Odds and Ends from the Publisher’s Desk

When I put together my list of tasks for my summer research leave yesterday, I realize that I hadn’t shared quite as much of my current work in publishing as I had hoped. 

The first one is a book of poetry which will appear as a collaboration between NDQ and The Digital Press. Songs of the Bunch Grass Acres is a collection of poems written by Clell Gannon and published in 1924. The goal of republishing this work is to recognize its centennial and to shine some attention on the work of this prairie poet. We also want to bring attention to “Midwestern Modernism” and show how regional voices, like NDQ, contributed to larger cultural currents. We have generous support from the Northern Plains Heritage Foundation to support cover design and copy editing. My Practicum in Editing and Publishing Class was responsible for elements of book design, some editing, and some elements of project management.

We’ve been trying to clean up the 1924 publication of the Gannon book and give it a bit more of a contemporary look without making it feel too current. The class identified a wonderful font to use for the text: LD Genzsch Antiqua. One of the students is cleaning up the line work (and more on that later in the summer) and that is giving us a bit more flexibility in our page design and a chance to to highlight Gannon’s art. You can see a few pages from the original below: 

Another project piece that has not appeared on this blog (as near as I can tell) is the cover for David Pettegrew’s epic Corinthian Countrysides: Linked Open Data and Analysis from the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey. This, I think, is our final cover design:

Summer Work

I’ve started to call my summer “research leave” to help my focus on doing what I need to do and to avoid getting complacent. This summer will he hectic, in a fun way, with a few different projects rubbing shoulders with one another and it help me develop a bit of stamina for what will likely be a busy fall and winter semesters.

For those of you who wonder how the average academic spends their research leave. Here’s what I’ll be up to.

1. “Teaching as a Response to a Campus Crisis”: This paper is due August 1, but I have a substantially complete draft of the text. I think I’ll send a draft of it to a couple buddies who have endured campus budget crises in their day and see what I can do to make it stronger and more useful. I don’t have a ton of time to work on this either this summer or when I get home. I’m hoping that I can be efficient.

2. “Mobilizing the Archaeological Report for the Future Interpretive Community: Linked Open Data, Analysis, and Publication”: This is a coauthored paper with David Pettegrew for the Journal of Field Archaeology. I think we’ll work a bit on it when we’re together this summer in Greece, but most of the work on this will have to wait until September. A manuscript for review will be due September 26th, I think. So we have some time!

3. Polis I: We’ve recently learned that we need to submit the first volume of our work at Polis on Cyprus to press by the end of December (so let’s say, December 1) or risk losing funding. This is adding a much needed injection of stress to our summer work on Cyprus, but it is what it is, and fortunately, we’re close to having our part of this volume complete. In fact, most of what we need to do is the fun stuff: re-read what we’ve written and give it a bit more polish and refinement. First thing is first, though, and that’s producing a proposal for the first two volume and getting them accepted.

4. PKAP II: ARRGGGHHH… this is our long simmering second PKAP volume which is 96% done. Seriously. 96%. It is so close to being done that we could reasonably send it out for review before the end of the summer, but it has gone from being the wolf closest to the sled to just another wolf in the forest. This is less than ideal from my perspective, since I invested a good bit of energy in this volume this fall and spring, but the risk of long simmering projects is that while they might produce the richest sauce in the end, they also risk being forgotten.

5. Larnaka Sewage System pottery: This is one of those OPP (Other People’s Pottery) projects that has a spring deadline for publication. We started the work this past summer and spent some time during the “non-research leave season” collecting bibliography and strategizing how to publish this salvage material in a meaningful and efficient way. We have two weeks in Larnaka to finish our work on this material and put together some kind of very rough draft of an article to submit in the spring. 

6. Slavic Pottery from Isthmia: Last summer, we started a project to study and contextualize the Slavic pottery from Isthmia. I think our first season was moderately productive. We not only studied the material from the Roman Bath (and framed some small additional research questions), but we also came to understand both the potential and challenges of working with Isthmia data and ceramics. This summer we plan to look beyond the Roman Bath, particularly to contexts associated with the Justinianic Fortress and use these to check our contexts and typologies developed from the material from the Roman Bath. My feeling is that we’re yet another season away from producing a significant publication of this material, but we should know more or less what we want to say by the end of this summer. 

