BTL profile

In 1977 a progressive publisher emerged from the House of Zonk. This is the story of the commitment that has kept them going for nearly 25 years.

by Jamie Swift

“Remember,” said Benjamin Franklin famously, “that time is money.”

The American Revolutionary’s 1748 remark stands as a byword for industrial capitalism’s hurry- up ethic. Franklin was a printer by trade, and printers often say that customers want their jobs finished yesterday. The same goes for their cousins in the publishing business. Authors predictably want to see their books on the store shelves right away - even if they’ve been six months late in submitting the manuscript. And the publisher, of course, gets impatient when the book is delayed at the printer.

So it was with satisfaction that the people at Toronto publisher Between The Lines (BTL) were confident that the printer would be delivering a key title for their fall list in plenty of time. The author had torched pornographic video stores in the name of the Wimmin’s Fire Brigade and bombed a guided missile plant. Her memoir arrived at BTL’s office on September 11.

Marketing Ann Hansen’s Direct Action: Memoirs of an Urban Guerilla in the context of the War on Terrorism and the accompanying campaign against civil liberties and dissenting opinion would prove, as the social workers say, a “challenge.” A month after its release I called Indigo books in Kingston (where Hansen lives) and found that they didn’t have it in stock. The other superstore, Chapters - owned, of course, by the giant Indigo-Chapters (or is it Chapters-Indigo?) - had a single copy back in the Canadian political science section. Fortunately, an independent bookstore survives here. Novel Idea had seven copies.

When we started BTL there were lots of independent bookstores. Errol Sharpe, a grizzled veteran of Canada’s left-wing book trade, says that in the 1970s there was a dearth of Canadian titles. “People were starved for Canadian books,” recalls Sharpe, who has been flogging BTL titles since the beginning. “If I went into a bookstore and I got an order for less than five copies of any Canadian book I considered it a failure.”

Because we had no experience in the editing or selling of books and no idea what we were getting into, we just filled a car trunk with copies of our first book (a muckraking attack on Inco) and peddled it from store to store. It was typeset on a machine the size of a refrigerator and we’d have it priced at five dollars even, as $4.95 was considered deceptive.

“We had no business plan. Any accountant or businessperson would have just laughed,” recalls Ken Epps, a founding member of the company. “Those of us who considered ourselves a little more towards the logical end of the spectrum would occasionally ask if there was any kind of plan at all. And usually we’d be ignored.” Indeed, several of the planning meetings were held outside Kitchener in a co-op called the House of Zonk. That was in 1977 when the big disco hit of the day was “Stayin’ Alive.”

Twenty-five years later BTL is still staying alive as an independent publisher, getting books that are critical of conventional opinion out to a broad readership. We’ve published 150 titles ranging from early warnings about acid rain and Canada’s role in Central America to more recent books on race, culture, identity and politics. Aside from Hansen’s direct action memoir, the fall list included Michael Riordon’s look at queer families, No-Nonsense guides to migration, world history and sexual diversity and Charlie Angus’s Mirrors of Stone, a book about the ethnic and labour history of working class life in the Porcupine region around Timmins, Ontario.

Staying alive has involved sustaining four salaries (not all full-time, to be sure) while dealing with the complexities of self-management. BTL has no boss, no individual owner. It’s the product of what the mainstream would likely describe as “sixties idealism” - what we call political principles. The office has, however, conceded to the division of labour. We’re not idealistic enough to believe that everyone should share or discuss every task, from catalogue copy to editing text to dealing with printers and other suppliers. There are fewer meetings - and certainly fewer all day chin-wags - than there were in the early years when it seemed that for every hour of work there was an hour of meetings.

Epps worked on BTL when he was a member of a co-op typesetting shop called Dumont Press Graphix. He also lived in a housing co-operative that struggled to involve its members in running the place, hewing to the principle that the people who are affected by decisions should make those decisions. Now a researcher for Project Ploughshares, the church-based peace and disarmament group, Epps is still committed to this radical version of democracy. But he also knows that real democracy is messy: “If you do believe in it, if you want people to get involved and really do want to hear what they think, you have to be prepared for a certain amount of nonsense.”

