Nick Mustoe

I am a student of publishing.  I learn what that means by working at Ooligan Press, a small trade press run by the students in the Masters in Publishing program at Portland State University. When you work in publishing, people (my family, my friends, and that dude at the Hollywood Transit Center) always want to know what it is you actually do. The literal response for me would be something like: Last week I made out royalty checks and scheduled appointments with people at TopShelf and Dark Horse and sold books. I did other stuff, too, mostly project planning which includes moving information from editors to designers, from book marketers to promotions. I did all of this because my area of study is generalization, which is to say, me generally knowing a little bit about everything in the publishing profession.

But that isn’t what I really did, is it? Such work sounds tedious and completely unrelated to anything literary. No, in a small way, I made a wild rumpus. But we’ll get to that later. First, I’d like to address my area of study: publishing generalist.

Being a generalist means being a mover of ideas, a word-pusher, as it were, only minus the money that other types of pushers get. But how does a person get to such a place? As with anyone who arrives somewhere, my beginning started when I was very young. I lived in a faraway place where parkas were a way of life rather than a fashion statement. How’s that for foreshadowing of backstory?

This is because parkas are a necessity when your town is on the north side of the Lakes Michigan and Superior sandwich that is the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, a strip of forests and endless rivers and streams. In the winter, the whole of that place becomes an endless ode to white. Even the cold is white as you breathe it in and out and white as the lace it makes on the windows as it frosts on the inside as well as the outside. It’s white that hurts your lungs and sears the inside of your nose. If it is cold enough, it feels like the moment a finger burns as it touches a hot oven rack. This describes the winters of my youth, when the cold seeped in through the cracks of the where we rented a walk-up. My mother, older sister, and I would sit in the kitchen on chairs we had pulled up close to the cast iron radiator so we could put our feet on it. This extra heart came after we’d turned on the electric oven, leaving its door open. I only mention these details so that what follows can be evaluated in proper context. It was just such a white cold day when I understood the power in a written story.

The day before had been our weekly library day and our haul of picture books and our mother’s novels sat in impressive piles on the table, as if the books were a multi-course meal waiting to be consumed. Our mother had pulled a book at random from one of our piles before she took the chair between us at the radiator. She opened the page and read: “Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak.” And she began to read the story. We listened as a boy named Max make mischief (to this day I love that word because of that book), and his room became the world all around. We heard the wild things roar their terrible roars, and liked it when Max tamed them with the magic trick of staring into their yellow eyes. And then the moment that holds me to this day: “Let the Wild Rumpus Begin!” Max cried,” and the pictures were of the Wild Things on parade and dancing, and my mom started “Rump, rump, rump-rump!” and we joined in and got up and did our own wild rumpus with jumps and stomps. We had been taken away, taken away from our drafty rooms and the white-on-white world of a Michigan winter. We were transported to where the wild things are, and it was pure, wonderful fantasy. And that was the day my love affair with books began.

My amour came along when I moved across the country twice and later when I joined the Air Force, traveling to Turkey, Iceland, and Panama. Later, as a veteran beginning her college education, it followed me still.  After almost a decade of vocational dabbling here and there, I realized books were “it” for me. I decided to settle down, get a laptop, start out on finding a career. Which means—I became an English Major.

And that was when I learned the question of questions for all up-and-coming word nerds: What is literature?

Funny, I’d never even thought to ask before. Kind of like definition of pornography, I figured I knew it when I read it. But the questions didn’t stop there. No, they kept on coming: How do we determine that something is or isn’t a novel? Through what lens do we view our quest for an answer? What can we trust? The canon? Who picked the canon? Why? What’s the ideology behind the choices? What signifiers lead the way? Hello literary theory, you have made me question everything.

Over those years, what struck with me the most were the questions concerning the canon and who decides what it is, and what a problematic concept that one actually is. The power of words—and the ideas and understanding held therein—is an awesome thing. And yet there is a canon, an assemblage of work that defines the breadth and width of where and how ideas and understandings can reside. How does a new form get entry into these hallowed halls? Who says, “Hey, this piece has potential,” and gets it out there for people to critique and like or hate and pass judgment on. The canon, I thought, has to come from a pool of books. Well then who gets to stock the pool?

I found my answer when I took the Introduction to Publishing class at Portland State. Even though books can’t exist without some form of publishing, I hadn’t thought to look in that direction before. And there it was, the stocker of the pool, the potential finder, the filter through which all the canon and maybe-canon pass through. In every way, being a publisher is to be enmeshed in the question, “What is literature?” I knew right away I wanted in on the action—(See, you just knew that you were right with the whole “back-story foreshadowing” thing).

For me, the epicenter of the action is in the publishing industry itself. The actual jobs—whether in editing, design, marketing or, sales— are where the process of bringing the worlds and ideas created by an author to the hands of the reader begins. Each requires a working knowledge of both audience and craft.

Publishing is an industry that is, at present, in flux, where big houses are trying to figure out what to do in the face of e-publishing, where small presses are still trying to stay afloat, where money isn’t the reason you do the job, but it is also where words and ideas and the language to express them are nursed. It is an industry that wields an amazing amount of power; the power that determines what ideas and worlds will pass through the realm of the reader to become a part of the human condition, a thing that shows us our inner lives and ideologies, that connects and impacts us, that motivates change and exposes taboos. Sign me up.

That’s what I thought as I started my apprenticeship at Ooligan Press: Sign me up and I will learn every aspect of one of the most amazing jobs in the world, I will be a mover of ideas. Ethically, I am bound as a publisher to attend to the creation of the conversational framework in the literary tradition. My personal way of doing that is by understanding the whole. Hence generalizing. Cool. Cold. Oh, fine, I’ll bookend and go back to the beginning—publishing generalist, Ooligan Press, and Where the Wild Things Are.

Basically, if anyone wants to know what I have found as I hop from one area of the press to another throughout my day, I can say I have found a way to potentially give what I was given on a cold day in a faraway place, a way into what is beyond ideas and canons and theory. My apprenticeship at Ooligan Press is giving me the tools I need to find, champion, and produce a wild rumpuses (rumpi?) to the world at large, because I have never unlearned the lesson of that day, a lesson that all publishers learn: A book is magic.