New American Dream

The New American
Dream Interview

JOHN CRAWFORD is the publisher of West End Press in Albuquerque.

West End operates on a budget of about $35,000 a year, and puts out an average of four books each year. Crawford says they survive by sales of a few name authors, including Meridel Le Sueur, Cherrie Moraga, and several Native American poets.

The press is politically oriented.

Crawford says, "We can't possibly publish as much as we'd like to among progressive writers. We're booked two years ahead on average. I've been at this for thirty-five years and we have around one hundred thirty books out."


NAD: John, hello, welcome.

Do you ever tire of spelling Albuquerque?

JOHN CRAWFORD:
Actually, the Spanish did. The original name, from a city in Spain, was Alburquerque.

Some monkish copyist at the ABQ Chamber of Commerce around 1800 must have shortened it.
When the guy from the sister city in Spain shows up for the annual celebration, there’s always some polite confusion — or is that confursion — about the spelling of the name.

Aren’t you sorry you asked?



NAD: Your photo on your website, from 1976 shows that you were going bald three decades ago.

How's that working out for you, and does it have anything at all to do with trying to write and publish political fiction in the United States?

JOHN CRAWFORD:
I looked at that picture again. I look like a vampire. Maybe we’ll change it.

Now I’ve got two front teeth missing, so at least no one will think I’m out for blood.




NAD: Where did you grow up, go to school?

Did you always want to be a writer? Then why are you a publisher?

JOHN CRAWFORD:
I was born in Pasadena, California. What a start. I went to Pomona College and Columbia. I wanted to be a poet, but when I started a magazine I began rejecting my own work.



NAD: How did you ever last this long? Are your dreams intact? What do you still want to accomplish?

JOHN CRAWFORD:
I don’t know. I’ve got a brittle bone disease, took boxing in college, got a nose broken by a barstool, rolled a car six times, almost died of a gall bladder infection — my dreams?

I guess it’s actually a matter of practicality.

There are too many suffering bastards out there and it’s time we did something about it. I like sticking up for people.

There are too many suffering bastards out there
and it’s time we did something about it.

I like sticking up for people.

NAD: Do you get lots of queries, submissions? Do you end up turning down some good manuscripts? What makes you different from the New York publishers?

JOHN CRAWFORD:
Weirdly enough, we don’t get that many manuscripts.

I have an assistant who rejects all the bad ones.

Yes, we do turn down some fairly good ones — most likely those conforming to the writer’s best idea of what we’re looking for.

I think submitting a manuscript is like anything else in creative work: don’t try to play it safe.

I don’t like most literary agents. But then the ones I’ve dealt with are either nasty business types, liars and cheats,
or born-agains from Miami.

I don’t like most literary agents. But then the ones I’ve dealt with are either nasty business types, liars and cheats, or born-agains from Miami.

Where do they get these people?

Poets shouldn’t use agents. Fiction writers and memoirists might feel they need them for self-protection, but that already says something about how degenerate the field is.




NAD: Do you think the larger publishers self-censor? Are there political novels being published by the large publishers?

If so, where are they?

JOHN CRAWFORD:
I don’t think the problem is self-censorship so much as lack of political awareness, lack of education, too much hustle out there, stupidity and venality.

Look, Harcourt (Houghton-Mifflin) just published Gunter Grass’s “Peeling the Onion” last year.

It’s fascinating to read that he fought for the Nazis as a kid.

It’s honest, it tells you something you didn’t know, and it puts his other work in a new perspective.

So what happens? H-M just decided to suspend publication of literary works due to the economy.

It has nothing to do with self-censorship; it has to do with stupidity and venality.




NAD: How have the books you have published addressed our recent times, the war, 911, torture?

Do you ever self-censor? Are you forced to publish with one eye on the customer on your front sidewalk?

JOHN CRAWFORD:
This is a good question. You know, we’re not all that topical. We have a lot to do with the kind of personal settings — attitudes, experience, trauma, coming to awareness — that the author is able to disclose.

A recent book we did by Michael Henson, “Crow Call,” addresses the murder of a housing activist over a decade ago in Cincinnati. That’s the kind of topical we do.

The only self-censoring I’m aware of is trying to stay away from real downers that NOBODY will buy.

Sometimes it has to do with the title. Try to avoid accepting things like “My Life Is Very Disgusting.” (I’m paraphrasing from a real title, which is better yet.)




NAD: What else would you like to add? What else should I have asked?

JOHN CRAWFORD:
Let me put you on the spot a little. Why do you go in for paranoid story lines, especially conspiracies, so much? It does limit your audience, and I challenge you on how “political” it is.

We published a book that raised eyebrows in 1980: Pablo Neruda’s “Incitation al Nixonicidio,” which we titled “A Call for the Destruction of Nixon.” And Neruda described himself in the introduction as a poetic terrorist.

... it was about how beautiful Chile was and Nixon’s real plot to destroy it. It was written in the spring of 1973, months before the US-sponsored fascist overthrow of the
Allende government, which hastened Neruda’s own death.

But the book wasn’t just about that: it was about how beautiful Chile was and Nixon’s real plot to destroy it. It was written in the spring of 1973, months before the US-sponsored fascist overthrow of the Allende government, which hastened Neruda’s own death.

My point is that you don’t have to make up conspiracies, they’re already out there.

If you concentrate on them too much, you’re on a death trip. Thinking that way “doesn’t further.”

The point is what people turn around and do about them. Despair has to be put in a context of possibility. There have to be survivors.




NAD: Please insert a link here to something you would like linked to, with a brief tag re: where that link goes:

JOHN CRAWFORD:
I’m working with a friend, Mandy Gardner, who runs the Albuquerque Almanac.

She gets ordinary people to write things down — oh yeah, and prisoners, the homeless, even a meth head. And she prints it in a book.

The web site is www.albuquerquealmanac.net. There’s no money in it to speak of, but it’s an honest way to spend your time.