Success at PastyFest

The local food and culture festival in Calumet, Michigan known as PastyFest was a great success last Saturday and Thimbleberry Press felt right at home. We had one little table to sell our two ambitious books and even though at first glance our Chinese-themed books seemed to have no context at this event (afterall, the day long festival centers around Copper Country mining traditions and Cornish-Finnish-Italian food) we had a blast, generated a lot of interest in what we are doing as a publisher and even sold a few books. And our small, but growing, community of "fans" on Facebook got a little bigger as well.

In typical Upper Peninsula laid-back fashion, when a light rain settled in, the vendor next to us, who had a tent, just helped us move our books and materials over to share his table. No problem, don't ya know. So we shared a table for half the event with The Window Store and a very nice young fellow named Travis. Thanks, Travis.

You gotta love the Keweenaw.

Selling Books at a Food Festival?

Well, we're going to try. Books and food have always gone together and since we want Thimbleberry Press to be part of the culture of the Keweenaw we will have a vendor table at this Saturday's PastyFest 2009 in Calumet, Michigan.

Should be fun as long as it doesn't rain (the entire event is outdoors). And after all, pasties are just the Cornish answer to jiaozi (Chinese dumplings) so they should go great with The Dragon's Daughters Return.

All Hands On Deck

It might sound like I'm quoting Hillary Clinton's approach to managing the State Department in these challenging times, but nope I'm only referring to Copper City's call for town kids to come and help us decorate our new (and first!) sign for the Copper City Community Park. Many hand prints later we are one step closer to a real start on rejuvenating our community.

Mild summer weather has finally arrived on the Keweenaw, and with it everyone's spirits seem to rise. The local ice cream stand about a mile or so away is open (yeah), school's out and the kids can ride their bikes to "Jilbert's" to get a cone or to the pond to catch a fish. I painted my porch chair, planted a garden, and now it's time to get down to some serious work.

I glanced out my window a moment ago to see the gorgeous late-sunlight-glow on the woods off to the east. It is 9:00 p.m. and the light might as well be mid-afternoon. It's the same gold/green color that afternoon sunlight gives to a field of corn but here it is aspen and paper birch and pine. Just one more reason to love living this far north. The blue, blue sky, and the changeable weather on this little spit of land in Lake Superior is constantly uplifting.

Community...a Business Plan?

My partners and I have been doing a lot of thinking about what it means to try and be a viable business in a rural community. A publishing business, no less.

We know what it meant to attempt our ideas in an urban area: the complications of money, the guardedness of competitors, the closemindedness of peers, but still the possible connections at every turn.

Now, in our new small-town home, we help with the work of rebuilding after years of...I was going to say neglect but that's not right. This little town is no different than many: set off from financial centers, transportation hubs and major media attention we experience the double-edged blessings of benign seediness and boundless possibilities. No idea is too far fetched. All you can do is fail or succeed, don't ya know. [And who's to say that the old market building, shown in this photo, can't become a community hub again?]

I wake up in the morning and throw on anything that comes to hand, with-or-without makeup (usually without). A local nursery contributes a tree for our park and another donates the lumber for a new sign for that park which town kids will decorate and we have the makings of a major celebration, and rightly so. Someone reads an article about a new publisher settling in this small town and shows up at my door one morning, book in hand, with not an eye batted at my uncontrolled hound dog or messy house.

The fact that we are welcome here as neighbors to help in the rebuilding, not as meddling newcomers, tells us we have made a good choice for our "corporate" headquarters.

And so my new thoughts about a business plan are as follows:

Can a business plan include: a front porch, bird feeders, a vegetable garden, poetry, and a piano?

Apparently so, because I have decided if there are no hummingbirds and gold finches, then I’m sorry but the deal’s off. Yes, I’m prepared to put up with the inconveniences—the neighbor who starts cutting his grass at 6:00 p.m. (my cocktail-and-inspiration hour), or the teenage boys for whom spring is 4-wheeler time. They come and they go. I can sit here all day and outlast them. Just the price of doing business.

The freedom to be supremely isolated and intimately connected is the twenty-first century model. And while I write these words my hound dog bays with the best of them, adding his own discord to the evening’s music.

What can we create together? What is possible alone? Who is out there to work with, to trust, to partner with, to make life better with? These are the truly profitable questions many people are asking and they are the questions Thimbleberry Press, as a company, seeks to answer and to profit from.