Between the Lines is a loosely-knit organization that works by consensus. It has an office staff and a handful of aging participants (including myself) who do editorial and production work on contract. There’s also a broader editorial committee that includes two university professors, two journalists, a systems analyst and a trade union staffer. The editorial committee makes decisions on what to publish and is the only thing that vaguely approximates a formal board in practice. But it has little if anything to do with running the place and making business decisions. That’s left up to the staff.

Although BTL’s financial co-ordinator is a generation younger than the company’s founders, she has just as much experience in non-hierarchical work situations where, she says, you can get “lost in meetings.” A veteran of a feminist bookstore and several political collectives, Esther Vise is aware of the tension between the need to be efficient and productive, and the need to stick to some principles. “BTL is one of the most successful places I’ve been at in balancing that out.”

BTL has tried to make up for its lack of financial capital with human capital. Longtime BTL editor Robert Clarke acknowledges that it’s often been a hand to mouth endeavour but thinks that its politics may have helped BTL survive. “We’ve managed all these years to maintain a strong group of kindred spirits. Although the staff has evolved to make the day to day decisions, the big decisions - especially the decision to publish - are made collectively. That can be frustrating but it has also slowed things down somewhat, kept us on the level. To some extent it’s kept us from growing too fast or making huge mistakes.”

Still, things are seldom smooth. There have always been conflicts over personalities, work styles and the famous “accountability” that go along with all the challenges of publishing radical, non- fiction books. And selling them.

The ground has shifted considerably in the past 25 years. Canada’s retail book trade is now dominated by Indigo, a near monopoly that’s emerged from the Chapters fiasco. The government- sanctioned merger of Smith and Coles that produced Chapters failed. It killed many of Canada’s independent bookstores in the process. The demise of Chapters and the government approval of the merger of Chapters and Indigo has given rise to a situation in which a single company dominates book retailing. One company, Jack Stoddart’s General Distribution, warehouses and ships books for half of Canada’s book publishers. Seeing Chapters’ “big boxes” as the wave of the future, General gave favourable terms to Chapters and received big orders. When Chapters couldn’t pay for the books on time and returned large quantities, General’s clients got burned. For nearly two years BTL, distributed by the University of Toronto Press, was unsuccessful in selling any books to Chapters.

Concentration has affected the ways books are developed, published, distributed and sold, and not just in Canada’s retail book sector. A few dominant corporations now control English-language retailing and publishing. Germany’s Bertelsmann owns Random House (publisher of Naomi Klein’s No Logo), Knopf, Doubleday, Dell, Pantheon, Crown and Ballantine. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation owns HarperCollins. Longman’s, Pearson (also UK-based) owns Viking and Penguin. Germany’s Holtzbrinck owns Farrar, Straus & Groux as well as St. Martin’s. And Viacom, the mega-corp that runs MTV and Paramount Pictures, also owns Pocket Books and Simon & Schuster.

Given this, it’s not surprising that books are sold and displayed in the same way that brand name foods get treated in supermarkets. You have to be big - and you even have to pay - to carve out a piece of the action. Fewer and fewer books (usually described as “bestsellers”) get the best display space. “The way that books are presented in the chains has nothing to do with the merit of the book or an assessment of the merit by a book buyer or a critic,” explains BTL editorial co-ordinator Paul Eprile. “It’s largely, if not entirely, a function of payments that are made by the publishers to the booksellers to obtain a position in the stores.”

BTL marketing co-ordinator Peter Steven feels that the state of public libraries is just as important as the condition of the retail book trade. “It’s just as important for us and many other publishers that library budgets have been cut. We don’t just want to make money. We want to get our books as widely available as possible and the libraries are a good way to do that.”

Still, it’s always tempting for a tiny outfit like BTL to complain about cutbacks and the way that market forces inevitably work. But there’s little to be gained by that. Besides, there are signs that the market - and changing technology - is ravaging the superstores and the dominant corporations as well as making things difficult for smaller players. Attempting to make money by turning the book publishing and retailing trade into a mass market business has been a dismal flop. High rent suburban stores demand large and, with a nod to Ben Franklin, fast turn-overs. This requires that “bestsellers” (along with the potpourri and the greeting cards) dominate the front of Chapters-Indigo outlets.

The need for quick turnovers at high margins has meant that the superstores aren’t all that super if your browsing takes you beyond Tom Clancy and Danielle Steel. The inventories in these stores have become much thinner, especially in non-fiction. A stroll through the “Canadiana” section will not likely turn up a rich vein of regional titles or a backlist of interesting surprises. More likely, there will be some old Peter Newman and Pierre Burton fare. History generally translates into military history or, more precisely, war books.

