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A Conversation with writer, publisher and urban farmer Nic Esposito

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APIARY’S Steve Burns recently sat down with urban farmer, activist, small press founder, self-published (and APIARY!) author, and fellow Rowan University alumnus, Nic Esposito, in his newly acquired writing space on Frankford Avenue. Amid handmade wooden desks and the glow of a writer’s lamplight, Nic, an ambitious artisan of the literary arts, tells us the origin of The Head and the Hand — an independent publishing company run by just a handful of passionate Philadelphians.  He also talks about his evolution as a writer and how the storytelling culture he witnessed in post- Hurricane Katrina Louisiana influenced his work and life.  Nic’s first novel Seeds of Discent and the press’ upcoming almanac, Rust Belt Rising, illuminate just how ripe Philadelphia’s literary landscape is. 

 

Steve: You went to the Gulf Coast to help Katrina victims, farms in South America, then California, [and] Louisiana. Could you talk about some of the highlights, some of the things you did and how those experiences influenced what you’re doing right now?

Nic:  Sure, yeah. I ended up down there because after I got out of Rowan — I enjoyed writing and everything I did there — but I had this nagging desire to serve. I was part of the Progressive Student Alliance over at Rowan University. I was surrounded by some really great minds and great thinkers, but in college thoughts sometimes overtake action. I was just craving action. I wanted to do something and I knew some good influential people that served and wanted to give back. That made me first join the Peace Core and ended up turning down a commission for them and did AmeriCorp and Civilian Conservation Corp which was an unbelievable program. I ended up being able to travel with them and responded to Katrina. It was a great experience being down in Louisiana, helping people rebuild. They were very land-based people, the Cajuns. When the oil boom happened [the economy changed]; they used the land but not in the same way. After Katrina wiped so many things out people started to reevaluating their lives. It was kind of the right place at the right time. After I graduated from Rowan I got into Philly with some people who were a little more of the “hippy persuasion,” for lack of a better word, and I started to explore that on my own. It was serendipitous. A lot of the people I started meeting were interested in that lifestyle too — especially after Katrina.

I feel like Katrina was a huge turning point for our culture. It was at a time when this whole resurgence was happening: local foods, local culture, and this natural disaster that wiped out so many things made people think about that again. Louisiana culture is unbelievable. It really got me into storytelling and these American traditions. You can go around this country and it’s not just box-stores, homogeneous culture. I have friends down there who are twenty years old and speak Cajun-French. It was cool to sit there and see them speak back and forth. That kind of culture made a huge impact on me. At the same time there were people coming from all over the country coming down to [help with] Katrina. I used to call it an “anarchist playground.” Every structure that was made for society was wiped out. People were coming down and re-imagining what these structures were going to be. It was a really, really great experience on so many levels — whether it was farming, community development, storytelling, [or] culture. All of these things swirled together and put me on this path. When I got out of that I was, I wouldn’t say totally lost, but I was definitely searching for where I was going to be. I went down to South America and had some great adventures there. [Afterwards] I work[ed] on farm in Louisiana [until] my grandfather got sick and I came back to Philly.   There were definitely bits of Romanticism in it, you know. Reading, being young, reading too much Kerouac. I’ll admit that.

Steve: Yeah, but it definitely wasn’t a bad thing — at all. It gave you direction and maybe the misdirection you needed to break up the structures of school.

Nic: Yeah, that’s a great point. Just re-imagining what my life was, what I wanted it to be, getting these great experiences.

Steve: So, when you were in Louisiana, that’s when you saw self-sustainability [in action]. When did farming become something you were interested in? When you were back in Philly did you feel like you were in a structure again? Maybe you wanted to bring what you saw down south, up here?

Nic: In AmeriCorp they have these things called independent service hours. Part of my independent service was working on farms. There was a community farm in Lafayette, Louisiana and I started working there. Then I went and moved north of New Orleans and met this farmer who became a good friend of mine. I worked with him for a little while. Our superiors saw everything we were doing and [assigned us] a project in Seattle. We worked on a community garden there. That was what did it for me. When I got to Seattle I went, ‘Oh man, this is what I’ve been looking for.’ I definitely got the urban thing there. I can live in the city, I can walk anywhere I want, I can grow food, and work in this beautiful environment? This is for me. I thought I was gonna move out to California or stay in Louisiana or get some land in the country, but I had to come back to Philly when my grandfather got sick. I wanted to be with him at the end of his life. I ended up falling in with some people out in West Philly who had a big group house. I started seeing the culture out there and it was very similar. There’s that old proverb, you know, this person has this dream and travels all over looking for what was already right where they’re from. The urban farming scene here is huge, really inspiring, and vibrant. There’s a lot more work that needs to be done but when I found that I wanted to stay here.

