Mud Luscious – Violent, beautiful, pulsing texts that shatter, that bury us in its lines

mlp [first year] anthology (Mud Luscious Press, 2010)

"An anthology of everything we have ever printed in our chapbooks beginning in the fall of 2008 & going through the end of 2009 & featuring the most fantastic authors as they first appeared in mud luscious print, most of which are sold out now or will be soon, & here collected all together
The contributors:
ken baumann, shane jones, jimmy chen, brandi wells, blake butler, nick antosca, sam pink, james chapman, colin bassett, michael kimball, jac jemc, kim chinquee, kim parko, norman lock, randall brown, brian evenson, michael stewart, peter markus, ken sparling, aaron burch, david ohle, matthew savoca, p. h. madore, johannes göransson, charles lennox, ryan call, elizabeth ellen, molly gaudry, kevin wilson, mary hamilton, craig davis, kendra grant malone, lavie tidhar, lily hoang, mark baumer, ben tanzer, krammer abrahams, joshua cohen, eugene lim, c. l. bledsoe, joanna ruocco, josh maday, michael martone"

"Most luscious of the output of J. A. Tyler’s Mud Luscious are the limited edition 4×4 “mini-chaps,” published each month in trios. Recent news that Mud Luscious is publishing an anthology of all 43 of the chapbooks in January 2010 is a boon to readers since the chaps are printed in one run only and sell out almost immediately.
Pocket-sized and with hand-stamped covers, these go with me everywhere to help keep active that part of my brain that feeds on fresh voice and syntax. But though they are so small, so pretty and so nice to touch do not be deceived. The stories in these chaps, all between 500-1000 words, are demanding and require focus. They do weird things with language sometimes, make you have to let go a little and give in to another’s logic. But in letting go you will be rewarded.
Here are some examples of stories that have recently caught my attention. Some elements I have come to think of as embodied by Mud Luscious stories are: heart, an urgent and satisfying destabilization, and extreme concern for detail. That so much can be packed into so small a package is continually surprising. But I think the best way to show you is to show you, and let you see for yourself what I mean. Here are excerpts from five stories:
thunderstorm as familial convulsion - ryan call (this ongoing project to “produce a new and much needed field guide to north american weather” is an analysis as insightful of the singular turbulent nature of the North American family as it is of thunderstorms.)
“Such a transformation is rarely appreciated, however, until after the thunderstorm has passed, revealing to those left behind the forgotten corners of their lives, how they shine in the sun, how the brittleness has gone away, how guilt can only accompany someone equally attuned to love.”
from the hip - mary hamilton (I was as amazed by the control and consistency in this piece as I was by the ingenuity of Mary Hamilton’s language)
“The man in black doesn’t notice, but you does, & so does I, bike messenger.
I hears the sound of an orchestra playing in her mind.
I feels the tremors of a big band traipsing across Marta’s skin.
I sees a man all dressed in black & we mistakes you for the Maestro.”
a thousand & one others, yes - elizabeth ellen (this one is heartbreaking. that’s all I’ll say)
so dark in the wolf’s maw - kevin wilson (this conveyed all the wonder and fear I felt as a child reading fables)
“She thinks of the handful of seahorse fry that she ate earlier, the babies less than a quarter inch long, the bones dissolving on her tongue without the need for chewing.”
parts - molly gaudry (parts is an excerpt from the novel(la) WE TAKE ME APART)
“ovules
that upon fertilization become seeds
like sequins I sewed those ovules to the hems
of those women’s dresses & liked to
think of them shining & glittering as they
undressed before the watching eyes of lovers”" - Rozalia Jovanovic