7. Hexamilion Wall Exploration Project. This is a made up name for the work that David Pettegrew and I plan to do to document what might well be some new sections of the Hexamilion Wall. We received a permit to clear some vegetation and to do some documentation and we’ll just have to see what we find. I’m optimistic. What could be very interesting is if we can connect this work with the work we’re doing with the ceramics and stratigraphy at Isthmia.

8. Publishing Work: This summer is a summer of FIVE books, I think. The Corinthian Countryside, Wild Drawing: Street Art in Perspective, The Muslims of Darürrahat, Big Pandemic on the Prairie: The Spanish Flu in North Dakota, and Clell Gannon’s Songs of the Bunchgrass Acres. I’ve never had this many irons in the fire, but I’m very excited about this bumper crop of titles scheduled to appear this fall. I’m already beginning to think of ways to market this! 

9. The Slow Cooker. This fall, I’ve agreed to give a paper on my “slow cooker” idea of “Black Pseudoarchaeology.” Fortunately it is only a 10 minute paper as part of a larger workshop on Pseudoarchaeology at the ASOR annual meeting. Hopefully this gets me back to work on my next book project which will be a short book on pseudoarchaeological ideas and Black culture with particular focus on Black spiritual traditions, music, and literature. It’ll offer an alternate view to the whitewashing of the pseudoarchaeological discourse and hopefully encourage archaeologists to tread a bit more lightly when they encounter pseudo-science and pseudoarchaeological ideas in the wild. 

10. The Deep Freeze. Finally, I have a few ideas that have been shunted into the deep freeze for now. These are mostly digital projects especially related to our work at Polis. I would love, for example, to build out a digital framework and standards for publishing the archaeological data from Polis. We got a start on it may years ago so this wouldn’t be de novo. 

Paper Proposal: Mobilizing the Archaeological Report for the Future Interpretive Community: Linked Open Data, Analysis, and Publication

As a bit of lark David Pettegrew and I submitted the following abstract to the Journal of Field Archaeology for their 50th anniversary volume. According to the call for proposals, they’re looking for papers that consider “what inspires researchers to do their best work?” The longer I spend in the field of archaeology, the less I’m moved by inspiration and more by professional responsibility and a sense of obligation to the next generation of scholars (this, of course, remains a work in progress!). But I suppose we can call that inspiration even if we sort of side step the issue in this paper. 

Readers of the blog will recognize both the project and our thinking here and David and I will likely write this paper even if it doesn’t land in pages of the JFA.

Title: Mobilizing the Archaeological Report for the Future Interpretive Community: Linked Open Data, Analysis, and Publication

Archaeologists conduct fieldwork with the goal of sharing results through final publications and reports. Whether completed to meet core professional expectations, to fulfill requirements of public funding, or simply to build careers, archaeologists do their best work when they have a sharp sense of outcome and purpose. Yet, as reporting has become an object of critical reflection on disciplinary practice (e.g. Hanscam and Witcher JFA 48 [2023] and JFA 11 [1981]), and has changed with new modes of publication and data sharing, archaeologists may question how to mobilize reporting for a richer and more inclusive future.  

Our paper aims to address the seismic changes that archaeologists will face in publishing and reporting on their work. In the next half century, publication must streamline reporting and make the interpretive process more intentionally accessible to wider communities. Archaeologists will need to come to terms with the declining institutional market for traditional book length publications, the changing expectations of funders and professional organizations, and the growing range of digital technologies central to archaeological work and publication. They will also need to make their results more findable, accessible, interoperable, and usable for future interpreters.

