 Welcome viewers to our ongoing program Focus, coming to you from Channel 17 Center for Media and Democracy here in Burlington, Vermont. I'm your host, Margaret Harrington, and here in the studio I have my very welcome guests who are Donna Bister and Mark Estrin, the publishers from Fomite Press, and the title for a program is Leaning in with Fomite Press. So thank you very much for coming into the studio today. You're right in Burlington. You are the publishing house in Burlington. Fomite Press. That's true. We're one of the publishing houses in Burlington. Okay. They're few publishers in Burlington. But we're the major publishing. Major publishing. No, I mean in terms of size. In terms of output, maybe not in size. Yeah, I mean this got out of hand very quickly in terms of size. Okay, well what does, why did you choose the name Fomite Press for the beginning? I had a, I had written a novel I think in 2007 or something like that in which there was a fake press, a fictive press, that had published a book that's part of the novel. And we needed a name for the press, for the fake press. The novel is called The Annotated Nose. And the nose is this fictive novel, which the book is about. And we didn't, you know, what's the name of a press? So I think it was my daughter who was a doctor who suggested Fomite. And we didn't really know what Fomite was. And she says, well, you know, and then it seemed perfect. Fomite is a surface on which, from which microorganisms can be transferred. So like, this is a fomite. This is a fomite. This is a fomite. And the extension to books is that books are fomite for psychic microorganisms to be passed from one person to another. Ideas, stories. And then we had this great Tolstoy quote that, you know, subsequently we found, he says, the activity of art is based on the capacity of people to be infected by the feelings of others. So, you know, it all kind of worked out. So then there was this press. And we had a name for the, when we decided to make a press, we had a name for it out of this comedy book about a fake press. So when, when was that? When was, was, uh, from my press? 2011. And it grew out of a, uh, writer's group that Mark participates in that's been going on for many, many years in Burlington. And Mark would come home and say, that book really needs to be published. And at the time, print on demand publishing was kind of just getting started in a big way. And so we decided we would try it. And Ron Jacobs, who's a local librarian, activist writer said, well, I have a novel. You could use that for an experiment. So we laid it out, set it up, send it away. And it came back and looked pretty good. So. That's wonderful. That's the first novel then that you, you, for my press. It was sort of the experimental novel. We didn't even really, we weren't even sure we were going to have a press. We were just trying to see what would happen if, if we, if we applied self publishing kind of, um, procedures to someone's book. And this was at the time when, in some bookstores, there were printing presses there at that time. And were there, did you use somebody local here or did you send it away to some other publisher? We sent it away to the Evil Corporation, Amazon, because they had the easiest interface for us to use and the lowest cost. So with that system, there was no cost to us at, at all until a book is printed. Now, eight years later, we've moved much of our work over to Ingram Spark, which is the printing side of Ingram books, which is a wholesaler that supplies mostly independent bookstores. So we're getting away from that early focus on Amazon to being more like a regular press in some ways. And what was the reaction to this first publication? I don't remember. I remember. And it wasn't Ron's book. That wasn't the first book. It was? Okay. But, but it didn't matter. And what mattered to us was that it looked like a real book, you know, and it was sort of beautiful. And you could flip through the pages. It looked normal. It looked normal. It didn't look like, it looked like any, any other book you would pick up in Crow, for example. Because there are the, there, you know, in the early days of this stuff, there was stuff that really looked, do it yourself, DIY. And this didn't look DIY at all. It looked like a real book. And we thought, well, you know, this has possibilities that won't offend our aesthetic tastes. Although the problem of doing it with Amazon has been present as kind of our original sin from the beginning. Because we are trying to do this in a, quote, business model that is different from normal publishing. And our business model is not to make any money. For the press. For us or for the press. And this is a rather complex issue because at the same time we want maximum exposure for our authors. Right, right. And also you want, the authors want some recompense also. And the split is very dramatic. It's 20% for you for all the costs that you have and 80% for the writer. It is. And normally it's 10% for the writer and 90% divided between bookstores and the publishers. And that's one of the things that we wanted to flip around. And so we have a model that comes from our long history, both of us with bread and puppet, which is to not be worried about money, to be outside of the cash nexus and sort of outside of getting reviews and outside, just outside of everything. And that the quality