April 15, 2024
I have been reeling from the news that my dear friend, Lyn Hejinian, passed away on the morning of February 24. She more than anyone changed the very trajectory of my life, and I will be forever grateful to her, and for the generosity she showed me.
I met Lyn 30 years ago in the spring of 1994. I was a student at UC Berkeley and the semester before we met I had been introduced to her work through her book, The Cell. I was excited at the prospect of being able to study with her when she was invited to be the visiting Holloway Poet. Students had to submit a packet of work for her to review in order to be admitted. I was nervous. I didn’t have confidence in my writing, and yet, Lyn accepted me. That one act changed everything. I felt seen and validated as a writer, and she pulled me into the community that Lyn created, as she so often did, around the class.
The class was intended to be a workshop with an accompanying reading list that exposed me to writers whose work spanned a wide stylistic variety. It was so much more. Our discussions bled beyond the classroom. After class, most of us would head over to Cafe Milano on Bancroft to continue talking about our work along with broader ideas and intellectual themes that seemed to be emerging at the time. We held these informal discussions after every class and started referring to them as the Milano discussions. We continued beyond the semester and into the following year. The Milano discussions were for me as educational as any other class I had taken in the formal classroom, and I look upon those experiences as some of my most treasured.
It was during one of our walks from the classroom across campus and over to the cafe that Lyn and I started discussing the possibility of starting Atelos Publishing Project together. Little did I know that project would be one we’d work on together for the rest of our friendship. Atelos was hatched during that walk in 1995, but the Milano discussions about emerging genre-bending work and poets really spurred us to take up the effort to try to publish some of it. Atelos would become a commission-only series of 50 books with only a loose set of organizing principles. Our goal was to publish, under the sign of poetry, writing that challenges conventional, limiting definitions of poetry. In our invitations we asked writers to compose a manuscript specifically for the project that in some way (their choice) crossed traditional genre boundaries. Our promise was to publish the work. Our hope was that this would encourage writers to go out as far as they wished in their genre-crossing efforts. Atelos would give our writers free reign to be as abstract or difficult or lyrical or narrative or analytical as they wished. We thought this project would take ten years to complete. It’s been 29 years. In January we released Astrid Lorange’s book Raw Materials. It’s book #45 in the series.
Atelos will not be the same without Lyn’s tireless efforts constantly moving us forward. She was a force of nature in her support of our writers, and I can only hope to have learned something from her about what I will now need to do alone. Lyn and I had many discussions over the last few months about the future of Atelos and she expressed relief that we’d finish the series. Completing the series is the least I can do.
I am beyond thankful to Lyn for all that she gave of herself to me, a young, inexperienced writer, who turned into a much more confident thinker and writer. All along she has been a steadfastly loyal friend and publishing partner. There is no way to adequately represent the depths of my love and gratitude for Lyn. I will miss her unwavering kindness, her intellect, and her infectious energy and enthusiasm for the things she loved. I will miss seeing more books emerge from her constant stream of writing. I will miss her close readings of my (and other’s) work. I will miss my dear friend Lyn.