Cantaraville's Blog (8)

Somewhere on the internet I’ve mentioned that Cantarabooks-Cantaraville was inspired by Hogarth Press, founded in 1917 by the writers Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Like authors before them—and certainly authors after—they began their small press as a way to ensure that their own works, and the works of their friends, would always find publication. As far as Hogarth Press’s scale of operation, the Woolfs’ ambitions were modest: a tabletop handpress, tools, lead type and a how-to pamphlet on… Continue

Temporary Roots George Whitman, that irascible old legend, held the flyer and read it carefully while I waited at the counter of Shakespeare and Company. “So let me get this straight. You’re not charging any money for people to join your writers group?” he said finally. No, I answered. “Okay,” he said, “go ahead and post it for free.” And that was how PariSalon4665 The International Writers Support Group began—with a notice soliciting for members on the bulletin board of the most famous Ameri… Continue

If you subscribe to our occasional update-by-email, Cantaranews, you’ll probably recognize the title above as my normal salutation. I started to use the phrase late in 2000 while running a Topica.com forum for Michael’s and my real-life writers support group—begun in Paris and continued in San Francisco—called PariSalon4665, after its old Geocities website. When the forum and the group went defunct, I used it again in answering emails to our magazine. Now I use it exclusively to address readers… Continue

Photos from PariSalon4665, our writing group from 1999-2000 (Paris) through 2000-2002 (San Francisco) are now up in the Gallery. Continue

My first publishing venture was at the age of ten. Equipped with typing sheets, my mother’s office stapler and manual Smith-Corona, and, most wondrous of all, a box of carbon paper, I created twenty copies of a work entitled Faculty Frolics, a collection of stories about the totally imaginary romantic doings of the staff of Waite Park Elementary School. It was about as silly and scandalous as a fifth-grader could write. I charged ten cents per copy and sold twelve. Even my teacher bought… Continue

Cantarabooks, it should be noted, is not the first literary PDF ebook publisher on the internet. That honor goes to Electron Press, a solo operation started by Philip Harris back in 1997. Philip, by profession an IT consultant, saw the possibilities the internet offered early on and started Electron; and because at the time web publishing was such an intriguing frontier, he was able to acquire the works of varied and veteran authors such as Barry Malzberg, Arthur Herzog and James Ridgeway. I wo… Continue

About a week ago I had to opportunity to view again, after twenty years, an arty but satisfying film by director-documentarian Jill Godmilow, called Waiting for the Moon. Plotless and rather devil-may-care when it came to realistic chronology, it depicted the lives of Gertrude Stein and her companion, Alice B. Toklas, as they spent them in the artistically rich atmosphere of pre-war Paris and their peaceful country house in the French province of Ain, near the Swiss border. Their days spe… Continue

It wasn’t the first thing on our minds to start a literary magazine last summer. Civilization—again—being assailed from within and without; the world—again!—on the precipice of chaos; the human race this close to utter annihilation like a sneeze in the universe—what could be more frivolous than to launch another round of feckless chatter into this fraught atmosphere? Besides, with the baby struggles of my small press, Cantarabooks, my husband (novelist Michael Matheny) and I had our hands full… Continue