About a week ago in San Francisco, a few ambitious writers, editors, and designers (from publications like Dwell and Wired) gathered in the offices of Mother Jones to put together 48 Hour Magazine, an experiment in using crowdsourced tools to erase media’s old limits. The project involved writing, photographing, illustrating, designing, editing, and shipping a glossy magazine in a mere two days, as well as putting forth a transparent funding structure. The theme was, appropriately, hustle, and the inaugural 60-page issue is now available from self-publishing service MagCloud. I love the emphasis on both web-based tools and a printed end product. Hustle over here and get a copy.

Experimentation is alive in other corners of the literary world as well. Erinrose Mager and Ben Segal are assembling a book of blurbs about books that don’t exist, titled The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature. They’re accepting submissions through July 15, so if you’d like to blurb a fake book, now’s your chance. Willows Wept Press will publish the Catalog in a limited edition.

Brooklyn-based indie publisher LoudMouth Press recently released a book based on a project by artists Carla Repice and Geoff Cunningham, titled The Office of Blame Accountability. Beginning in 2007, Repice and Cunningham—acting as Blame Accountants—set up a table, a typewriter, and a red telephone at such places as Ground Zero, Wall Street, and the Republican and Democratic National Conventions. They invited passersby to fill out Blame Forms (I blame:______ for: ______. My role: ______) or voice grievances into the red phone, in hopes that these acts would afford the opportunity for catharsis and reflection—and maybe even inspire action. The book, subtitled A Compendium of American Finger Pointing, collects all kinds of blaming scenarios, from major injustices to everyday minutiae.

Here’s another opportunity for writing something potentially cathartic (or at least fun): the Letters with Character project, in which you compose a letter to your favorite fictional character. The particularly great submissions are published on this here blog. Check out the ones already posted, such as the letter to Gatsby (of The Great Gatsby), to Seymour (A Perfect Day for Bananafish), and to Cathy (Wuthering Heights). They’re clever, hilarious, rambling, succinct, and just generally awesome.

Also in the experimental category (I think I’m just gonna go ahead and declare this National Literary Experiments Month): Independent arts magazine White Fungus recently relocated to Taichung, Taiwan, from Wellington, New Zealand, and released an eye-popping 11th issue. And have you checked out the new(ish) online journal Cerise Press? A collaborative effort between three French and American editors, it features poetry, prose, photos, artwork, reviews, interviews, and translations (with an emphasis on French and Francophone works). C’est magnifique!

Another new journal of poetry and prose, Little Star, was recently born. The first issue gleams with the talents of Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Lydia Davis, Padget Powell, Mary Jo Salter, among others. Edited by Ann Kjellberg, a former editor of the New York Review of Books, Little Star is poised to have no small impact.

Lastly, if you like to hang out in the Twitterverse, you should definitely follow some famous literary characters. I particularly recommend edgar_allan_poe (sample tweet: My most beloved iPhone app is the one that transmogrifies my phone into a bottle of absinthe.) and halfpintingllas, the Twitter account of Laura Ingalls Wilder (Folks really ought to keep their hands off their blackberries while driving. Leave them in the pail! You can eat them when you get home!). I’m not much of a Twitterer, but I love these little tweets from the prairie and from beyond the grave.

Photo by Flickr user su-lin

Some of the publishers I spoke with were branching out into digital formats, while others aimed to kindle interest in books better than a Kindle™ ever could. Whatever their approach, they all demonstrated a propensity for outside-the-box thinking. I interviewed Jen Loy and Kaya Oakes of the late, great Kitchen Sink magazine; Johnny Temple of the adventurous Akashic Books; and the creative minds behind Small Beer Press, Green Lantern Press, and Mule magazine (among others). I spotlighted the literary magazine and press Tin House, located in Portland and New York, and the Zurich-based publishing house Nieves, which specializes in good-looking limited edition zines and artist books.