Steve: Through all this, when did you start writing? Were you writing throughout this period or did more happen when you returned to Philadelphia?

Nic: I was always writing. Constantly. When I first applied to AmeriCorp I also applied to MFA programs. I was writing short stories; I always journal. I always knew I wanted to write, but I took this really different path for a little while because it was the right thing to do; it felt right. I knew I wanted to write so even when I first got jobs when I came back to Philly that were in urban farming I was definitely still involved with the arts and culture scene. I did a semester at Goddard College for an MFA. It wasn’t for me; I just wanted to focus on my work. I said, ‘Oh, well I want to write a book. What should I write a book about? [Laughs] Okay, this seems like a pretty good subject.’ So I novelized my experiences in urban farming into this book. [Touches Seeds of Discent]

Steve:  That’s awesome. How did you funnel a lot of these experiences you had into this book? How did you go about constructing it? This was the first huge artistic task you took on.

Nic:  Yeah. Like I said, I journal so I had tons of sequential pieces. If you go through a bunch of them from 2005 to 2009 you’ll see these little things that say, ‘SOD notes’ so I knew what was for Seeds of Discent.

Steve: Oh, so you had that title for a while?

Nic: Yeah, I had the title for a while. When you get to the end of the of the book it makes sense. Some people have been critical of it, but that’s part of writing. It’s fun to get critiqued as much as you’re being praised. It was originally just ‘dissent.’ I had a woman go, [Nic enters a snotty tone here] ‘You don’t do that with your first book!’ There’s actually a book called Seeds of Dissent, which is part of a novelization of Star Trek.

Steve: Really?

Nic: [Laughs] Yeah, I’m glad I didn’t do it the other way because it would’ve been confused when people Google it. So yeah, I just started taking all of these ‘SOD notes’ that were in my journals. Basically, any time I write a book I write ‘character profiles.’ I’ll take every character that I have and I’ll write a whole history of their life, their parent’s lives — even back to their grandparents. I give them a reality. Even though I left Goddard (maybe if I stayed and did the MFA with this book it would’ve been different) my advisor, Michael Klein (who’s a poet in New York), said, ‘Just write this in the first person.’ I was trying to do it in third person and it just wasn’t coming together. So I decided to do it in the first person; it really revealed itself as it went on. I let the book take me the way it was going to go.

Steve: What do you want Seeds of Discent to accomplish? What is your major goal?

Nic: There were a lot of great books that came out about urban farming: academic books, memoirs, or just how-to kind of things. A lot of them did a really good job, but within the media and pop culture you started seeing some stereotypes arise about what people are like in urban farming. My main thing was I wanted people to read this book and see a little bit more depth to the character of people in Philadelphia. People have been doing this, urban farming, for a very long time. This isn’t a new thing. [Urban farming goes] back to the victory gardens, to the seventies when the city went to crap and everyone started growing food because there were vacant lots. People of different races, different ethnic backgrounds, different economic backgrounds, different education…so I really wanted to capture that and show that people who have these ideals aren’t these off-the-grid, ‘out there’ people. They have student loans, they want to have kids.

Steve: They’re real people. They’re passionate about what they’re doing.

Nic: Exactly. I wanted people to get a different perspective of it through a novel. The way you can do it in a story creates so much nuance because you have to challenge your characters, you have to create plots, you have to create all these things. It’s not just your perspective going forward, which I really enjoyed; it was very challenging. The editing process was just as challenging. This book was definitely too manifesto-ish before I said down with Carl Cheeseman, who was my editor. I really give credit to Carl. He turned this from a set of thoughts into a story. Working with him and going through the editing process completely inspired The Head and the Hand.

Steve: Now that we’re talking about writing, we can talk about The Head and the Hand. When did it occur to you that you should create a small press? What about The Head and the Hand?