Against this background, BTL has survived in several ways. It’s not just a trade publisher. We’ve always sold lots of books to the college market, with our titles appealing to instructors who think that a book on the class bias in social work is an ideal teaching tool. This means that Ben Carniol’s Case Critical has been a mainstay. Similarly, Stephen Dale’s book on Greenpeace’s uneasy relationship with the press (McLuhan’s Children) has been widely used in courses on communications, politics and the media.

Another staying alive strategy has involved developing books in conjunction with social movements. Indeed, one of the most enduring watchwords (cliches, even) of all those meetings is that we see books as more than just commodities. That they should somehow fit into political struggles. (Someone once even returned from a meeting of radical publishers with a copper-enamel button that proclaimed “Books Are Weapons.”) In any case, we’ve teamed up with green researchers, Christian social justice activists, NGOs doing liberation support work and, perhaps most importantly, trade unionists. The backlist is peppered with titles like First Contract and Workplace Roulette: Gambling With Cancer. We like to think that Celebration of Resistance, Vincenzo Pietropaolo’s handsome photographic record of Ontario’s Days of Action, will serve as a reminder of some of the largest and most creative expressions of political opposition in Canadian history long after Mike Harris and his odious cronies have faded from memory.

Then there are the books that stand out, for one reason or another, as successes. The late Alex Wilson’s Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez is a handsome book with a strong message about the culture of the environment. The Mountie From Dime Novel to Disney by Mike Dawson is an irreverent look at a Canadian icon, also lavishly presented, that must be one of the few books - let alone commercial successes - to emerge from an MA thesis. Robert Cosbey’s recent Watching China Change, a Saskatchewan Book Award nominee, was co-published with a press in India.

Along with the winners have been disappointments. I think that Quebec and the American Dream, an excellent work of historical journalism by Bob Chodos and Eric Hamovitch describing Quebec’s uneasy attraction to matters American, deserved to do much better than it ever did. Ditto Charlotte Montgomery’s Blood Relations, a fascinating inside look at the politics of Canada’s animal rights movement. But, we tell ourselves, getting titles like this into print constitutes an important cultural contribution.

I was recently reading a new book called Book Business by the veteran New York publisher Jason Epstein. Epstein is a publishing optimist. He believes that superstores run by the likes of Chapters and Indigo will prove to be passing fads, as will on-line outfits like Amazon.com. Epstein notes that Amazon has lost some $900 million. Modest, independent publishers will continue to develop and edit books, nurturing relationships with writers and selling directly to customers. Distinguished websites will supplant distinguished publishing houses. Readers will buy their products using ATM-like machines that will be able to produce good-looking “books.”

I’ve never been much of an optimist, but there is no reason to think that little enterprises like BTL can’t survive. Epstein captured the essence of the thing in the very first paragraph of his book, describing publishing as “by nature a cottage industry, decentralized, improvisational, personal; best performed by small groups of like-minded people, devoted to their craft, jealous of their autonomy, sensitive to the needs of writers and to the diverse interests of readers. If money were their primary goal, these people would probably have chosen other careers.”

That said a lot to me about our little enterprise. So did something that the youngest member of our group told me when I asked her about BTL. Joanna Fine started working as an intern two years ago. She designed the company’s Website, a task that baffled - indeed, frightened - most of the rest of us. She said that she approached BTL because she “liked the books and the politics.” She doesn’t like hierarchy and figures that the egalitarian structure has given her more responsibility more quickly than she would have been handed elsewhere.

“I wouldn’t want to work in publishing if it were not at a publisher like BTL,” said Fine. “I see it as a political act. I wouldn’t be interested in a house that turned out a hundred books a year. There’s still a solid foundation of people interested in non-fiction, Canadian left books, despite the changes in the retail environment and the big stores. There always will be people keen on those issues. I’m always positive because I know that exists.”

Jamie Swift has been around BTL since the start and is the author of The Big Nickel: INCO at Home and Abroad. His biography of the Jesuit Bill Ryan, a leading social justice advocate, will be published in the spring by Novalis. This article originally appeared in Briarpatch magazine in December, 2001.

