Lee Byrd, Susannah Byrd, and John Byrd

[00:01] SUSANNAH BYRD: Hi, my name is Susie Bird. I'm 51 years old. On today's date, January 7, 2023. I'm here in El Paso, Texas, my hometown, and I'm here with my brother, Johnny Bird, and my mom, Lee Bird. My name is John Bird. I'm 49 years old. Today is Saturday, January 7, 2023. We're in El Paso, Texas. I'm with my mother, Lee Bird, and my sister, Susie Birdhouse.

[00:28] JOHN BYRD: My name is Lee Bird. I'm 77 years old. It's January 7, 2023, at the center of the universe in El Paso, Texas, and I'm with my daughter, Susie Bird, and my son, Johnny Bird.

[00:46] SUSANNAH BYRD: So, ma, I think we're here today to talk about the family business. Okay, so do you want to tell us what the family business is? Give us the family business.

[01:00] JOHN BYRD: The family business was Cinco Puntos Press, and it was a publishing company that started in 1985 85. And it came out of the fact that in 1981, John Bird and Andy Bird were burned in a playhouse fire, and that changed the direction of our lives. And your father was working at Fort Bliss, I think. And I was waiting on tables at the time, and we decided, I forget how we decided that we were going to do something different.

[01:35] SUSANNAH BYRD: Oh.

[01:35] JOHN BYRD: And we had gone to California to talk to Richard Grassinger and his wife, Lindy Howe, of North Atlantic press. They were publishing books, and they were making $25,000 a year. Right. This is the very standard story, right, John Bird? And we said, oh, we think we can do that. And so we decided to start publishing books. And we had absolutely no idea what publishers did, except that we were both writers and we knew what good writing was all about.

[02:13] SUSANNAH BYRD: So how did you know to go see their grassingers? What took you to California?

[02:18] JOHN BYRD: Oh, because Bobby is a poet. Your dad was a poet, is a poet. And North Atlantic press had published his book get some fuses for the house. And also, I think we were out there because Andy needed surgery on his hand, something like that. And so we were out there to visit a hand surgeon. And so when we talked to the grass singers, that's what we decided we would start. We would become publishers. Luckily, Vicky Hill lived down the street, and Vicky Hill knew how to design a book. Luckily, Dagoberto Gilb lived around the corner, and he had just written a book that had won a big prize. And everybody told him, someone in New York is going to pick up that book. But no one in New York was publishing Chicanos at that time. He was not picked up. And so we said, if you don't get picked up, we'll publish it. And so our first book was called winners on the Pass line by Dagoberto Gilb. It was reviewed by Alan Chuz on NPR News and NPR. And we had not a phone number in the phone book or nobody knew how to get that book, and we didn't know how to get it to them. So that was the beginning of our.

[03:43] SUSANNAH BYRD: Were you still waiting tables then?

[03:44] JOHN BYRD: No. When we left for Galveston, when you were burned, that was the end of my waiting tables career.

[03:53] SUSANNAH BYRD: You were at the gas company, weren't you?

[03:55] JOHN BYRD: No. No, I was at the crow's castle waiting. Waiting on tables? No.

[03:59] SUSANNAH BYRD: But when the press started, what were you doing?

[04:03] JOHN BYRD: No, when the press started, Bobby was at Fort Bliss doing tech writing, and he asked them, and the boys were going back and forth to Galveston, and he asked them if we could switch. He said, she's tired and she needs a break, and so can she take their job and I'll go back and forth to Galveston.

[04:24] SUSANNAH BYRD: Oh, really?

[04:25] JOHN BYRD: And so that was when. So I started working at Fort Bliss as a tech writer. And I remember saying to him, what do tech writers do? And he says, I don't know. Just ask questions. And so I did. But that was when. That was when we switched careers. And then dad became the mom, in a sense, and he stayed at home. And people associated Cinco Punto's press with Bobby because he really was the face of Cinco Puntos while I was working outside. And you haven't asked me. I'll ask Susie. Susie what does Cinco puntos mean.