Nic: There was a lot of great stuff about self-publishing that we found. I was a first time author writing about urban farming in Philadelphia. I couldn’t find the right press that would really pick [my book] up. I didn’t have the greatest knowledge of that world either. It’s not always as apparent [when you're] living in Philadelphia. There’s not as many presses here. I wasn’t really in the New York scene; I wasn’t in other cities. I didn’t want to contact somebody out of the blue and say, ‘Here’s my book.’ I did that a few times and wasn’t getting responses. I said, ‘I really want to get this book out; let’s just do it ourselves.’ What you can do right now with all the software, [access to] a good printer…[pauses] We just went for it. But very quickly I hit the wall with self-publishing. Distribution, marketing…

Steve: That’s one of the things I was curious about. What’s the business side like?

Nic: Well, the business side was a mess when we first started. The business side was just me, you know, delivering books, getting the word out there to people, and doing talks. I’m luck[ier] than most people who try to self-publish…I do a lot of speaking. I’m in the public eye a little bit more, but it wasn’t enough to be able to push a book. So, I hit all these problems and [remembered that] I’m all about local culture. I thought, ‘I don’t want to leave Philadelphia to get this book published. I shouldn’t have to do that.’ I was sitting with a friend who works on Wall Street. His parents run a successful organic farm in Bucks County. He said, ‘You should make your own company.’ I was like, ‘That’s a crazy idea.’

Last Christmas I read this great book called The Craftsman (Richard Sennett). We were interested in crafting, being involved with handmade culture. In the book there’s a line about ‘the head and the hand.’ I put it down [and it] became the press. In the beginning [I thought about] how we could help people self-publish. Very quickly I realized, as I started thinking more about it, if we really want to push a book and do an author justice there needs to be a lot of thought that goes into this; we needed to be an independent press. I wanted to be creative, but at the same time I wanted to make a viable business. I was exposed to a company called Green Village (now called Good Company Group) and they have what they call a ‘Seed Starter’ program. It [connects upcoming businesses with] a mentor to write a business plan. I was really into that in the beginning…Business plans get a bad connotation: ‘Aw, I don’t want to be a business. This isn’t business! I don’t want to make money.’ It’s good to make money!

Steve: You need money to survive!

Nic:  To survive! We’re not trying to make tons of money. I wanted to start off on the right foot so I went through and got this whole business plan done. Kerry Boland, who is a very good friend of mine, she was in Drexel’s publishing program (for the marketing side of things). She wanted to write her thesis, for her Master’s, on The Head and the Hand. She helped with the business plan. We went through it together.

Basically, at the end of August we had a business plan, almost $6,000 in the bank, and we had Kerry and Linda who were willing to bootstrap with me. That’s what we’re doing right now. I don’t have a trust-fund. We don’t have any angel investors. We’re just trying to make this work as we go. Everybody is working for free right now, but if we make a run at this and sell some books we could make this into something.

Steve: Yeah!

Nic: There’s this really fine line between passion and care for books and literature and the project. Also, [there's the] drive and ambition [to make this] a cool full time job if we can make this work. [Soon] we had the idea for the workshops, which we did a Kickstarter for. I saw a dramatic change when we stopped meeting in coffee shops, meeting in my house, or anywhere else. We have OUR space [on Frankford Avenue]  that we can work out of. It was a huge shift for everybody at The Head and the Hand. It was amazing getting this space. Then we have the workshops. We want the workshops to be something where people can ask questions, get feedback, and get their books out. We want to build the writing community. We want to help make Philly a world class literary town.

Steve: People want it, we need it.

Nic: We need it. If we could just be one part of that, we’d be happy. We’d do our job. So, with the writing workshop, we have the workshop Tuesdays now, but our bigger hope [is to] create the capacity, in this space or another space, to have memberships for our writing studio. They’d be able to come any time they want.

Steve: It’s very much real people and authentic experiences being brought in.

Nic: Yeah, and the mindset you know? I take a lot from, besides urban farming, rebuil[ding] houses after Katrina; I learned carpentry. I love when you’re working with — whether it’s carpentry, working on the farm — people who are completely creative and pragmatic at the same time. My friend Jim built all these desks [motioning to the desks along the wall] and he’s a huge influence on me. When we work together…you’re working through problems together. We’re going to make the best product possible and let’s do that together.

Steve: That’s The Head and the Hand.

Nic: Exactly. It’s not this abstract thing. We really want writers to leave egos at the door. We want people to sit across from each other and have that conversation, form that bond, [and] form that camaraderie to get a book out together. [We want people to] look at things with a clear eye. When you’re looking at it as a craft, you’re not looking at it as a ‘personal’ investment. It takes on a better feel.