Rather than revive that column, I’m preserving the literary theme and launching a new recurring feature, “Pressing Issues,” in which I’ll share a selection of news and notes about small presses, periodicals, and other bookish goings-on. Feel free to chime in: If you have any interesting literary news/notes/events of your own to add, please do so in the Comments section or email me at laura@laura-pearson-net. Onto the pressing issues…

Poised to baffle, muse, and bemuse, the legendary Chicago-based cultural and political magazine, The Baffler, is back. Founded in 1988 and published until 2007, the magazine reemerged in Jan. 2010 with Vol 2, Issue No 1. In this humdinger of an issue, the eds. declare, “…We are losing our faculties of inquiry at precisely the moment when public-minded scrutiny of our institutions is most needed,” going on to promise “a strong dose of our particular brand of scoffing: Strong ideas, elegantly expressed.” Reminds me of George Saunders’ essay, “The Braindead Megaphone,” in which G.S. proposes a remedy for shallow and sensationalistic mass media: “Every well thought-out rebuttal to dogma, every scrap of intelligent logic, every absurdist reduction of some bullying stance is the antidote.” The antidotal issue is available in stores and via subscription. (I got mine at Powell’s.)

Paul Harding just won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his debut novel Tinkers, an elegiac story of a clock repairman on his deathbed. It was published by Bellevue Literary Press, a teeny indie operation located in a tiny office in New York’s Bellevue Hospital Center. It’s the first small press to put out a Pulitzer-winning novel since 1981, when Louisiana State University Press published A Confederacy of Dunces. Turns out that “books at the intersection of the arts and sciences” are just what the doctor (and Pulitzer committee) ordered!

Speaking of small presses, last month was Small Press Month, and in case you missed it, the Chicago Tribune’s book blog, Printers Row, spotlighted a variety of local presses, including Agate, Haymarket, and Flood Editions. Works by these publishers (and tons more) are available for perusal in the newly expanded Publishers Gallery in the lobby of the Chicago Cultural Center.

April is National Poetry Month, and in celebration, CA-based independent bookstore, Diesel, is posting a video poem each day. Palm trees and Rumi, anyone? Meanwhile, the Academy of American Poets has launched Poem on the Range, a collaborative multimedia-mapping project in which people upload and geotag videos of poetic pilgrimages, landmarks, and roadside ephemera. Maybe someone could do a video recitation of Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” while standing by the company lost & found. Or how about an Anne of Green Gables-esque recreation of “The Lady of Shalott”? An endless range of possibilities, people.

Moving on…South End Press, formerly based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, moved to a new HQ in Brooklyn. The 32-year-old indie has opened an editorial office at Medgar Evers College (CUNY) and will partner with the school’s Center for Black Literature and the DuBois Bunch Center for Public Policy to sustain and grow SEP publishing initiatives. Also check out SEP’s other cool sustainability effort, Community Supported Publishing.

Other publishers have opted to go digital. According to the Media Bistro blog, eBookNewser, Graywolf Press and Melville House are among some indie presses that plan to release frontlist titles (and a bit of backlist) as eBooks.

David Shields’ collage-y, controversial manifesto Reality Hunger was published by Knopf last month, but did you know that before that, it was serialized in the fledgling literary journal Knee-Jerk? F’reals.

Those hungry for dessert, rather than reality, participated in the Seattle Edible Book Festival on April 10. This idea is so awesome: Participants make literary-themed culinary creations—food like The Bun Also Rises, Curd Vonnegut, and S’more and Peace—and are awarded prizes for “Most Pun-derful,” “Most Appetizing,” etc. My friend Kate, one of the organizers, posted some photos from last year’s fest.

This summer Chicago Artists Resource, a project of the Chicago Dept. of Cultural Affairs (full disclosure: I work for CAR) launches a new literary component, featuring Artist Stories (essays by writers, publishers, and other lit-minded people), informative articles, and links to opportunities and resources. If you live in/around Chicago, consider participating by emailing ideas or submitting an Artist Story. (Email literary@chicagoartistsresource.org).

We just learned the meaning of “hypocorism” and “couvade,” thanks to this list of all the words David Foster Wallace circled in his dictionary. It comes courtesy of the Ransom Center, the research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin, which now houses the DFW archive. From “Viking Poem,” composed when he was six or seven years old, to obsessively annotated copies of Cormac McCarthy and John Updike books, the archive is sure to foster additional interest in the late writer.

Check back next month for still more pressing issues.

