Invisible Circuitous Susurrations

Hidden stars, compounds, hard truths, and where publishing assumes its rightful place.

In Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man the line that haunts me the most is: “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.” This a remarkable sentence that lacquers meaning atop and over again atop of meaning. It’s a rabbit hole I went down decades ago and have never returned.

The invisible is everywhere and nowhere. Real when the primary role you’ve designated for yourself in life is marginal, mildly embraced, and uncommon. Over and over people wish for certainty in a world runneth over by uncertainty.¹ What’s left after all your calculations, plans, imaginations, and hopes is reality. Reality then becomes invisible: camouflaged in uncertainty. It’s a force beyond control, “the invisible controls the visible.”²

The most common reply to finding out I’m a book publisher is polite disbelief and indifference: “Do you actually make any money?” or simply, “What else do you do?” or “What’s that?” The best lines I hear are near the end of Sunday evening when I’m sitting with others and one person will look at me and say (ignoring the fact I work on weekends as solopreneurs must do): “Some of us have to go to work tomorrow.” I smile, thinking, “Sure, I guess.” This usually leads to them hustling backwards, “I suppose it’s not work if you enjoy it, right?” Whatever you say mon frère. To be fair, I do like my work, but it’s called work not play for a reason.³ Being misunderstood is many things but at least one part unseen.

Living in this day and age requires a balance of social behavior. Now you see me, now you don’t. I hinge on this concept: I’m adept at being both privately secluded as well as publicly engaged. As the saying goes, To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. I am what needs doing as often as possible. Leaving inconspicuous tracks. Publishing is all about behind the scenes. It’s figuring out unwritten rules. Independent publishing is built on trusting my instincts. I turn to Ralph Ellison again: “What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?”

I tread in lost arts and what some call alternative. I prefer kayaks to motorboats; cross country skiing to snowmobiling; a bicycle not a motorbike. A fuel-efficient car to a 4x4 truck; backwoods to resorts; the speed of saunter; reading a book to a movie, slowly writing, revising and editing; a handsaw to a chainsaw; craft beer to lite beer; imagination to interpretation, clean water to polluted water; prefer to give time, not money …. It can be overwhelming though, so much attention needed and such little time to give. It feels quite defeating to discover there’s little you can do about what you care the most about. By this, I mean to say, my sincerity frequently seems a dead end—> “If you tell [people] they won’t believe you. Believing you entails too much disruption.”⁴ For example, there’s a point at which a lake only looks like a lake. Drum roll toward indifference: not to care if the fish are gone and the beaches are closed to swimming are fine apparently, as long as you can still water ski and party on a pontoon. This hovers at good enough for the majority, or the tyranny of the minority. I can’t figure it out. So often life seems either a mirage or invisible. Dis-information seeping in from ether?

It’s easy to feel a stranger in a strange land when inconvenient truths loiter in holding patterns. Sure, I want to fix things, but once you understand the difficult path toward change it’s easier to just keep talking about change: instead hoping to inspire each another around and round. Inspiration is fairly easy to come by, but literal action much harder. Einstein has a good line on this, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

I’ve been hearing the mantra, “It’s time for a change” most of my life. Things very seldom change. One of my favorite authors, Jim Harrison, wrote a sentiment as follows: It only gradually occurred to me that it’s not people’s problems that interest me, but their solutions to their problems. Precisely. I feel the invisible here, don’t you? How many solutions ever come to fruition? Change requires a Standing By Words mentality. A praxis. Do what you say. There are plenty of examples of this, I like this simple one. Three adults are meeting to go fly fishing at 5:30 am, when the third person hasn’t shown up by 5:33 am, the other two look at each other and say, “Guess they’re not coming. Let’s go.”

I care about my health and my family. I care about the environment and publishing. It would be easier to want less. To drink and play as if there is no tomorrow. The idiocy of live like there’s no tomorrow, right, the only reason we know about tomorrow is because we don’t go around acting like there’s no tomorrow. It’s uncomfortable to have to admit it’s the compounding of time that is life’s great solution. Shortcuts are needed by people who need them. I mean, isn’t the saying the future is like the past only longer. Feeling a bit inaccessible, isn’t it?

Vague whispers hiding from being heard. A cottonwood leaf late in the fall, spinning on a stout stem, starlight deep inside the tree (photo above) alive to the pace of the breeze. Woodpecker echos inside a hollow tree. Water slip sliding around a stone. In and out of time—now and at once toward never again. Then there is this. People are dependent upon us falling for lies, it’s called advertising, beautiful imaging, or marketing. Pulling our heartstrings. A clean-looking farm must surely be creating a spic-and-span world. A president who speaks with a slow southern drawl must be for and of the people. A person who wears overalls is surely devoted to hard work. Someone in black wearing small round spectacles very insightful. Normally, though, things aren’t what they seem.

Okay, back to being a small independent book publisher in the Midwest. I am well aware it’s not work the world rests precariously upon. However, it has allowed me to be the best I can be. I believe what I do has made some wee bit of the world a better place, you know, the butterfly (chaos) effect in action. The power of awe can never be underestimated. For many of us, awe is our survival technique. I start and complete projects because of it. I choose and devise plans of success that seem plausible and then move from start to finish.

It’s not always this complex though. Some things I have learned are supposed to be invisible about publishing. The design of a book, unless it’s a book on design should be inconspicuous as you read. If no one notices the margins, the leading, the type, and the paper you’ve done a good job. The literal shapes of letters should be moved right past. Paragraph indentions inherent information as is a period, a comma, and spelling. Reading between the lines is a necessary skill. I often make notes in a book’s margins, a sort of translation of the space between the lines, right? Comprehending what can’t be seen.