We present a case study from the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey (1997-2003), a diachronic intensive distributional survey project conducted in the periphery of Ancient Corinth, Greece. Our work to publish this project provides a practical perspective on the short-term potential of linked open-access books and datasets. We developed the book, Corinthian Countrysides, with low-cost, persistent, and sustainable practices to both build upon existing digital infrastructure and software and evoke traditional forms of publication. Linked to online datasets at Open Context, the book centers the potential for reuse, ongoing analysis, and interpretation decades beyond fieldwork. The process of publishing the book and datasets required care in the preparation, documentation, and linking of information, and prompted us to reconsider the relationship between fieldwork, study, analysis, interpretation, and final publication. In contrast to recent innovations in archaeological publishing that explore the bleeding edge of technology (e.g. Opitz in JFA 43 [2018]), our book offers a simpler alternative to reflexive archaeological publishing, and it takes a critical view of notions of finality in publication.

Our article will have three main sections: 

The first part will offer an introduction to the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey (EKAS) and The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota which frames our case study of digital publication as part of a conversation about the nature of intensive Mediterranean-style distributional archaeological survey, the presentation of survey data, and the iterative analysis and publication of the results of fieldwork.  

The second part will present the various contexts and processes that David Pettegrew, the author, and William Caraher, the publisher, undertook to prepare the digital publication of the survey data, its metadata, and its analysis and interpretation. Data collection strategies, early efforts in study and presentation, and the changing landscape of digital technology all shaped the publication of the digital book and presentation of data. 

The final section will situate our experience publishing EKAS within the future landscape of archaeological publishing. Instead of isolating digital technology as a kind of solution (or, conversely, a problem), this section will argue that digital-first processes, methods, and approaches offer a compelling trajectory for the future of archaeological publishing by deepening reflexive practices and building a more inclusive purpose of work through collaborative archaeological knowledge making.   

The paper, in short, anticipates a future of archaeological publishing that sees greater integration between archaeologist, publisher, and a community of scholars committed to the ongoing production of archaeological knowledge through both data production and reuse. 

Another Sneak Peek of a Forthcoming Title

Fall is starting to look very busy for The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota.  

Today, I’d like to introduce another of our forthcoming titles: Wild Drawing: Street Art in Perspective edited by Kostis Kourelis. This volume will be the first book length treatment of the artwork of WD and include a wide range of contributors speaking to his style and technique as well as the social commentary explicit in his murals and efforts to conserve and preserve them.

The book has been prepared in a loose collaboration with the artist, WD, himself, who our editor got to know WD over the last decade or so. Many of WD’s most famous works, such as the one on the cover, are in Athens and the focus on street art (as well as the book’s 8 x 8 size) gets me back to the Punk Archaeology roots of the press. 

The other connection is that this is one of the first books where I have “off shored” production. That said, I didn’t send it far offshore: the book designer and production manager is none other than Mr. Punk Archaeology himself, Andrew Reinhard, whose experience as an editor and publisher, helping me get The Digital Press started, and as a prolific scholar in his own right has given my a role model as publisher. 

Andrew is responsible for the cover and the page layout (and both of these are in draft, but I like to imagine a fairly advanced draft at this stage).

You’ll notice that the text is set sans serif! This will be a pretty rare example of it in The Digital Press catalogue, but it feels absolutely appropriate for this book.

The book is edited by Kostis Kourelis, who is a longtime collaborator and friend. He and I have been kicking book ideas around for almost two decades and the idea for this book predates the COVID pandemic. It’s it very exciting to see it coming in for a landing.

This book will drop this fall!

More on Grand Forks 150th

As readers of this blog know, I’ve been working with a fantastic group of students over the last two semesters to produce a new book to celebrate 150 years of the city of Grand Forks. The book will feature 150, 150-word essays on the history of the city. Some of these will be well-know, but other stories will be new and introduce new voices, visions, and narratives to the history of our community.

Last semester, a group of students under the direction of my newest tenure-track colleague Nikki Berg Burin produced about 40 of these essays in a class in the fall semester. This semester, my practicum in editing and publishing developed these essays, copy-edited them, and worked with me on page design.