and importance of the work would in itself be like an icebreaker in this big field of too much, the field of too much. And you're not swimming as you're just articulating like that to the Garden of Eden. The Garden of Eden is locked, right, as far as publishing. What is the Garden of Eden? About getting locked out of the where you would need money and that sort of thing. So, I mean, these are facts that once were out of the Garden of Eden as the biblical text. I think we're in the Garden of Eden. This is too amazing. No, seriously. What's more Garden of Eden, a big capital bank, complex Northrop Grumman or Lockheed or Bread and Puppet? And so we can choose books to publish because we think they're great books or we like the message. We don't have to worry about whether or not that book is going to sell enough copies to make its cost. Because there are no costs until a book is printed and sold. That's what's amazing. We can bring out a book that's this size. This is a medium-sized novel. We can talk about this book later. In fact, each of these things for... The cost of our time, which is free. Well, no, it's nothing. No, I mean, it will cost us out of pocket, what, $35 or something? At the most. Yeah. And you think of, oh, it's publishing, so expensive. It's not expensive. It's free, basically, if you want to contribute your time and your software and your machines and your interests and your background and your history and your critical skills. It's free. And Bread and Puppet has a very similar kind of relationship to costs. Well, could you elucidate us on Bread and Puppet? Because a lot of us viewers are ignorant of what Bread and Puppet is. It burst upon the scene in America in the 60s, as far as I know, in the great protests against the Vietnam War. The puppets were there. And also, they were at Theater for the New City in New York City. That's where I saw their first productions. I think the guiding principle of Bread and Puppet that we've used in publishing is the cheap art principle, which is art is like Bread. Art feeds the soul. Art shouldn't be for museums and banks. It doesn't have to cost a lot of money. And so we've chosen to make our work based on that same principle. And what are the salaries of the resident puppeteers is $100 a week or something like that. They've got to raise to $125, I don't know. So, I mean, the puppeteers themselves, obviously including Peter Schumann, the director and his wife, Elka, who does every task you can't even think of, are basically nothing. Our salaries are literally nothing. So the idea that you don't use your art or your politics to make money, personal money, is our version of cheap art. And it's also drawn us to do a lot of work with Bread and Puppet Theatre in publishing in book form things that Peter has made in pamphlet form, usually. Do you have one of those here now? Yeah, a few different things. I mean, this has been a recent adventure. Here's the latest book. And if you can see this, it's called A Child's Deep Primer. And, you know, it looks like this inside. It's all lessons for the thinking child. And, you know, the texts are, Peter Schumann, this just says, I just opened it, when the holes get treated at the hospital, the adult worlds diagnosed with heart disease. And these texts are just great and crazy and profound, as is usually the case with stuff that Peter writes. We have a whole, Peter has a whole bunch of possibility books. This book is called From the Possibilitarian Arsenal of Belligerent and Not-So-Belligerent Slogans. So that title is very Bread and Puppet-y, Peter Schumann. And again, you know, it's drawings and pages and things like that. So these are a great deal of fun to publish, two diagonal man books. So working with Peter actually does a book that's not here, which is not like this. This book we is like this, is kind of drawings. But we have a book that is mostly print, which was an attempt to get into, to poke little tiny noses in the feet into the vast library of notebooks that Peter has kept, sketches and ideas and laundry lists and to-dos and, you know, and they're half, they're about a third in German and they're quite illegible. But there's so much stuff in there that's of value. And so we extracted 608 little paragraphs and it's called Bread and Sentences. And it's a very, very privileged angle of sight into the mind-brain soul of Peter Schumann, because these kind of books are not. You know, this is the presentational self. This is the political image. Is this, are these actually from diaries that he kept? They're not diaries. They're just things he writes down, you know. So whenever he walks around, he has a notebook and he's always scribbling in an idea for a change in a show or what he needs to do this afternoon or could be anything. I'm losing the notebooks. Anybody seen my notebook? Now you mentioned some, a lot of it is in German and Peter Schumann was born in Germany. And he came here, was it East or West Germany at that time? In East Germany. East Germany. And he came here, well, I only... Silesia, actually. Yeah, Silesia. Silesia, yes. Yeah, which is near Poland. It was, you know, it's changed Polish-German, Polish-German. Yes, yes, ping-ponging back and forth. But Peter Schumann came here and became a well-known artist in the 60s. Isn't that so? Yeah. Yeah. And the theater has defied all rules of theater. And it's the only theater