Publication News «

December 16, 2011

A Kick-Ass Moment? Nah. A Kick-Ass Year.

When I was a teenager, I kept a journal, and at the end of each year, I’d designate one event from the previous twelve months as “Most Kick-Ass Moment of the Year.” I no longer keep a journal, but each December, I silently designate a new “Kick-Ass Moment.” Last year it was easy. What can compare to launching your first book in New York City? This year, though? It ain’t so cut and dry. I look back on 2011 with my head spinning.

We launched Assaracus through Sibling Rivalry Press and schools from the Ivy League to community colleges subscribed, not to mention readers from around the world. (England! Hong Kong! Italy! Australia!)
My Life as Adam was included on the American Library Association’s Over the Rainbow list of noteworthy LGBT titles, one of only five collections of poetry named.
I had a poem published in one of my “dream” pubs, The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide.
I was named one of eight young Arkansans “for the future” by the Arkansas Times.
I closed the Arkansas Literary Festival’s Pub or Perish and read poems from the forthcoming Less Fortunate Pirates: Poems from the First Year Without My Father in public for the first time. (Next December, folks. That’s when my second full-length book will be released, and this one is something special to me. Just last week I scored the perfect artwork for the front cover.)
I stood in the back of a beautiful room at this year’s Rainbow Book Fair and watched Raymond Luczak absolutely hold a crowd in the palm of his hand as he read from Road Work Ahead.
Theresa Senato Edwards broke SRP’s glass ceiling and became our first female author.
We reissued one of my favorite books from the previous year, Steven Reigns’ Inheritance, under the SRP label.
I chased Jessie Carty, caught her, wrestled her to the ground and made her sign a contract to bring Fat Girl to SRP.
One of my best friends, Loria Taylor, became contractually obligated to sing my praises.
Kevin Simmonds took Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion & Spirituality (the first anthology of its kind) around the world, holding readings in New York, New Jersey, San Francisco, South Carolina, Minneapolis, Washington DC, and London.
Gavin Dillard and Eric Norris gave me enough behind-the-scenes material from Nocturnal Omissions: A Tale of Two Poets to write my own tell-all memoir, then they made Richard Labonte’s Favorite Books of 2011 list.
Saeed Jones’ When the Only Light Is Fire sold like, well, it was on fire, occupying Amazon’s #1 spot in Gay Poetry for weeks.
I delivered half of the keynote address at the Atlanta Queer Literary Festival and drove away from Georgia with three new authors in the works… Megan Volpert, Collin Kelley, and Theresa Davis… a trio of talent that can take over the world. Megan knocked it out of the park with Sonics in Warholia, and Collin and Theresa will do the same in 2013.
Our list of eBooks grew. I tested the waters of prose with an eBook short story (only 99 cents!) and we’ll end the year ready to jump into fiction with both feet thanks to Leigh Binder’s How to Kill Harry and Donnelle McGee’s Shine.
Another poet I’d long courted, Stephen S. Mills, signed a contract to debut his first collection with SRP.
Philip F. Clark was officially named Art Editor for SRP. Brent Calderwood became the Associate Editor of Assaracus. Brian Gryphon was named Associate Editor of Marketing. It’s not a one-man show anymore!
Matthew Hittinger, Jane Cassady, Virginia Bell, and Brad Richard (pronounced Reessssh-ARD, FYI) were selected out of hundreds of poets who submitted manuscripts during our open-submission period. You’ll see their work come to fruition in 2012.
Columbia University used Ocean Vuong’s Burnings as course material, Gallaudet University is slated to use Road Work Ahead as course material, and just today, a friend and fellow writer emailed to let me know that My Life as Adam will be used as course material in an upcoming Queer Lit class at the Rhode Island School of Design.

