Cate Willits
Fall 2011
Small Press Project
Advocado Press
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Mary Johnson, editor and co-founder of Advocado Press. Most of the information contained in my report was obtained through correspondence with her.
Why is Advocado Press Important?
Generally speaking, disability studies reached academia in the 1990’s. Perhaps even more importantly, the Americans with Disabilities Act was not made into law until 1990. Advocado Press, however, was founded in 1981, making it a significant frontrunner for critical work and thinking concerning disability studies. The fact that Advocado prefigured disability studies and legislation demonstrates its critical influence in highlighting disability as a social presence that needs to be recognized. Furthermore, that Advocado has remained as a successful press -- publishing texts concerning disability and disability studies for 30 years -- is a testament to its continued vital presence in a culture where disability is still a problematic identity and uncomfortable topic of discussion.
A Quick Look at Advocado Press Today
• Advocado Press is based in Louisville, KY.
• Advocado is currently interested in publishing books in the disability studies market, especially those concerning media.
• The majority of Advocado’s titles are print-on-demand.
• Advocado is not currently seeking new manuscripts, but they do receive some through mail and e-mail
History of Advocado Press
• Advocado Press was founded in 1981 by Mary Johnson and Cass Irvin.
• In 1980, Mary had started publishing The Disability Rag as a local newsprint magazine.
• Mary’s goal behind The Disability Rag was to help organize the community of disabled people in Louisville.
• The press originally did not publish books, but was created to publish The Disability Rag Magazine (later, Ragged Edge Magazine). http://www.advocadopress.org/ragsub/subscribe.htm
• In March 1981, Advocado incorporated as a non-profit press and began publishing The Disability Rag.
• Advocado began publishing books in 1994 with The Ragged Edge – an anthology of writings from The Disability Rag.
The Ragged Edge Online
[http://www.raggededgemagazine.com/]
• The Ragged Edge Online features fiction, poetry, and non-fiction.
• Samples of texts found on The Ragged Edge Online:
Economics of the Press
• Advocado currently does not have an office or a paid staff.
• Their most significant overhead is maintaining the websites for Advocado and for The Ragged Edge Online
• Their income comes mostly from the sales of their print-on-demand titles.
• Advocado runs by the work of several volunteers; however, they did have some paid staff in the past.
• The primary tasks of these volunteers include fulfillment and shipping duties for orders on the few books that are still in stock.
History of Advocado’s Economics
• In the past, while still publishing The Ragged Edge and The Ragged Edge online, Advocado received most of its income from magazine (both print and online) subscriptions.
• Early in its history, Advocado received about a third of its income from donations.
• In the late 1980’s Advocado administered several federal grants which also created income.
Marketing
• Advocado markets their titles using:
– disability studies e-mail lists
– booths at disability studies conferences
– reviews in disability publications and academic journals with a focus on disability studies
• In the past, while Advocado still maintained a print periodical, they marketed their titles to their magazine subscribers.
• Advocado is a member of Small Press Distribution (SPD).
Book Design/Production
• Advocado has an in-house designer – Barrett Shaw is Advocado’s current board president and is a freelance graphic/book designer.
• Today Advocado prints all their books via print-on-demand. For their first print-on-demand book, Advocado used lulu.com for Disability Awareness: Do It Right!. Since then Advocado has used CreateSpace and LightningSource (which is a division of Ingram distributors). Additionally, once their older titles have sold out, they switch them over to print-on-demand and do not take them out of print.