from the 60s that's still not only around, but, you know, alive and kicking hard. All right. And it was conceived as a political theater, is that so? Yes, and it is. Yeah. Yeah. It stayed that way. So anyway, that's part of what we're doing. And, you know, we could do a whole show on Bretton Puppet and he puts both of us spent a lot of time. But another way that Bretton Puppet has influenced us in publishing is that many of our books have a political message or they're commenting on the current political situation or talking about some political history. For example, this little book of poetry is called Little Steel, and it's about the Little Steel Strike in Ohio. And the author, Suti Burton, from Burlington, her family was involved in that. And it's an important piece of labor history. And here it is in a beautiful, tiny little book. The same with... Yeah. And I mean, here's a similar thing. This is the Shirt Waste Fire. You mean, you know about that? Yes. Yes. So all of these young women who were locked up in the building were killed in this fire, because the door was locked, because the owner didn't want the women to be taking stuff out of the factory or taking breaks or whatever. And Delia Bell has made a book of two very different types of drawings. One is a sort of comic book stuff, and the other are these drawings of the time, the people at the time. It's a gorgeous book called The Shirt Waste Story. And it brings this issue of job exploitation, and not only in American history, but currently. And this was the beginning, at the beginning of the 20th century. This was the Shirt Waste Fire. Yes. The Triangle, was it mentioned? Triangle Shirt Waste Factory, so what it was called? It was a triangle building right down there near City Hall in New York City, Manhattan, and the terrible loss of life in women who were locked in that building. So this is very political, but also historical. Well, and the two stories are interwoven. So one is the story of the immigrants who were working in the factory, and the other is the story of family that owned the factory. And so it brings those two stories together. The grandson of the owner lives in Montpelier. Siding distance, Dee Dee can see his house from her house. She, for many years, was thinking, she'd like to talk to him about this story, what's it like to be a Shirt Waste guy? And eventually he said, okay, and he told her this story, and she wrote it down and made drawings of Peter's story, this different Peter. And that's what these are. And does this book go into the forming of labor unions then? No, this book is about this story. Yeah, about the tragedy, about the tragedy and about the effect of being related to having people in your family who are responsible for that. So I think it has some contemporary, the same things are happening today. I mean, people are doing things that are similar on both sides. There are people who still own sweatshops. We could talk about Amazon warehouses in the same way. So one of the questions that faced us early on, okay, someone should publish it, someone should publish it, why don't we publish it, let's try it, there we are. But then who reads? The people that are in the workshop, that's not a workshop, it's just a reading group that I'm in don't publish because they think publishing is an inverse chic. If you're published, you're already garbage. So the question of printed text in this culture, why would we go into, why would we make novels like a fat novel like this? Who would read it? Nobody. That's my last novel. Kafka's Roach by Mark Estrin. So who would read it? The answer is nobody. Even though it's a fabulous book, I have to say. I mean, it really is. It's a history of, detailed history of U.S. death wish from 1915 to 1945. It's a detailed history of the Manhattan Project. It's a detailed history of the nuclear, it's not a history. I mean, it's as told by a friend of a six-foot talking cockroach who is Gregor Zomsuk from Kafka. And so it's a novel, there's a lot of funny things in it, but it's terrifically critical insight into how these stuff, one develops from the other and you wind up with the atomic bomb. So, you know, in a way it's ridiculous waste of my time to write a book like that and waste of my time to publish it. But it has political content. This came, this is a really interesting book about a real community in New Jersey now, current, currently, that was built on the hill at the bottom of which, going into the bay there, was a Ford motor plant. And Ford took all of its old paint and buried it, buried the paint in tunnels up the hill where these people are living and that paint has gotten into the soil and the food and the air and you have this whole poisoned community living on the hill above the Ford plant with these tunnels. And this is a book that takes place in that community and when the people are dealing with this ongoing poisoning. Well, New Jersey is a haven for such like communities, going way back to the last set. But so this is a novel about that. How many novels do you have about it? You don't. And that's a novel about the corruption of the New York Police Department and its interaction with the press, you know, and derail this train wreck. So all of this stuff has real political content. You want to talk about this or? Well, I thought maybe we should talk about the pamphlets next. Yeah. Well, when Trump got