Editor in Residence
Greetings All,
It’s your editor in residence, Emma Holt, here. That’s me standing there with the mop of curly hair trying to look all rebellious in my green army jacket from Old Navy. Behind me is a picture of Jack Kerouac. When I was sixteen years old this man was my hero.
He founded the Beat Generation.
For those not familiar with the Beats they were a group of bohemian poets and writers (mostly male) who challenged the literary conventions and cultural mores of 1950s America. They forged a counter-culture revolution fuelled by poetry, art, sex, drugs, wine, spiritualism and jazz music.
They were rebels. Better yet, they were educated rebels who loved to write poetry and prose. Best of all, that poetry and prose contained words like “fuck” and “cock” and “cunt.” I had never seen words like that written in books before. Especially, books I could check out from the library. I was in love.
After reading Kerouac’s On the Road, my eyes were opened to a world that was a billion light years away from the one I was living in my parents’ quiet suburban home in southern Ontario. I couldn’t get enough of reading about this strange, exotic place where men and women sat around coffee houses, smoking joints, listening to jazz music and discussing books and writing. No one I knew in real life did these things. But at sixteen, it’s all I wanted to do.
It was never meant to be. Simply put, I was living in the wrong city and the wrong era.
Flash forward to the present.
I may no longer be sixteen and this may not be a coffee house in San Francisco but Publish and be Damned is bigger and better than anything I could have conceived of during those lonely years of searching for kindred spirits who shared the same passion for words and writing that I held. For the first time in my life I feel like I’m among people who speak the same language as I do.
I feel like I’m home.
