RECOVERY MISSION 2020

Help the Operating System recover costs from AWP and Whale Prom!

This year, we took a major leap as a result of community voting to invest in a Booth, at a cost of almost $1000. Because we commit to having at least some copies of all of our 100+ books represented, in a sort of “showcase” model, we printed copies expressly for both AWP and Whale Prom, and shipped 15 boxes to meet us at AWP. I designed, produced, and paid for new notebooks to sell as a fundraising effort, and printed 500 new postcards. Then of course there’s the flights, the housing, and the car in TX — all told, about $3000 for the OS, which we hoped we could come close to recovering, at least… our goal is always to stay in the green, even if not to profit. This all, of course, represents hundreds of hours in planning and coordination, hours not spent on countless other things.

Whether or not there would be a table at AWP this year, and whether or not Peter and I (primed to fly to Austin, drive to San Antonio, pick up books from the family of an author, set up, coordinate and set up the reading, etc etc) would still go, even as countless authors and other presses cancelled their attendance, has been a complicated, fraught decision.

We decided we could not make it based on costs, even though the losses would be great. We also decided we needed to make sure our feelings of obligation to our authors and to the community were not outweighing making a safe decision about our and others’ health.

For us, it ultimately came down to a numbers game: which is to say that Peter and I are from New York, where there are also cases of COVID-19, and where neither of us are in a position to self-quarantine. Commuting daily on NYC subways alone, full of travellers from all over the country and the world, is a condition where potential exposure is impossible to control, at a scale far higher than we would encounter on this trip. As vectors for potential contagion, being alone in a car in Texas, in airbnbs, and not really moving from our table in the Bookfair (where we will have gloves and disinfectant wipes and hand sanitizer), we reasoned that the math checked out for it potentially making us less of a risk than encountering the number of people we encounter daily in New York. That might not be true for people whose personal environments are more of a closed system, and the logic many are using for their own and their communities health is 100% sound, but this made sense, for us.

What this means is that a super skeletal few of a previously incredibly robust crew will be at AWP, in some fashion, but we may not do the whole fair. We may not spend many hours at the Bookfair, to reduce number of hours in a large shared space. We may pack up early if anyone feels at all uncomfortable. Our booth is #1752, but from the 700+ booths there’s so many cancellations those numbers are going to change as they shift the floorplan accordingly.

But also what it means is that recovering costs will be nearly impossible. And also that this time in the year when our decentralized community gets to see each other, something we draw on energetically for the year to come, has been fractured and turned into something stressful and costly for both the organization and individual authors. So we’re trying to do it online.

Below, find the titles released since AWP 2019, in reverse chronological order.

[translated from the Faroese by Matthew Landrum]

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