into reality, I don't mean when he was elected. I mean, when all of a sudden it appeared as if this joke had potential serious consequences. So during the pre-election stuff, we thought, well, you know, it's one thing to put detailed, deep analysis into big fat books that no one's going to read. We should do something that's a little more available. So we decided to do a series of shorter pamphlets, tracks, which are what, 6,000 words? Yeah. So they're longer than a three-fold brochure, but they're not as long as a book. And we made a template for them, so they're very quick and easy to publish. However, mostly we don't sell them as printed pamphlets. We sell them as free ebook downloads for people. And they cover a lot of contemporary topics. Yeah, I can just read through. They each have on the back this quote from Gramsci, the old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters. Each of them have that on the back. And this is Teatro Mundi, the theater of the world. This is called Riot. This is called Conspiracy of Philosophical Defense. This is called Art, Post-Truth, Masculinity, Three Warnings, Palestine Path, Marx, Capitalism, Waste, Reality. This question's about reality. And there are a few more, actually, that are not in this pile. So how does it get to be free? That's a good question. Well, because in the world of online publishing, it's actually pretty common to make samples of ebooks available for free or online downloads from somewhere to be free. And it just works out for us that we can make it available that way. Once we've done the layout and the preparation for the print version, it's really simple to make it not cost anything. And electrons don't cost very much. Yeah, but people who sell it charge for electrons, right? They can. They don't have to. Well, who doesn't and why? Well, I think who doesn't are people like us. And these actually get a fair number of downloads every month, which was a little bit surprising to us because we haven't done a really a lot to promote them, other than a little bit on our website and occasional other things like that. But that's my train of thought. But it's not just people like us. I thought like Kobo and not Kindle, but Nook and all of those big, big people do it for nothing. They do some things for nothing. And why do they do our things for nothing? Because we're not asking them for anything except a little space on their website. I think it's primarily to get people to use the devices and to read that way. Although, theoretically, you are against e-books. You would want people to read the actual book, to smell the book, to experience the weight of the book in your hands. I don't think we're against e-books. Yeah, you're not against e-books. We're not against e-books. They're not as beautiful. They're not tangible. They're not really objects. But e-books have some advantages for some folks. One, for example, I travel a fair amount and I always used to bring three, four, five books with me. They're heavy. And then I have to do something with them when I'm finished with them. So it's an advantage to me to be able to read that way. Mark likes to be able to make the type a little bit bigger. So in a book like this, the type size is fixed. And that's not so easy for people who don't see well or whose eyes get tired or something like that. Your assumption is correct. We started out with a big chip on our shoulders about how, oh, that's probably a lot better than e-books. And then we thought, okay, but the authors would like to have their books out there. And so maybe we should say, oh, we can do e-books for practically nothing. Oh, that's interesting. Okay. And so we ordered a nook and a kindle. Just to see. Just to see what the books would look like after we'd done the formatting for them. And, you know, first of all, they looked great. And second of all, we discovered our bookshelves, which is every single square inch of our house. We're too full to put any new books in. And third of all, this is a great one to illustrate, when you're lying in bed at night and it's cold and you just want to have one hand under the cover and just reach up and you're lying there and you're going like this and then the print is too small. Okay. So you make the print bigger and then how do you turn the page without taking your other arm out from under the covers? It's impossible. And whereas with an e-book reader, you just go like this, you know, and you touch the screen. So I have to say that I haven't bought a book in two years, a book book. Bad boy. A what? Bad boy. But the other thing that we were able to do through print on demand publishing is to connect the print book and the e-book. So if someone buys a printed copy of this, they can download the e-book for free. Yes. So they're not, it's not either or necessarily. And that's also not available to every book that you buy. Every hardcover book that you buy is not accessible by e-book too. So it's very good that you make it accessible. Right. And what's free on e-books are the great books. Yes. And what's terrific on them is if you're reading in foreign languages and you need a word, you just tap on it and you get the translation. And furthermore, I mean, these are great machines. They're really well thought out and well designed. Furthermore, if you, you know, you read a book and you out, you put a line next to it on the, that's