[05:03] SUSANNAH BYRD: For our listeners? Cinco Puntos press is Five Points press. So we live up the street from five points in El Paso, Texas, in a neighborhood. And the press, in many ways, grew out of sort of the love of that neighborhood and the language in that neighborhood, which is both Spanish and English, and sort of the culture of the region and our neighborhood.

[05:33] JOHN BYRD: Yep.

[05:36] SUSANNAH BYRD: So it seems like not knowing what you're doing is sort of a career path for you.

[05:41] JOHN BYRD: It's sort of what?

[05:43] SUSANNAH BYRD: It's sort of your career path.

[05:44] JOHN BYRD: It was definitely our career path, writing. We didn't know, for instance, that you needed a distributor to get books published. We only knew that he was a poet and I was a fiction writer. So we tried fiction, and then we tried it. We did a poetry book by Joe Samosa, and then we met Joe Hayes, this bus storyteller, and he said, and we said, we'd like to publish a book by you. And he said, you've got to publish La Llorona now, what is la Llorona?

[06:16] SUSANNAH BYRD: Susie bird. So la Llorona is a story told through generations of latino families about a woman who falls in love with a man, a beautiful. You know what? I'm not gonna remember the whole way to tell it. You tell it. I mean, you had a good start. It's the story about a married woman who falls in love with a beautiful man outside of her marriage. Wait.

[06:49] JOHN BYRD: No, wait a minute.

[06:51] SUSANNAH BYRD: Wait a minute.

[06:52] JOHN BYRD: I gotta tell that story.

[06:53] SUSANNAH BYRD: It has many variations.

[06:55] JOHN BYRD: It's a story of a girl named Maria who gets married and falls and gets jealous of her husband because he falls in love with somebody else.

[07:04] SUSANNAH BYRD: It's the husband that's outside the marriage.

[07:06] JOHN BYRD: And they have two children, and she gets jealous, and she throws her kids in the river and they drown. And as soon as she does that.

[07:15] SUSANNAH BYRD: She gets very sad and distraught and tries to chase them down in the river and can never get them back. And then she trips and falls and dies, and her ghost says, don de.

[07:28] JOHN BYRD: Esta mi sijos, forever and ever.

[07:31] SUSANNAH BYRD: Forever and ever.

[07:32] JOHN BYRD: And I remember sitting in the scholastic. Scholastic office in New York, and somehow somebody said scholastic would never publish a book about that kind of thing. But that book was so beloved, and we sold so many copies of it. And Jo hay said, if you publish it, you have to do it in Spanish and English. And so that began our career that everybody seemed to think we knew that path we were following, but we followed this nose of books that came out of this culture that kids would really love, and we saw that there was a need for that. So that's really what Cinco Punto's press ended up being known for, is books that were books that came out of people's lives here.

[08:25] SUSANNAH BYRD: Yeah. You know what I was thinking about today? So the other thing is, for many, many years, you guys published out of the house. Yes, probably. Until then, you moved up, like, 99.

[08:37] JOHN BYRD: We bought the house at the beginning of. Right after 911.

[08:41] SUSANNAH BYRD: The office.

[08:42] JOHN BYRD: Yeah.

[08:42] SUSANNAH BYRD: You bought it right after 911. But weren't you in another office up the street on Piedras for a little bit or. No. Oh, you were in Texas.

[08:49] JOHN BYRD: We were in Texas, where Jim Ward worked for us.

[08:51] SUSANNAH BYRD: Yeah, Jim Ward. Yeah. And then. But for a long time, you were out of the house, and then Eddie and I came and worked for you when I got pregnant with Hannah, and we were in Atlanta, and I wanted to be home. I wanted to be close to you. And I convinced Eddie, my husband from Connecticut, that he needed to come with me, or maybe he wasn't my husband at the moment. But then we got married in El Paso and both came to work for you. He was the business manager and I did marketing and publicity. He probably had more experience in that than I had in publicity and marketing. So I had to learn a lot. But I remember that we. For some reason I was thinking about it today, I guess on the way here, just sort of thinking through all my memories, is that we had published that story of colors, remember, from subcommandante Marcos, who was a guerrilla leader in Chiapas against the mexican government and also a storyteller and a great spokesperson for that movement. And we had written a grant to the NEA and we had asked them for $15,000 to publish it. We had been very 7015. No, I don't know.

