Everyone recognizes the traditional hushed envelope of silence maintained in a library for the benefit of scholarly concentration. But have you noticed that it also seems to have stuck like a ghostly, repressive force to the books themselves? Maybe it’s the intimidating arrangement of books—towering overhead in gleaming, orderly rows, or in the case of used bookstores: crammed, stacked, piled and levered into every available inch with the occasional goblin-eyed cat dozing atop like some supernatural bibliomancer. Perhaps that thing that makes us quiet around books is the realization of the sheer number of them that exist, and that we could never possibly hope to read all of them— and reading is, after all, a lonely and silent act.

Or, is it?

Liz Lisle and Tavia Stewart-Streit at Watchword Press have been setting an alternate example: rather than approach the literary canon as if it were the ashes of great thoughts filed away in a mausoleum, they are firing the can(n)on, as it were: lighting a spark under the belletristic powder keg, or in other words, making a ruckus. That ruckus is Whole Story, an annual performance involving writers, visual artists, dancers, musicans, actors and others who create unique art in response to a story selected by Watchword Press.

Watchword Press was founded in 1999 by Danielle Jatlow on the premise that emerging writers who had little or no chance at securing mainstream representation should have an opportunity to have their work published. In its first few years, Watchword specialized in Eastern European authors in translation, and new and emerging American authors. From 2001 to 2005, Liz Lisle worked closely with Jatlow on the press, eventually taking over when Jatlow moved to New York to pursue social work. In 2007, Tavia Stewart-Streit joined Lisle, and together they launched the Whole Story aspect of the press. “A magazine is a tough thing to keep going,” Lisle explains, “especially when the community that supports it is ever-changing. What Whole Story did was create a performance event, which helped the financial wheels keep turning, but more importantly, it kept the experience alive. It wasn’t just people sitting at home alone on a couch reading a literary magazine, it was in a gallery space, with performers.” Stewart-Streit adds, “You’re not just responding to art with words, you’re responding to words with art.”

Stewart-Streit says the idea for Whole Story came in part from a piece she wrote and decided to turn into a small zine. When she asked an artist she knew to illustrate it, she was blown away when the artist found things in the story she hadn’t even realized were there. Wheels began to turn: what if a musician were given the story? A dancer? How would different artists react to the same piece of work? What would they create in response, and what if they could get together in a gallery space and see one another’s responses at one community event? The answer is Whole Story 1: After the Flood, Whole Story 2: A Concordance of One's Life, and Whole Story 3: The Notecards: A Living Museum. The success of the Whole Story events can be seen in the response from artists, writers, and the community: each event drew from 30-40 contributing artists and packed the gallery spaces during the performances. Watchword Press is still looking for the right manuscript for Whole Story 4, to be enjoyed live and at full volume later this year.

The effect of the Whole Story events on Watchword Press has been extremely positive. “This has given us a chance to go in a different direction with the press,” Lisle says, “it is very hard to sustain a magazine that publishes several writers in each issue. As an editor, you don’t get to develop a long-term relationship with writers when you are only working with one or two pages of their work for a single issue of a journal. We are going to take a break for a little while from publishing the literary magazine and focus on supporting and distributing a full book from a single author for a couple of years and see how that goes.” Watchword Press’ first single-author book, Artifacts, by Britta J. Austin, was released in January 2010. Check it out, and stay tuned for Whole Story 4.

posted by LJ Moore editor(dot)moore(at)gmail(dot)com

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