called highlighting. So if you do that on the e-screen, you've highlighted that text. Okay. And you want to use that in scholarly work or to quote it. It already exists as a file. You don't have to type it in. It's there. You can just cut and paste it. So all that I'm saying is that at least I am an e-book fanboy. Even though I don't write e-books, I write these books. Well, I picture the vast number of holdouts from the e-books of friends of mine who will not read the e-books no matter what their age. You know, whether they're very old or very young and they do all the research and they have all the little yellow stickers in there. But there's a completion about having the book in front of you and holding it like this and a tactical and all kinds of satisfaction that comes from holding the actual book. Books are beautiful objects. And that's what we make. And that's what we try to make. But could you go into, this is, Fomite is a post-capitalist operation. You don't want to do that? No, no, no. We can go into it. I mean, that's what we originally thought. And for instance, that is certainly true of Bretton Puppet as it exists in totality. I mean, they work with cardboard. They don't wait for theater reviews. They don't do advertising. And that was one of the reasons why they were originally in Manhattan in New York City. They were originally living there in the Lower East Side and producing their plays right there. But then they disappeared to Vermont. Well, that's another story and we can talk about that every half time. But the thing is that if you start out in bed with Amazon, and we're trying to get out of the bed, or at least have one foot out of the bed. But the fact is that Amazon, the Amazon structure handles these books optimally. And it puts it on the website. And a week later, there's a look inside things. So you can actually read the first 50 pages of this book and see if you want it. That it's horrible, but it is the case that doing this with Amazon contradicted our needs, but fulfilled our needs, or the author's needs anyway. And there's also, that's the way the society is. But yet being a bread and puppet. You try to live outside that as much as possible. You try to live outside it. But even, you know, to say this is an anti-capitalist press, we started with that idea. But it doesn't make, it doesn't. Doesn't exactly work that way, much as we would like it to. And the only thing that we can say about it that is sort of pure is that we don't take money. And we don't, the press doesn't take money. If we did take money, we would, if the balance, right now we're pretty much on the line. We're not in the black, we're not in the red, you know, we're just about on the line. If it changed, we would change our policies to continue our no money making. So that in itself is not, is not a capitalist idea, obviously. Well, what do you want today? Like, there are writers out here, and all around the world now to come to Foamite Press. And they do, yeah. Yes, and they do. And, but sometimes you have a red light on your website that people can't get in, because you're not accepting manuscripts right now. And a green light means that you are. And what is, what's the deciding factor in that? Whether you let people in or whether, can anybody approach you? And would you say, yes, our doors are open? Well, whether or not the red, the light is red or green has to do with how many manuscripts we have waiting for production. Okay. So right now we have about, I would say we have 20 books that are in some state of production. They've been accepted. They've been accepted. I've accepted them, and I have worked with the author back and forth enough times to have sent to Donna a manuscript that says, Final One. Okay. So I send it over to Donna. That means it's in production. And what is the criteria, or do you have a criteria for accepting a manuscript? What he likes is what you like. Okay. Yeah. And that's problematical, because my particular tastes are, you know, who are my, my, my greats? Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and Thomas Mann and, okay, Pynchon and Gaddis. And, you know, like I like hard, complicated texts. Because they're very interesting. They're more interesting. They send me off to do research. So my taste, if I were to do my tastes only, we would have zero books. Okay. So there's some stretching about, you know, what's good, even if it's not Dostoevsky? Well, and there's certain things we don't do, even if they are good. So we don't publish memoirs or nonfiction generally, or children's books, or straight genre fiction. Some of those because they have pretty good markets somewhere else, and it's not necessary. And some because we just couldn't do it. Either physically couldn't do it. Children's books are really hard. Or because we're not interested. Or because it's too hard. For instance, we learned early on, because a puppeteer actually gave me her memoir. And, you know, it's sort of interesting, but I tried to talk to her the way editors talk to, you know, how about we cut this out, or this should go here. And you can't mess around with people's lives. That isn't how it happened, she said. And so I realized that doing memoirs is dangerous. And plus everybody's memoir. I mean, people are publishing their memoirs like this, especially if their father was a priest with whom they had incest. But I think the