By Conor Mc Donnell
“Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking about them in a particular context. I imagine a trench about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit. I imagine these people, some of them good friends, some of them barely acquaintances, at one end of this trench. I also imagine a faceless industry lackey at the other end, holding a fountain pen and a contract waiting to be signed.”
–Intro to The Problem with Music, Steve Albini, 1994
Part 1:
Does this quote have anything to do with poetry? I don’t know, maybe? Maybe it’s a metaphor for slogging through years of bad words, bad lines and bad pages to emerge with an ‘end-product’ you are not embarrassed to share with the world. Maybe you don’t like the image of the shit-filled trench but still you picture a glut of writers getting ready to duke it out, to run swim wade crawl and battle-royale their way through the runny decay. Maybe all this talk of faecals and scat has turned you off already and for that I genuinely apologize; however, I can’t be held responsible for what you think, only for what I write. In taking that responsibility, that accountability, seriously I will always defend what I write to my dying breath (because a lot of thought and review has gone into the process) including its right to exist in the first place. That being said, please do allow me the opportunity to win you back.
The first time I read Albini’s essay was in 2023. I’ve been a fan of his music for nearly forty years but never his politics & opinions and I have avoided most of his printed words but while reading The Problem with…, I found myself thinking about publishing instead of music. While many might focus on the shit-filled trench I focused instead on the word, contract. Recently, I agreed to publish my third book of poetry and, for the first time in my publishing career, I received a contract which formally secured our commitment to each other: editor and publisher to writer and book. I was not overly interested in the minutiae of the contract such as advance copies, Scandinavian royalties, etc. I was only interested in the two signatures at the bottom: mine and my new publisher’s. A reasonable follow-up is of course, ‘why is this so important to you, Conor? Lots of us don’t get to sign contracts for our books.’
Great question, I’m really glad you asked. Please, let’s start by acknowledging that is a complicated knot but one I believe we can unravel together. My third poetry collection is due to be published in the fall of 2025; this represents not only my first contract but also, hopefully, my first book launch. My first collection, Recovery Community, was accepted in March 2020 (remember what else happened that month?) and was ‘launched’ during the ongoing lockdown of Spring 2021. I myself was unaware that the book was available until Annick MacAskill posted a picture of it on Instagram. This was neither the first nor last time that decisions were made on the fruits of my labour without consultation or some form of notice.
Part 2:
Monday, March 16th 2020, 7:15 a.m.: On my commute to SickKids Hospital, I drove along the yellow dotted centre-line of an empty Yonge Street from Queen to Dundas Square, much like the protagonist in Richard Matheson’s, I am Legend. Over the next six months I provided daily care to the sickest of children by day, then sat in my basement writing at night. I read Ballard, Burroughs, Selby and Sacks, and my writing mirrored the darkness of both my day-job and nocturnal library. In July 2021, I published the chapbook, In the Museum, with rob mclennan’s Above/Ground Press, in which a deserted museum tasked with preserving a civilization’s knowledge after an unspecified apocalyptic event slowly loses its mind; so much so that when survivors take shelter in the museum it sees them as a threat, an invading virus that does not value the precious exhibits beyond functional use as camouflage and warmth. The poems in that chapbook gradually morphed into a larger collection, one that sought to describe a world fifty years hence where culture-wars spilled into a near-distant future, one where science and rational thought had fought and lost the great battle for data, language, and truth.
This collection, titled This Insistent List, was accepted for publication in Fall 2021 by the same publisher as Recovery Community, which was important to me because this second book is not an easy read. It is an immediate sequel to its predecessor (it begins on Page 87) and I wanted both books to have a consistency in both tone and presentation. I was committed enough to publish this book without, as you guessed it, any mention of a contract again and after some concerns over personal health circumstances and COVID-related economic concerns, we eventually agreed that This Insistent List would be published sometime in the fall of 2023. Over the next year I knocked the poems into shape, secured cover-art from the same artist as Recovery Community, Erica Smith designed front and back-covers while Julie Crawford & Alexandra Basekic provided gracious insightful cover-comments. The publisher alerted Amazon, Indigo, etc. to the imminence of our publication (albeit with an incorrect title: ‘amazon’ me to see for yourself).
In the summer of 2023, I needed more copies of Recovery Community as there was still a reasonable amount of interest expressed in the book at readings. At this point, my publisher’s somewhat sporadic communication-style improved enough to provide me with an invoice for 50 copies of my own book. The price seemed a lot but I was told by others, ‘that’s pretty normal for this kind of thing’, a phrase that has often been repeated to me when I ask, ‘is this how things are done?’, or when I complain, ‘that wasn’t very nice, was it?’ “It’s kind of the way things are, Conor, we all had to / have to go through it.” I’ve heard this a million times in my day-job, “I had to suffer and stay up all night with no help when I was in training so why can’t these trainees manage the same? It’s part of learning, trial by fire.” No, it’s not a normal part of learning. First, that’s not how we should deliver healthcare. Second, current students and trainees have been through a pandemic, they are being told they cannot afford to live in the city they grew up in, their planet is almost burnt to a cinder and they question whether they should bother having children at all. I think they have enough on their minds without also having to bear the brunt of the previous generation’s training-related trauma. I’m sorry but I just don’t agree with how things are as a justification for repeated bad-behavior. To my mind, there was a first time that a thing was done, to which no-one said anything. Then a second time and a third, no-one did anything again. How many times before that becomes, ‘it’s just the way it is’?