This latest installment of Preserving Our Independents doesn’t feature an official small publisher (as has been the case in past installments) but rather a small publishing venture. And just like the presses previously featured, this project uses a DIY approach to pursue admirable initiatives.

Are you aware of the incredible adaptations of cephalopods? Or that scientists have discovered a special virus that kills harmful bacteria in hot dogs? Do you know that people use different sets of muscles to create fake smiles and genuine smiles? Maybe these facts are new to you; maybe you learned some of them in school. Or maybe you were riding the train the other day and happened upon a little zine that cleverly explained some of these scientific curiosities.

In the latter case, you might have stumbled upon a publication from the Small Science Collective, a public education project that aims to put scientific information in the hands of non-scientists. The collective accomplishes this by publishing one-page zines and pamphlets on a range of enlightening topics—everything from smiles and cephalopods to stem cells and pheromones—and then distributing them in public spaces: at coffee shops, on park benches, inside the sugar packet containers at restaurants, between the pages of in-flight magazines.

The zines are written and designed by Small Science Collective founder Andrew Yang, as well as fellow scientists, friends, and his students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where Yang teaches courses in biology and the intersection of art and science. The idea originated when Yang was a student himself, and he kept finding Chick tracts—little illustrated booklets designed to be evangelistic tools—popping up around campus, particularly in the building where he was doing his graduate studies in evolutionary biology.

“I think the cleaning staff might have been putting them around surreptitiously—trying to convert our wayward souls to their view of things,” Yang says. But while he took issue with the content and intent of these booklets, he still considered them interesting on an aesthetic level. “Although the tracts can be pretty ridiculous, I have never picked one up that I haven’t read through. As little comics, they are really compelling and kind of beautiful objects,” Yang says.

Yang already had an interest in zines and handmade brochures as a way of disseminating ideas, but he was frustrated that science information wasn’t being disseminated as widely or earnestly as these religious stories. Yang began discussing these issues with a friend, astrophysicist Jeff Oishi. Both wondered how useful, interesting, and educational science could be communicated. “Science as an institution does a very bad job at educating people about its concerns, its findings, and how science works,” Yang says. “It strikes me as strange that as significant as it is, science doesn’t penetrate the everyday lives we lead, and…is often restricted to very formal venues, like the textbook, the museum, the standardized font.”

For these reasons, Yang eventually started making science zines with his students at the Art Institute. In this way, students who were already adept at combining visual and narrative content and thinking about ideas creatively could learn about science topics by actually communicating about science.

“There is this whole other issue about who gets to communicate science, how experts and teachers appear to be the ones exclusively with that authority,” Yang says. “But that lack of personal agency is so much of the problem of why people don’t engage with science or technology and feel helpless and daunted by it.”

The one-page zines certainly encourage engagement and discovery, and they do so with a sense of wonder and often a sense of humor. Some zines are typed; many are handwritten. Some contain field drawings and illustrated diagrams; others incorporate old sepia-toned photographs, comics, and collage. All of them present facts and scientific tidbits in an entertaining, easy-to-understand format.

There’s a zine about evolutionary biology called Snake Legs and Wisdom Teeth, which was designed to look like one of the aforementioned Chick tracts, and a publication titled simply Ants, which shares facts about such fascinating types of ants as the honeypot ant, leafcutter ant, and weaver ant. The Mini Book of Sexual Selection explains different traits in animals that contribute to their reproductive success, and Hole in Yer Head identifies the various uh, holes in our heads that make sensory experience possible.

Whatever the topic discussed therein, each zine attempts to explain scientific concepts and discoveries to people who might not otherwise be exposed to (or independently pursue) such information. In so doing, the collective hopes that everyone, particularly non-scientists and non-specialists, will feel empowered to learn more. “When folks spot me on the train dropping [the zines] around, it starts conversations and sparks curiosity,” says Yang. “In that sense, it isn’t exclusively an ‘anonymous’ format; it also provides a lot of opportunity to connect with people.”

And that’s what this publishing venture is all about: starting conversation, sparking curiosity. Via simple, easily distributable zines and pamphlets, the Small Science Collective is helping people more actively engage in their world. For copies of the zines, visit the SSC website and simply download, print, and fold the publications of your choice.