While the book is a week or so away, we now have a page design almost settled. We decided to use a kind of unusual font for the main text, Vendetta, and then use more traditional sans serif fonts of the title of each entry and large, bold, grey numbers in a 60% tint to emphasize the playful number-oriented organization of the volume.

The students have a keen eye on page design and have asked for a few little tweaks to this before we finalize it. They’ve also started to proof the main text and we have a cover design draft. I’m excited to share our progress as we bring the first 50 essays together over the next few weeks!

One, Two, Three Things Thursday

We’ve almost over the midgame hump and end game is on the horizon (one way or another). So it seemed like a particularly good time for one, two, three things Thursday that spans teaching, research, and (in the name of symmetry) service.

One Thing the First

Next week, my Medieval History class discusses the Middle Byzantine epic-ish poem that goes by the name Digenes Akretes (or in somewhat stilted English “The Two-Blood Borderer”). It’s one of my favorite sources for the Byzantine world largely because it shifts our attention from the claustrophobic confines of Constantinople and into the hazy landscape of the Middle Byzantine “Middle Ground” between the Byzantine and Muslim worlds. Plus, it’s a good read, of manageable length, and filled with a wide range of material to support a critical discussion of the politics, economy, and social world of the Byzantine borderland.

The “one” thing is that while surfing the web last night, I came across this fine little article on Digenes Akrites by Nathan Leidholm of Bilkent University in Ankara. Nathan is not only a University of North Dakota (BA) alumnus, but also took Byzantine History with me in 2007. How cool is that?

Two Things the Second

I’ve been reading with considerable enthusiasm the articles on “Back Dirt” in the recent issue of the Journal of Field Archaeology. The two articles that have intrigued me the most have focused on the political character of back dirt. For folks who don’t know, back dirt is the soil removed from excavation. Recently it has received renewed attention particularly in the Near Eastern archaeology as a number of “sifting” projects have emerged, particularly in Israel, where archaeologists combing through back dirt from earlier excavations have made spectacular (and at times controversial discoveries). As Chemi Shiff makes clear in her contribution to this special section, back dirt is professional dirt that archaeologists have produced and is therefore the domain of archaeology as a profession and a discipline. The professionalization of archaeology, Shiff argues, has problematically allowed for it to claim to be apolitical and to bring impartial knowledge to contested situations. Practically, of course, this is not the case; just as back dirt is archaeologically ambiguous material capable of being used in a range of political and professional arguments, so is the discipline of archaeology itself where a generation of scholars have sought to both professionalize and acknowledge the political complicity inherent in disciplinary knowledge making.

I also quite enjoyed Krystiana L. Krupa, Jayne-Leigh Thomas, Rebecca Hawkins, Julie Olds and Scott Willard’s piece on the relationship between back dirt and burials in a NAGPRA context. They offer a short, but complex argument that back dirt from Native American sites has a range of relationships with NAGPRA. In the simplest of these relationship, back dirt from burial sites might contain fragments of human remains or have been changed through contact with the burial and should therefore be treated in accordance with cultural protocols of whichever Native American group is associated with the burial site. In more complex ways, however, there is abundant evidence that most “dirt” is not culturally neutral “nature,” but the product of any number of cultural, social, and even political processes. These processes range from the deliberate deposition of certain kinds of earth at certain kinds of sites (a global phenomenon well attested to in Native American contexts) to the remains of “artifacts” and “ecofacts” in the soil strata itself. Since NAGPRA governs objects associated with burials in direct way (i.e. “grave goods”) as well as in less direct ways (e.g. associated with, say, burial rituals), then back dirt might too be governed by NAGPRA guidelines.

There are more of these articles on back dirt coming on line over the next couple of months and I look forward to reading them!

Three Things the Third 

The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota now has THREE books officially in PRODUCTION. This is about the most I can handle at any one time and to be fair, one of the books is in copy editing and the other one is about to enter final proofs (and to be completely honest, there is another book just entering production this week, but that would mess up the “one, two, three” thing).