But I digress… fifty copies of Recovery Community arrived on our doorstep a day or so after asking and I took care of the e-transfer transaction in a reasonable period of time. A few months later, fall of 2023 came and went and nothing happened with my book. This Insistent List was not published and I haven’t heard from the publisher since. I tried to get in contact, my editor tried too. We were concerned about a serious health issue of which I was aware and we reached out to empathize, to offer our help getting books onto shelves (other authors as well as me). Despite communicating multiple concerns for our publisher’s health and for the state of our respective books’ publication, as well as a genuine ‘reaching out’, no-one heard a thing. My editor and me talked long and often about how we dreaded the appearance of a death notice but the longer the silence continued the less that appeared to be the case. Relieved on one hand but confused on the other we made one last effort to get in touch; however, in early 2024 I (and other authors in the same bind) had to accept we wouldn’t be hearing back: too much time had passed. I really do hope everything is okay, there is absolutely no long-term ill-will, I just wish things could have been handled differently but, apparently, sometimes that’s just the way it is.
Many writers commiserated with me before immediately launching into stories of how their own books had been cancelled before too (writers with five, six, seven books under their belt compared to my paltry singular lockdown debut), however, cancelled is not what happened to me. To be cancelled implies some form of being told, ‘sorry, it’s not going to happen after all.’ Despite multiple attempts to communicate with someone whom I thought I had established a working relationship with, I heard nothing. My book was not cancelled, it had been ghosted, unceremoniously dumped, silently disappeared. I was encouraged by many to resubmit elsewhere but, who was likely to agree to publish a difficult sophomore collection that begins at page 87? Who would agree to the stylistic requests from a second-time author whose first book had not exactly set CanLit aflame?
To that conundrum, let’s add an extra pound of pressure: time. My third collection is due for publication in the fall of 2025. I know this to be true because I have a signed contract that states as much. On asking my future publisher how much of a window I should keep between the publication of my second and third books they quite reasonably replied, ‘one year, either side.’ I asked that question over coffee in Spring 2024 when I finally accepted that my old publisher was not going to jump out of a bush screaming IT’S ALIVE, and shower me with ten industry-agreed free copies of my work. That meant This Insistent List could either be published in the next six months or sometime after fall of 2026, i.e., no sooner than Spring 2027. I am well versed in promoting material written one or two years prior but there is no way I can see myself promoting a book written 5 years before, especially This Insistent List, which represents a unique and particular mind-set, one I have almost completely moved beyond. The anxiety and mental turmoil which consumed me during that book’s writing is not a particularly easy vein to tap back into and there will come a point where I view that writer as a completely different person I no longer wish to reconnect with.
I decided, absolutely, to publish This Insistent List myself. I had recently begun to consider the possibility – not the inevitability, just the possibility – of doing so but in that moment I was so certain this was the best solution available I actually announced it out loud. My publisher, also a prominent poet editor and professor, said, “please, don’t do that. Self-publishing never works out …” Over the next few minutes I told them why this was not a case of self-publishing: this book was edited by a professional, i.e., not me; it had been accepted for publication by a respected publisher; it had made its way through the full peer-review process we expect of any non-self-publication, the only difference was that my book died somewhere on the way to the printers. I launched into a description of a plan I’d been hatching in recent months and by the time I was done he said, “you should totally do this, this could be the beginning of something really important for you.” That was mid-April 2024. Now, in mid-October, barely six months on, This Insistent List ‘hits the shelves’ next week. Here is how we did it …
Part 3:
When I say, ‘we’, I mean my wife, Audrey and I. Our own conversation began in January 2024 when I asked if she would mind my working Saturdays in a used bookstore on the other side of town (Sellers & Newel, please do drop by, I am there every Saturday except when I am on hospital duty). Working there is part of my wellness balance plus ongoing ‘transition to retirement’ plan, each step of which has been carefully discussed with Audrey because it speaks to either money or time (on occasion, both) both of which impact directly on her quality and experience of our life together. It might also have been during that conversation when Audrey agreed (a little reluctantly at the time) to one day explore the possibility of our publishing other writers under a banner, press, company we could run together. So, when I rocked up in April and said, “I think we have to publish This Insistent List ourselves, and we should treat it as a dry-run for bringing a book into the world. Let’s make all the mistakes on this one so we don’t mess up someone else’s baby somewhere down the line.” We made a list, we talked to people like Jim Johnstone, we added to that list and we started the real work in August. Here is that list in full:
* How to start a publishing company? Pick a name; make sure it’s not already in use; secure a domain name if you are going to sell it online (you can also sell in-person at readings & gatherings and forego the website thing for a while if money is an issue); secure an ISBN number for each version of your book. Except for the website, all these things are free
*New website (for me as an author but also from which to sell our first book – Audrey to research and try it out herself). Squarespace offers good deals including e-commerce as part of the set-up for approx. $35 a month
*Company Logo (Audrey to give that a go)
*Type-set & design: (Audrey has In-Design experience so…) In-Design also costs money; best deal is a monthly subscription or, if you have experience with In-Design you can grab a two-week free trial and work like blazes to get it done within that timeframe…
*New Headshots (Conor to sit still for long enough to accommodate this) – obviously a vanity expense
*Source printing options (both of us to look into this)
By the first week of September the list looked like this:
*ThreadNeedle Publications (we agreed to name it after the address where we lived together)
*conorgmcdonnell.com (built from scratch by Audrey tout seul) – domain secured for both sites for $95 for two-years
*Company Logo designed in full by Audrey (see bottom of this article)
*Type-set & design done by Audrey in full with multiple sessions of us both staring at a screen measuring lines and paginations with a nano-scope. If you do read This Insistent List you will appreciate the painstaking work that went into this part of the project.
