There are three things I want to tell you about publishing and community.
First.
Increasingly, I see publishing as the act of making language public. That action may result in a book, a broadside, a postcard, a wall installation, or an audio tour. In any case, it results in something that can be experienced away from the body of the “writer.” Publishing includes curation and framing. Always. If I print 100 copies of my beautiful new poem, and pass these poems out to you, then I am publishing within a frame. There is the size of the paper, the color, the font, the layout. The method of delivery. I pass a single sheet of paper out to you at an academic conference. I may send several sheets of paper in the mail, paper that is perfect bound, trimmed, covered, and called a book. I may sell that book to you at the AWP book fair, at LitFest Pasadena, or at a reading. I may put a postcard in that book, a postcard printed with a line from a poem by Jennifer Karmin, and when you send that postcard in the mail, you help me publish too.