Advocado’s Titles
• Most recent title that represents Advocado’s current publishing interest:
– Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media
– Published by Towson University professor Beth Haller
– Published in 2010 through print-on-demand
Some of Advocado’s Titles:
Make Them Go Away: Clint Eastwood, Christopher Reeve the Case Against Disability Rights
By: Mary Johnson (2003)
[http://www.advocadopress.org/make.html]
• Available for purchase online from Advocado and from Amazon
https://www.createspace.com/3423117
"Imagine an African American's voting rights withheld until he or she proved 100 percent African American descent, or a woman having to sue her employer to get a women's restroom in the workplace. Outrageous as those scenarios seem, their like is commonplace in the lives of the disabled, Johnson says, because of widespread misinterpretation and misapplication of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). She points out numerous flaws in the law, beginning with its title (she prefers that of the British analog, the Disability Discrimination Act) and including the fact that it is enforceable only via lawsuit, putting rights seekers in an adversarial position, and that it contains an escape clause permitting noncompliance if accessibility causes a business "undue hardship." The disabled person's difficulties aren't, however, confined to the law, and the roots of conflict over disability rights reach deep into personal prejudices and national values. Bit-by-bit Johnson deconstructs arguments against disability rights from the likes of Clint Eastwood as well as more ordinary folk, and she constructs powerful reasons why we all benefit from inclusion." --Booklist
Acclaim for Make Them Go Away
• "In challenging us to imagine a more accessible living environment, Johnson outlines why we all have a stake in creating such a society,...it's the one minority that anyone can join in an instant... Viewed this way, accessibility becomes a matter of self-interest for everyone. [I]f America is to live up to its promise as a place of opportunity for all, then this is a discussion we desperately need to have. Johnson's thoughtful, carefully argued book is an important contribution to that dialogue, and an excellent place to start." -- Martha Barnette, The Courier-Journal (Louisville)
• Make Them Go Away "reveals the animus against disability underlying all those sweetly written op-ed pieces, and ... challenges us to oppose the mindset that puts the civil rights of all Americans at the mercy of the marketplace." -- Douglas Lathrop, New Mobility
Selection from Make Them Go Away
• Is it disability status – or discriminatory treatment by others – that the ADA is about? Most Judges and many attorneys still don’t seem to know. And a series of decisions the summer before Clint Eastwood began his campaign seemed to say that most members of the Supreme Court didn’t know either” (57)
• When Clint Eastwood insisted that he should have been given a letter notifying him of changes that needed to be made at his resort, rather than being simply sued for having violated a 10-year-old law, attorney Paul Rein, who had taken the case for wheelchair user Diane zumBrunnen, had argued that neither black people nor women barred from facilities would be required to send a letter to the organization in advance of suing them. Why, he’d asked, ‘should disabled persons be the only class of persons required to send letters?’ Eastwood’s response to Crossfire’s Bill Press, who had brought up Rein’s comment, shows why people think disability rights are beyond the bounds of common sense: ‘You’re not going to reconform a whole building based upon the entrance of a black person or a woman coming in,’ Eastwood had said.” (29)
The Ragged Edge: The Disability Experience from the Pages of the First Fifteen Years of the Disability Rag
Ed. Barrett Shaw (1994)
[http://www.advocadopress.org/ragg.html]
• Available for purchase from Advocado and online from Amazon
• “What this book attempts to capture and convey is simply the experience of being a person with a disability in America today. What does it feel like? The introduction says: ‘It is hard to unravel the tangled, knotted ball of the disability experience – isolation and differentness versus a common identity; images of weakness, vulnerability, enforced childishness, learned helplessness versus defiance, willingness to make waves and change the status quo; pity, destroying dignity, and its other side, fear, fear of our differentness, our ‘imperfection,’ as if perfection were humanly achievable; and then our own fear, raw fear of attitudes that would destroy our kind, whether by genocide, selective abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide or rationing of care. This book attempts to weave a rough but strong cloth from these gnarled strands, to give the feel of the disability experience.’” – from jacket cover
Acclaim for The Ragged Edge
• “The Disability Rag is the voice of a mighty revolution, and this stunning collection from its first 15 years will become an invaluable primer for anyone who wants understand the new thinking of the disability rights movement. Here are the urgent, spirited and provocative stories that have changed the way people – disabled and nondisabled – have come to view what it means to have a disability.” – Joseph P. Shapiro, U.S. News World Report, author of No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement
• "Reading The Ragged Edge [anthology] is like sitting in on a vigorous, sometimes funny, and often irreverent roundtable discussion of the issues that most concern all humanity, disabled and nondisabled, whether they admit it or not. Some of the voices are reflective, some sad, some furious, but none will lull you to sleep. On the contrary, you'll feel ready to roll on out and transform the world.” – Nancy Mairs, author of Plaintext, Carnal Acts, Ordinary Time and Waist High In the World
Selections from The Ragged Edge
“White Caps” By Mararet Robison
White caps on the river.
