As Al shared personal stories intimately tied with Unicorn’s history, I learned about one of Thich Nhat Hanh’s early visits to the United States, courtesy of Unicorn. (The press published four of Nhat Hanh’s poetry collections, plus a novel in their journal). Cry of Vietnam was published with support from a National Endowment for the Arts grant. Unicorn was a early recipient of the program. 

Al also shared about Philip Levine’s work. The press published 5 Detroits, which included the poem, “They Feed They Lion.” That poem would one day bring Andrew into Al’s world. Click the audio above to hear that story. 

I heard Al’s stories about Philip Levine just weeks before Levine passed away (Feb 14, 2015). I learned that Al met Phil in Santa Barbara during Thich Nhat Hanh’s poetry reading. With the Vietnam war raging, and with many of the white, middle class audience having never encountered a real Vietnamese, much less one who was a monk donned in an orange robe and with a shaved head, Phil turned to Al and said, “How can we kill people with such beautiful language?” How could we so easily dehumanize a civilization that produced such poetry from someone like Nhat Hanh? 

Phil served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2010-2011. 

Unicorn Press was instrumental in raising generations of poets who would grow up to become literary giants. The press engaged writers who mirrored its mission of spiritual, political, and civic engagement.

Producing this podcast challenged me in several ways. Every story Al shared shimmered with so much historical anecdotes that I lamented having to put any of it aside. Al’s marriage to Teo is an episode into itself. He was 19 years old when he met her; she was much older, not Jewish, five times divorced. They established Unicorn Press together, and the press is a testament to their relationship as well as their commitment to carving out powerful literary space in American society.

Al -- a former resident of Gotham Books, a writer, a book maker -- turns the press over to Mr. Andrew Saulters in January of 2016. The fellow on the bike takes flight. The legacy will continue.

I grew up in the rural South, the old kind of South that spawned Flannery O’Connor and Truman Capote: a humid, gothic world seeped in religion and ritual. The landscape included large patches of farmland, open spaces, and family homesteads. Like many who grew up in rural areas, my reading arrived through school libraries and Scholastic book fairs. One of the most significant events of my formative years occurred in seventh grade. The school librarian granted me access to her secret stash of books, the ones she deemed too controversial for the shelf, because she felt that I was a “mature enough reader.”

There were no bookstores except for the one sixty miles away in the mall. The mall!

When your world is acreage of wide spaces filled with familial geographies, you don’t ponder the links between literature, communities and Third Place. There is too much place to imagine conceived limits or contested narratives. Thus, my childhood was just that –- a collection of wide open spaces in a small world.

I was nineteen years old and in college before I entered my first independent bookstore. I discovered Ruby Fruit Books in Tallahassee, Florida, an iconic establishment celebrating LGBT voices. They sold other books, as well, but not the kind shelved in the mall's bookstore. I remember how the bells jingled on Ruby Fruit’s doors, as if announcing entrance to a different dimension wherethe rules of mass culture were suspended-- taunted even -- in pursuit of a different type of authenticity.

Independent bookstores play a vibrant and important role in American literary culture. Yet, I had to leave America to really understood the importance of such spaces. In 2001, I moved to Azerbaijan where English language books were hard to find and exorbitant in price. How gracious it felt when a small bookstore opened in Baku and I purchased my first Harry Potter books, about a year behind the rest of the world, as my belly swelled in anticipation of my son’s birth. This was right after September 11th. I desperately needed fiction and magic to make sense of a world gone mad. The bookstore (and poetry circle) provided a meeting space for expats to create community at a time reality started shaking with earth-sized uncertainty. 

Thank goodness for the bookstores that greeted me in The Kingdom of Bahrain during the mid-2000s. These spaces were often dominated by British reading tastes; a different county, a new reading list. Bookstores helped Bahraini author, Ali Al Saeed, became a regional superstar, These spaces also supported my brilliant friend, artist Phoebe Boswell, and her work, Bahrainona.

My relationships to bookstores changed with the release of my first book in 2011. Now back in the United States, I sat in the aisles of my local big box bookstore in disbelief as I eyed my book on the shelf. But the biggest thrill arrived when friends texted to share of sightings in unusual places: a small New England bookstore or a copy in Denver’s Tattered Cover. Making it into those kinds of spaces meant something different --  that some type of care had gone into their journey.

When I decided to launch A Little Podcast, I wanted an excuse to have conversations about things that I found intellectually exciting. Brian Lampkin, bookseller, poet, and one owner of Scuppernong Book’s, seemed like an inspired first choice. I have a soft spot for anyone formerly associated with Seattle’s Left Bank Books, thanks to anarchist leanings during my undergrad years in Toledo, Ohio. Brian also established Buffalo, New York’s Rust Belt Books. He never envisioned that he’d find his way to the South, much less behind the counter of another bookstore. But he did. Scuppernong Books opened late 2013, and Greensboro is all the better because of it.

This first episode isn’t just about Scuppernong Books. A bookseller as experienced as Brian eloquently illuminates the importance of independent bookstores to a city’s intellectual life, and why writers – and communities -- need such spaces. 

The act of reading and writing is the mother vine of culture. In the beginning was the Word.

So let's start this journey. 

Music used in this podcast complies with open source, free use, and/or attribution-non-commercial licenses: 

David Byrne, "My Fair Lady, " WIRED CD. Rip. Sample. Mash. Share 

Falken,"Learning to Forget”

Atom Wrath, “Morphism” and “Alarm” from THE HEAP