Scene Report: AV at AWP

Little Engines returns to Seattle

Mar 19, 2023

That was a good conference-ending tweet last Sunday, and a sentimental opener for a newsletter. But fuck it, when I get cynical or smartypants about writing and publishing, I know & you know & anyone taking a peek for even a minute knows this is my soft place.

Little Engines first published in Seattle from 2001-2003. The four original issues came via my now long-shuttered small press, TNI Books. It was specifically a Seattle publishing company, and a Seattle magazine. I was losing my mind on memory lane today crawling through the old TNI Books website around the first issue’s release.

I couldn’t help but feel the vibes when arriving back in Seattle with the resurrected magazine. I shipped several heavy boxes of the new issue to my old friend David ahead of the conference. He runs the beloved Seattle record label Suicide Squeeze. Long ago, we did a split release together with his label and TNI Books, a kid’s story written by my friend JR Buchenberger called A Guitar for Janie, which came complete with a Pedro the Lion 7” single.

David and his label validated me and my press, which was trying to be a record label for books. He was one of the first people who had nothing to do with Christian Rock whatsoever to take my shit seriously. Suicide Squeeze had records out with Elliott Smith and Modest Mouse. He was working with actual fuckin’ gods.

The week before AWP, assembling the new Little Engines and stuffing the envelopes for subscribers, I was reminded of David and me putting those 7”s together with the children’s story. We huffed spray-glue fumes for two days in my garage, affixing the cardboard sleeve for the singles to the inside back cover of the book.

David kindly brought the boxes he’d received to my Airbnb the day before AWP, and after we transferred them from his car to my rental, we walked around Capitol Hill and caught up on things. I asked how he felt Seattle had changed, and he said my old neighborhood, the last place I lived before moving back to Indiana, had gone downhill, the seep of It-City progress never making it that far north. Lots of ass for sale on Highway 99, he told me.

Later, I drove by the places I’d lived and visited some other personal landmarks.

Here is the first place I lived, a sturdy family home in Ballard, where I rented a bedroom on the second floor with a balcony where I smoked a ton of weed, always alone. The house had many bedrooms, and was populated with a bunch of dudes all Venn diagrammed together via the underground Christian Rock scene. A few of them might have been drinking a little by then, but I was the only one getting stoned.

The guy who lived next door was definitely up to some shit. His windows were blacked out with plastic garbage bags, and several times a day he stepped out to take a ride around the block with a rotating cast of cars, getting dropped off minutes later, slinking back inside his dark, beat-down Craftsman.

There was the mountain of cardboard boxes filled with my first book, self-published as the debut TNI Books release, on the front stoop of this place. The freight company dropped the pallet on the sidewalk, and I moved the boxes up the patio steps one-by-one—stacked them at the threshold of the front door, snapped a photo which I’ve lost—and then loaded them all inside, up the stairs, and into the bedroom headquarters of the company.

I’ve still got the Polaroid of me from New Year’s Eve 1999, standing in front of this house. I’m in socks and underwear only, stupid skinny, smoking a cigarette in the middle of the street. I’d met my eventual ex-wife in person for the first time a few days before. After an email romance, she came to Seattle so we could meet in person and extended her visit extra days so we could turn over the millennium together.

Here is an incredible 7-Eleven I had forgotten about, walking distance from that first house, down by the dive bar and restaurant which was still partially fishermans’ turf.

Here’s the road you take to the rocky beach where we built little fires at night. I’ve got great photos of a friend, his first baby, and his first wife, all with melted marshmallow faces.

Here is the duplex on Dravus Street where I lived with Jordan, who was not a Hoosier but a fan of the Indiana Pacers, wholly because of Rik Smits. I remember the day of the Nisqually earthquake. My cat predicted it, started tweaking out and urgently meowing thirty minutes before the shaking. After it stopped, I climbed out my bedroom window onto the roof of the porch and watched the streets clog with traffic, and the air fill with sirens and honking horns.

Here’s the apartment where I lived on 9/11. I woke my ex- up after turning on the TV early in the morning. “The World Trade Center’s gone.” Also gone is the miniature video store where movie rentals were one night for a dollar. The publishing company got its own spare bedroom in this spot. There’s footage of me from a King 5 local news story, behind an Ikea desk and giant beige PC, complaining about getting ripped off on an extended warranty from Best Buy.

Here is where The Paradox sat, an all-ages club in the U District. It was owned by a church, so plenty of Christian Rock played there, but plenty of non-Christian stuff, too. That wasn’t common, not with a church footing the bill.

Here’s the street where the Hiawatha House used to be. I’m told it’s apartments now, but I couldn’t pinpoint the actual lot. The whole street is apartments now. The Hiawatha was Roadside Monument’s place, and sometimes a venue for basement shows. I never lived there, but it’s where I stayed on my first visit to Seattle while still in college.

Here is the Kress building where Suicide Squeeze and my nascent booking agency shared an office next to a bootstrapping hair salon called Tart. Two blocks away is Swedish Medical, the hospital where my son was born. I had to leave there while his mother was in pre-labor to fire my assistant, who was literally doing jack shit, my hasty calculus saying it was better to be absent for weeks of paternity than have this dude working on my clients’ behalf. Once he was gone, I looked at the browser history on his work computer and it was 100% Suicide Girls, which is like… fine dude, no worries! But not a single venue website to go along with it?