When I venture into remote tracts of land such as the Boundary Waters (BWCWA), the cold shores of Lake Superior, or above tree line in Colorado, the first thing I notice is silence. Shortly after that, I question my own thought. It’s not silence, it’s calm. But it’s not calm either, plenty is a stake within what I consider calm silence. The old phrase, “less is more” comes to mind. But only because I am not attuned to the many details I don’t comprehend, or notice. Silence is a good relative of the invisible. Vengeful even, as the first Ellison quote made clear, “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”

Sitting and reading, simmering quietly, words on a page perform creation. So, it is to be a publisher. It takes time to reach this moment though in a world rushing and hoping for attention and instant fame, ten second videos rife with meta-keywords. To read, at least after public school, is a choice we make. The easiest thing is to stop reading. Every wannabe writer should know this. Reading is not a given. I live and breathe in a profession considered less and less vital every day. I believe if words aren’t enough to hold attention than I have not done my job well.

We talk about 10,000 hours to get proficient at something. The same goes for reading, thinking, sitting, and watching. All things we find curious and interesting, when paying attention, are sacred and inconclusive. As Jim Harrison wrote it’s “the improbable mystery of moving water.” I find this to be true pretty much everywhere I go. Not to ignore what needs to be seen while simultaneously accepting what I can’t see but know to be important.

A last quote from The Invisible Man: “I am standing puzzled, unable to decide whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered more firmly in place; whether I am witnessing a revelation or a more efficient blinding.”

Similarly, I consider this a decent use of book publishing—to find and examine what we might otherwise not know. A good enough antidote in a human world where people seem busy just to be busy, where books are banned, or even worse, available but ignored. Where we are disinformed rather than informed. Where people believe inconvenient truths feel like too much work.

Write (and read) on.

Even though I’m sure Chuck Offenburger looks the other way when he notices, or that Laura Belin rolls her eyes at the very thought of it, I’m a member in good standing, at least as of this writing, of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. Please support our work by sharing and subscribing to the authors below, and consider a paid subscription if you are able:

Nicole Baart: This Stays Here, Sioux Center

Ray Young Bear: From Red Earth Drive, Meskwaki Settlement

Laura Belin: Iowa Politics with Laura Belin, Windsor Heights

Tory Brecht: Brecht’s Beat, Quad Cities

Dartanyan Brown, My Integrated Life, Des Moines

Doug Burns: The Iowa Mercury, Carroll

Jane Burns: The Crossover, Des Moines

Dave Busiek: Dave Busiek on Media, Des Moines

Iowa Writers’ Collaborative, Roundup

Steph Copley: It Was Never a Dress, Johnston

Art Cullen: Art Cullen’s Notebook, Storm Lake

Suzanna de Baca: Dispatches from the Heartland, Huxley

Debra Engle: A Whole New World, Madison County

Daniel Finney, Paragraph Stacker, Des Moines

Arnold Garson: Second Thoughts, Okoboji and Sioux Falls

Julie Gammack: Julie Gammack’s Iowa Potluck, Des Moines and Okoboji

Joe Geha: Fern and Joe, Ames

Jody Gifford: Benign Inspiration, West Des Moines

Rob Gray: Rob Gray’s Area, Ankeny

Nik Heftman: The Seven Times, Los Angeles and Iowa

Beth Hoffman: In the Dirt, Lovilia

Dana James: Black Iowa News, Iowa

Chris Jones, Chris’s Substack, Iowa City

Pat Kinney: View from Cedar Valley, Waterloo

Fern Kupfer: Fern and Joe, Ames

Robert Leonard: Deep Midwest: Politics and Culture, Bussey

Letters from Iowans, Iowa

Darcy Maulsby: Keepin’ It Rural, Calhoun County

Tar Macias: Hola Iowa, Iowa

Alison McGaughey, The Inquisitive Quad Citizen, Quad Cities

Kurt Meyer: Showing Up, St. Ansgar

Vicki Minor, Relatively Minor, Winterset

Wini Moranville: Wini’s Food Stories, Des Moines

Jeff Morrison: Between Two Rivers, Cedar Rapids

Kyle Munson: Kyle Munson’s Main Street, Des Moines

Jane Nguyen: The Asian Iowan, West Des Moines

John Naughton: My Life, in Color, Des Moines

Chuck Offenburger: Iowa Boy Chuck Offenburger, Jefferson and Des Moines

Barry Piatt: Piatt on Politics Behind the Curtain, Washington, D.C.

Dave Price: Dave Price’s Perspective, Des Moines

Steve Semken, The Pulse of a Heartland Publisher, North Liberty

Macey Shofroth: The Midwest Creative, Norwalk

Larry Stone: Listening to the Land, Elkader

Mary Swander: Mary Swander’s Buggy Land, Kalona

Mary Swander: Mary Swander’s Emerging Voices, Kalona

Cheryl Tevis: Unfinished Business, Boone County

Ed Tibbetts: Along the Mississippi, Davenport

Jason Walsmith, The Racontourist, Earlham

Kali White VanBaale, 988: Mental Healthcare in Iowa, Bondurant

Teresa Zilk: Talking Good, Des Moines ….

1. Same As Ever, M. Housel, a worthy line being roughly certainty is the biggest disease the mind faces

2. Neil Postman

3. In the spirit of layers of meaning, someday I’ll do a post on publishing and entrepreneurship in which work is passion, as well as creation, and how livelihood depends solely upon what I do rather than clocking in and following “orders.” aka If I don’t do it, it won’t get done.

4. Barry Lopez, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World, pg272.