AUXARCZEN | IN MOTION
"What have we been doing?" you ask.
Well let me fill you in!
Tuesday, we launched our 20th book, Planet Marq.
Wednesday, we cleaned up a first proof and sent off for a second proof of a second edition of Desert Threnody, by author John Macker. It was first published in 2020 and recipient of the 2021 New Mexico - Arizona Book Award. This is one of the things we love about being a small press, we don't have to believe a book is set in stone simply because it has been published. We can open it back up, make the adjustments that feel right, and send it back into the world.
Of course, there are about seventeen other things happening at the same time. But, we are learning how to bring some zen into our schedule. We have been working on a flow that allows us to easily move from one project to the next and stave off our boredom.
Over the weekend we attended the Old Taos Trade Fair.
Joe Kierst is the author of a wonderful book that we have in the editing stage of the Auxarczen process. The novel is set in the early 1800s in the Taos area and beyond. This rendezvous gave us an opportunity that we couldn't have gotten from research alone. For a while we were able to step into the world of his novel. It also reveals that the reason for his remarkable descriptive language is partly because he has experienced it.
One of the things we love about what we are building here is that the work keeps crossing paths with itself. Publishing leads us somewhere, photography follows. A book becomes the reason to go somewhere. A place becomes a photograph. A photograph finds its way onto the cover of a book. A manuscript sends us looking for history, and history leads us back to the story.
Never a straight line, more like a dirt road winding through time.
We are still figuring out exactly what Auxarczen is becoming, but we have a pretty good idea what it feels like.
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