Robert Harper is a Gen X writer originally from Los Angeles, who has lived in a number of states across the west. Hattree Press is now announcing several titles in print and other formats to inaugurate our Scheele’s Green Editions.
Rbt. Harper likes to write about the big, serious topics from a ground level viewpoint, with an analytic and abstract mind, but makes them bearable with his splashes of surprise humor. Even though he’s from the late analog era and thus has a head full of them, he doesn’t often use swear words in his writing, but when he does it’s usually funny.
R. Harper is a neurodiverse, queer writer who has mainly published arts journalism, advocacy on topics such as gender and faith issues, and writes more nonfiction, fiction, and poetry than he can sift through. He is also a visual artist and a musician. People who are skin deep tend to find him suspicious because of his naturally squinty eyes, so the occupation of a writer seems appropriate. Normal people think he’s intense, professional and easy to talk to.
(He denies he is a musician, and insists that it’s just for cognitive therapy, but we don’t buy it.)
When Rbt. Harper was a young kid, he was enrolled in school under a name other than his legal one. For some reason that started a lifetime habit of inventing a different name for each artistic project. He knew he wanted to try out a number of different fields, so he put each category under a different name. In grade school, he was Robert King, in college he became Robert Seitz because of their legal requirements, and when he made experimental writing and art websites in the days of the early net, he chose the more pretentious R. Lawrence Seitz.
That doesn’t include the completely made up ones, like the rocker silversmithing he does under the name R. Strange & Co. There isn’t even a company, it was just him. What a liar!
The way he sees it, the whole world was made of brands and names and symbols and he has been studying this his entire life, and to participate in it one should and was free to create identities as one needed. A strange lesson in self-hood from capitalism. Language really got cooking when he discovered things in college, like Beat and other post-war literature, poetry, semiotic language theory, journalism, and the challenging specifics of things like cognition and taxonomy. He knew he was a word nerd from early on, being a proud member of the Science Fiction / Fantasy Book Club in high school, his only extracurricular besides a mechanical drafting class. So he got into the habit of carving off extra names for projects that were not about the writing, primarily because he never studied marketing in school. In college, he became especially interested in psychology, the esoteric, and meditation.
The author was born in Los Angeles, at a place called Ross-Loos. He grew up in the old core of the city, with its picturesque WPA era streetlights and bridges, ribbons of freeways lit up and empty boulevards at night, and climbing the dry grassy hills between neighborhoods, waiting to catch fire. Being Gen X there was no internet in the 90s, so a lot of the ways people did things had lasted at least a hundred years and were still going strong. Even so he had a feeling things were about to change, devouring in one hand old dusty works of philosophy and subculture’s greatest hits of the 50s and 60s, and in the other, near future novels about cyberpunk and discord.
To discover the world he adulted into, you had to go out and dig, but it was rarely disappointing. You only had to go to the library, the CD & record store, or one of the many new and used bookstores in Pasadena, which was where he spent his first years as an adult. To stream a movie you still had to go out, you spent $5 at the Academy for a matinee. Almost anything you learned as an adult outside of school was a chance encounter, you stumbled across it, it popped out at you from the routine of life. Now we have to dig through visual noise, but we don’t have the journey, and for some reason, the search now includes a little disappointment on every page, in the form of a pop up.
It started around the year 1994, when the author took an invite from a savvy friend with a creative family, his dad wrote sci-fi and drove a city bus, to go to a poetry reading. They put their change in the mason jar in his old beater to chip in for gas, and experienced their first POETRY READING. Adults, sitting around in a cafe in some back alley that felt secret because there was no obvious sign or parking lot, adults sitting around reading to each other. It was a dream come true, and he has been participating in that world, in one way or another, ever since. They used to say home is where your hat is, but it turned out to be easier, than owning a hat – home is a space, even in print, where people love language.
Hattree Press is proud to announce the publication in print and electronics, of the poetry of R. Harper. Which is for today a pen name, but will soon become his legal name. Robert Harper has selected about 250 poems from over the last ten years, and is a prolific writer who throws more away than he is willing to describe. This is the first author for Hattree Press, the books are self published and print on demand. It may sound strange, but R. Harper has been writing for decades, and only this year has felt comfortable even letting an editor take a look. A whole career practiced without submitting work, and we can’t tell if it’s because he is a maniac perfectionist, timid, or just very patient in holding himself to a high standard. He says it was about wanting writing to be personal, to go within and not think of an audience or input. To become autonomous, as in automatic writing, was an old term he’d long been transfixed by. Interestingly, as the world’s information and even its writing is becoming automated, something else is stirring in him, perhaps a cross-over from his decade working in craft. Being independent sounds less like doing it on his own now, and the idea of summoning words from the deep in some unconscious place they way he encountered it described from a century ago, no longer looks like a response but a surrender to our contemporary situation. Therefore, R. Harper says, it is time to go from automatic, to semi-problematic.
Hattree Press has released in one volume the collection of poems that is outlined in smaller parts below. DECADE: R. HARPER OMNIBUS 2015-25 contains eight chapbooks from across that time. It is available only in print in our store, the cover price for 460 page trade paperback is $19.95 1
Hattree Press is also selling a chapbook in print from 2015-16, that’s just one of the eight in the collection above, called POEMS FOR THE ASCENT. This is 100 plus pages for $8.95 in trade paperback. 2
Finally, Hattree Press also has ready to buy and download in the Store section of this website, PDF eBook versions of all eight chapbooks, for those of you who need to dip your toe before wading. These are $1.99 each.3
Finally, would someone like this pull a stunt like being the Sr. Editor of their own press, and writing about themselves in the third person? Oh you bet. Rbt. Harper is also Sr. Editor of the newly launched Hattree Press, and with any luck, we’ll be seeking and finding other talent to share, and have some thoughts about starting a newsletter. First, he has to finish his doorstop of a fantasy novel, which has been in the works for about five years. We expect to have that ready to go before the fall, if he hasn’t sold it elsewhere before then.
- The author strongly feels that poetry should not be first attempted for money or success from the first. If any worth is in it, others must decide. It is however something meant to be read aloud and once even sung, it is one of the more free forms we have in the history of the arts and humanities. So he wants you to know that if you truly cannot afford to buy a new book, you can write in a brief essay explaining why you deserve a free digital copy of the poems, and likely receive a free one. It’s better to be read, and to share using this technology, than to try to squeeze a nickel out of everything in life.
↩︎ - If you don’t know what a chapbook is, it’s just a really skinny book, a format that poets love because you can count your pennies and still get it bound in hard copy. Paper is not a waste when it goes into literature, there it becomes one of the most durable formats we have, because it is distributed, and off the cloud, which is a place that does not exist, but can evaporate your life or info-bomb you at any minute.
↩︎ - Some will deceive you and say ‘click to donate a coffee’, but they might not even drink coffee. Here, one eBook will be like buying the author, well, maybe a quarter of a cup of coffee these days, but you will then get a file link, ready to download and read, so no one has to lie about this being about some phantom, cloud-like coffee. ↩︎
