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The General Manager
Apr. 28th, 2014 10:03 pmI've just made my way home from a really engaging interview with the general manager of a Canadian literary press. What a grand person and a grand organization. I want to hug their whole approach. They have that genuine old-school love of the work and commitment to a very simple thing, without fanfare or pretension or upselling or microbranding -- printing good books on good paper and getting them into people's hands. Hopefully the interview will be posted in a few days.*
The General Manager runs the whole thing from her spare room. She was lively, funny, modest about being the "practical" one among creative people, yet clearly both inventive and shrewd about how to further the cause of books in Canada, and deeply invested in the authors and their work.
Every year she has to come up with something new to propose in the grant application, and every year she comes up with something not only "grant-good" but genuinely useful. A whole series of digital projects that extend the visibility of the authors and their work, and make both the books and information about the books easier for the readers get to. The press makes great use of social media and digital formats, *and* geeks out about paper quality.
I wish we (at large) did a better job honouring creativity in less glamorous fields -- in the invisible architectures of organization, administration, building connections between people. Constructing and maintaining all that scaffolding that supports the development of more obviously creative work. My ex, I remember, had a marvellous administrative imagination. It sounds silly, or trivial, but it's actually both essential and rare. I tried once or twice to propose that what the General Manager did was also creative, but she wasn't really having any of it, and it's not my place to define what someone's work means to them or how they interpret it.
She complimented me on my questions. It made me shy and I mumbled something about liking to interview people, as though I were a 12-year-old being asked what I wanted to be when I grew up.
How lovely, though, and reassuring, and heartening, and inspiring. I would maybe write a poem about it were I not so tired.
{rf}
*Always assuming this blasted encyclopedia entry gets written. I don't know what ever possessed me** to suggest that I knew enough about Christopher Isherwood to tell anyone else about him.
**Vanity and hubris
The General Manager runs the whole thing from her spare room. She was lively, funny, modest about being the "practical" one among creative people, yet clearly both inventive and shrewd about how to further the cause of books in Canada, and deeply invested in the authors and their work.
Every year she has to come up with something new to propose in the grant application, and every year she comes up with something not only "grant-good" but genuinely useful. A whole series of digital projects that extend the visibility of the authors and their work, and make both the books and information about the books easier for the readers get to. The press makes great use of social media and digital formats, *and* geeks out about paper quality.
I wish we (at large) did a better job honouring creativity in less glamorous fields -- in the invisible architectures of organization, administration, building connections between people. Constructing and maintaining all that scaffolding that supports the development of more obviously creative work. My ex, I remember, had a marvellous administrative imagination. It sounds silly, or trivial, but it's actually both essential and rare. I tried once or twice to propose that what the General Manager did was also creative, but she wasn't really having any of it, and it's not my place to define what someone's work means to them or how they interpret it.
She complimented me on my questions. It made me shy and I mumbled something about liking to interview people, as though I were a 12-year-old being asked what I wanted to be when I grew up.
How lovely, though, and reassuring, and heartening, and inspiring. I would maybe write a poem about it were I not so tired.
{rf}
*Always assuming this blasted encyclopedia entry gets written. I don't know what ever possessed me** to suggest that I knew enough about Christopher Isherwood to tell anyone else about him.
**Vanity and hubris