"J.A. Tyler is the founding editor of the online quarterly Mud Luscious and Mud Luscious Press , both venues for “aggressive / experimental writing.” However one defines “aggressive” or “experimental” (see J.A. Tyler’s answer below), since the start, Mud Luscious has been publishing authors known or becoming known for breaking, with method, expectations about form, both on a narrative and sentence level. And with determined consistency, Mud Luscious has been fulfilling its goal featuring such authors as Shane Jones, Ken Sparling, Kendra Grant Malone, Michael Kimball, Elizabeth Ellen and Brian Evenson. And in December 2009, J. A. Tyler will expand his enterprise even further with the publication of MLP’s first perfect-bound novel(la), Molly Gaudry’s We Take Me Apart. Two other novellas, by Ben Brooks and Sasha Fletcher, are also lined up.
MLP’s most recent development is its announcement this week that in January 1, 2010 it will be putting out an anthology of all 43 of the mini-chapbooks it has published thus far–great news for those who missed out on those pretty little chaps, which sell out, unsurprisingly, almost immediately upon production.
In addition to running all arms of Mud Luscious, J.A. Tyler continues to write and publish his own work. He is the author of the forthcoming novellas Someone, Somewhere (Ghost Road Press, 2009) and In Love With A Ghost (Willows Wept Press, 2010) as well as the chapbooks The Girl In The Black Sweater (Trainwreck Press, 2008) and Everyone In This Is Either Dying Or Will Die Or Is Thinking Of Death (Achilles Chapbook Series, 2008). He is also currently publishing his novel(la) The Zoo, A Going online in serialized format. J.A. Tyler was nice enough to answer some questions I had about MLP, serialization and the non-chronological aspects of film.
The Faster Times: What does “experimental” mean to you? I think it is a term that is overused and has lost some of its meaning in any general sense, or rather has a very person-specific meaning.
- True, true, ‘experimental’ is often overused and really doesn’t mean much to readers / writers anymore because of its constant use. for me, it means something that I haven’t seen before, something that hits me as profoundly different - that is why I tend towards describing our work as violent / beautiful / pulsing - I want a text that shatters, that buries me in its lines. and I suppose too that I use ‘experimental’ or sometimes ‘innovative’ in order to scare away the exposition-heavy writers, those who spoon-feed actions / events as if readers are not smart enough to discover what a text is doing. I look to the work of james chapman as well as his fugue state books, jesse ball and blake butler, those writers who aren’t afraid to omit the narrative details in favor of descriptive tones and overall voice, those works that reach into me without pandering, hand-holding, without guiding me as if I am blind.
How and why did you start Mud Luscious?
- I started the online portion of Mud Luscious because I wanted a hand in editing. I wanted to read as much new writing as I could and to launch myself into the scene, to make a run at working with authors in every aspect of the lit community. Starting my own venue was a simple and readily available answer to those wants. Mud Luscious then gained readership, and I gained experience, and it seemed that print was smart way to expand, so we did, bringing on the chapbook series and now branching into our novel(la) series.
Your press has a very unique quality. The mini-chapbooks are simple but extraordinarily beautiful and have a unique look. How did you come up with the idea to publish the chapbooks and the particular length of the fiction you publish?
- One Story was a start, but reading their work felt a bit mechanical to me - the texts were lacking the edge I wanted for our series and the production, while high quality, seemed a little less human than we wanted. Futuretense was also a place that showed me, very simply, that beautiful and stirring lit can be made of staples and paper and nothing else. The last factor was that I wanted to produce something that I could do for little expense, at my kitchen table, and yet bring something big into the literary world. The digestible text size was a bit like water finding its own level, and it has been fast forward since then.
While all the writing I’ve read from the various writers you publish is distinct, there’s a quality that is discernibly “mud luscious” in feel, which is natural, I think, for any good press. How did you begin finding the writers for Mud Luscious? And do you solicit or do you accept unsolicited writing, or both?
- Thanks. I do hope that our writers, collectively, amount to a kind of immeasurable aesthetic - so feeling that in reading our authors is a great compliment. With the online component, issue zero - when no one knew us - was entirely solicited; we wanted to hit the ground running. Since then, we have not solicited anything for any other online issues. As for the chapbook series, I solicit about 1/3 of our volumes and the rest come from the submissions pool. The novel(la)s at this point are mostly works that I have either solicited in part or in full, but new queries are always accepted and read with interest. We have never closed to submissions of any kind and are happy to continue that tradition.
How many chapbooks do you publish per print-run? And have you ever done a second printing?
- Our first three titles were printed in editions of less than 50 - the next 20 or so had to be increased to 75-100 to accommodate sales - and now, with this latest stretch, we print at least 100 to make sure we can meet demand. We have never done second printings of an individual chapbook, but our new anthology MLP [ FIRST YEAR ] is the second printing of each of our first 43 volumes in one collection - so now they are all wrapped together and fit nicely on the shelf.
What are Stamp Stories and how can I get them?
- Stamp Stories was an idea we had to foster a more collaborative spirit between indie presses - I wanted people to buy from all of these great presses - I read their work and I love them - so I thought what better enticement than to get some sort of micro mud luscious story distributed for free with these other presses. So we solicited authors to pen 50 word stories, we print them on 1×1 cardstock, ship a load of one particular story to an indie press and have them distribute that story as they see fit. Think lit baseball cards - order from all these cool presses and collect the Stamp Stories that come along for the ride. You can see the full current listing on our website - and any order from those presses should yield a Stamp Story tucked away somewhere inside, a kind of buried lit treasure.
I recently purchased Scorch Atlas from Featherproof and was pleasantly surprised to get along with it one of your chapbooks. I like the idea of small presses working together in this way. Are there any such upcoming collaborations in the works?
- The chapbook with Scorch Atlas was most likely A Field of Colors by Charles Lennox, a volume that we gave away to every single person who emailed us anytime during the month of June, 2009. We wanted to get that Lennox story out there to everyone - an mlp chapbook for anyone who asked - and we ended up sending that title to a dozen different countries and nearly every state, over 400 copies when all were shipped. But as stories go, this one continues: the wonderful Peter Cole at Keyhole Magazine/Books contacted us about including A Field of Colors with their then current Keyhole volume. We agreed and made more copies. And I believe what copies did not go with Keyhole took a van trip with the Dollar Store Reading Series, distributed widely there, and then the last copies ended up shipping eventually with Scorch Atlas. Quite a journey.
We also, way back when, collaborated with Publishing Genius Press by making extra copies of Shane Jones’ Black Kids in Lemon Trees to ship with the first twenty-five pre-orders of Light Boxes.
And, looking ahead, we have plans to distribute a handful of free copies of David Peak’s Museum of Fucked, the first chapbook release from the newly established Warm Milk Printing Press (Ben Spivey, Jennifer Whitley, Kyle Whitley). Who knows what else, but we are always open to work with another press - we love collaboration." - Interview with Rozalia Jovanovic