The first of the three and the most imminent in appearance is Çiğdem Pale Mull’s translation of Ismail Gaspirali’s 19th century utopian tale: The Muslims of Darürrahat which Sharon Carson edited and situated historically and philosophically (you can read a bit about it here). The last of the three books is Christopher Price’s Big Pandemic on the Prairie: The Spanish Flu in North Dakota which is in copy editing now and is scheduled for a fall publication date. Chris will always have a special place in the history of The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota in that I publishing his little book The Old Church on Walnut Street: A Story of Immigrants and Evangelicals before The Digital Press was even a thing! We have, of course, re-released it and it is an absolute gem of careful, local history.

Finally, to make this “three things the third,” I just received the second proofs to David Pettegrew’s epic Corinthian Countryside book. I’ve blogged about this book recently (you can read a bit about it here), but there are updates. Because of the complex archaeological politics associated with working in Greece, it seems more than likely that this book will be a joint publication with the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. The reasons for this are bound up in the way in which permitting works in Greece and the tradition of the ASCSA requiring right of first refusal on the final reports from projects receiving a permit under their auspices. The ASCSA deemed David’s book the “final report” and therefore subjected to this policy. This is really a situation where the ASCSA has all the cards and deeming this or that work a final report is “well, yeah, that’s just like your opinion, man.” 

Three Things Thursday: Looking Down and Looking Ahead

Spring break is almost over and I’m not sure that I got what I wanted to do done yet, but I’m still going to take a couple of days to recharge my batteries by watching some boxing and F1 while I catch up on some grading, finish a peer review, and maybe read something for “research.”

In the meantime, I thought I would offer a little handful of updates for those of you curious about what I’ve been up to!

Thing the First

First thing, first. This evening my colleagues and I are giving a talk celebrating both 20 years of work at the site of Pyla-Koutsopetria and marking the changing of the guard as we pass the project off to a new generation of archaeologists.

The talk will be over zoom and there’s a small fee ($25 or so) that goes to benefit ASOR. Our talk should embrace the chaotic collaboration that characterized our work from the start. 

You can register for the event here for $13 which goes to help support ASOR.

And you can see what I have to say here.

Thing the Second

My summer research time is starting to take shape. We have our place to stay at Polis and look forward to a three or four week season there focusing primarily on an apparently kiln and lamp deposit in the area of E.F2 near the South Basilica. Here’s our internal final report from last season for anyone who is interest. 

We’re also going to spend a couple of weeks in Larnaka working on some material from the Larnaka Sewage System Excavations in collaboration with the Department of Antiquities. This will involve the study and preparing for publication of some salvage material that should shed some light on Hellenistic, Roman, and Late Roman Kition.

Finally, we’ll be spending a few weeks at Isthmia in Greece working once again on the Slavic material as well as looking at some possible new stretches of the Hexamilion Wall. You can read a bit about some of our evolving research questions here and here.

Thing the Third

Later today, I’m going to start typesetting a collaborative project associated with the city of Grand Forks 150th anniversary. Our plan is to produce a volume that presents 150, 150-word essays related to the history of Grand Forks. The first 40 or so came from a seminar that Nikki Berg-Burin ran for history students. These essays were then edited and polished by students in my Writing, Editing, and Publishing Practicum class and about 10 more little essays were added from elsewhere.

The students offered some suggestions on page design and typesetting and I’m going to do my best to honor these, but some of them are… let’s say… unconventional to the point of being aesthetically jarring (or at least mildly irresponsible). So I need to find a way to embrace their design vision while gently reshaping it to produce a more polished and professional looking final product. I hope to have something to share by the middle of next week! 

Stay tuned!

Teaching Thursday with NDQ

For the last few years, I’ve been teaching a practicum in the English Department’s Writing, Editing, and Publishing program. This course splits its time between North Dakota Quarterly and projects with The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota. This semester, I literally split the class into two teams one of which focused on putting the next issue of NDQ in order and the other focused on editing, organizing, and developing a template for the first 50 contributions to the Grand Forks 150th volume.  

