Tag / The Braddock News Letterpress Museum

by ndsupress

Cover Reveal: The Distance That Isn’t Miles

from NDSU Press Publisher Suzzanne Kelley

This Sunday and Monday, our Intro to Publishing students will commence printing the covers for our newest Poetry of the Plains & Prairies (POPP) Award winner, The Distance That Isn’t Miles, by Anthony (Tony) J. Albright. We’ll meet at The Hunter Times, located at Bonanzaville, where pressmen Allan Burke and Sawyer Flynn have been prepping the Chandler & Price letterpress machine and making sure our printing plate is working in good order.

The selected cover concept for The Distance That Isn’t Miles.

 

This collection is about a Choctaw man (the author) who enters the military and becomes a parachute rigger. That means he’s in charge of packing parachutes for his army peers to use when they jump.

After reading and discussing the poetry collection, students prepared a creative brief for our designer, Deb Tanner, who does the bulk of our design work. The brief included senses and colors and emotions evoked by the poems, along with a summary of the collection and favored poem samples. We expressed a desire to add a design embellishment, perhaps something to represent parachute fabric or other textures to resonate with a rigger’s work.

Tony also provided specifics about parachutes; rigger uniforms and colors; suspension lines for parachutes; planes and helicopters commonly used with paratroopers; and more. He included these excerpts from his Author Questionnaire:

This book is therapy for me. I was able to cast many of my personal stories . . . and explore the ways in which my branching web of choices led to one outcome or another. In writing these poems, I found myself returning to the emotional residue of those years: the impressions, sensory flashes, the moments that never fully left my body . . . [These impressions/sense memories] reveal my in-most thoughts of my journey to climbing out of the circumstances of my childhood and end just short of the series of events that led to my successful and comfortable life of today. In that sense, the book became a way of honoring the younger version of myself who survived those years. At the same time, a literature of the Choctaw Nation is currently lacking, especially in specific use of the language . . . the inclusion of Chahta Anumpa isn’t decorative–it’s structural. It’s how memory actually sounds in my mind, how identity assets itself even in places designed to strip it away.


Our designer provided five concepts for us to choose from. Here is an excerpt from Deb’s description of the concept we chose. 

These are variations using the silk ribbon woven through the cover. The first page shows what would be printed; the last page shows how the ribbon could be woven into the cover. When reading about being a rigger, I imagine it to be a very precise, exacting job, which is the direction I went with the text and feel of this option. Very structured, very secure. The woven ribbon also evokes the sense of a road, which references miles. 

Upon seeing the concepts, Tony wrote:

I think the one I like best is the last one in the 5-page file, where the sage is woven through the title and continues on the other side. I think it’s a good analog for a journey in green with multiple fits and starts. 

Our author, students, designer, and I were unanimous in our selection! We have since chosen a brown cardstock and a sage-colored ribbon. Once the covers are printed, we’ll thread the ribbon to complete the full cover effect.

 

In the next couple of weeks, after the ink dries on the covers, we’ll add the satin ribbon embellishments. Then, in early October, we will print the interior pages at The Braddock News Letterpress Museum. There, the students will print, fold, and assemble all the pages; stitch; and trim each chapbook. Tony will join us, and he’ll autograph each copy as it rolls off the assembly line. Copies will be available for purchase upon our return.

If you’d like to reserve limited edition copies, we are accepting advance purchases here: The Distance That Isn’t Miles. 

by ndsupress

Publishing Students to Print 10th Annual Chapbook on Antique Printing Presses

from NDSU Press Publisher Suzzanne Kelley

Students in the Introduction to Publishing class at NDSU Press will be printing the cover of the tenth annual poetry chapbook for NDSU Press on an antique printing press at Bonanzaville, Sat., Sept. 27.

The class will be hand-feeding the covers into a Chandler & Price press from 1897 in The Hunter Times building in Bonanzaville’s pioneer village. The students will work in shifts from 10 a.m. to 3:45 p.m.

Fall 2025 Intro to Publishing Students: (at front, left to right) Grace, Maddie, Hannah, Mason, Maverick; (standing, left to right) Morgan, Eliza, Maggie, Tara, Alison, Aidan, Dr. Kelley, Ingrid.

 

Past publishing students at The Hunter Times: (left to right) Abbie, Breanna, Jamie, and Anish.

The students will travel to Braddock, ND, to print the inside pages of the chapbook on antique presses at The Braddock News Letterpress Museum the weekend of Oct. 10-12.

This year’s winners of Poetry of the Plains and Prairies (POPP) Award are co-authors Josh Gaines, Portland, OR, and Ben Clark, Minneapolis, MN, for their manuscript After the Floating Barn.

