“It just sort of happened,” Joseph Wood, editor and co-founder, says of Slash Pine Press.

In February 2009, Wood and fellow University of Alabama English professor Dr. Patti White were attending the Associated Writing Professionals conference when they talked about wanting to start a chapbook press. From that desire, Slash Pine was born. Since its inception, Slash Pine has held several reading events and has selected its first two manuscripts to publish.

The central focus of Slash Pine Press is the idea of location and place. Both historically and currently, Wood says, Americans have been fascinated with the idea of place and how to define America or the South. Are these places defined by attitude? Are they about geographical lines? Are they metaphysical spaces? Are they mythological constructs? Running with this idea, Slash Pine began an open reading period. They solicited manuscript submissions via Facebook, small writing conferences, and word of mouth. Out of the nearly 150 submissions, they chose 15 finalists and finally two authors whose work will be published by Slash Pine into chapbooks.

Chapbooks are very “organic” books. A chapbook is a small book of one author’s poems that can be roughly between 6 and 35 pages. Chapbooks are typically handmade by chapbook presses.

For example, Wood has a friend who runs Cannibal, a well-regarded publishing house. Of the personnel of Cannibal, Wood says, “They’re sewing those books in their living room, and it’s next to the baby carrier…. It’s something they do to pass the time, but their books are utterly beautiful and amazing.”

Most chapbooks see only 150 to 250 copies made. These copies are then distributed through the press’s website or chapbook publishing collectives on the Internet, face-to-face at writing or arts conferences, and among friends who buy friends’ work. The chapbook is both the product and the producer of a close knit-community: friends in the writing world come together to start a press, and then when presses choose the work they wish to publish there is a high level of involvement and interaction between the poets and the publishers.

Slash Pine is more than a press for chapbooks. In April, Wood began organizing a poetry reading. “It started innocuously enough with me just going around and asking, ‘Do you want to read?’” Wood says.

Before they knew it, the Slash Pine Poetry Festival comprised forty readers and a total of seventeen hours of readings. For a few hours on the night of Friday, April 24 2009, participants met in the Kentuck Courtyard. The next day, the readings moved from venue to venue, starting at the Arboretum, then going to Little Willie’s, the River Pavilion by the Bama Belle, and CarpeVino. Each reader read for approximately fifteen minutes.

While the poetry read was not place-centered, Wood said, place was a huge factor in the day-long reading. After all, the nature of the reading was to continually change venues, and each venue brought something new to the reading. At 11:30 a.m., the last week in April, being outside at the Arboretum was considerably uncomfortable.

“The sun was up, and it was hot. Sweat was beating off people’s heads, and we were giving out water and bug spray,” Wood laughs.

Then there was Little Willie’s. People were drinking, it was the afternoon, and the crowd was what Wood could only describe as “raucous.” Then, come dinner time, the reading went out by the river, with “the sun fading and us having to hang camping lanterns and tiki torches in the background," Wood said. "That just had a much more serene, kind of meditative feel.” The shifts in place really changed the mood of the reading.

“Visual artists get this—it’s not just the piece that’s the art but how the art is housed, how it’s contextualized.” Wood said that the press is focused on taking readings off campus and out of sterile places and more into the community.

Already this semester, Slash Pine has been infiltrating the community. On Saturday, September 12, saw 23 readers from both Tuscaloosa and Birmingham brought together at another reading, the “20/59 Poetry Collision,” at Greencup Books. The event was part of Birmingham’s Art Walk, raised money for Greencup, and consisted of a 4-hour poetry marathon.

On Saturday, October 4, Slash Pine will be holding its final event for the 2009 year, a reading fittingly dubbed “Into the Woods.” The event's structure should result in quite a unique experience. Four different groups of twenty and two authors per group will gather at the Arboretum for a hike. As the hike goes on, the hikers will stop to hear different selections of the authors’ work vocalized by readers placed strategically along the trail.

Like the other Slash Pine events, this event endeavors to play with the audience’s ideas of what a reading is and how it works; Wood promises “some elements of concealment and surprise” will be utilized. This event is by RSVP only and is close to reaching capacity. This fact, evidence of the fast success and risk-taking, location-centered Slash Pine Press. If you are interested in participating, you must email slashpinepress@gmail.com to reserve a spot on the hike.

In eight or so months, Slash Pine Press has come into being with a bang. Wood muses on the process, “It was very word-of-mouth, very organic.” With so much happening in such a short space of time, Wood says he and Patti White are still reeling from the process. “We haven’t even really had time to sit down and think about what it all means yet, but I like it! It’s getting poetry into the community. ”