The NDQ team has completed organizing the volume and were impressive in their commitment to the project. In fact, they even met on the Snow Day to wrap things up. As part of their project, they prepared a brief “editors note” that connected their work in class to their hope for the readers. This will appear at the front of issue 91.1/2 and I share it with you here:

Editors Note

Eighteenth-century politician Edmund Burke once wrote, “Good order is the foundation of all good things.” Burke was reflecting on the bloody upheaval of the French Revolution—not a little magazine published in the Midwest—when he wrote those words, but he may as well have been writing about the North Dakota Quarterly. The 100-plus poems, stories, and essays selected to appear in each issue of NDQ must be thoughtfully ordered, creating an arrangement that will result in a cohesive issue.

 

As students in the University of North Dakota’s Writing, Editing, and Publishing certificate program, the NDQ editors tasked us with ordering this issue. We chose theme and tone to thread from piece to piece. We hope this issue, read from cover to cover, moves seamlessly, builds momentum, unveils emotional highs and lows, and makes you want to stay up a little later to read just one more.

 

By reading this issue from cover to cover, not only will you appreciate each piece on its own merit, but you will also see the issue as we have. We think you will be rewarded with a genuinely distinctive reading experience. The issue spans every stage of life from birth to death, travels miles to locations both exotic and familiar, and meets compelling characters—from one-armed lion tamers to convenience store cowboys. Part of NDQ’s charm is its freedom to publish content with few artistic limits. Without any one mission statement, every issue becomes its own unique style, creating what can only be defined as the North Dakota Quarterly.

 

We would like to thank editor Bill Caraher for throwing us into the deep end of this project. Coming to know every composition intimately and crafting an order that honors each piece has been a rewarding challenge. Bill has encouraged us to be innovative, independent, and reliable. Thank you, Bill, for trusting us, even though we messed up your Excel spreadsheet. We hope you’re not still upset about that.

 
Chad Erickstad

Brenden Kimpe
Danika Ogawa
Caitlin Scheresky
Maren Schettler

Five Things to Consider Before Submitting to NDQ

The little devil on my shoulder has sorely tempted me to post this over on the NDQ blog, but for whatever reason, something has always stopped me from posting this. This week it was the passing of N. Scott Momaday. Other weeks, it was something more positive and creating. 

As I’m working to bring together issue 91.1/2, I find myself thinking a good bit our authors and how they often struggle to understand NDQ and manage the submission and editorial process. To help this along a bit (and as an excuse to vent some), I thought I would offer this simple guide on things to consider before submitting to NDQ:  

Over the past five years, I’ve spent a good bit of time working with authors to get their work published in NDQ. Over that time, I’ve noticed a few curious trends in authors who submit to our pages. These trends are in equal parts amusing, alarming, and depressing. The slight increase in alarming and depressing trends has nudged me to make a few recommendation to folks considering submitting to NDQ.

I’m framing these  

First, do you know the name of the journal? 

I regularly receive email that refer to the North Dakota Review or the North Dakota Quarterly Review. This is amusing, but also a bit demoralizing. After all, we’ve been North Dakota Quarterly since 1910 so there has been plenty of time for someone to get to know our name. More than that, it suggest an abject unfamiliarity with our little magazine. This is fine, if it comes from a casual inquiry from a reader or colleague, but in an alarming number of cases this comes from folks who have submitted or even PUBLISHED work to our pages. As the great Keyshawn Johnson famously exclaimed “C’mon, man!”

Second, have you read NDQ?

I’ve also become amused (and a bit troubled) by the number of people who submitted work, but have never read NDQ. I understand, of course, that there are many little magazines and we have limited time in our days, but why would you submit something to a journal that you’ve never even bothered to peruse?

It’s not like you have to subscribe! We regularly post content here on the web, we’re not available via Project Muse, and you can download two complete recent issues and our entire back catalogue for free! Despite this accessibility, people still ask me simple questions: Is NDQ a print journal? How many issues per year do you publish? 

Third, are you able to respond to Submittable and email messages? 

I find it incredibly confusing (and a bit demoralizing) that authors submit work for review and then never respond when we accept their work. To be clear, we do this via submittable and via the email that the author provided.

