1. You sell books. Could you tell us about that? What need do you see yourself fulfilling?
What sounds like one activity in the question is more than one activity in daily practice. So maybe there are multiple answers.
Selling general books & other ephemera is a secondary revenue stream for me as I cobble my way through this post-career phase of mine, which has been so far so good.
Like many people who have been lucky in this writing life, I find myself with a house filled with books, zines, CDs, and related stuff; more than I can ever use, much more. I learned from thinking about my experience that this unused, unusable surplus hinders my forward progress. But I am attached to these things, so a simple and drastic stacking of boxes in the alley would not ever happen unless things took a rather bad turn.
And it’s not like I’m going to stop picking up interesting things. So I have this inventory of my stuff online, and I add to it each week, and people order stuff from me, and I take their orders to the post office.
In the age of plenty ubiquitous stuff we live in now, there really isn’t much that’s hard to get. But not everything is infinitely, elastically available. So it’s cool to put a copy of a chapbook into the hands of someone who’s really excited about it, something that they can’t find at their local bookstore or library. I was excited about it, too; and I still am, most likely. But I don’t have the bandwidth to keep it all in front of me at once, and I think it’s better to sell it to a new excited reader than to hoard it as proof of my affection and excellent taste.
As for my own work, book production/publication is nothing more or less than a stage in a workflow – just as important as keeping a notebook, typing up the contents of the notebook, and all the other stages of that workflow.
At this phase of my writing arc, I find that I am both doing the best writing of my life and creating work that is not likely to find a publisher. I don’t think this is unusual at all. Once more, great good fortune to live when I do, in a time when self-publishing is a sophisticated practice with fairly wide and growing acceptance.
2. How do you warehouse (assuming you do)?
I’ve been living in the same house since 1994. Not moving has been another luxury of good fortune; but unlike people who move every couple of years, I don’t have an extrinsic reason to cull & discard things. My warehouse is where I live, and in some respects what I am trying to do is a managed de-hoarding operation.
3. How do distribute?
All the stuff is listed in the Amazon Marketplace, and I ship orders out 2-3 times a week through USPS. I have been a fan of the postal system my entire adult life, and it’s great to keep throwing them business.
My own books are available on Amazon, and at Lulu, and links to all that can be found at www.buckdowns.com
4. Why do you do this?
Each action is a partial and provisional answer to the question of the day, “how shall I live the good life?” That’s pretentious, of course, but really. How am I to get through the day, pay my bills, find the time to write a little, and all that? I’ve been pretty lucky; to have had no reliable means of support for the last four-five years, and not only not be dead or in an institution yet, but to be about as happy and productive as I’ve ever been.
5. What is your contact info?
People who want to find out more about what a “poetry workflow” is, or put in an order for one of my latest books can visitwww.buckdowns.com. If they want to get on the Buck Downs postcard list, they can send an e-mail to my automated assistant,Tanya@buckdowns.com.
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Part 2 of this interview will focus on Downs' poetry, and will appear soon.
Buck Downs poems appear in AlteredScale.com 2.
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