Issue #40 of Mineshaft (Spring 2021) features new work by R. Crumb, Sophie Crumb, Drew Friedman, Laure Boin, Bill Griffith, Christoph Mueller, Mary Fleener, Max Clotfelter, Robert Armstrong, Denis Kitchen, Rika Deryckere, Aleksandar Zograf, John Porcellino. More details here.
Here's a bit about this remarkable small-press magazine, written by co-founder Gioia Palmieri:
I asked Everett where he first had the idea for starting a magazine. He told me the idea came to him when he was staying at River Huts, a place run by an excellent Thai chef and her husband who was from Hawaii. Everett had a small thatched roof bungalow that overlooked the Mekong River. I was traveling in India at the time. This was the fall of 1997 and in 1998 to begin the new year, Everett and I met up in Bangkok and traveled south to Penang, Malaysia. Everett decided to return to the west coast of the U.S. and pick up our old two door Subaru that we had left with his cousins in Oregon. That same year in the summer he and I drove the car back to the east coast where we decided to live in Vermont. Through some friends that we met while working at the Common Ground Co-op Restaurant in Brattleboro we ended up renting the "Cook Shack", a 15 foot by 15 foot well insulated cabin with a big woodstove, no electricity or running water, that was the oldest remaining building of a commune that existed on the property in the 1960's.
It was in Vermont that Everett said to me that he would like to start a magazine. I asked him what the name should be and he said that he had liked "Mineshaft". This was the name translated into English of our favorite bar in La Paz, Bolivia where we had lived in the early '90s. El Socovan was on a side street a few blocks from the university. The entrance was a red door that opened onto stairs leading into a basement. The owner supported the arts and there was always a band or performance group, and art covering the walls. A bowl of coca leaves sat on the end of the bar.
I worked at the Brattleboro Public Library at the time and used the computers there to type in the magazine. I also rented space in a comfortable old darkroom on Elliott Street, a short walk from the library. I developed all of the photos for the magazine here. Everett would often wait for me in the studio area with the big couch and few chairs. The woman I rented from let us keep a T.V. and VCR machine in the closet and we often watched old movies in the evening.
I asked Everett why he wanted to begin a magazine. He said that he had accumulated some great art that no one would publish, so he thought that he would publish it. He had been inspired by his friendship with Irving Stettner, the creator of Stroker, a small magazine that published Henry Miller, Paul Bowles, Tommy Trantino, Albert Cossery, Seymour Krim, and other artists who we highly regarded. Irving ran his operation on a shoe string. He began Stroker in 1974, at the age of 52 and was still publishing it regularly when he died in 2004.
Read the rest here.