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In 1977 a progressive publisher emerged from the House of Zonk. This is the story of the commitment that has kept them going for nearly 25 years. by Jamie Swift “Remember,” said Benjamin Franklin famously, “that time is money.” The American Revolutionary’s 1748 remark stands as a byword for industrial capitalism’s hurry- up ethic. Franklin was a printer by trade, and printers often say that customers want their jobs finished yesterday. The same goes for their cousins in the publishing business. Authors predictably want to see their books on the store shelves right away - even if they’ve been six months late in submitting the manuscript. And the publisher, of course, gets impatient when the book is delayed at the printer. So it was with satisfaction that the people at Toronto publisher Between The Lines (BTL) were confident that the printer would be delivering a key title for their fall list in plenty of time. The author had torched pornographic video stores in the name of the Wimmin’s Fire Brigade and bombed a guided missile plant. Her memoir arrived at BTL’s office on September 11. Marketing Ann Hansen’s Direct Action: Memoirs of an Urban Guerilla in the context of the War on Terrorism and the accompanying campaign against civil liberties and dissenting opinion would prove, as the social workers say, a “challenge.” A month after its release I called Indigo books in Kingston (where Hansen lives) and found that they didn’t have it in stock. The other superstore, Chapters - owned, of course, by the giant Indigo-Chapters (or is it Chapters-Indigo?) - had a single copy back in the Canadian political science section. Fortunately, an independent bookstore survives here. Novel Idea had seven copies. When we started BTL there were lots of independent bookstores. Errol Sharpe, a grizzled veteran of Canada’s left-wing book trade, says that in the 1970s there was a dearth of Canadian titles. “People were starved for Canadian books,” recalls Sharpe, who has been flogging BTL titles since the beginning. “If I went into a bookstore and I got an order for less than five copies of any Canadian book I considered it a failure.” Because we had no experience in the editing or selling of books and no idea what we were getting into, we just filled a car trunk with copies of our first book (a muckraking attack on Inco) and peddled it from store to store. It was typeset on a machine the size of a refrigerator and we’d have it priced at five dollars even, as $4.95 was considered deceptive. “We had no business plan. Any accountant or businessperson would have just laughed,” recalls Ken Epps, a founding member of the company. “Those of us who considered ourselves a little more towards the logical end of the spectrum would occasionally ask if there was any kind of plan at all. And usually we’d be ignored.” Indeed, several of the planning meetings were held outside Kitchener in a co-op called the House of Zonk. That was in 1977 when the big disco hit of the day was “Stayin’ Alive.” Twenty-five years later BTL is still staying alive as an independent publisher, getting books that are critical of conventional opinion out to a broad readership. We’ve published 150 titles ranging from early warnings about acid rain and Canada’s role in Central America to more recent books on race, culture, identity and politics. Aside from Hansen’s direct action memoir, the fall list included Michael Riordon’s look at queer families, No-Nonsense guides to migration, world history and sexual diversity and Charlie Angus’s Mirrors of Stone, a book about the ethnic and labour history of working class life in the Porcupine region around Timmins, Ontario. Staying alive has involved sustaining four salaries (not all full-time, to be sure) while dealing with the complexities of self-management. BTL has no boss, no individual owner. It’s the product of what the mainstream would likely describe as “sixties idealism” - what we call political principles. The office has, however, conceded to the division of labour. We’re not idealistic enough to believe that everyone should share or discuss every task, from catalogue copy to editing text to dealing with printers and other suppliers. There are fewer meetings - and certainly fewer all day chin-wags - than there were in the early years when it seemed that for every hour of work there was an hour of meetings. Epps worked on BTL when he was a member of a co-op typesetting shop called Dumont Press Graphix. He also lived in a housing co-operative that struggled to involve its members in running the place, hewing to the principle that the people who are affected by decisions should make those decisions. Now a researcher for Project Ploughshares, the church-based peace and disarmament group, Epps is still committed to this radical version of democracy. But he also knows that real democracy is messy: “If you do believe in it, if you want people to get involved and really do want to hear what they think, you have to be prepared for a certain amount of nonsense.” Between the Lines is a loosely-knit organization that works by consensus. It has an office staff and a handful of aging participants (including myself) who do editorial and production work on contract. There’s also a broader editorial committee that includes two university professors, two journalists, a