It’s pretty clear to me, looking back, that I have no ability to separate myself from SRP at this point. SRP’s best days are my best days. When an SRP author is happy… man, I’m happy. I’m living it and breathing it, folks. This is the life I wanted. So yeah. Kick-ass moment? I don’t think so. Kick-ass year. The moral of the story: Don’t wait for anyone to hand you anything. Figure out what you want, and then just fucking go for it. It’s RIGHT there. It’s waiting on YOU.

10 comments

October 22, 2011

The Eclectica Interview: Philip F. Clark and Bryan Borland

A few months ago, at the urging of online literary magazine Eclectica‘s Elizabeth Glixman, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Philip F. Clark to discuss poetry, publishing, and Sibling Rivalry Press. The interview has now been posted. Despite the fact that I don’t remember saying any of this, enjoy! (And many thanks to Eclectica!)

5 comments

June 30, 2011

On Publishing Loria Taylor: The Journey to SOB

I first laid eyes on Loria Taylor when she moved from North Carolina to my Arkansas neighborhood when we were both in the 5th grade. If one got their hands on our yearbook from those days, my photo would reveal a basketball-like chubby face; Loria’s would demonstrate a perm-gone-wrong. Still, though we passed in the halls, counted each other out of swing-sets, and shared some mutual friends, we wouldn’t form our own bond until the 10th grade, when Mrs. Matheny assigned us to stage a production of Julius Caesar for our English class. Naturally, I was Caesar and Loria was some sort of witch. The scene we were assigned involved ketchup as a blood-substitute. I was wearing a toga and socks: fashionable, if not entirely historically-accurate attire. When it came time to spread the ketchup around me in my key scene, when I was ready for my closeup, Loria intentionally aimed at my feet and ruined a perfectly good pair of socks and my acting debut. So I did what any fifteen-year-old toga-clad boy would do. I spit in her hair.

We’ve been friends ever since.

Flash forward a couple of years to the illustrious Senior Awards Banquet at our High School. We’d both taken Creative Writing and we’d both been awarded the title of “Most Likely to Win a Pulitzer.” But we couldn’t share what we both desperately wanted: the coveted Creative Writing Pendant (which was actually a plastic brooch etched with a tiny replica of a pencil). Because we were both unwittingly and unknowingly gay-men-in-training, Loria and I daydreamed of winning the Pendant, attaching it to our Calvin Klein denim vests and/or our National Young Leadership Conference T-shirts, and strolling through the local mall’s music store, where we’d fight over the sole copy of a bargain-bin George Michael cassette. (“He’s so dreamy,” Loria would sigh. “I’m going to marry him one day.”) Afterwards, we’d sit in the Cafe Court and sip Cokes while the winner of the Pendant would attract the jealous glances of passersby, a courageous few of which would approach and ask for an autograph. After all, by this time in 1997, Loria had written a story about a teenage girl smitten with a straight, English pop star and I’d completed a novel that read like a homoerotic Saved By the Bell episode. In other words, the stakes were high, and our reputations were on the line.

In the end, I won the Pendant.

Suffice to say, Loria was crushed. She locked herself in her room for hours, listening to George sing “Careless Whisper” again and again. To console her, I made a promise that when I became a famous writer with my own publishing company, I’d offer her a book contract with a miniscule royalty rate and multiple required speaking obligations. She would also have to let me make use of her swimming pool should, in her adult life, she have access to one.

Through her tears, she accepted my offer, and fourteen years later, I can finally announce that pre-orders are open for SOB by Loria Taylor.

I keep my promises.

9 comments

May 7, 2011

Call For Submissions – Lesbian Poets mean LADY BUSINESS!

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May 3, 2011

Upcoming Appearances and SRP News

Springtime and Arkansas go together like warm and cold air masses in the jet stream, and the result usually involves me crawling back into the closet with multiple cats and a gin and tonic while either a tornado or a train shakes the house (since we live next to railroad tracks, one can never be sure which is the culprit). This April has been extra volatile if one measures on the basis of the amount of alcohol I’ve ingested.

