synaesthesia press paperback original #1 is Steve Fisher’s Rock Salt & Glissandos: Stories and Poems.
For lack of a better term, it was synaesthesia’s first “real” book. What I didn’t know at the time? It would also be the last.
Steve Fisher was there from the beginning. In fact, he named the press. By trade he was a piano tuner. He was also a bookman, a collector, and a writer of extraordinary gifts. Today, Steve serves as the synaethesia press’s guardian angel.
The book grew out of years of Steve’s work that had already attracted the attention of serious editors and writers. His stories appeared in many of the country’s leading literary journals during the late 1980s and 1990s. TriQuarterly devoted a special Steve Fisher section to his work, while Hayden’s Ferry Review published a feature titled “Edges & Spears Outside.” Yet despite the admiration of editors and fellow writers, Steve never lived to enjoy the recognition his work deserved.
As Barry Gifford wrote:
“Steve Fisher’s work reads like Jim Thompson at his best meets Drugstore Cowboy with Jean Genet standing outside in a freezing desert wind waiting to score. It’s a shame we can’t have more, much more—because Fisher wrote like a flaming angel genius. Maybe he was.”
Fisher tuned pianos for a living, collected rare books, corresponded with Charles Bukowski while incarcerated, and wrote unforgettable stories and poems drawn from the worlds of addiction, prison, survival, and redemption. Readers discovering his work today often assume he is the better-known mystery writer of the same name. He isn’t. This Steve Fisher belongs to a different tradition altogether—one that includes William S. Burroughs, Nelson Algren, Harry Crews, Hubert Selby Jr., and Jean Genet.
Perhaps the most moving assessment came from Gerald Locklin, who wrote the introduction to the book:
“I decided early on that Steve Fisher was the best writer of prison life and the drug world I had ever read. He wouldn’t have liked such pigeonholing, but it is high praise indeed. He didn’t get to write as much as, say, Burroughs, but I would in all honesty rather read Steve.”
As a first book from a tiny independent press, Rock Salt & Glissandos had a difficult road. There was no author tour, no interviews, no readings, and no publicity machine behind it. Just a remarkable body of work and a handful of people who believed it deserved to be read.
I still believe that.
If you’re interested in prison literature, drug literature, outsider fiction, William S. Burroughs, Jean Genet, Harry Crews, Nelson Algren, Charles Bukowski, Barry Gifford, or the darker corners of American writing, Steve Fisher is waiting to be discovered.
