The Brooklyn Rail

American Weather, the recent book from NewLights Press, is an artist book about gun violence in the USA, as well as a deep and thoughtful collaboration between a city, a neighborhood, friends, and community members. The book grew out of an essay local poet Mary Margaret Alvarado wrote after the 2015 Colorado Springs shooting, originally published in Virginia Quarterly Review. After the King Soopers shooting in Boulder in 2021, NewLights Press publisher Aaron Cohick and ceramicist Corie J. Cole, both neighbors of Alvarado, began working with the poet to give the essay another life as a limited edition, hand bound, letterpressed artist book.

Leaning into the idea of a book as a nexus of collaboration, Cole and Alvarado engaged RAWtools, a local project (though now based in multiple cities) that forges gardening tools from used guns and provides nonviolence training. Alvarado wrote an afterword about the group and Cole contributed painted images on ceramic tiles depicting the processes of sawing the barrels off of guns and smithing spades and trowels. I spoke with Alvarado, Cohick, and Cole over video call about the book’s hyper-local origins and the ritual of the long, sustained labor of bookmaking.

Sommer Browning (Rail): Tell me about American Weather.

Mary Margaret Alvarado: I wrote the initial essay out of anger. I think I was even angrier because the October 2015 Colorado Springs shooting was on Halloween, and I was thinking of how it’s such a beautiful, and in some ways really surprising, thing—that we wander the streets and knock on the doors of strangers and receive gifts from each other and how much a person using those same streets in such a different way negates that.

Aaron Cohick: Reading Mia’s [Alvarado’s] essay became this kind of ritual that Corie and I would do to grieve mass shootings in the nation, especially because it is tied very specifically to where we lived. After the Boulder King Soopers shooting in 2021, I thought we should put the essay into print again, make it its own thing, and circulate it in a different way. I asked Mia if she wanted to do a book, and she said yes. And then in thinking about how tied the essay is to place, I wanted to involve more people. Corie was an obvious choice because she lived on the same street where the Halloween shooting took place and she was doing paintings of Colorado Springs at the time [“36 Shots of Pikes Peak”].

Corie J. Cole: I had artist’s block for a while. I was thinking very literally at first. I was trying to think of ways to negate the gun as a symbol while at the same time talking about it. It wasn’t meshing in my brain. Do I buy an AR-15 and chop it up myself and make ink out of it or something silly like that? That seemed really artificial. Mia and I met up and talked and we both simultaneously thought about working with RAWtools.

Alvarado: I remember we talked about Columbine by Dave Cullen. I felt so troubled reading it because the narrative engine is very much like the suspense of getting ready to commit a mass shooting and the calculations that go into it. I don’t think it was at all intentional on the part of the author, but it really reifies violence as the narrative, and narrative itself as violence. I think that’s very deep in all of us, just in terms of storytelling period. How do you tell a story without the suspense or the forward motion being the undoing of someone? There was something really glad when we thought about RAWtools.

Rail: I was taking note of that while I read the book. Especially the part where you are narrating the walk down the street. By being with the neighbors who were immediately affected by the Halloween shooting, by telling their story, uncovering their background, talking with the family that owned the nearby convenience store, you’re sort of rescuing the city and the street and the people and the family and the stories of the victims. I felt a kind of reversal.

Alvarado: That was very intentional and that part actually did not run in the original print of the essay. It’s here in the book, but it was cut in the original, in part because it is literally pedestrian. It’s slow and it’s flat and there’s no arc and it’s chatty. Anytime you just sit with any narrative, it’s complex and complicated. People have complicated stories, including shooters. They have complicated stories and have had different days in their lives.

Rail: I wonder about the space of a book and the space of an essay in a journal. And I want to talk about ritual, too, Aaron.

Cohick: For one thing, we can build the book around the essay, as opposed to when it’s in a journal and has to sort of fit that format. The ritual aspects or social aspects of a book are different because it’s a thing that you can touch. As we all know because we’ve participated in various readings and publications over the years, a book is also an occasion to gather people together and to have a tangible thing from that gathering. It’s also an occasion for me because these are all made by hand, and for Corie, because she’s spent a lot of time making all those paintings. It’s a long, sustained labor, which is its own kind of ritual.

First the essay happened, then the book started, and then the afterword was written. There was this kind of back and forth between the book and the images and the essay and the afterword. All these moments of really long, sustained, thoughtful labor throughout the whole thing. It was literally four years from “let’s make a book” to “we actually have a finished book in our hands.” A lot of other stuff happened in that time, but that’s the kind of weird timescale of the whole thing.

Alvarado: I love how physical your books are, Aaron. I love how your books recall all of this body stuff. I feel three or four different textures, and with the stitching I’m aware of a human hand. It reminds me of how often I engage with objects and technologies that have no human mark.

Cohick: I describe NewLights books as emphatically physical but also not precious. The weight, the movement, the opening, and the texture, all of that is considered as part of the experience.

Rail: Corie, you painted these images on tile, and it’s endlessly delightful to think about the difference between tile and porcelain and the iron and steel that guns are made of. That’s very poignant.

Cole: I wanted to use tile for a couple of different reasons. It was a continuation of “36 Shots” because that was about the war industry in town. American Weather was a zooming in, away from the administrative and the mechanics of war and into a very intimate setting. When you work in ceramics, you think about the timescale of things in a larger way. This could be a record of humanity twenty-thousand years from now, so what are we going to record?

I had been using this very specific technique that allowed me to put it down and come back to it and put it down and come back to it. It was feasible for me to do in my daily life, but that technique also yields a lot of depth of value or gradations of dark to light. I knew it would look good reproduced on a page. I also wanted the object itself—the tile itself—to be recorded as an object. You can see the outline of the tiles on the page. I wanted them to assert themselves as objects in the book.

Rail: Did you work together on the placement of the images in the book, and on this kind of appendix at the end in particular?

Cole: Yeah, the appendix is sort of a strange choice, but it also is a way to allow the images to be their own counter narrative. It’s a moment of silence after the book is over. You’re looking at how the process works, of actually breaking a gun down and making it into a garden tool, and then images of gardening come after that. It was an extended moment of silence or a silent movie in my mind. A wordless part of the text that is non-text.

Rail: Give me some lofty ideas about what a book means today. Why are you making books and what do you love about it? Why is it necessary? Or maybe it’s not, and who cares?

Alvarado: All of the above. Aaron, you should read your manifesto.

Cohick: Which one? [Laughs] I don’t know if I have a really good answer for that question of why, other than I really enjoy doing it, and it’s a collaboration. It’s an occasion for people to come together, be involved in a thing, involved in a process. That’s the important thing. But then you end up with this tangible object. There’s all this activity, all this collaboration, all this thought, all this energy, all this labor over a long period of time, and then it gets narrowed down into this thing. It’s this moment of coalescence. Because it’s made in multiple copies and distributed to other people, it goes back out into this network. And the books keep doing that, right? They provoke this continual transfer of energy and care from person to person.