systems analyst and a trade union staffer. The editorial committee makes decisions on what to publish and is the only thing that vaguely approximates a formal board in practice. But it has little if anything to do with running the place and making business decisions. That’s left up to the staff. Although BTL’s financial co-ordinator is a generation younger than the company’s founders, she has just as much experience in non-hierarchical work situations where, she says, you can get “lost in meetings.” A veteran of a feminist bookstore and several political collectives, Esther Vise is aware of the tension between the need to be efficient and productive, and the need to stick to some principles. “BTL is one of the most successful places I’ve been at in balancing that out.” BTL has tried to make up for its lack of financial capital with human capital. Longtime BTL editor Robert Clarke acknowledges that it’s often been a hand to mouth endeavour but thinks that its politics may have helped BTL survive. “We’ve managed all these years to maintain a strong group of kindred spirits. Although the staff has evolved to make the day to day decisions, the big decisions - especially the decision to publish - are made collectively. That can be frustrating but it has also slowed things down somewhat, kept us on the level. To some extent it’s kept us from growing too fast or making huge mistakes.” Still, things are seldom smooth. There have always been conflicts over personalities, work styles and the famous “accountability” that go along with all the challenges of publishing radical, non- fiction books. And selling them. The ground has shifted considerably in the past 25 years. Canada’s retail book trade is now dominated by Indigo, a near monopoly that’s emerged from the Chapters fiasco. The government- sanctioned merger of Smith and Coles that produced Chapters failed. It killed many of Canada’s independent bookstores in the process. The demise of Chapters and the government approval of the merger of Chapters and Indigo has given rise to a situation in which a single company dominates book retailing. One company, Jack Stoddart’s General Distribution, warehouses and ships books for half of Canada’s book publishers. Seeing Chapters’ “big boxes” as the wave of the future, General gave favourable terms to Chapters and received big orders. When Chapters couldn’t pay for the books on time and returned large quantities, General’s clients got burned. For nearly two years BTL, distributed by the University of Toronto Press, was unsuccessful in selling any books to Chapters. Concentration has affected the ways books are developed, published, distributed and sold, and not just in Canada’s retail book sector. A few dominant corporations now control English-language retailing and publishing. Germany’s Bertelsmann owns Random House (publisher of Naomi Klein’s No Logo), Knopf, Doubleday, Dell, Pantheon, Crown and Ballantine. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation owns HarperCollins. Longman’s, Pearson (also UK-based) owns Viking and Penguin. Germany’s Holtzbrinck owns Farrar, Straus & Groux as well as St. Martin’s. And Viacom, the mega-corp that runs MTV and Paramount Pictures, also owns Pocket Books and Simon & Schuster. Given this, it’s not surprising that books are sold and displayed in the same way that brand name foods get treated in supermarkets. You have to be big - and you even have to pay - to carve out a piece of the action. Fewer and fewer books (usually described as “bestsellers”) get the best display space. “The way that books are presented in the chains has nothing to do with the merit of the book or an assessment of the merit by a book buyer or a critic,” explains BTL editorial co-ordinator Paul Eprile. “It’s largely, if not entirely, a function of payments that are made by the publishers to the booksellers to obtain a position in the stores.” BTL marketing co-ordinator Peter Steven feels that the state of public libraries is just as important as the condition of the retail book trade. “It’s just as important for us and many other publishers that library budgets have been cut. We don’t just want to make money. We want to get our books as widely available as possible and the libraries are a good way to do that.” Still, it’s always tempting for a tiny outfit like BTL to complain about cutbacks and the way that market forces inevitably work. But there’s little to be gained by that. Besides, there are signs that the market - and changing technology - is ravaging the superstores and the dominant corporations as well as making things difficult for smaller players. Attempting to make money by turning the book publishing and retailing trade into a mass market business has been a dismal flop. High rent suburban stores demand large and, with a nod to Ben Franklin, fast turn-overs. This requires that “bestsellers” (along with the potpourri and the greeting cards) dominate the front of Chapters-Indigo outlets. The need for quick turnovers at high margins has meant that the superstores aren’t all that super if your browsing takes you beyond Tom Clancy and Danielle Steel. The inventories in these stores have become much thinner, especially in non-fiction. A stroll through the “Canadiana” section will not likely turn up a rich vein of regional titles or a backlist of interesting surprises. More likely, there