Excursions

Optional: Echo of the Park Book Launch: A Conversation with Jeannine Pitas

Screening of Pressing On: The Letterpress Film

ABOUT THE FILM

“The modern world was born on a printing press. Once essential to communication, the 500-year-old process is now in danger of being lost as its caretakers age. From self-proclaimed basement hoarders to the famed Hatch Show Print, Pressing On: The Letterpress Film explores the question: why has letterpress survived in a digital age?

Worlds of each character emerge as unusual narratives—joyful, mournful, reflective and visionary—are punctuated with on-screen visual poetry, every shot meticulously composed. Captivating personalities blend with wood, metal and type as young printers strive to save this historic process in a film created for the designer, type nerd, historian and collector in us all.”

Letterpress Workshop at Meshwork Press

Students will talk with letterpress artist Haylee Ebersole and try their hands at the machine as she prints the covers for the chapbook Sleepless Nights Under Capitalism (Erin Moure/Juan Gelman/John Wendell, Eulalia Books, 2020).

Zines at Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, Oakland

On this excursion, we’ll speak with librarian Rita Johnson about the place of zines in alternative publishing. As noncommercial, handmade, low-budget publications, zines carve out a subversive space on the fringes of the mainstream and develop their own unique aesthetics. Let’s think about the freedoms and constraints of zines alongside small press poetry magazines and presses.