A Year in the Life--The Beginning

(K.C. Bacon, circa 1995, the year we concocted Cold Eye: A Generation of Voices)

Like all the years before this one, 2011 flew past.

But every year is full of stories, and a history is born.

So intermingled with whatever else strikes my blogging fancy between now and the fast-approaching new year, I'll try to post a few of the highlights of what Round Bend Press sought to do and in most cases succeeded in doing since this time a year ago. 

Through these posts, I believe I can create a kind of narrative of a year in the life of an upstart, renegade press functioning on a dime and a dream.

Yes, I will link to my own blog some of the time.  But I will also post links to a variety of other outlets that have given brief yet much valued notice to Round Bend and the authors who have been kind enough to allow this experiment to go forward these past months.

A year ago, I was basking in the glow of a new concept for Round Bend.  I had the previous year concentrated on gathering the manuscripts of four plays I'd written years before and self-publishing them. At the same time, I was writing a memoir that began as a series of sketches on this blog.

I sent a copy of the memoir to K.C. Bacon in Tacoma, whom I'd worked with on a number of writing and video projects years before when he lived and worked in Portland.  In 1994, Bacon had published my short play, The Problem, and Charles Deemer's Ten Sonnets, along with a collection of his own poetry, under his Irvington Press imprint. 

K.C. volunteered to give my memoir a much needed editing job, and we began to meet regularly when he came to Portland on other business.  From those sessions came the opportunity to rethink Round Bend and to grow it into something more than a publishing exercise for Terry Simons--though I am proud to say it still has that element and hopefully always will.

During the Irvington Press era, K.C. and I had tossed around the idea of publishing an anthology.  I had, as poetry editor of a community paper in Northwest Portland, collected a number of works that I believed merited a kind of historical overview of a particular, small segment of Portland's writing community from the late 1970s.  The project never got off the ground after our initial discussions in 1995, but with the advent of publishing-on-demand in more recent years, its time finally arrived.

Cold Eye: A Generation of Voices finally emerged after its long gestation period a year ago this month, along with my memoir, A Marvelous Paranoia.

(to be continued)


TS