A decade between
the covers

>>Cumulus Press celebrates 10 years of
publishing everything from politics and
poetry to comic books and travel writing

BOUND BOUNTY: David Widgington

by VINCENT TINGUELY

Scrolling through the Cumulus Press backlist is like taking a trip through a decade of indie/underground Montreal’s socio-cultural zeitgeist. It covers a lot of ground for a little press.

There’s the Tendril series of anthologies by writers under 25, covering everything from poetry to travel writing. There’s vital texts by Canadian artists of the African diaspora, like Kaie Kellough, Jason Selman and the Kalmunity Vibe Collective. There’s traces of the increasingly aural character of poetry in the 21st-century, with book/CD collaborations like Throw the Captain Overboard by Mia Rose Brooks with musicians Stefan Christoff, Peter Burton and Anni Lawrence, and Taien Ng Chan and Scott W. Gray’s collaboration Maps of Our Bodies. Then there’s the utterly unclassifiable audio, visual and textual work of the Harvey Christ crew, as presented in The Dead Beat Scrolls.

Cumulus publisher David Widgington puts it all down to serendipity. “My life seems to evolve by circumstances, there’s not that much planning in my endeavours,” says Widgington. In fact, he was bitten by the publishing bug while working as a freelance cartographer, designing maps for a series published by Reader’s Digest. “I got to see and appreciate and understand the editorial process,” he says. “When I left I thought, wow, I really like the whole process of making a book.”

He’d been working on the series in Old Montreal, so he turned his experience with the area into Cumulus Press’s first book, Montréal Up Close: a pedestrian’s guide to the city.

Over the years, Cumulus has lent essential voice to the insurgent activist culture that sprang up following the Quebec Summit of the Americas protests of 2001. “It was an important event as a political instigator, it opened up a lot of people’s eyes to political issues in Quebec,” says Widgington. “Including myself!”

The summit ferment prompted Widgington to put together counter productive, a compendium of poetry, essays, images and audio clips that reviewed events one year later. “That initiated the political identity of Cumulus Press. It began with that title.”

The political side of Cumulus refuses to reside in the serious, non-fiction category. There’s a novel by Concordia U. gadfly David Bernans, brilliant paintings on macho military culture by Scott Waters, comic book coverage of Canada’s less-than-stellar mining practices here and abroad in Extraction! and Autonomous Media, a how-to book for the current crop of anti-corporate journalist agitators.

Widgington is especially proud of Picture This!, a compendium of social movement posters spanning four decades. “It might be a crowning jewel, in a way, because it is a book that’ll last for a while,” he says. “It’s a social document of the history of Quebec, and the first book of its kind in Quebec.”

Cumulus Press celebrates 10 years in the biz this Saturday, April 5. For more information, please contact Cumulus Press at info@cumuluspress.com.