That said, I’m looking forward to a couple of forthcoming trips which will allow me to flee the Arkansas weather, though, in the case of at least one of my destinations, I will likely increase my dependence on cocktails. From May 12 – May 15, I’ll be in the Big Easy for Saints and Sinners, where I’ll be participating in a couple of panels. The first occurs on Saturday, May 14, at 2:30 PM, and is titled, “Well Versed: Poetry Discussions and Readings.” Moderated by one of my favorite poets (an upcoming Assaracus-featured poet), Jeff Mann, I’ll be in the company of Sally Bellerose, Michael Montlack, and Brad Richard. By the time the second panel, “Sudden Exposure: The Write to Market” rolls around on Sunday at 2:30 PM, I’m sure I’ll look like I’ve been in New Orleans for several days. The marketing panel will include David Pratt, Cecilia Tan, and Lara Zielinsky; and our moderator: will be Michele Karlsberg.

Then on June 23-25, the tour bus takes me to the Atlanta Queer Literary Festival. It is an honor to be one of the keynote speakers for this well-organized and well-promoted event, and I’m going to talk about how poetry gave me mouth-to-mouth resuscitation (and slipped me the tongue), the creation of SRP, why Assaracus is important, and why a queen would open the equivalent of a Tower Records in the kingdom of iTunes. I might also take a minute to stalk Miss NeNe Leakes of The Real Housewives of Atlanta.

In other news, the submission period for SRP is open through June 1. The current submission period for Assaracus is open through the end of May, as well. We have some exciting things in store for our readers, including a special issue of Assaracus subtitled “Lady Business,” which will focus on the work of ten lesbian poets (watch for a call for submissions for that issue later this week). Speaking of women, yesterday my bulk order of our first full-length collection by a female poet arrived. Voices Through Skin by Theresa Senato Edwards is a powerful book of poetry that absolutely shatters our glass ceiling. Voices Through Skin hits the bookshelves on June 1st. Also look for strong work from Loria Taylor (SOB), Jessie Carty (Fat Girl), and Saeed Jones (When the Only Light is Fire) in the coming months, as well as a massive project from the magical hands of Kevin Simmonds called COLLECTIVE brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion & Spirituality. All that, and the third and fourth issues of Assaracus are going to rock the house. Our journal, which has been subscribed to by places like Brown, SUNY, and Cornell, is reaching into the guts of America and taking poetry to the people. I can’t thank the Assaracus poets enough, and (here’s some more breaking news) the likelihood of a college campus tour of Assaracus poets in the future is growing stronger.

If you haven’t checked out already-released SRP books by Steven Reigns (Inheritance), Raymond Luczak (Road Work Ahead), and Ocean Voung (Burnings), then I encourage you to do so. And more than encourage you, I’ll also give you a 10% discount from the SRP online store if you enter the code BLOG at checkout. Also watch for a newly-designed My Life as Adam in the next week or so. We wanted to revamp it a bit to make it uniform to the rest of the SRP titles. I also added a few new poems to the book – pieces I wrote after the book went to press that felt at home with the original Adam set. The cover still features art by my newly-married pal Seth Ruggles Hiler, but the back and spine have enjoyed a makeover.

As for my own writing, I’m still chugging along. I’m working on a novel that explores the impact of a son’s enlistment in the military during wartime on a family from Troy, Alabama. The characters are real to me now, and I don’t have much say in where the story goes. I’m an observer. We’ll see what happens with the family and the project. Oh yeah. I’m writing a few poems here and there, too.

So… if you are near New Orleans or Atlanta and can make it out Saints and Sinners or the Atlanta Queer Literary Festival, come on and track me down. We’ll hang. We’ll party. We’ll gossip. If you’re on the other side of the country or the other side of the globe, have a gin and tonic in the closet for me. But don’t stay too long. I think I’ve spent enough time there for all of us.

Always appreciative,

Bryan