how fast it all moves, how many kettles in the fire

I've had to buy myself a physical planner, an analog thing with a zippered pouch, to store receipts (taxes!) and colored pens (green: the press; blue: the journal; black: family; red: my own writing life-do I still get to have that? yes, I think yes).

I've made myself write little goals for the days. Today, email people to garner interest in a board of directors. Finalize first round edits on the first manuscript. The end.

It's the first day of my daughter's summer vacation, and my son is at my feet, singing tweet tweet! I understand, now, why it is called "kitchen table press." Last night, my husband and I floated ideas, considered renting an office downtown so we could detach (me for the press, him for his contract work). Not yet. For now, I am once again turning to our sliver of a guest room, which doubles as my poetry books room, and I'm clearing shelves, clearing the desk. I won't hog this dining space for much longer. We have to put the operation on the floor at dinner.

Soon, shelves will be lined with backstock and postcards and other promotional material. Files. Soon, walls will be filled with framed things like first book covers and broadsides from our authors.

* * * * *

I've finished my first read-through of our first manuscript-that-will-be-book. I've physically felt it as I read it, felt my own heart swell like a slammed thumb, felt it ache like only an organ can do. I've gotten bleary at the beauty of it, at where it moves me. I've made that noise, you know the one, that sounds like mmmmm, like something has turned over inside of you.

this is it.

How does one explain the kernel of a journey? Do I start three years back, eight, go all the way to when I began to read? Do I tell you about Anne Frank, whose journal I read in second grade and definitively dedicated my life to the literary arts? Or do I tell you how this post, a friend from our undergraduate years and her first book, got me into gear, out of the high school classroom and back into an MFA program?

I think I will simply say these few things and let more slip out as I let it settle inside of me: In 2012, I was a mentee in the Loft Literary Center's Mentor Series. I met Kelly Hansen Maher and her poems caught inside my chest. Sometimes, I could truly feel the breathlessness in the reading. I was used to falling in love with poets whose books did this to me--immediately, I think of Idra Novey's Exit, Civilian, Sharon Olds's The Wellspring, Eduardo Corral's Slow Lightning, Maggie Nelson's Bluets, Rebecca Lindenberg's Love, An Index, Athena Kildegaard's Bodies of Light, Nikky Finney's Head Off & Split--and books from peers, such as Karen Rigby's Chinoiserie and Opal C McCarthy's lyric essay pamphlet Surge: An Oral Poetics, but never the opportunity when the book was in-progress. Not to the point of possession, the point of wanting stakes in that work.

I met another woman whose first book I (editorially) covet as well.

And with that, the idea of becoming someone who had a press, someone who edited manuscripts, took root.

But such a thing is so enormous and so intimidating and important and glorious and exhausting and all else, I never imagined I would be here, taking those first steps. As I whispered to my children, "This is a very pivotal week for your mommy." I'm amazed; they have no idea. Perhaps I don't either.

I love the work of editing. I've read many manuscripts and made big suggestions that my poetry friends have said bring a new lens. I love the work I do at Tinderbox Poetry Journal with my partner Brett Elizabeth Jenkins. I love when I dive into the slush and find those gorgeous, gorgeous gems that become a part of the next issue and the next.

So here I am, an editor of a book, a manuscript by Kelly Hansen Maher, I am a person who has the honor and privilege to help bring this gem of a book into the world. (And the next and the next.) I know it is cliche and terribly irritating to say, but it's also true: I feel called. I'm somewhere in my thirties, have spent a good amount of time in other professions, the best of which have been teaching and getting to work in a bookstore, but there's something about this that has clicked inside of me, just as something clicked when I met the man who became my husband and something clicked when I first walked into the house that became our first home together. A definitive, wholly unsubtle click that said: This is it.