This past week I was asked to speak at the Benicia Literary Arts Group Salon No. 3 at The Upstairs over First Street Cafe in Benicia. The subject for the evening was publishing, as in books, novels, memoirs, fiction, non-fiction, and so forth.

I was asked to speak on design and layout and fill in for member Tom Stanton, who was taking care of family health issues. No problem, I grabbed 10 or so great and informative books from my home reference shelves, two of my own chapbooks, our sidewalk sign and dry erase markers, and was off and running.

Hosts and Ben Lit board members Lois Requist and Jim Stevenson did a great job of discussing their experiences in book publishing and what it is that Benicia Literary Arts wants to do and has done in the past two years supporting literary efforts in Benicia.

I was asked to comment on my own experience with Design and Layout. I began briefly:

“My thirty years of corporate graphic design and an equal time publishing my poetry and songs has rolled off me like pine cones and needles in a light Benicia breeze.

“In short, it’s been a kick in the pants! I have always had a corporate career or day job to support my more fun efforts, but with what I’ve spent on this hobby, I could have had three Corvettes! But how many Corvettes can you drive down the coast or up to Mendocino on a weekend’s outing?”

My Corvette Alternatives started early in the 1970s. (This is way more than I shared with the Ben Lit audience, but this is a column’s worth, not a 10-minute sound byte.)

I attended my first Open Mike poetry reading at the Egg Shoppe and Apple Press on Euclid Avenue in Berkeley, just across from my alma mater, the engineering department and grad school at the UC Berkeley campus.

Cost was non-existent then except for travel, and soon I was entering poems in another poetry contest at the Berkeley Women’s Club across town on the south side. I didn’t win anything but there was an entry fee.

Soon I was sending poems to all the poetry journals I could find in my then recently purchased copy of The Poet’s Market, and years later songs to entries in my copy of The Songwriter’s Market. Both books available online and probably also from Bookshop Benicia, 636 First St., here in Benicia.

Years passed and the postage, photocopies, typewriter ribbons and correction fluid begin to add up.

Typewriters were the medium then, with only Steve Jobs and Wozniak and a few others having any clues that early Mac versions of home computers were being built in their garages. And the rejection pile at home was getting rather enormous.

I also found some hokey music publisher in New York somewhere and paid some disgusting fee to have them record my first song, “Cherokee Woman,” and mail it to me. Disgusting! Don’t do that! It sounds like merry-go-round music and I think it’s still in a small suit case of disgusting memories in the attic of our garage.

By this time, I was a self-employed graphics designer in Walnut Creek, and was doing all kinds of graphic design for customer ads, brochures, presentation pieces and so forth. Therefore I knew about paper, printing, and specifying type, and my poetry rejection pile was enough to weep and cry over.

However, I could skip the rejection by others and publish my own poetry book! Of course!

That done (1,000 copies of “A Raindrop to Call Your Own”) on Strathmore paper to fit a matching A6-sized envelope, I took it around on consignment to many boutiques and gift shops in the Diablo Valley.

I also sold some 200 or more copies through the Unity Center bookshop in Walnut Creek where I was a Sunday service chairman, so my following there was a plus. I did a one-man Poetry Event also at Unity but sales at local shops were slower than expected. My books were buried in stacks of other books on back tables.

So I made barnwood display stands and took those to the shops also. Nice stuff! (Also adding to my alternate cost of a first Corvette.)

Six months later, I returned back to work all the wiser: Selling hotdogs in the park in the dark in the rain would have been more profitable than investing in poetry books!

But I decided to do it again the next year, but published only 500 copies this time. A year later turned to ten years later and I did my second chapbook, “Sometimes a View So Dimly Lit,” as a project for a book design class at UC Berkeley’s UC Extension Program for a graphic design certificate in 1982. Conventional layout with pasted-up type galleys, amberlith photo windows, tissue overlays, Strathmore paper, horizontal format, A6 envelope again, gray ink, grandfather Adolf Larsen’s barn door photo on the cover. Computers were still not yet invented and a dream away.

This time I skipped the boutique shops, and mailed them out directly to friends and family. Printing, envelopes, plus postage – great fun, but zero income.

Moving to Benicia in 1983, attending Open Mike poetry events at the Bronze Seal in town on First Street, I made sure the old and tiny Benicia library over on East G Street also had a shelf copy of my second chapbook.

In 1987,I led the group “Save the Lido” and needed a lobbying piece. So I created a newsletter “Taproot & Aniseweed,” learned Pagemaker on my take-home-from-work Apple, Lisa, and started turning out early issues of the newsletter.

Later I evolved that to tabloid size, 11 by 17 inches, and I printed it out on my HP black and white printer at home. Toner cost at about $100 a cartridge, plus I spent money on envelopes, mailing labels, and postage.

In several years time I was listing all poetry venues in the area from Valona Deli in Crockett to places in Livermore and Pleasanton. These were naturally for fun only, but then a dozen subscribers supported it for a few years until the financial drain sounded like a small Niagara Falls. So I gave it a rest.

Bonnie Weidel also asked me to do a few years of Poet’s Tree for Arts in the Park, and so I made posters and shot photos.

Joel Fallon appeared on the Benicia poetry scene, began the First Tuesday Poetry Group, the Love Poetry Contest, and Poets Picnic in the Park. Yippee! And after several years of entries, I won the Love Poetry Contest in 2008, and published a third chapbook, “Pieces of Work,” shortly thereafter,

Martinez poet Maria Rosales of Ina Coolbrith’s Poetry Circle invited me to be featured poet at Primo Poets in Walnut Creek, and Martha Cinader invited me to be featured artist in 2005 at Listen and Be Heard Poetry Cafe in Vallejo.

My friend and Handyman customer Ursula Morgan Kane of Vallejo videotaped me there recording 12 original songs a cappella on VHS tape. We published 40 VHS copies (more bucks). Then converted it to a DVD (more bucks), then uploaded them to YouTube (with lead-in text and closing footers, more bucks).

Lately I’ve rebirthed “Taproot & Aniseweed” as a full-color pdf, no postage, no paper, and regularly upload graphics and poetry to my Facebook page. For several issues I’ve promoted the works of other poets and artists. In addition I’ve done 8 to 10 websites for poetry and other interests on my Apple MacBook Pro (more Corvette bucks).

Publishing? Yes, I swear by it, definitely a hoot! But make money with it if you can, maybe a novel, memoir, fiction or non-fiction, but then again, maybe you too, really like Corvettes.

Peter Bray lives, works and writes in Benicia.