Scrub Jay Flyer – January 2025
Hello, friends. It’s a new year and I hope you are all happy to be in it!
It’s a sunny and cold January day in Fresno, and I’m listening to the vocal stylings of the great Armenian troubadour Charles Aznavour, enjoying his effortless drift between French and English on the live album “The World of Charles Aznavour: All About Love,” recorded in 1965 inside what’s now known as The Montalbán in Hollywood.
Listening to this Aznavour record always puts me in a cinematic mood, and not just because I first became familiar with him when he played a pianist turned gangster in the French New Wave classic “Shoot the Piano Player.” Aznavour’s unrefined but earnest approach to writing and music reminds me to try and live lightly, with bigger brush strokes, and to love deeply.
Trying to take a little of his freewheeling energy into 2025 with our work on Scrub Jay Press.
– Jefferson Beavers
Fragments: Bird watching, zine making, and revisiting the archive
1. Our publisher’s wife, Tracy Stuntz, has fully entered her bird watching era in recent months, capturing warblers, finches, sparrows, juncos, and jays of all kinds, in and around Fresno. Pairing Nikon Aculon A211 binoculars with an iPhone, she photographed this California scrub jay sitting on a fence, pictured above, peeking through the branches of a nectarine tree.
2. Production is currently underway for volume 2 of Wild Blue Zine, edited by Marisa Mata and Taylor Seals. The zine received more than 30 submissions (thank you!) and the editors just accepted about a dozen writers and artists to be published. Stay tuned for a list of contributors and details for a community launch event soon. The zine will be the first publication of the Scrub Jay Press 2.0 era.
3. Since the re-launch of the Scrub Jay Press website a few months ago, the best-selling book from our back catalog has been the 2010 anthology Yosemite Poets: A Gathering of This Place. Edited by Bridget McGinniss Kerr, the collection includes poems by 29 writers, including Brandon Cesmat, Michael McMahon, Monika Rose, Gail Jensen Sanford, and more. We invited one of our favorite Fresno writers, Mike Cole, to make a video reading of his poem “Goat Mountain Sunday” from the anthology, for our Instagram.
List: What’s In Our Bags
Lauren Groff / Matrix (Riverhead Books, 2021)
From Angela Chaidez Vincent, associate editor:
A towering young woman is cast off from court and grows into the formidable head of an abbey’s self-reliant and astonishingly enterprising sisterhood. A story of a feisty, flawed, hot-blooded, and ambitious woman rendered in the most robustly elegant prose I have read in quite some time. Also: glimmers of sapphic hotness.
Claire Keegan / Foster (Grove Press, 2022)
From Chris Henson, publisher emerita:
When the impoverished and neglectful parents of the narrator of Foster leave her with unfamiliar relatives, she knows she is “in a spot where I can neither be what I always am nor turn into what I could be.” As she tries to decipher adults’ words and actions, the novella – recently reissued for the first time in the U.S. – portrays the intertwining of bewilderment, trepidation, relief, uncertainty, desire to please, and tentative beginnings of trust and affection in a situation that turns out to be all too fragile. Keegan manages all of this in a scant 92 pages, which feel simultaneously understated and agonizing.
Naomi Shihab Nye / The Tiny Journalist (BOA Editions, 2019)
From Jefferson Beavers, publisher:
The great Palestinian American poet channels and reimagines the videos of young amateur journalist and peace activist Janna Jihad, who has documented the Israeli occupation of her hometown in Palestine’s West Bank since she was 7 years old. This collection repeatedly broke my heart, gave me hope, and then broke my heart again. It is beyond sobering to read these poems today, during Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, and to reflect on the spirit of Janna’s essential work more than a decade on.