Steve: Do you have any specific qualities, traits, or ideas in mind for the kind of works you’re look for?

Nic: You know, not so much. We just really want good, honest stories from people who are willing to challenge their notions of the world.

Steve: Rust Belt Rising Almanac. Could you explain how you came up with Rust Belt Rising and where it’s going right now?

Nic: Sure. It just came to me one day. People have done almanacs before. There’s a Farmer Almanac. Actually, someone just told me today that someone put out a Philly Almanac back in the 90′s. Once you see all the different departments we have for the Almanac — from the old school — we actually went down to the Rosenbach Museum and we have been looking at Poor Richard’s Almanac, the original copy. We’re looking at all that stuff. [Almanacs] have very satirical essays; they’re funny, interesting, [and] they give a really good snapshot of life. We wanted to do that because I had the idea of creating an anthology of life in rust belt cities…[There's this idea that] if you really want to make it you have to go to New York, you have to go to San Francisco. I don’t buy that because, one, social media has changed everything and, two, there are such great people, great thoughts in these cities. We just want to spotlight all the amazing stuff that’s going on — primarily in rust belt cities. I was at this party at a Kickstarter contributer’s house and I was talking to him and he said ‘You know, man, the rust belt… it’s really, really rising up.’

Steve/Nic: [Laughs] Simultaneously, “I like that.”

Nic: I just kept thinking about that: Rust Belt Rising. That’s a really great thought. It seems like a timely thing. We call it Rust Belt Rising because we want to show that things are rising up, that things are changing, but not everything’s going to be positive. There are some stories we’re taking that show the true nature of living in one of these cities. There’s crime; it’s tough. We want to capture a snapshot of what it’s like [to] live in a rust belt city.

Steve: Will the almanac focus just on Philly, or other places too?

Nic: Anything that’s considered a rust belt city. What’s considered a rust belt city are cities that bet the farm on industry, creating an industrial town. Philly’s a weird rust belt city. It wasn’t an industrial town. It was our nation’s capital and we lost it to DC. It was the nation’s artistic hub and we lost that to New York City. Mid nineteenth century, we became an industry town because that’s what we needed. Put your mills here, put your factories here. So Detroit’s a rust belt city. Pittsburgh. St. Lewis. Cleveland. These places that had big industry and collapsed. If you go through [these cities you'll find] there’s a lot of great things going on. It’s not just local, cute things; it’s great art and great music. Great shops and artisans. Part of the whole local thing is, ‘How are people reviving these vibrant communities?’ This is what we want to capture.

Steve: What kinds of work are in the Almanac right now that you can speak of?

Nic: Right now we’ve only accepted poetry. The poems are really good snapshots of the sights, sounds, and people. We’re still working out those things so I can’t say who the authors are just yet, but we have a lot of other good things in the hopper. [There are] stories coming in from people who have done really cool projects. Anybody who is doing something cool or interesting in a rust belt city, we want to hear about it. You look down the street and there’s Pizza Brain Restaurant, which is owned by guys who were music school students. Same thing with Little Baby’s Icecream. Guys in music, in bands. They opened these shops. People laugh at me: ‘Did you grow up farming?’ I’m like, ‘No, I was an English major.’ I got into farming because I wanted to do something with my hands. There’s so many people in the artisan community who were failed by a lot of our institutions and our systems but have a liberal arts education. I’ve had people say, when I traveled in Europe and India, ‘The great thing about Americans is they can do anything.’ We have that mindset. We can do whatever we want. There’s beauty in that.

 

The Submission Deadline for the Rust Belt Rising Almanac is February 15th, 2013.

Writing workshops and co-writing hours run from 6 pm to 8 pm. Enjoy “talking shop” among fellow writers into the evening.   

For more information visit http://www.theheadandthehand.com/

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(image credit: Steve Burns)

(Seeds of Discent cover art by Carpe Diem Construction Co.)

 

 Steve BurnsSteve Burns recently graduated from Rowan University with a BA in English and Education. He’s toying with the idea of graduate school (that is, when he’s not making poems with refrigerator magnets) and hopes to teach at the college level some day. Freeing insects from windowsills, massaging cat tummies, and reading poetry are but a few of his pastimes. Words fascinate him. As do spinning records and freshly brewed coffee.

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