It’s 1990. Maybe 1991.
I’m on the phone with a cat named Steve Fisher. We’re having some fairly serious conversations about starting a publishing company. At one point Steve says, “Let’s call it the synaesthesia press.”
“I’m all for that,” I told him.
The plan was simple. We’d contact writers we admired and ask them for work. Steve thought we should start with a broadside series and then move into chapbooks. It sounded perfectly reasonable.
After we hung up, I remember running to a dictionary to look up the word synaesthesia.
Steve quickly secured a poem from Denis Johnson. Naturally, it was a keeper. It wasn’t long thereafter I went to a Lawrence Ferlingetti reading.
Then life intervened.
Steve vanished; not too long later I would learn that he was gone for good. Or, as Iggy Pop once said, “Heroin Hates You.”
In the winter of 1994, I made a commitment to the synaesthesia press and decided to move forward with the idea we had talked about years earlier. The following spring I published the press’s first two books.
The Denis Johnson poem eventually appeared in 4 Poets. So did work from Ferlinghetti, along with a few contributions from a writer I never spoke to directly but admired enough to pursue. Looking back, the book feels like a snapshot of everything Steve and I originally hoped the press might become.
It’s funny how these things work. A phone call. A name. A poem. Then years pass.
The synaesthesia press still exists because of that conversation.
