As today turns into tomorrow, I hope that people don’t forget the women who died, and that these horrific events don’t simply fade into the background. Show up for your Asian, Indigenous, Black, and Latinx friends, show up for your community.
An Opening to the Multi Universe: Reading Warming and Woman on the Edge of Time
Trick-or-Treating, Parenting, and the Pandemic
This past spring, I found myself watching and reading more to escape the daily stress of the pandemic, and oddly enough, I was engaging with horror and post-apocalyptic novels…I think that imagining what life might be like after the pandemic had passed and how we might survive actually feels hopeful to me.
Poems that Demand More: Poetry and the Radical Imaginary
Why Cardbord Box Productions?
By Jack Rossiter-Munley
I’ve been producing podcasts for about five years. As the number of shows I was involved with grew, I realized I needed some way to keep them all connected. So Cardboard Box Productions, Inc. was born.
Why Cardboard Box Productions? Well, it started way back when I took on my first major creative endeavor - writing a mystery novel. I was nine.
I had the title before I started writing: The Kryngonofsky Murders. It was about used book store owner who, along with her three cats, solved murders. At the time I had three cats and was obsessively reading two series the Cat Who… and Mrs. Murphy mysteries where cats assisted with crime solving. My influences were showing.
When I needed to work on the novel - with all the solemnity that only a young child can bring to their life’s work - I would carefully feed a piece of paper into an old Underwood Olivetti typewriter that sat on a low ledge in the upstairs hallway of my parent’s house. The height was just right that if I knelt on the ground my tiny fingers had the necessary strength to peck out words keystroke by keystroke. So I would pull up a large cardboard box and sit in it as I typed. One or more of my cats would often join me. Eventually I finished. Twenty-nine single-spaced pages of highly derivative cat mystery.
Artist’s rendering of Amenamie cartoon circa 2002.
A few years later when I was trying my hand at cartooning, I came up with the name Cardboard Box Productions, Inc. Back then it was just something I scrawled in the corner of every 8.5x11 sheet of paper on which I scrawled out rudimentary drawings of an anthropomorphic, tie-wearing cat named Amenamie whose tie also talked. Even then, I knew that my skills in the visual arts were…lacking and something about Cardboard Box Productions captured the scrappiness of my drawings.
When I started thinking of what to call this production company, that old name came back to me and I was surprised to realize that it fit perfectly. Cats are drawn magnetically to cardboard boxes. In the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon whenever they need an all-purpose vessel for adventures, they turn to a trusty cardboard box. A good cardboard box is the distillation of wild creativity into something simple and everyday.
And that’s what our podcasts do. They’re about poetry, literature, and cultural history. Topics that can, at first, seem heady, but which don’t have to be. The shows that Cardboard Box Productions currently produces: Poetry Spoken Here, Close Talking, Party Bard, and Nothing But the Bruce take their subjects seriously, but are committed to making them approachable. This blog is going to be an extension of that mission with posts digging deeper into the poems, plays, and histories covered on the shows. We’ve got lots of good stuff cooking here at Cardboard Box Productions, inc. - new shows, more blog posts, and a whole lot more. So stay tuned.
That’s the beauty of a cardboard box - it can contain the universe.