Introduction
by Shane Jones
Anthologies in my high school were these big clunky things, loaned each year to a new crop of uninterested students. You would look on the inside cover to see the previous students names, see if you knew someone who spent the school year with the anthology, and if you did, you felt closer to the stories inside. Some of the anthologies were so old a few students recognized their own parent’s names. This made them feel even older, outdated and irrelevant texts. The covers fell off a lot even though we wrapped them with paper bags.
I didn’t appreciate the anthology until college. I was an average student in high school and a terrible student in college. I’d go to class and write poems, and when I wasn’t in class getting assignments on what to read, I was in the library reading what I wanted to read. I skipped so many classes I failed classes. I really didn’t have an excuse for not being in class, not studying what I was assigned. I didn’t even have a part time job. I spent years hiding in the SUNY Buffalo library crammed into a tiny “reading cube,” and in a deeper more sinister aspect, hiding from my life.
The anthology—I forget the exact title; I think it was the Norton Series—contained all sorts of treasures, none of them assigned for the American Literature class I rarely attended. The stories were traditional flair—Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, etc—and this was a kind of training ground for later boundary pushing authors that would open my own writing up. Before, I mocked the anthology, but now I worshipped it. Even years later, working full-time at a bookstore where I could borrow any two books for a week (interesting side note: Borders Books & Music functioned as a library for employees!), I still went back to this anthology and would open to a random page. There was nostalgia at work here, but also endless discovery. I wish I knew where this anthology was—I misplaced it years ago—but I can still remember what the cover looked like, and the weight of the book, and how the thin pages felt—absurdly stacked with text—in my hands.
Electric Velocipede ran for twelve years and published twenty seven issues. This is no small accomplishment. I’m thirty four and I’ve been following small press literature since I was eighteen. I’ve seen journals cease publication after one issue. I’ve seen hundreds disappear. I’m guilty of this. After admiring a journal close in style to Electric Velocipede, I printed my own called American Standard in 2003. I’m not sure anyone knows this, and I’m not sure anyone remembers, except maybe the dozen authors I published. And even though I enjoyed the process (the printer got the colors all wrong and it ended up being puke green and neon pink, not like the colors I specified from a wine bottle I brought to the printer) it was so much work, required such tremendous energy, that I stopped after the first issue. So I can’t imagine twelve years, twenty seven issues, hundreds of thousands of words edited and printed. John Kilma should have a bronze statue of himself placed outside the SUNY Buffalo Rare Books room—the true center of small press history.
Why would anyone do such a job? I believe it comes down to belief on part of the publisher, editor, and the writers themselves. Everyone is doing this because they believe in the work at hand and that’s a beautiful and powerful thing. It is a matter of love. All the stories included in this anthology were sprouted from an intense need to create with no outside factors, no presumption of money or accolades or being taught or being, now, in an anthology like this.
It’s impossible to highlight all the stories in The Best of Electric Velocipede. But what I will say is that these stories as a whole are imaginative, well-crafted, sometimes experimental, sometimes disturbing, and always, worth your time. I’m glad it exists. I’m glad that people, all too often consumed with the wrong types of worship, wrote these stories, and now they are available in one place.
I really should plan a visit to my parent’s house and look for that American Literature anthology I loved so much. I’m feeling guilty about it as I type this. My hope is that you too will escape with this anthology like I did in college. Maybe flake on your daily responsibilities a little, maybe fail a few classes (no, don’t do that), maybe ignore your spouse and kids (no, don’t do that), just run to a library or coffee shop or bar and hide with this big book of weird and forget everything outside of it, because you hold endless worlds right here.