other thing is a lot of things that we choose to publish, either have some political content. There are things that would be hard to get published in the current publishing world. They're just interesting to us. We're working now on our fourth book, I think, from a Bulgarian writer, who her writing is just like nothing you've ever seen here. And so we liked the first group of stories that she sent, and now we're working on her third novel. But why the political thrust, why? Because it somehow is narrowing. Is it not if it's political? Is it, does it have to be political in your eyes? Is that part of your selection process? Yes. It's a positive. It's not a deal breaker. It's not a deal breaker. Although, I don't know if it's a deal breaker or not. I think I get interested, obviously, if it's a topic of relevance. And then the question of what's relevant has to do with what's politically relevant, what's psychologically relevant, culturally relevant, and all of that. In some way, that's all political. And we don't publish lobby-da books. And even if there's a lot of political content, it still has to be well-written and a coherent story. Because, say, Dostoevsky is so political. He is political in everything that he writes. And yet, it's because it's in his whole being, in his metabolism. It's the way he breathes and goes about his business that is political. And it works a century later, or however much longer later, more than a century later. But so what is political to you, Mark? What is political? Is it something that is an existential word? I think that political is a subspecies of important and relevant to me. And so, for instance, we have this big novel about the plot as this full guy's father disappeared, walked through checkpoint Charlie during the war, and never came back. And then he goes out to search for his father. And it's a huge book, 1,300 pages or something like that. But it's basically about searching for about two anthropologists, linguists, on either side of the political divide, both going out to try to find and translate, break a code of this ancient Mycenaean language. You learn about how CIA guys are brought up. You learn about the generals in Greece, you know, the whole generals thing. And speaking of generals, I mean, you tell them about Fedorakis. Well, we're about to publish a dual language book of the song lyrics and poetry of Mykos Theodorakis, who was so involved in protests against the Greek generals. I don't know what else to say about him. Well, these things haven't been published. The author is a professor of Greek at Cornell, who played as a young woman in Theodorakis' band. And this is when they were on the hit list to be killed. And so she's had this lifelong relationship with Theodorakis and has access to all of his stuff. And a lot of his stuff has not been published, like he's a great poet. His songs and poetry have not been published. And we got the first crack at him because we know Gail and we've published some other poems of hers. And so now we're bringing out, in dual language, you know, left page, right page, we have quite a few of those. I think an important book. So Gail, what is your last name? She's written this book. Halswar Haft. Yes. She has made available and translated these texts and given us pages of his manuscript, you know, on music paper, where he's writing the notes of the songs. And he wrote a little preface to the book. So that should come out probably in the next month or so. Someone other than us is proofreading the Greek. Wonderful. But Theodorakis is no longer alive. No, he's still alive. Is he still alive? Yes. He's in his 90s. We have some great pictures of them. Oh, wonderful. Wonderful. It brings to mind the first things I did in theater, which was with the ancient drama company in New York City. And the director was Paul Nord, and his leading lady, this was for Hakuba, was Aliki Nord. And they were refugees from Greece at that time. And they were political also. They had been tortured by the Nazis in Greece during the war. And Aliki Nord had lost her infant. But from the Nazis, so that they did these great Greek tragedies in New York City. We also, by the way, this sounds all very serious, which it is often, but we also do crazy books. And we should have brought some crazy books. Well, tell us about them then. Well, the books, they're called, we call them odd birds. That's a category, odd birds. And they don't fit into the general, like this is fiction, and this is poetry, and this, you know, fiction, poetry, short stories. These are books that are, whose content won't fit, right? And one of them, for instance, is a book of beautiful drawings by Doug Knapp. A lot of people around here know. It's called Artsy Fartsy. And Artsy Fartsy is just a bunch of encounters, one face at a time with text under it, of the kind of idiotic things that people say to him as they're buying his art. Including me. Right, I'm in there. And his mother. And his mother, right. You know, that's been, and then, you know, Peter's books are odd birds, too, because, you know, that's not what you're expecting in a book. Right, and a lot of those books are more interesting page making and design problems than, you know, this book is very big, but it's basically, you throw the text into a template and it comes out like that. And then you have to check little things. But this is not in the