*New Headshots courtesy of OmiiThompson @ https://www.omiifilm.com/
*Hume Printing (a company we have known for years due to Audrey’s involvement in Bernese Mountain Dog Club Newsletter): Cost of printing 200 copies of 60-page book with full gloss colour cover = $855 including tax
On October 4th, Audrey ordered the first copy of This Insistent List from our website to ensure the e-commerce worked smoothly. It does. On the same day, we mailed copies of the book to my parents in Ireland, to Jim Johnstone (editor), Julie Crawford and Alexandra Basekic (back-cover-blurbers extra-ordinaires). Last night and today, we wrote and rewrote this article. Two days from now (October 8th), I will deliver a spoken word performance at Sellers & Newel [https://www.sellersandnewel.com/live-music.html] accompanied by a jazz trio of gifted young musicians whose cumulative age outstrips my own by barely a decade and a half. The words that night will be entirely from Recovery Community; however, the gift-bags for those in the crowd who have supported me from day one will contain shiny new copies of This Insistent List, signed and hand-delivered with gratitude and love. We will continue to soft-launch our book throughout the rest of 2024: some dates are already set and will be advertised soon enough, others await your kindness and support in offering opportunities for us to attend. I am open to any and all offers.
When the dust finally settles on this exercise in self-launching, and the lessons inherent have been fully absorbed, Audrey and I will begin our search for ThreadNeedle’s next author(s). We can’t promise anything today but Candace de Taeye, Shelly Harder, Miriam Colleran, we are looking at writers like you… Scientists, doctors, healthcare-workers identifying as frustrated authors, we are looking for people like you. ThreadNeedle will be run in the same spirit as Factory Records: I plan to bring the Tony Wilson while Audrey will add much-needed business-savvy. Unlike Factory, we are committed to working under contracts; contracts agreeable with the writers involved where costs are absorbed by ThreadNeedle, profits are shared in a manner that favours the author, but also the editor and artist(s) involved in creating the cover.
To date, our little house on the poetry-scape has three items in its catalogue:
TN01 – ThreadNeedle’s logo (again, see below)
TN02 – This Insistent List
TN03 – Official bookmark to This Insistent List (designed by Everan Michalchyshyn)
TN04 – …
*
The Problem with Music closes with a stark statement, “Some of your friends are already this fucked”, and I would like to firmly distance myself from that sentiment. That may be the case in the business of music but it should not apply to poetry. The title of my first book was no accident, I firmly believe in community. But I also believe in the power of decency and behaving consistently no matter the circumstances. The closing lines to This Insistent List’s blurb urge that we move forward through darkness pain and uncertainty to emerge to discovery that poem & song are the greatest and last of our secret weapons. There is no rule I am aware of that says nurturing a creative community requires we silently acknowledge we must jump into the trench.
Conor Mc Donnell is a poet and physician on staff at The Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto. He is author of two collections of poems (most recently, This Insistent List) and three chapbooks. A third collection, What We Know So Far Is, will be published in Fall 2025. He is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto where he is a funded researcher of pediatric hospital safety, pediatric medication error, and opioid stewardship. His poetry has appeared in various Canadian and international publications and he is a frequently invited international lecturer and presenter on pediatric perioperative care and error prevention. He has also published poetry in noted medical journals such as JAMA, and CMAJ. He recently joined forces with the Narrative Based Medicine Lab at U of T to launch Case Repertory (an online platform publishing physician/scientist/healthcare workers’ narrative based case histories where, as Editor in Chief, he hopes to engage and promote the voice of the patient in collaboration with the primary authors of future accepted publications).
The Woodlot 