Scrub Jay Flyer — March 2025
Hello, dear readers.
In just a few days, Scrub Jay Press will welcome its first new publication into the world in 15 years: volume 2 of Wild Blue Zine. To say that we are excited would be an understatement!
Book launch: Wild Blue Zine volume 2
Join the editors of Scrub Jay Press for the launch of Wild Blue Zine volume 2 at 2 PM on Saturday, March 29, inside the television studio at the Community Media Access Collaborative (CMAC), 1555 Van Ness Ave. in downtown Fresno.
Wild Blue Zine editors Marisa Mata and Taylor Seals will introduce you to our 13 writer and artist contributors. There will be a walk-in reception and zines for sale.
With appearances by the contributors: Paul Aloojian (in tribute), Stephen Barile, Audra Burwell, David R. Carrasco-Gomez, Soreath Hok, Anjali Kapoor-Davis, Shannon C. Matalone, Sharon K. McClain, John Moses, James O’Bannon, meche olvera, Senia Rodriguez, and Lisa MC Weston.
You can pre-order your copy for $10. Under the Add Note section, write-in “pickup” if you’re coming to the launch. If we miss you, mailings will go out the week after the launch. A recording from the launch event will be available on CMAC TV at a later date.
List: What’s In Our Bags
Claire Dederer / Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma (Vintage, 2024)
From Ronald Dzerigian, associate editor:
The artist is often represented in media as special, genius, or worse, existing on a level beyond understanding. Therefore, when artists are exposed for doing horrible things, we are shook; we don’t want the behavior(s) to be true. Monsters considers a dialogue we should have, with others or on our own, when faced with the difficult and sometimes disturbing behaviors of artists we have admired. Dederer never excuses the rapist or the abuser, and shows complicated and sometimes harrowing comparisons between lives, often sourcing her own. Today, no action goes without scrutiny, and this book may help us identify and know within ourselves the line between creation and destruction.
Stefanie Foo / What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma (Ballantine, 2023)
From Taylor Seals, assistant editor:
What My Bones Know had been in my periphery for a long while before I got the courage to finally sit down with it. Stephanie Foo’s writing through trauma and healing is so visceral and evocative; it oceans all my senses on the page. The memoir is a beautiful illustration of the reactive endurance of childhood traumas on adults and how healing cannot be a linear journey. There’s been so much pitted in my chest that feels watered as I read this book, like something is in bloom. Or, healing.
Soul Vang / Song of the Cluster Bomblet (Hmong Educational Resources, 2024)
From Jefferson Beavers, publisher:
A decade in the making, Soul Vang’s second collection of poetry feels like a slow bloom, bitter and sweet. The title poem opens with lines that take the shapes maybe of birds, maybe of bombs, maybe of both. The last poem closes with a mournful but hopeful attempt to reclaim a word that has defined and not defined a people for half a century. Everything in between is a drumbeat, a series of moments captured while living in a hazy interregnum of forever change. A fellow Hmong poet called this book courageous, and I couldn’t have said it better.