Here’s Safeco Field, now called T-Mobile, I guess. I hocked David Shields’ Ichiro book on the sidewalk outside the games when the Japanese star arrived in America for the big leagues. He got Rookie of the Year, won the MVP, and played in the All-Star Game, which happened to be in Seattle that year. I knew nothing about baseball—still don’t—and wasn’t yet familiar with Shields or his books. When he cold-called me saying he couldn’t find a publisher willing to hurry up and get his weird unauthorized Ichiro quote book out in time for the hype of the season, I told him I wasn’t the guy for the gig, that I didn’t do sports stuff, that I was a miniature operation. After hanging up, I called Suicide Squeeze David, a baseball nut, and told him about the weird pitch. “I dunno, dude,” he said, “I think you should call that guy back.” Next, I’m in a conference room with Amazon buyers talking about needing thousands and thousands of copies, and asking if I could fulfill the purchase order. I told them yes, not knowing the real answer, and was on the phone to my Canadian printer that day with an urgency.

Here’s a wobbling unhoused guy hanging around outside Neumos with a laminated QR code linked to his Venmo.

There’s the window to James Morelos’ apartment where he started his label, Made in Mexico, to release Pedro the Lion’s debut full-length. He was still working at Tooth & Nail, one foot out the door, mostly openly gay. Everyone called him The Sexi Mexi. Several memories from that place feel like growth spurts.

Here is the first house we owned, an ugly post-war two-bedroom. We painted the living room blood red and used cheap sticky tiles to redo the kitchen floor. I had a big office in the half-finished basement before eventually getting the shared space with Suicide Squeeze. A long shelving unit was stocked with titles, my own and, by then, issues of the mag and other people’s books, too. I started the booking agency down there. I smoked cigarettes inside, overflowing ashtrays next to my computer, routing tours. Our kid was born while we living in this house, and we started mostly smoking outside.

David was right about the neighborhood. It was far from fancy when I lived up there, but the businesses are more busted now, the fast food chains dirtier, the potholes deeper. The often think of a photo of the baby in his highchair in the kitchen of this house, covered in food, with stacks of moving boxes piled up around him.

My wife wanted to slow down to part-time with her well-paying gig, and I was pressing pause on publishing to give the music industry my full attention. I wasn’t making shit on commissions yet, so we went to Bloomington, Indiana, to live cheaply.

Being back in Seattle for AWP, I realize I originally moved here to be a writer and publisher. It was going to be my career! I had my first book written. I’d learned HTML and built the company a website with rudimentary online ordering. Of course, I knew I’d need a regular job while I hustled with TNI. I was just fine with temping or other mindless admin. At this point, I didn’t even know what a booking agent was.

And so, in retrospect, packing up and relocating in order to book bands for a living, instead of doing literary things, was letting go of my first true original motherfucking dream. Once I left Seattle, I wrote almost nothing for nearly twenty years.

Ok. AWP. Shit, I’ve barely mentioned it. I heard a lot of snark leading up to this thing, but the post-conference consensus in my little world seems to be: That was pretty great!

I told myself I was going in knowing nobody, but was pleased to be mistaken: I had a meal with Molly McGhee who’s spreading the word about her debut, coming soon; I briefly bumped into my old friend and novelist Tobias Carroll, who was in early Little Engines issues and wrote a blog on the website in the early days; Joey Sweeney, frontman for a band who were unlucky enough to be the guinea pig for the first tour I booked, was there with his wife who’s crushing in her new role running a poetry journal; Caleb Curtis, who lobbied to publish the first new writing I’d put out there in a very long time, told me the wildest cult story I’ve heard in a minute, a story built around an image so strong and stunning that if he doesn’t write it down soon I’m going to steal it for myself; David Drury, another early Little Engines contributor who has continued to publish stuff in many journals over the last 20 years, and who remains one of the most notorious professional blackjack card counters in the country; and Kevin Sampsell, who did the collage art for the new issue of Little Engines, and stocked the original version of the mag at Powell’s in the early aughts, the second bookstore to carry it, beat to the punch only by Quimby’s in Chicago.

I made a joke tweet before the conference, setting the very attainable goal of establishing three (3) new and long-lasting relationships at AWP, and followed it up after the conference with another tweet talking about overachieving. I’ve got some new friends! It’s no small feat in middle age.

Listen, Mike Nagel and I are not lovers, but I don’t blame anyone for thinking that. We hung so hard from the moment I picked him up at the airport until we hugged goodbye in the convention center parking garage as I loaded the leftover mags into the car. I texted Mike the next morning asking if it was too early to say I missed him, and he replied admitting that he started missing me on his walk to his hotel. I fucking love Mike’s writing, and I fucking love Mike’s being. Home run of a human. I can’t wait to hang out again, and to publish him some more.

I’m feel lucky to witness M.M. & Brooke doing their thing with Taco Bell Quarterly. On the first night of the conference, a handful of us got drunk and very high, and stumbled upon a macaron place weirdly open the same hours as the bars. I was hyped to hang out and get to know them a little. If you think you’re in on the joke, I would just say: I don’t think they’re joking!

I spent eight hours a day in the booth at the book fair, handing out copies of the magazine. I’ll tell you this: it was an absolute blast, a pleasure, and it was humbling. The whole conference is humbling. There were hundreds and hundreds of exhibitors selling ten millions and millions of titles! I walked around a few times to keep the blood moving, looking at what everyone was up to. At least twenty percent of these fuckers are making extremely sexy books and magazines.

By the last day, I was second-guessing the “Free Lit Mag!” thing for AWP. It felt like I was trying to put a flier into a tourist’s hands. Free when it shows up in someone’s mailbox is one thing. Free when you’ve already got a tote bag full of literary crap is suspect. That said, I gave out a ton of magazines. And of course, my tagline, my armor: This is my hobby, not my career! I’m just happy to be here!