will be some old Peter Newman and Pierre Burton fare. History generally translates into military history or, more precisely, war books. Against this background, BTL has survived in several ways. It’s not just a trade publisher. We’ve always sold lots of books to the college market, with our titles appealing to instructors who think that a book on the class bias in social work is an ideal teaching tool. This means that Ben Carniol’s Case Critical has been a mainstay. Similarly, Stephen Dale’s book on Greenpeace’s uneasy relationship with the press (McLuhan’s Children) has been widely used in courses on communications, politics and the media. Another staying alive strategy has involved developing books in conjunction with social movements. Indeed, one of the most enduring watchwords (cliches, even) of all those meetings is that we see books as more than just commodities. That they should somehow fit into political struggles. (Someone once even returned from a meeting of radical publishers with a copper-enamel button that proclaimed “Books Are Weapons.”) In any case, we’ve teamed up with green researchers, Christian social justice activists, NGOs doing liberation support work and, perhaps most importantly, trade unionists. The backlist is peppered with titles like First Contract and Workplace Roulette: Gambling With Cancer. We like to think that Celebration of Resistance, Vincenzo Pietropaolo’s handsome photographic record of Ontario’s Days of Action, will serve as a reminder of some of the largest and most creative expressions of political opposition in Canadian history long after Mike Harris and his odious cronies have faded from memory. Then there are the books that stand out, for one reason or another, as successes. The late Alex Wilson’s Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez is a handsome book with a strong message about the culture of the environment. The Mountie From Dime Novel to Disney by Mike Dawson is an irreverent look at a Canadian icon, also lavishly presented, that must be one of the few books - let alone commercial successes - to emerge from an MA thesis. Robert Cosbey’s recent Watching China Change, a Saskatchewan Book Award nominee, was co-published with a press in India. Along with the winners have been disappointments. I think that Quebec and the American Dream, an excellent work of historical journalism by Bob Chodos and Eric Hamovitch describing Quebec’s uneasy attraction to matters American, deserved to do much better than it ever did. Ditto Charlotte Montgomery’s Blood Relations, a fascinating inside look at the politics of Canada’s animal rights movement. But, we tell ourselves, getting titles like this into print constitutes an important cultural contribution. I was recently reading a new book called Book Business by the veteran New York publisher Jason Epstein. Epstein is a publishing optimist. He believes that superstores run by the likes of Chapters and Indigo will prove to be passing fads, as will on-line outfits like Amazon.com. Epstein notes that Amazon has lost some $900 million. Modest, independent publishers will continue to develop and edit books, nurturing relationships with writers and selling directly to customers. Distinguished websites will supplant distinguished publishing houses. Readers will buy their products using ATM-like machines that will be able to produce good-looking “books.” I’ve never been much of an optimist, but there is no reason to think that little enterprises like BTL can’t survive. Epstein captured the essence of the thing in the very first paragraph of his book, describing publishing as “by nature a cottage industry, decentralized, improvisational, personal; best performed by small groups of like-minded people, devoted to their craft, jealous of their autonomy, sensitive to the needs of writers and to the diverse interests of readers. If money were their primary goal, these people would probably have chosen other careers.” That said a lot to me about our little enterprise. So did something that the youngest member of our group told me when I asked her about BTL. Joanna Fine started working as an intern two years ago. She designed the company’s Website, a task that baffled - indeed, frightened - most of the rest of us. She said that she approached BTL because she “liked the books and the politics.” She doesn’t like hierarchy and figures that the egalitarian structure has given her more responsibility more quickly than she would have been handed elsewhere. “I wouldn’t want to work in publishing if it were not at a publisher like BTL,” said Fine. “I see it as a political act. I wouldn’t be interested in a house that turned out a hundred books a year. There’s still a solid foundation of people interested in non-fiction, Canadian left books, despite the changes in the retail environment and the big stores. There always will be people keen on those issues. I’m always positive because I know that exists.” Jamie Swift has been around BTL since the start and is the author of The Big Nickel: INCO at Home and Abroad. His biography of the Jesuit Bill Ryan, a leading social justice advocate, will be published in the spring by Novalis. This article originally appeared in Briarpatch magazine in December, 2001.

SEARCH \| ORDERING INFORMATION \| MANUSCRIPT SUBMISSION GUIDELINES BETWEEN THE LINES EVENTS \| AUTHOR INTERVIEWS LINKS \| HOME