JABBERFUCKY and other poems

As Maude Spekes, and with Sybilia Grogan, I edited Jabberfucky and other poems, an anthology of bawderlized poems. I was in grad school for information science. For a class on how librarians work with publishers, I wrote a guide for using print-on-demand services to publish annual anthologies of work generated in or read at onsite writing workshops and readings. A way to capture local writers and library programming.

To show not tell, I wanted to accompany the how-to guide with a book. I needed something I could manage to pull of in one month, so I decided on an anthology of public-domain poems since Sybilia and I both read a lot of poetry.

The inspiration for the anthology topic still delights me: In a different course we were reading about how librarians can fight book bans. On a message board I found a gem of a comment written by an outraged parent, something along the lines of THAT’S WHY WE NEED BAWDLERIZED BOOKS FOR OUR CHILDREN!

Surely they meant Bowdlerized but Sybilia and maliciously complied with Jabberfucky.