Tag / The Hunter Times

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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.

 

 

 

 

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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.

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C’mon in! The door’s open!

Publisher’s note from Suzzanne Kelley

Here you see visible proof of why moving our chapbook publishing project from the spring to the fall semester was a good choice. Iron Man Tracy Moch, with the South Central Threshing Association, illustrates how this winter is progressing as he works to gain access to The Braddock News Letterpress Museum, located in Braddock, North Dakota. As our spring semester draws to a close, we would have been hard pressed—with snow piled high—to conduct our letterpress printing project of printing, assembling, stitching, trimming, and numbering individual chapbook copies. Instead, our students in the Certificate in Publishing program now use the spring semester to acquire our next chapbook collection in preparation for publishing in the fall.

Facing east from inside The Braddock News Letterpress Museum. Thank you, Allan Burke, Pressman Extraordinaire, for this picture and the photo of Tracy. Between his work at preserving and operating The Hunter Times (Bonanzaville, West Fargo, ND) and The Braddock News Letterpress Museum, Allan has his hands full of good projects!

 

These days, as we hunker down in the wake of more blizzardy weather, we continue the process of giving first reads to dozens of manuscript submissions for our 8th Poetry of the Plains & Prairies (POPP) Award. Students learn how the acquisition process works for literary press prizes.

The first step is to learn how to navigate our online submissions portal at Submittable, a platform used by more than 11,000 organizations. Submittable is known to poets and writers of all genres as a place to submit their work for publication consideration. In a 2023 review conducted by FinancesOnline, Submittable ranked 3rd of 253 popular apps used for applicant tracking. I chose Submittable because of its familiarity among authors at large, its user-friendly design, and its price. Submittable is an easy place for students to see how publishers (and nonprofits and institutions offering grants and scholarships) are able to receive and track submissions, and it is a place where authors can keep track of all the presses and magazines where their work is being considered.

At Submittable, we are able to design our online entry forms. Here is what the form for submitting POPP Award nominations looks like.

 

 

Once manuscripts start rolling in, students in the Practicum in Publishing—taught every spring—learn how to assess manuscripts based on the aim of the POPP Award series and the mission of the press. They will each read each of the submissions, ranking them in accord with this call for submissions:

North Dakota State University Press seeks poetry submissions of any style for our annual Poetry of the Plains and Prairies letterpress chapbook publication. While authors may call any place home, their submissions must deftly capture the feeling of, as well as the reality of, living on the plains and prairies. Authors may submit any number of poems equaling thirty to thirty-five pages in length, with no more than one poem per page.

We accept new submissions for the POPP Award every year from January 17 through March 17. Answering a series of questions about the aim and mission for each submission, students—undergraduate and graduate, coming from studies in multiple disciplines—take part in winnowing the submissions down to about seven to ten finalists. Where submission selections are close, we meet to advocate for favored collections. Thus, the experience prepares students for work at other literary presses, where interns or other in-house readers pore through what they call a “slush pile,” discerning which manuscripts should go forward for further review and acquisition. Our finalist selections are then sent to the previous year’s POPP Award winner, who serves as our finalist judge and selects the winning manuscript.

Our team of students learn about the history and form of chapbooks in the Introduction to Publishing class. They take the POPP Award-winner’s manuscript, chosen in Practicum in Publishing, and they are introduced to the line-editing process, standards for book design, selection of cover art, building a copyright page, and developing marketing and publicity plans.

Instead of printing, assembling, stitching, and trimming chapbooks at the Letterpress Museum during our chill “spring” months, the hands-on labor takes place in the more accommodating fall months. How lucky we are to have the good fortune of reading poetry manuscripts indoors, while the snow piles up around us!

For more information about the Certificate in Publishing, check out our course descriptions for undergraduate and graduate students. If you are age 65 or older, and you would like to audit the publishing courses for free, check out the option in Project 65.

Destiny Manifested, by Bonnie Larson Staiger, was our first POPP Award chapbook publication solicited through competition. The award was first named Voices of the Plains and Prairies, and—in 2019—the award name changed to Poetry of the Plains and Prairies Award (the POPP Award).