Books should confuse. Literature abhors the typical. Literature flows to the particular, the mundane, the greasiness of paper, the taste of warm beer, the smell of onion or quince. Auden has a line: “Ports have names they call the sea.” Just so will literature describe life familiarly, regionally, in terms life is accustomed to use — high or low matters not. Literature cannot by this impulse betray the grandeur of its subject — there is only one subject: what it feels like to be alive. Nothing is irrelevant. Nothing is typical.
—from Richard Rodriguez’s book “Brown: The Last Discovery of America”
I stumbled upon the work of Richard Rodriguez as I was stumbling through my first year in the American high school classroom, teaching five sections of 9th grade English language arts. As I was learning how to teach from my failures to teach, hour after hour, day after day, I was heartened to read the words of Rodriguez in his breakout first book, “Hunger of Memory”(1982), where he describes learning how to be a writer from failing as an academic. Richard Rodriguez has remained good company through the years, his work charting deeper vulnerabilities as he has continued in the personal essay vein, growing wider in reach — cultural-historical in “Brown”(2003), which I quote from above, and theological-cosmic in “Darling”(2013).
“Book should confuse,” Rodriguez writes.Isn’t that a strange sentence? We live in a world where tech billionaires are pushing AI bots at us (and our children) in order to, among other things, remove all possible friction from the acts of reading and writing. But those of us who love books and literature know instinctively that this desire to “smooth out” the kinks of the sentence, the paragraph, the book actually eliminates that which makes the writer the writer. And further, and perhaps more importantly, this removal of friction in the act of creation makes the actual encounter (an encounter of authentic difference and, yes, often confusion) between writer and reader, impossible.
Why start a book publishing company in 2025, as we did, at a moment when the push from the tech overlords among us is against any real reading, writing or encounter at all? When ingestion and automation and upskilling are the tasks of the day? The short answer is that I had to. I couldn’t not answer the call Rodriguez names in that paragraph above. As a poet and high school English teacher (a post which continues to be my day job), I have long received Emily Dickinson’s dictum to “tell all the truth but tell it slant” not as an injunction or command but simply, as Rodriguez has it, a description of how the teacher/artist works in the world. While there is certainly work to crafting literature — the sentence, the line, the paragraph, the book — in a deeper sense, all of the vision is received: Literature “flows” in the words of Rodriguez, to the particular things around us, “the greasiness of paper, the taste of warm beer, the smell of onion or quince.” I use the word relaxed to describe Rodriguez’s stance here because it seems the apt word to name his attentiveness, his seeing what thing swims into his ken.
Interestingly — maybe paradoxically? — having this relaxed state of attentiveness has not meant for me lack of urgency. The first thing I did as a publisher of One Subject Press was to start a series, called Teacher/Writer, that has as its aim to “center the voices of writers who teach in the humanities, whether to students in the fourth, 10th, or 22nd grade.”
I’ve noticed in nearly 20 years as a high school educator that teachers’ voices rarely are the ones that inform the ways that politicians and administrators talk about and structure the schools in our communities. (This would also be true for students’ voices, but that’s a topic for another essay, and another book series.) My noticing of this fact and my awareness through a long life of reading on the topic made me think that lifting up the voices of remarkable teacher/writers as distinguished public artists and intellectuals in their own right would be a worthy aim.
Our first book out of the gate was Montana State English Professor Scott F. Parker’s manifesto on writing instruction, “Teaching without Teaching,”which was followed up by my own provocation, “Good Teaching.”This year, we’ll publish two more outstanding entries to the series: In the fall, Cassandra Nelson’s “Who’s Afraid of the Still Small Voice?: Essays on Teaching, Learning, and Faith,”will consider, among other things, the author’s experience both as student — in the K-12 American public school system — and as a teacher at the United States Military Academy; and in the winter, a collection of essays by fifth grade teacher, Adrian Neibauer, whose work challenges the hunger for standardization that lies at the heart of so much of what ails education, public and private.
Rodriguez writes: “Literature describe(s) life familiarly, regionally, in terms life is accustomed to use — high or low matters not.” While it is hard to find a more familiar life task than teaching, we are certainly not limiting ourselves to that particular subject at One Subject Press. In our inaugural year, 2025-2026 (as a teacher I can’t help but think in school terms), we also published: a beautiful memoir-in-essay form, “From Glory to Glory: A Pilgrim’s Notes from the Badlands of Grace,” by Fr. Patrick Hannon; an incisive collection of short stories, “Scapegoats,”by April Vázquez; a poignant poetry collection, “The Shape of Your Absence,” by Greg Watson; even an apostolic exhortation by Pope Leo XIV, enriched by the commentary and introduction of scholar and theologian Fr. Stan Chu Ilo, “Dilexi te: A Church Formed by Love.”And I can’t forget to mention two revised and updated second editions by mentors who have been huge supporters of the press: Alice Camille’s excellent meditation on Christ’s final words from the cross, “Seven Last Words,” and Fr. Joseph Brown, SJ’s ever-timely “Retreat with Thea Bowman and Bede Abram.”
As you can tell from just the titles themselves, One Subject Press is certainly and unapologetically a Catholic publishing company. Though not one exclusively interested in Catholic writers and certainly not exclusively Catholic themes (whatever that would mean), we definitely do see ourselves as responding to a call offered by folks like Dana Gioa and Fr. Andrew Greeley to support and contribute to a movement of the “Catholic imagination,” understanding that phrase to mean well-crafted literary art, art that testifies to, in Richard Rodriguez’s words, the grandeur of the one subject: “what it feels like to be alive.”
As you teach and read and write, and write and teach and read some more, you realize you are participating in very long-lived and interesting conversations — conversations that started long before you were born and will continue after you die.
When I think back on the teacher, the writer, the person I was when I first encountered “Hunger of Memory,” and when I first stood in front of those 9th graders I was lucky enough to teach, I am humbled by all I did not know. There was so much — it would fill the proverbial ocean. One of the most important things I didn’t know — and most pertinent to this essay — is that as a teacher, as a writer, you never stand alone. Just as we can hear a whole river of voices (and Auden explicitly) in Rodriguez’s voice in the passage I’ve been mulling over in this essay, so I’ve learned afresh from starting this publishing company, that in the craft of writing you are dialoguing with so many, living and dead.
As you teach and read and write, and write and teach and read some more, you realize you are participating in very long-lived and interesting conversations — conversations that started long before you were born and will continue after you die. (And which you might even be contributing to after you die yourself.) The catalog of books One Subject Press has on offer gives singular names to their titles, and rightly so, but I think every one of those original voices would agree that their own voice is happily part of a larger river, a bigger sea.
With that insight in mind, I invite you, reader, to try out one of these authors at One Subject Press as a travel companion. I pray this encounter brings you challenge, nourishment and, yes, maybe even confusion, too. But most of all, may it bring you life.