Impassio Press is an independent literary press devoted to publishing a variety
of fragmentary writings, with a focus on journals, diaries, and notebooks.
IN PIECESAn Anthology of Fragmentary Writingedited by Olivia Dresher“For more than thirty years, Olivia Dresher has been sifting through diaries, journals, notebooks, letters, aphorisms, and other literary short forms. Because sometimes less is more. But it is only during the last four years, since she founded the Seattle-based Impassio Press in 2002, that she has had her own press dedicated to publishing examples of this kind of fragmentary writing, or frag lit—a term sorely lacking the mellifluousness of that other, slightly more commercially successful genre that is typified by a diary (Bridget Jones’s Diary).... This month, Impassio Press will publish its sixth title—In Pieces, an anthology that features literary nuggets from thirty-seven contemporary writers, including aphorisms by William Stafford.” —Kevin Larimer, senior editor, Poets & Writers Magazine On the surface, the very idea of “fragmentary writing” almost sounds like a contradiction in terms. Shouldn’t any writing be either complete or considered unfinished? What is the value of a “fragment” when a “whole” is clearly the norm? In this new collection, editor Olivia Dresher and over 35 thoughtful and diverse contributors explore fragmentary writing as we glean everything from tiny scraps of intimacy to an abundance of broad ideas—all from sources including journal entries, terse short stories, dreams, poetic exposition, passionate political philosophizing, and quiet yet incisive off-the-cuff single sentences. Although some of the names in the book are less than familiar, In Pieces includes work by poets Yannis Ritsos, Phyllis Koestenbaum, and William Pitt Root. At once playful, introspective, and deadly serious, this collection will alter any notion one might have about the validity of the personal musing, the seemingly “incomplete” and the depths that can be found in the briefest of prose. Olivia Dresher is a publisher, anthologist, and aphorist. Her poetry, essays, and notebook fragments have appeared in a wide variety of magazines and anthologies. She is co-editor of Darkness and Light: Private Writing as Art, an anthology of contemporary journals, diaries, and notebooks. IN PIECES: An Anthology of Fragmentary Writing 
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Publication Date: June 2004 |
Judith Azrael’s latest work, Wherever I Wander, has just been released by Impassio Press. Written between 1979 and 2001, the book is a collection of stories and lyrical essays that chronicle Azrael's experiences as a traveler, a writer, and a spiritual seeker.
Award-winning author Kim Stafford writes, “What if a journey were free of destination? What if friendship with the self kept no score? What if a paragraph were not burdened by a thesis? In Wherever I Wander, words become sensation. Judith Azrael gives us literary fragments like exquisite small meals, a dash of tea, koans to brew within the mind.”
Many of the essays in Wherever I Wander describe the author’s solitary travel to remote Greek islands and to Southeast Asia. Others capture her experiences attending retreats at Buddhist monasteries in Thailand and the western United States, and teaching a creative writing workshop at a prison camp.
Azrael’s collection explores the timeless experiences of sorrow and joy, beauty, and the longing for peace. “Wherever I Wander is mysterious, spellbinding and gentle,” writes poet Sharon Doubiago. “It feels holy to be allowed so deeply into another's soul.”
Wherever I Wander is available at independent bookstores and online retailers, or can be ordered directly from the publisher.
Judith Azrael holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and has taught writing workshops at art centers and colleges. She has published four books of poetry, and her fiction, poetry, and lyrical essays have appeared in numerous anthologies and literary magazines, including Harvard Review, The Nation, Poets & Writers Magazine, The Sun, and The Yale Review.
Impassio Press is an independent publisher of a wide variety of fragmentary writing, and is a member of the Small Publishers Association of North America (SPAN), Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association (PNBA), and Book Publishers Northwest (BPNW). Impassio's books are distributed by Baker & Taylor and Partners/West. For more information, visit www.impassio.com.
Press Release: Traveling Light
IMPASSIO PRESS PUBLISHES Deborah DeWit Marchant’s
Traveling Light: A Photographer’s Journey
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Publication Date: May 2003 |
In Traveling Light, Deborah DeWit Marchant tells the personal story of her life as a photographer and her passionate search to capture the power and mystery of light with her camera. Her poetic prose, combined with 47 of her color photographs, creates an original and engaging memoir.
Writer/photographer Carlos Eyles writes, “Traveling Light is a brilliant work. The highly gifted Deborah DeWit Marchant brings to the reader her exquisite prose, which coalesces with and confirms her stunning photography. This heartfelt treatise of the artist’s journey is a book for those in life dedicated to the discovery of hidden beauty.”
