Visions

 

 

Dream dreams, see visions,

speak in parables.

                                                                                  William Blake

 

 

Joan Fiset’s Now The Day Is Over, has been selected as the King County Publication Award by Rebecca Brown for 1997.  Linda Brown’s Secret Waters was awarded a prestigious grant by Artist Trust.

 

Linda Andrews won the Governors Award for her book, Escape of the Bird Women.

 

Judith Skillman’s Storm was awarded the Eric Matthieu King Award from Academy of American Poets. Five presses from all over the nation were awarded this prestigious prize.

 

Blue Begonia Press has also been awarded the 1994 Bumbershoot Publication Award with Kevin Miller for his poems, Light That Whispers Morning. The work of Miller, Lee Bassett, Barry Grimes, Bill Ransom, along with Colleen McElroy, Sam Hamill, and Michael Daley has been recognized in such competitions such as Seattle’s Bumbershoot and Yellowstone Arts Council. Blue Begonia Press has won four awards for Best Letterpress & Design being the most recent being Doug Johnson’s Bardons Crossing. Terry Martin’s Wishboats was the recipient of The Judge’s Choice Award. The press has been recognized as well as for publication in Best Regional Literature Categories.

 

Blue Begonia has received the Washington Poet’s Association’s Poetry Contributor of the Year Award.

 

And yet, and yet…this is not what poetry, what any of this, is about.

 

Working closely together, typesetter, editor, poet and artist combine visions to create the book. When possible, a visual artist is brought in to create a cover after reading the manuscript. Editing is first done with an eye on bringing forth the great theme in the poet; second, on straightening and centering the manuscript. Individual poems discover themselves within this process. This process, in the finished book, becomes an invitation to the reader. It is the work of the poet to assist the book in crossing into the world. The book belongs to the world at the point in which the reader makes contact.

 

Photographer Rob Prout brings photography, design and digital imaging to each poet and book that he has worked on. Artist’s eye, technological edge, Prout’s contributions to each project keeps the ancient, and conservative, art of bookmaking just enough off balance to give Blue Begonia books their original look and feel. As a working artist, books touched by his eye have achieved a new level of visual beauty.

 

In creating the cover for Gayle Kaune’s Still Life In The Physical World, Yakima artist Ann Bowker read the manuscript before deciding to undertake the project. She met and worked with Kaune at the Press to discover the possibilities for a painting within the limits of a book cover. All of the images in her painting exist in the poems. She is interpretive, she is not literal.

 

The cover for Joan Fiset's award winning book, Musings/Bird Talk, was painted by Seattle artist Lynne Saad. Saad's eye for the bold, contributed to the cover design, where she pushes color and boundary lines to get more from her painting. This process is the model for this book. Each book calls for its own collaboration. The process is dynamic.

 

Other artists contributing with Blue Begonia poets are: Marty Lovins, Rob Prout, Priscilla Maynard, Melissa Weinman, Sue Grimshaw, Joan Ross Blaedel, Jake Seniuk, Brady Miller, Delma Tayer, and Randy LeSage.