The Chapbook I Stapled by Hand
Kitchen table, borrowed stapler, thirty copies of my whole heart.
The stapler belonged to a print shop man named Dev, and he made me promise on my life to bring it back by Thursday. It was a long arm stapler, industrial gray, heavy as a small dog, and for one week in April it turned my kitchen table into a publishing house.
I was twenty-nine and I had been rejected by eleven presses. Not rudely. Rejection is rarely rude, that is the worst part, it is polite the way weather is polite, it simply happens to you and moves on. Eleven form letters, two of them encouraging, all of them no. The manuscript was twenty-two poems about the year my family fell apart and imperfectly reassembled itself, and after rejection number eleven I did the math on my life. At this rate I would be published at fifty-one or dead... whichever came first.
So on a Tuesday night, lying on my bed with my old diary and a pen, doing the sad accounting I always did after a no, I wrote a sentence in the margin that changed my year.
Nobody is coming.
I meant it as despair.
By morning it had fermented into instructions.
If you look up making a chapbook, the tutorials will tell you about grain direction and saddle stitching and something called an imposition layout, which sounds like a chess opening and behaves like one too. What the tutorials do not tell you is what it does to a person to hold their own book, even a homemade one, even one with a misaligned cover, before their thirtieth birthday, at their own kitchen table, at two in the morning, in their pajamas.
I can tell you. I am the only kind of expert this story requires.
The specifications, for the record. Eighty sheets of cream paper from an office supply store, chosen after twenty minutes of holding different weights up to the light like a jeweler. A cover of stiff card the color of strong tea. Twenty-two poems, folded to make thirty-two pages, print run of thirty copies, published by a press I invented on the spot and named after my grandmother's street. Total budget: the price of paper, ink, and one thank you samosa for Dev.
One of the twenty-two poems existed only because of a stranger. Months earlier, stuck and sulking, I had picked a prompt that said, write about a repair someone made badly but with love. I wrote about my father regluing the handle of my mother's teacup upside down during the separation, both of them laughing for the first time in a year, and that poem became page nineteen, the hinge of the whole book. I mention this because I used to believe real writers did not need prompts, the way I believed real books did not come from kitchens.
The assembly took three nights. Print, collate, fold, staple, and folding is where pride goes to die. My first four copies bulged like sandwiches. Dev, when I went back to confess, taught me to score the fold with the back of a butter knife, and he said something I have repeated to every writer I know since. People think the machines make it a real book, he said, tapping the big printer behind him. The machines just make it faster. Your hands make it real.
Copy six through eleven, I got cocky and stapled page fourteen in upside down. I only noticed at copy twelve. For about a minute I considered the trash can... Then I took a pen and wrote inside each flawed copy, this book contains one upside down page, like life. Those six became the first to go. People request the misprints now. Dev kept one and will not give it back.
Thirty copies, stacked, came up to roughly the height of a coffee mug. I remember being shocked by that. Two years of my life, the divorce, the reassembly, the teacup... all of it fit under a mug. I put the stack on my bed and lay down next to it and took a photograph I have never shown anyone, because in it I am crying and grinning in a way that looks unwell and felt like hope with nowhere to put itself.
Nobody was going to publish my heart, so I bought it eighty sheets of paper and published it myself.
Distribution was a rumor with legs. I gave copies to my sister, my landlord, the barista who had watched me edit for a year and comped me exactly one croissant per rejection. I left one at the laundromat on the shelf with the abandoned paperbacks. I mailed one to my father with no note, because the note was on page nineteen. He called me and could not talk. He kept starting the sentence, the teacup... and not landing it. We stayed on the phone anyway, quiet, the way you do when the poem has already said it.
Here is the turn I did not see coming: the book worked backwards.
I had made it as a consolation prize, a thing to do instead of being published, and it turned out to be the thing that made everything else happen. A woman found the laundromat copy, tracked me down through the invented press name, and asked me to read at her bookshop. At the reading I met two poets who had also stapled their hearts together at kitchen tables, and we started trading copies like contraband, and eventually I stumbled onto a whole page of profiles of writers nobody had heard yet and recognized the species instantly. Kitchen table people. Butter knife people. The ones who stopped waiting.
Rejection number twelve never came, because I stopped sending that manuscript out. Three years later a small press took my second collection, a real one with a spine and a barcode and my name set in type I did not choose. I love that book. I signed its contract with a shaking hand. But when the author copies arrived in their tidy box, I noticed I was checking the fold, pressing my thumb down the spine, looking for the ghost of the butter knife. The real book felt like something that had happened to me.
The stapled one felt like something I had done.
There are four copies of the chapbook left. One is Dev's, upside down page and all. One is my father's, teacup side up on his shelf. One belongs to a stranger, somewhere, folded into the world through a laundromat.
The last one lives beside my bed, next to the diary where I wrote nobody is coming. I keep them together on purpose. One is the lowest sentence I ever wrote, and the other is what my hands did about it, thirty times, at a kitchen table, before Thursday, because I had promised Dev the stapler back.
I returned it on time... Some part of me is still holding it.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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