Of course, we often run behind in reading, but we also charge no reading fee (a common feature at many journals). In other words, we read everything that we have submitted to us, but we do it slowly. We don’t get upset when we accept something and are then told that it will appear elsewhere. I do get a baffled, though, when we accept something and then hear nothing. Or, stranger still, when we accept something, the author responds positively the acceptance, but then no longer replies to messages. This leaves the work in an awkward limbo where it can easily fall between the cracks in our rickety system.

Fourth, can you sign a PDF, prepare a 50 word bio, and manage edits made in a Microsoft Word (or similar) document?

I have joked that being an editor involves 10% facilitating the development of a shared creative vision and 90% on helping poets sign PDFs. This is an exaggeration, but there is a kernel of truth to it. 

Little magazines like NDQ rely heavily on a digital workflow. This not only reflects the changing nature of publishing (where all books are digital books even if they appear in print form), but also reflects the real need to maintain an efficient system. Authors who want to publish need to develop the skills necessary to navigate our digital world.

While I recognize that this might sound agist, classist, or simply the condescending perspective of a digital-native, I hasten to point out that not only are we flexible as editors, but most of the tools necessary, say, to sign a PDF, accept or reject changes in an edited manuscript, and submit a short (<50 word) bio in a usable format either are already necessary to submit to NDQ or a free.   

Finally, do you understand that we’re a venerable, but under resourced little magazine that doesn’t have a staff, a four-digit budget, or vague but meaning institutional support?  

We try to remind our authors (and ourselves) that the most important aspect of editing is the human one. Part of this means being attentive to the context in which your work is being read, edited, and published, but also recognizing that we as editors will do our best to treat your work as if it were our own.

We are a very small operation, run by volunteers, with no office staff and access only to a very limited budget (used almost entirely for copy editing). As a result, the NDQ editor — in this case me! — updates the website and writes for the blog. There is no social media manager, no digital content director, and no independent webmaster. We also rely on our publishing partner for typesetting and distribution. Often our authors get their copies before I see them!

All this is to say, please be nice and understanding if correspondence, editing, production, and printing aren’t quite as immediate as you’d like and if we can’t solve a problem (or even know its status) when you reach out. 

New Book Day: A Physician’s Journey

A new year and a new book from The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota. We are very pleased to kick what is likely to be a busy 2024 publishing year with Robert Kyle’s memoir: A Physician’s Journey: The Memoir of Robert A. Kyle, M.D.

Bob Kyle did his undergraduate work at UND before going on to medical school at Northwestern and a distinguished career at Minnesota’s Mayo Clinic.

Here’s the back of the book description:

Regrettably, I did not know three of my four grandparents.

So begins A Physician’s Journey, a quintessential modern memoir. Beginning in the tradition of the prairie reverie with snow-filled winters and single room school houses and ending with a litany of late-life accolades, Dr. Robert Kyle details his life from the farm, to smoke jumper school, to the University of North Dakota, to Northwestern Medical School, the US Air Force and eventually a career at Minnesota’s Mayo Clinic.

At the Mayo Clinic he met his wife, Charlene, pioneered new treatments for cancer, and started his family. The story as Dr. Kyle tells is unique, but somehow still familiar and endearing. By drawing us into his life and accomplishments, we encounter a narrative suffused with the memories of an American experience that through his work, interests, and travels had a global reach.

~

When I started my press, I was satisfied publishing quirky edited volumes that largely revolved around my interests and my colleagues and friends. After a few of these books, however, I realized that I needed to expand my repertoire both to learn to publish new and different kinds of book with different kinds of authors.

A Physician’s Journey was my first effort at a memoir and the unique character of an editorial and production process that is more personal than usual. Fortunately, I had the support of a wonderful developmental and copy editor and Bob Kyle proved to be a thoughtful and collegial author.

The book is unique in The Digital Press catalogue in that it is the only volume available exclusively in hard cover and the only formal memoir. I hope that readers interested in Bob Kyle’s life, career, and accomplishments find it a worthwhile monument.