template. In fact, they would, Amazon wouldn't do this. And we had to find another printer to do it because it's, they don't have this size paper. And they also, like some of the paintings are on over the, oh, this is a book about refugees, about the refugee crisis. And it's, some of it is painted on a Pew organization report about refugees. And Amazon felt that the text was obscured and that people might complain. So they wouldn't print it. They complained they couldn't read the text on which these were painted, over which these were painted. They didn't complain about DDs about this, you know, because DD took a book and wrote over it and painted over it. Somehow this got passed. And what about these industrial Oz books? So these are especially relevant today because of big extinction rebellion protests that are going on. Scott Starbuck writes what he calls eco poems. So they're poems about you know, all of the ecological issues and disasters in the world. We have three of his books and a fourth one possibly to come. And he draws his inspiration just partly from his own interaction with the natural world, but also from newspaper headlines and things he hears about. And is a series, is it a series? Not exactly a series. You'd know it was the same poet. You'd know it was the same poet. But it's different artists. I just came across why old U.S. made nuclear waste must be stored at the White House. Oh, this is, I'll read some of my nuclear shows. This is amazing. And what's also amazing is the cover of this book. Here, let's see if I can see it here. I think here, I had the wrong camera. It comes over this way. That's all right, you can see it. Donna and I were at a, I don't know. New Year's Eve party. Yeah, maybe some kind of party at one of our author's house. And this woman had brought her little kids to the party. It was late afternoon, it wasn't there. And so this little girl is sitting at the table playing with clay. And she made this, this is a five-year-old, made this sculpture. And Donna and I had just passed by it and I said to Donna, that's a great book of her, that sculpture. So Donna took a picture of it and we, you know, got in touch with the girl's parents and got permission and gave her a credit. She has a cover credit. She has a publication credit. That's great, there she is. And there's a picture of her in the book. Abigail Carla, these poems have been written to increase the chances of Abigail having a decent life or a life at all. She's a beautiful picture of the girl. And now she's quite bigger than that now. Yeah, so thank you so much for coming in to talk about Fulmite Press, which is an education for me and for the viewers. And what do you want right now and in the near future as we sign off? You mean about Fulmite or about life? Well, about both of them, if you want to say that. The ladder is too big. Well, I think we could, you know, increase our readership. And it's hard to do that. We make gestures on social media, but we're both geezers. And we don't have a natural either aptitude or love of that stream. So we try. And I don't know that it could get any better. In fact, it's too good. I mean, this is very, very oppressive success. We have 165 books out now by probably 125 different authors. And each of them have friends who they tell about how wonderful it is to work with us. Right. And their friends get in touch with us. And the good writers have good writer friends. And so it's a tree that branches out. But guess what? It's just two people over here. So that's why the red light is on. And it probably will be on forever because even with the red light on, we can barely handle the quality and quantity of good books that are coming and submitted. So what we want is for nobody to know about us. Except we want people to know about the books that we already have and the books that we're about to bring out. And we do work pretty closely with Champlain and St. Michael's colleges in particular. Good for interns. With student interns who help us with that kind of outreach. And Donna, what is your greatest satisfaction in working as a publisher? Oh, I have a lot. One is I love to see the final printed book because I've put a lot of work into them. And they're usually beautiful. But secondly, I really like sending people money when their books sell. And I get to do that twice a year. And nobody's getting rich off their fomite books. But some people get a little more than a Chinese lunch. That's good. And we can buy the books in various bookstores. We see them in libraries, but you can buy them on Amazon. Or Barnes & Noble or Powell's books. Most of our books can be special ordered by any independent bookstore. And we encourage people to go that route if they can. Yeah. And then you can window shop on the website, on our website, foamitepress.com. And if you look at our books, you can scroll through it. It still amazes me to see all the books we've made. Some of which I can't even remember. Well, thank you so much for coming in. It's been an amazing introduction for most of us to foamite books. And we will find you. And we will find you. We'll run. Well, thanks. Thank you so much for coming in. Thanks for having us. And viewers, until next time, this was a wonderful, wonderful show, an introduction to foamite books. Thank you for watching. And thank you, Channel 17, Center for Media and Democracy. Goodbye for now.