About

History

I began Errant Pigeon Press to publish myself. This is how it happened.

In 2009, when my grandfather died, I gathered together a number of poems from the previous couple of years, some of which dealt with his experience of decline, others with our family’s experience gathering in Wisconsin to put his ashes to rest. Trying to better understand this man, Arthur Anderson, I read all I could find of his writing—memoir pieces from a continuing education course he’d once taken, sermons, letters. I adapted several fragments of those writings, putting them into conversation with my poems. I wrote more, from the perspective of the world without him in it, without the other half of the connection I’d always felt with him. The resulting long poem, completed the following year, was a milestone for me: a sustained work on one subject, something real and true. It was solid, a thing in itself, a thing I felt needed to stand on its own. It should be a chapbook, I realized—but I didn’t want to enter this work in a contest. I didn’t want to send it out for a reading period and wait for its acceptance or rejection. I wanted it published the way I wanted it published, with control over cover and design—and, because I thought of the chapbook as a gift, in part, to my (my grandfather’s) family, I wanted it done according to my own timeline. It became clear to me that I needed to do it myself. With encouragement from David Groff, my then-professor in the City College of New York MFA program, I went for it. I bought ten ISBN numbers and a saddle stapler. I became a publisher.

Publishing There Was a Gathering Darkness was deeply satisfying. It was a good use of my somewhat eccentric (errant?) skillset. Picking up the finished book, I felt its wholeness. It felt good.

Since that first book, Errant Pigeon has grown slowly, taking on other projects as they arise. So far, the authors have been people close to me, whose sensibilities and whose priorities for their work I know align with mine. But it is my hope that others—writers for whom Errant Pigeon is a good fit—will find it.

--Melanie Klein, Editor    

MELANIE KLEIN is, in variable order, a writer, visual artist, and community college English professor. She is active in the Visual Poets, a 5-person art-making group based in Poughkeepsie, NY, and is a managing editor of The Red Wheelbarrow of Rutherford, NJ. With Anne Gorrick, she co-founded the Process to Text reading series and co-curated it for its first three years. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the City College of New York; an MA in English from California State University, Hayward (now East Bay); and an MFA in Sculpture from Stanford University. She lives in Poughkeepsie and in Canajoharie, NY.