DeWit Marchant takes us on a breathtaking journey across the United States and through such countries as Scotland, France, and Western Australia. Each day is a new sensation, a new search for the mystery of light. “Light is the photographer’s paintbrush,” she writes, and her photographs are the perfect illustration of that simple truth. She photographs landscapes and interiors, each picture filled with an eerie stillness, a pristine innocence, as if we were seeing the world for the first time. She wakes before dawn, afraid that she might miss the perfect light. She stands on the beach on a chilly, wet winter’s afternoon and watches “the sea and sky shift in harmony from grey to silver to blue to cream to yellow to bronze to pink to mauve to orange and then join together and plunge into darkness.”
Traveling Light brings us the gift of one person's perception of light. It is a rainbow of visual colors, a gentle rain of words. By the end of the book, the author comes to realize that she is photographing her inner self, and that the light she seeks is within her. Her travels around the world have been a journey into herself, and with the power of language, she releases the light that is inside her and gives it back to the world.
Deborah DeWit Marchant is a photographer, painter, and writer living outside of Portland, Oregon. She has been exhibiting her work in galleries in the Northwest for over twenty years, and her images have been used on the covers of many books, magazines, and in calendars.
Impassio Press is an independent publisher of fragmentary writing, and is a member of the Small Publishers Association of North America (SPAN), Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association (PNBA), and Book Publishers Northwest (BPNW). Impassio’s books are distributed by Baker & Taylor and Partners/West.
Press Release: Water & Earth
For Immediate Release: October 1, 2002
Contacts: Sandra Berry, PR Consultant; Olivia Dresher, Impassio Press
IMPASSIO PRESS PUBLISHES GUY GATHIER'S WATER & EARTH
Playwright's Journal Explores the Sexually-Charged
New York Scene of the 1970s
SEATTLE—Impassio Press, the first independent publisher dedicated to the establishment of fragmentary writing as a distinct literary genre, today announced the publication of Water & Earth: A Journal (ISBN 0-9711583-2-0, paper, $16.00) by playwright and poet Guy Gauthier.
Water & Earth takes readers inside the thoughts and experiences of a young playwright as he ventures into the sexually-charged New York scene of the 1970s. From Edward Albee's parties at Montauk and graphic sexual encounters with men and women alike to reflections on Catholic philosophy and Andy Warhol's soup cans, the book explores Gauthier's obsession to capture and preserve the moment and to express the inexpressible during perhaps the most socially and politically tumultuous time in contemporary American history.
“I haven't read anything this year as intensely honest, sexy, entertaining and touching as Guy's Gauthier's Water & Earth. Gauthier uses his journal entries as entryways into the teeming life of the mind. He dares to question everything: God, the universe, existence. Gauthier constantly challenges himself to go where few others dare to,” said Bill Kushner, New York poet and author of He Dreams of Waters and That April.
Born and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba in Canada, Gauthier graduated from the University of Manitoba in 1963, where he began writing and publishing plays and poetry. A Canada Council grant took him to New York in 1969, and he subsequently moved to Manhattan permanently, writing a series of plays produced Off-Off Broadway, including Tonto, The Green Man and Red Lady in the Red and Green Ladies Room, and Ego Fatigue. He is also the author of a book of poetry, North of the Temperate Zone (New York: Midnight Sun Press, 1976) as well as Journal 5.1, a personal journal written in French during the 1990s which will be published by Editions du Ble in Winnipeg in 2003.
“Water & Earth is journal writing at its finest and deserves to become a classic,” said Olivia Dresher, founder and publisher of Impassio Press. “Gauthier's writing is fiercely confessional, daring and original. His colorful, improvisational commentaries about himself and the world around him will instantly transport readers back to a time when living itself was seen as a revolutionary act. Even Gauthier's deliberate, unconventional use of punctuation in the journal speaks of his desire to make language itself more expressive and alive within a society he viewed as spiritually bankrupt. We are very proud to include Water & Earth among Impassio's titles.”
About Impassio Press
Founded in 2001, Impassio Press is a Seattle-based independent publisher whose mission is to publish fragmentary writing, especially diaries, journals, notebooks, letters, as well as poetic prose and novels written in fragment form. The press publishes two to three books each year. Impassio Press' titles are distributed by Baker & Taylor and Partners/West, and are available at independent bookstores and through leading online retailers. Impassio is a member of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association (PNBA) and the Small Publishers Association of North America (SPAN). For more information, visit www.impassio.com.
