(Decisions, decisions …) ‘Why did you decide that you should self-publish the works in question?’ asked a friend — meaning the Pentridge memoir and related volumes I have planned. ‘Did you send out manuscripts and get rejections?’ [No.] ‘Or was it more to do with not wanting to be edited by others? Or something else?’ Another expressed the opinion that self-publishing is, in practical terms, no more useful than vanity publishing these days and that my memoir (which she has read) ‘deserves better’. Well, it’s like this – One reason I decided to self-publish the Pentridge memoir and the spin-off chapbook is that I realised quite belatedly that I had prepared them that way — because I’m used to doing that. In recent years I’ve mostly self-published. Well, sort of. I had a great collaboration with a small publishing and design firm in America, run by online friends with whom I first connected through poetry. I was employed to do some editing work for them, and when I wanted to create b
Photo © David A Nissen 2022. 2022 was largely a year of new writing. 2023 will be largely devoted to new publishing. (And, hopefully, losing some of the weight I've put on in being glued to my desk for the best part of a year.) It turns out I'll be releasing three books in 2023! There's not only Breaking Into Pentridge , the memoir of my time running prison poetry workshops. There are two other associated volumes. Letters to a Dead Man is a poetry chapbook, a spin-off from the memoir. It starts at the end and finishes at the beginning, and a lot is left unexplained. In spite of all this, when I've tried the manuscript on people who don't know the back story, I'm pleased they have understood it well. I want it to be able to stand alone, and clearly it can. (However, it would be ideal to read the memoir first.) Also I'm proposing to re-issue Blood from Stone, the 1982 anthology of poetry which arose from the prison workshops. It was published under my Ab