about greenboathouse books : jason dewinetz

Jason's editorial statement:

In 1999 I packed up and headed back to the Okanagan for the summer. I hadn't been there for a few years and it was the first time I really paid any notice to the old boathouse down the beach from my family's cabin, both of which had been sitting there for 80 years, hidden amongst the trees - the cabin housing my mother and her sisters, and then my sister and I as we grew up, and the boathouse neglected and hiding a rotten, half-finished cruiser abandoned around 1950.

I don't know why it remained ignored for so long, but it suddenly dawned on me that the boathouse could be transformed into something, into a small room at the edge of the lake where I could relax, read, and maybe get some writing done. So after dragging the carcass of the boat out and setting it aflame, I spent the next few weeks gutting the old building, digging out the dirt floor, putting in a few windows, nailing together a desk from old beach-wood.

During that summer and the reconstruction of the boathouse I spent most of the evenings sitting up reading, and in turn I started writing again, something I hadn't done for a while. Sitting up with a pot of coffee after hours of rye and hammers and sun, finally settling into evening and the sound of the lake a few feet from the window, I ended up sitting down and pulling out a notebook, dating the top of the page, and writing. A lot.

Much of what came out of those evenings at that desk make up the first section of the collection NeWest Press published in the spring of 2002, but the point is that that is also the moment Greenboathouse Books came into existence.

Since then, Greenboathouse has grown into a small collective, hosted five successful reading series, published more than 15 chapbooks, and hosted a poetry archive showcasing some of the best new and established writers in the country.

But it hasn't only been Greenboathouse Books that has grown. In the midst of all this activity, the boathouse itself has gone through some changes as well. During the summer of 2001, while hosting that year's Reading Series, I stripped the boathouse down to its frame, carefully plotting each board's removal, and rebuilt it anew at the other end of the property, raising the roof a foot or two and building in a new floor, a new window, and some great new driftwood front steps. The image in the sidebar shows the boathouse in its new location, yet still at the edge of the lake, and still the best place in the world to write.

I suppose what all this is supposed to amount to is that in starting Greenboathouse Books I wanted to achieve two primary goals: to create a relaxed, informal and creative publishing concern through which to produce attractive chapbooks full of good writing, and also to keep that project growing, changing, and constantly moving towards new challenges of form and content. That's how it started, and that's how I hope it continues.

 

Jason Dewinetz
Editor & Designer

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