The Beeswax folks from Oakland just put out their new issue and it’s beautiful.  Go and get it here.  These things are hand-bound with letterpress covers. The covers feature this amazing drawing by my friend Lydia Conklin, and more of her comics are inside.  It also features three more stories from my cycle The Complete Collection of people, places & things. There is a host of other great fiction, poetry and meta-literature from this lot:

Kelly Davio • Elizabeth Eslami • Crag Hill • Jason Jordan • Shane Michalik • Edward Mullany • Kristine Ong Muslim • Ray Skjelbred • Michael Spring • Jim Steel • Kat Steiger • Brendan Todt • Jess Wigent

Excerpt from "Just One Second" by Lydia Conklin

When I hold a thing like Beeswax, it makes me want to create something small and limited and tactile and right.  I get really excited by limitlessness of what we can do with Action,Yes and the web, our ability to leave ideas of form and hierarchy behind us. But sometimes I want rules and containment.  This recent boom of literature-art presses is very exciting to me, similar to the explosion of online journals a few years back.  All these things seem to be indicative of the dying off of sales rankings, big publishing, print runs and other literary indicators that are so antithetical to artistic creation.  Large industries are dying off, but these creations that depend on little capital are thriving; people continue to create just to create.