Press Release: This Is How I Speak
For Immediate Release: May 1, 2002
Contacts: Sandra Berry, PR Consultant; Olivia Dresher, Impassio Press
IMPASSIO PRESS PUBLISHES THIS IS HOW I SPEAK
BY SANDI SONNENFELD
Memoir Offers Intimate Look at Grad School Life
at the University of Washington
SEATTLE—Impassio Press today announced the June publication of This Is How I Speak (ISBN:0-9711583-1-2) by Seattle author Sandi Sonnenfeld. This Is How I Speak, a memoir in diary form, recounts the author's first year in the MFA program in fiction writing at the University of Washington. The book is a moving, entertaining and intimate portrait of an ambitious young New York dancer turned writer trying to negotiate love, sex, loss, a bad therapist and endless Seattle rain at one of the nation's leading creative writing programs.
National Book Award Winner Charles Johnson says of the book, “I read This Is How I Speak in a single sitting, captivated by Sandi Sonnenfeld's beautiful and brutally honest odyssey through love, a woman's wounds, literary evolution and yes, even a portrait of the creative writing faculty at the University of Washington in the 1980s. This former prof gives her an A-plus.”
Born and raised in New York, Sonnenfeld is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College and holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Washington, where she was winner of the Loren D. Milliman Writing Scholarship. Her fiction, essays and journalism pieces have appeared in more than 30 publications in the United States and abroad, including Hayden's Ferry Review, Sojourner, Voices West, ACM, Raven Chronicles, as well as in leading business publications such as Harvard Business Review and the Wall Street Journal's National Business Employment Weekly. She is a member of PEN Center West and the Society of Professional Journalists.
Sonnenfeld began keeping a writer's diary in college as a way to explore potential ideas for her fiction, but her work took on a whole new meaning after surviving a sexual assault during graduate school, forcing her to re-examine who she was both as a woman and an artist. Her diary became not only the place where she wrote about her intimate experiences and memories, but where her natural ability to tell a story unfolded, including stories about the people she encountered at the University of Washington.
“Writers often use their diaries and journals as sources for other work,” said Olivia Dresher, publisher and founder of Impassio Press. “But for some authors the diary or journal itself becomes the main work and exists as a valid literary art form of its own. That was the case with This is How I Speak. Sonnenfeld began her diary as a sideline to her fiction writing, but the urgency of her lived life inspired her to turn to the immediacy of the diary form. Rich with drama, her diary is as engrossing to read as a novel. We are delighted to be publishing such a provocative and revealing book.”
This Is How I Speak will be available in bookstores in June or can be ordered directly from the publisher.
About Impassio Press
Founded in 2001 by Olivia Dresher, founder and curator of the Diaries, Journals, and Notebooks Collection at Seattle's Richard Hugo House, Impassio Press is an independent publisher whose mission is to publish fragmentary writing, especially diaries, journals, notebooks, letters, as well as poetic prose and novels written in fragment form. The press publishes two to three titles each year, as well as smaller, alternative size books. Impassio is a member of the Small Publishers Association of North America (SPAN), a national organization of independent publishers and presses. Impassio titles are distributed by Baker & Taylor and are available at independent bookstores and via BookSense.com. For more information or to see Impassio's full list of titles, visit www.impassio.com.
Press Release: One Journal's Life
For Immediate Release: April 11, 2002
Contacts: Sandra Berry, PR Consultant; Olivia Dresher, Impassio Press
IMPASSIO PRESS PUBLISHES AUTHOR'S
TRIBUTE TO HER JOURNAL
One Journal's Life by Audrey Borenstein
Celebrates the Spirit of Journal-Keeping
SEATTLE—Impassio Press, the first independent publisher dedicated to the establishment of fragmentary writing as a distinct literary genre, today announced the publication of One Journal's Life: A Meditation on Journal-Keeping (ISBN 0-9711583-0-4, paper, $10.00) by Audrey Borenstein of New Paltz, New York.
One Journal's Life is the author's love letter to her journal, exploring her many selves and the possibility that her essence as a writer is most fully expressed in her journal.
Gordon Epperson, Professor Emeritus at the University of Arizona and author of The Musical Symbol and other works on the theory and practice of the arts, says, “Audrey Borenstein is a compassionate artist, whose human warmth and deep insight illuminate One Journal's Life. She addresses her Journal as an intimate and trustworthy friend with whom she is sharing her rich resources of mind and spirit. Her voice gives authentic life to these pages.”