In our archives, we’ve found copies of, and photos of, chapbooks being letterpress published by poet and faculty member Richard Lyons in the 1950s and 1960s. Decades later, in 2016, NDSU Press returned to publishing chapbooks on letterpress equipment. Now, as we produce our tenth POPP Award publication, I’ve expanded the enterprise by taking my publishing students into North Dakota communities; by publishing state, regional, and nationally located poets; and by providing national distribution for our prizewinning chapbooks.

The success of our project is the result of our collaborative arrangement between Bonanzaville and The Braddock News Letterpress Museum of the South Central Threshing Association and the dedication of Allan and Leah Burke, retired weekly newspaper publishers, who are the driving force behind the collection, preservation, and revitalization of letterpress printing. We also rely upon the generous nature and expertise of pressman Mike Frykman and the Iron Men (and women) of the threshing association.

Beth Jansen, executive director of Bonanzaville, said she is pleased to welcome the students to the pioneer village. “There is nothing better than to have students visit Bonanzaville to experience history through 19th Century technology,” Jansen said.

Introduction to Publishing is one of the required classes for NDSU’s Certificate in Publishing.

 

 

 

 

by ndsupress

Marjorie Buettner, Winner of the 2024 Poetry of the Plains & Prairies Award

It is with great pleasure that we announce the winner of our 2024 Poetry of the Plains & Prairies (POPP) Award, Marjorie Buettner, for her chapbook collection “Dakota Dreaming.”

Marjorie (Junkert) Buettner, born in Bismarck, North Dakota, is an American Pushcart Prize–nominated, award-winning haiku, haibun, tanka, and sijo poet. Her work has been published throughout the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., and she has won prizes in the James W. Hackett International Award for Haiku (2000 and 2003), the Harold G. Henderson Awards (2002, 2004, 2007, and 2011), the Robert Spiess Memorial Haiku Award (2003, 2004, 2005), the Robert Frost Poetry Festival (2008 and 2009), and the Kusamakura Haiku Competition (2006), among others. She has taught haiku and tanka at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis and presented poetry workshops throughout Minnesota. She is a former editor for the online journal Contemporary Haibun Online, and she frequently writes book reviews for haiku and tanka journals. Seeing It Now, a collection of haiku and tanka, appeared in 2008; her collection of haibun, Some Measure of Existence (2014), won first place in the Mildred Kanterman Merit Book Awards and was also nominated for the Minnesota Book Awards. Buettner lives in Chisago City, Minnesota.

In keen competition, thirty-eight submissions for this year’s POPP Award were narrowed down to six finalists. As seen in this photo, they are, clockwise from top left: Carol Kapaun Ratchenski (ND), “A Place Made of Space”; Caroline Wellman (IL), “Just Before Sunrise”; Steve Gerson (KS), “There Is a Season”; Carmen Dressler Ward (NC), “Rhythms in the Wind”; Buettner; Lance Nixon (SD), “Round the Sun’s Paddock: A Prairie Year.”

 

Our finalist judge, Brendan Stermer (winner of the 2023 POPP Award with Forgotten Frequencies and finalist in the 2024 Midwest Book Awards), had this to say about Buettner’s manuscript:

“Dakota Dreaming” returns us to the ancient core of poetry as spiritual quest. But this book offers no standard hero’s journey – no daring descent into the underworld, no triumphant, hopeful return. It offers, rather, a gathering of visions received by one who has learned to dwell indefinitely in the liminal space between realms. While much of the collection is written in the Japanese haibun form, Buettner’s imagery is rooted deep in North American prairie soil. Her poems are like “abandoned houses which let the gold of afternoon light filter in through open windows,” offering some brief, imperfect respite for “those of us who have lost our way.” And when the daylight fades and the darkness becomes complete, Buettner guides us: “I borrow the light / of snow.”

As our 9th POPP Award winner, Buettner will receive our standard university press publishing contract, $400 ($200 for winning, $200 for serving as our next finalist judge), ten comp copies, 50 percent author discount, and national distribution. Her chapbook will be letterpress printed in fall 2024 at The Hunter Times (located at Bonanzaville in West Fargo) and The Braddock News Letterpress Museum (located in Braddock, North Dakota). For more information about the POPP Award and our letterpress printing projects, check out this previous NDSU Press story, Land of Sunlit Ice, and this video: Thunderbird and The Land of Sunlit Ice, produced by Sandbagger News.

With congratulations to all six finalists and Marjorie Buettner, and with appreciation to all the poets who submitted their work, we invite poets to consider submitting their manuscripts to next year’s POPP Award competition (January 17 through March 17, 2025). We do not charge an entry fee.