Wind all day. Hard.
You’ve been dead three years.
Still I write you letters in my head.
And dreams some nights of us together.
Indian summer’s gone.
When I crossed the river bridge at dawn
A fine powder of snow was coming down.
My aide pushed my wheelchair
While I gripped the handrail. Mother,
I’m learning to walk again.
May/June 1993
(102)
“The Do-gooder” By Billy Golfus
• “When I say Do-gooder I don’t’ just mean the counselors, staff, vocational (do you really need four syllables to say ‘work’?) personnel and assorted ‘helpers.’ I mean the agencies, programs, or what they call ‘care providers.’ The term Do-gooder appears to suggest the kind of neighbor that brings over chicken soup when you’re sick – and once in a while somebody’ll even do that. But that’s not what I mean. I guess, for the most part, I’m talking about the professionals. After my accident I started to have my eyes opened very slowly. IT took me years, like they say, to process what had happened. While the physical disabilities and the brain damage that I have are inconvenient, a drag even, they’re not as bad as the treatment by my friends, social systems and especially the Do-gooders. These people are professionals,’ for God’s sake. To hang the word ‘helping’ on ‘professional’ gives the connotation of humanity, generosity and compassion. AS if their reasons for acting came out of a sense of community and personal beliefs. Give me a break! Obviously the Do-gooders don’t go into that line of work for the money – although they are making a better living than the people they ‘serve’ – and even though the words are about supporting and serving, they’re basically trying to fill their own needs, to use the jargon” (165).
Anesthesia: Poems
By Kenny Fries (1996)
[http://www.advocadopress.org/anes.html]
• Available for purchase on Amazon
• “What is the relationship between the poet’s body and his poetic corpus? This is the question Kenny Fries examines. He has formed out of his physical self a body of poetry of classical proportions, and in his sequence of poems in homage to Claude Monet, he has shown how the commitment to realism is, in fact, an incitement to the transforming power of love and the Protean nature of the world” – David Bergman, Editor of Men on Men
Acclaim for Anesthesia
• “In a deftly orchestrated collection, Kenny Fries brings to light a complex awareness of his history as a Jew, and as a gay man physically disabled at birth. Tough-minded and sparely written, the poems take their source from a clear and calm intelligence that projects an aura of affirmation in the face of suffering and loss. Fries is not content with the merely personal; his work spins into wider worlds. Anesthesia marks a new depth and range in this gifted young poet’s career.” – Colette Inez
Sample from Anesthesia
“Love Poem”
On the narrow bed. Patterns of light
and shadow across your body. I hold
your face in my hands. Tell me, before
I kiss you, what it is like to be
so beautiful? I want to know how other
hands have touched you. What other
eyes, beneath your clothes, imagine.
And how do you imagine me? Do you
feel my callused skin? See my twisted
bones? When you take off my clothes
will you kiss me all over? Touch me as
if my body were yours. Make me beautiful.
(10)
Desert Walking: Poems
By: Kenny Fries (2000)
[http://www.advocadopress.org/dese.html]
• Available for purchase on Amazon
• “In elegantly contemplative poems, Kenny Fries explores the natural world of the desert, carrying us on a journey that is both an esthetic and spiritual quest. Richly interwoven with colors and contours of the land, bomb testing sites, holy places, native lore, and offering homages to artists Georgia O’Keeffe and Ellsworth Kelly, this wise book merits our praise.” – Colette Inez
Acclaim for Desert Walking
• “From Exodus to Eliot’s The Waste Land the desert has been the site for spiritual quests that balance a deep mourning for the human condition against a longing for joy and transcendence. I see this same alternation in Kenny Fries’s Desert Walking, where the American wilderness fosters the poet’s quest, its non-human austerity tempered by the presence and solace of a beloved camerado in the tradition of Whitman. The promise of Kenny Fries’s earlier work is realized in this one.” – Alfred Corn