Borenstein has been writing and publishing in a variety of literary genres since the 1960s. Her work has appeared in many literary journals, among them Oxalis, Webster Review, Ascent, and in anthologies such as Pioneer Letters. Her nonfiction books include Redeeming the Sin: Social Science and Literature (Columbia University Press) and Chimes of Change and Hours: Views of Older Women in 20th-Century America (Farleigh Dickinson University Press). Borenstein was adjunct professor of sociology at SUNY, New Paltz from 1970 to 1986, when she resigned to devote herself to writing full time. Her awards include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowship.
“Running just 56 pages and rich with allusions and figurative language, One Journal's Life reads more like poetry than prose,” says Olivia Dresher, founder and publisher of Impassio Press. “Though the book's format and approach varies from the more mainstream titles we will publish, we believe this book will strongly resonate with journal writers, poets, and anyone who cares deeply about the contemplative life. We are proud of this exquisite work and glad that it furthers Impassio Press' mandate to publish fragmentary writing in all its forms.”
About Impassio Press
Founded in 2001, Impassio Press is a Seattle-based independent publisher whose mission is to publish fragmentary writing, especially diaries, journals, notebooks, letters, as well as poetic prose and novels written in fragment form. The press plans to publish two to three titles each year, as well as smaller, alternative size books. Impassio Press' titles are available at independent bookstores and through leading online retailers such as Booksense.com. Impassio is a member of the Small Publishers Association of North America (SPAN), a national organization of independent publishers and presses. For more information, visit www.impassio.com.
Press Release: Impassio Press Launches on 11/7/01
For Immediate Release: November 7, 2001
Contacts: Sandra Berry, PR Consultant; Olivia Dresher, Impassio Press
SEATTLE'S IMPASSIO PRESS LAUNCHES WITH THREE TITLES
Impassio Press Dedicated to the Publication of Diaries, Journals, Notebooks and Other Fragmentary Writing
SEATTLE—Writer and editor Olivia Dresher today announced the formation of Impassio Press, the first independent publisher dedicated to establishing fragmentary writing as a distinct literary genre, especially diaries, journals, notebooks and letters, as well as fiction and poetic prose written in fragment form. Dresher, who founded and currently serves as the curator of the Diaries, Journals and Notebooks Collection for the library at the Richard Hugo House literary center in Seattle, has been reading, writing, collecting and publishing fragmentary writing for more than 30 years.
“While many writers utilize journals and notebooks as sources for other work, for some authors the journal or diary itself is the main work and exists as a valid literary art form of its own,” said Dresher. “Impassio Press is not interested in journals or diaries which simply serve as tools for personal enrichment or self-help. Instead, we will discover and publish writers whose inner lives are already so rich that they spill out into their notebooks. Impassio seeks writing which is provocative and revealing, offering insights into the self and the world.”
Impassio Press plans to publish two to three titles each year. The first book slated for publication in March 2002 is One Journal's Life: A Meditation on Journal-Keeping by Audrey Borenstein of New Paltz, New York, a shorter-length book that is the author's love letter to her journal, exploring her many selves and the possibility that her essence as a writer is most fully expressed in her journal. The two full-length titles scheduled for 2002 are This is How I Speak: The Diary of a Young Woman by Sandi Sonnenfeld of Seattle, an intimate portrait of a young woman's first year in the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Washington and Water & Earth: A Journal by Guy Gauthier of New York City, which captures the author's experiences as a fledgling playwright in the sexually-charged Manhattan of the 1970s.
Prior to founding Impassio Press, Dresher worked as a freelance editor as well as an editor at the University of Washington. She is the co-editor of Darkness and Light: Private Writing as Art (iUniverse: 2000), an anthology of contemporary journals, diaries and notebooks. It was Dresher's experience of working on the anthology that prompted her to found Impassio Press.
“When I was looking for a publisher for Darkness and Light, I was very disheartened by how closed the established presses were to non-traditional literary forms. While independent publishers now account for 30 percent of all trade books sold, I've seen too many quality small presses fold over the years as the mainstream houses squeeze out their smaller colleagues. My goal is to bring something new to small press publishing, while also helping to keep alive the spirit of freedom and diversity that small press publishing offers.”
In addition to Dresher, a financial and legal consultant as well as a part-time PR and marketing manager to help promote book sales will staff the press. The press is working with an assortment of freelance book designers, layout artists and printers. Impassio Press is a member of the Small Publishers Association of North America (SPAN), a national organization of independent publishers and presses.