[10:11] JOHN BYRD: Or whatever it was. It was.

[10:12] SUSANNAH BYRD: Yeah, I think it was 15. Yeah, I wrote the grant.

[10:16] JOHN BYRD: Okay, sorry.

[10:18] SUSANNAH BYRD: But then we were very explicit to the NEA who exactly. Some comantante Marcos was. And they funded the book. They were excited about it and we printed it. And doing what a good publicist does, I went and told folks all about it and how great it was and the New York Times decided to do a story about it. But we're also a little bit curious about why the NEA had funded it. So as part of the. I think they were just going to do like a book, like a book review. But they called the NEA and asked why you would publish a book by a guerrilla leader. And then the NEA called us. I think it was Dad's friend.

[11:01] JOHN BYRD: They called dad to call dad and.

[11:04] SUSANNAH BYRD: Said, we can't fund you anymore. We can't fund this project anymore. And so they pulled the funding. And so the story, like a publicist's dream came. Was it below the fold or it.

[11:21] JOHN BYRD: Was below the fold on the New York Times.

[11:23] SUSANNAH BYRD: On the front page of the New York Times.

[11:25] JOHN BYRD: And you and I were sitting around thinking, how are we going to market this book? Who's going to believe anybody in public wrote this book, right?

[11:31] SUSANNAH BYRD: And so then all of a sudden, you know, I think we probably did like a print run of 5000 or something. It was a hardcover. It was a beautiful book illustrated by Domi. And all of a sudden we were inundated with phone calls. And I think because you were working out of the home, it was just the phone, the landline, it was your phone.

[11:52] JOHN BYRD: Then you went down to your apartment.

[11:54] SUSANNAH BYRD: And picked up there.

[11:56] JOHN BYRD: We just got.

[11:57] SUSANNAH BYRD: We got inundated with, I think we sold every book the first day and.

[12:01] JOHN BYRD: At first we were giving people discounts, and then when we realized what we were doing, we said, no discounts. No discounts. Just getting so.

[12:08] SUSANNAH BYRD: And then. And then I just remember, Ed, there's a picture. We should find it sometime. He has a picture of, like, the book stopped up to here and taking pictures of us with all the books.

[12:20] JOHN BYRD: Yeah. Were you working for us then, Johnny?

[12:23] SUSANNAH BYRD: No, I wasn't working for you, but I did. I did come. I came down to do the spanish language press interviews.

[12:33] JOHN BYRD: Oh, okay.

[12:35] SUSANNAH BYRD: Because we got some media came up from, like, Mexico City. Yeah. And there was all that media, like, in the living room, like ABC. They were plugging stuff in, and they were all done. National ones, too, which was weird.

[12:49] JOHN BYRD: Good morning America. They called the next day and they said, can I talk to your husband? And I said, he's asleep. We didn't realize anything about what was happening.

[13:04] SUSANNAH BYRD: I feel like, for context, we should just mention that that was at the tail end of the Clinton years, when Gingrich was in charge of the house, and things like the NEA were very. It's like the only time that anyone ever knew what the NEA was was like this two year stretch. Yeah.

[13:21] JOHN BYRD: But we had. We had, by that time, become part of the consortium, which was a. It's a group of independent publishers distributed by consortium. And. And we were at. I think we went to one of the big conferences, and Cliff Becker, the NEA guy, was walking down the aisle, and all the other publishers said, oh, cliff, can you rescind a grant for us? Can you steal away a grant? Because they all wanted that kind of publicity, but.

[13:47] SUSANNAH BYRD: And then we got funding from the Lannan foundation.

[13:50] JOHN BYRD: The Lannan foundation right away, refunded.

