Our first four titles:
Colossal, Part 1 by Josh Boardman (available)
Colossal, Part 2 (preorder, Fall 2026)
Omni: Beach Sloth’s 61 Best Albums of Our Time (Winter 2026)
The Breast Book by Darina Sikmashvili (2027)
More details on all of these to come (mostly we’re still figuring them out).
Learning the ropes with our first two releases, which are my own, I felt a tangible sense of relief. How nice to finally be outside and making little books the way I like them. Just like when Walter and I emerged from our woods walk in the Adirondacks, haggard, our feet covered in mud—he galloped ahead of me visibly elated to have entered the wildflowered little sanctuary that waited for us there.
hell yeah, y'all. good luck, have fun, and to quote the advice of richard nash given to me when i started a publishing co. a long time ago: "stop doing it when the parties and readings stop being fun"
I love you! 🌱