[13:52] SUSANNAH BYRD: And didn't. Sandra.

[13:53] JOHN BYRD: Sandra Cisneros called and wanted to add money, and I, of course, wanted to take it, but your father wisely said, we already have enough, so don't do that.

[14:06] SUSANNAH BYRD: And then when did you join? Because Ed and I left in 2001 when I went to run Ray Caballero's campaign. Or maybe he stayed with you guys for a while.

[14:17] JOHN BYRD: He stayed with us till we moved.

[14:18] SUSANNAH BYRD: And then he went to. Into teaching.

[14:20] JOHN BYRD: Yep.

[14:21] SUSANNAH BYRD: And then I started in 2002 or three. So you probably worked with Eddie a little bit. No, he had just gotten hired to teach at Coronado then. Yeah. So, yeah, it was 2003, so it was just. By then it was just me and mom. I think Jessica Powers was working part time.

[14:46] JOHN BYRD: I think Mary Fountain was.

[14:47] SUSANNAH BYRD: Mary Fountain was working part time. No, she was full time by then.

[14:52] JOHN BYRD: Yeah, because we bought the building.

[14:54] SUSANNAH BYRD: Yeah. So it was just the four of us. So can I back up just a little bit?

[14:59] JOHN BYRD: Yeah, please, back up.

[15:01] SUSANNAH BYRD: So you were a writer before all this started?

[15:06] JOHN BYRD: Yes.

[15:08] SUSANNAH BYRD: Was this how you. Was this what you thought your writing career would be? Would be. Is this what you envisioned when you started off as a writer?

[15:20] JOHN BYRD: No, I envisioned that I would be rich and famous. And your father, also as a poet, was thinking that he was going to. I've talked about this a lot because for the audience, Bobbie died in July of 2022, and he also envisioned that he would do well as a poet because he had a lot of people thinking that. But I think that we were. So what happened was that the jobs we had to have in order to make a living, the tech writing jobs at Fort Bliss or the writing jobs at the gas company, weren't fulfilling any idea of what a writing life was. And that's when I think the fire sort of forced us to rethink, well, what is a writing like life like? And then, of course, if you really want a writing life, you don't become a publisher because it takes every ounce of your energy. But publishing is so much like writing. It's like you're ahead. Like we've sort of described. We didn't know what we were doing, but you're just going along, sort of feeling your way along into things that are interesting to you and you're exploring it, and you don't really know what you're doing until suddenly the book comes out and does something you hadn't anticipated. Like, I was just talking to Patricia Armendaris, a librarian. I passed her house yesterday, and I was reminded that when Vatos came out, we did a book called Vatos.

[17:04] SUSANNAH BYRD: Yes.

[17:05] JOHN BYRD: Do you remember that book, Susan?

[17:06] SUSANNAH BYRD: I remember. I was the one that acquired it. I found it. Who wrote that book?

[17:10] JOHN BYRD: Luis Alberto Urrea wrote it.

[17:14] SUSANNAH BYRD: And then Jose Calavis Galvez. Galvez.

[17:18] JOHN BYRD: Jose Galvez had photos. And then he went to hear the Luis read poetry. And on the night he heard him, he realized he had a photo for every line in Luis's book. So we put that together, and when we brought it out, we got a lot of criticism. But I was talking to Patricia Armandaris, and she said, oh, you guys really opened up so many things in what you published. I guess because we were sort of naive. Like, here's this book full of guys. Maybe they're out drinking. Maybe they're out and laying around doing nothing. Maybe they're at mass, maybe they're at communion. It was all these just different images of men. But it was really a celebration, and it had cuss words in it, which is what the kids just thought was so great. You know, here they are listening to a book and hearing language of their own, and they. And here they were reading a poem by the time they were finished. So that kind of book was the kind of book that we loved, but we didn't know when we picked it up, when, like, when Susie acquired it, what we were doing.

[18:32] SUSANNAH BYRD: Acquired sounds very fancy. I think I just ran into Jose at a book conference, and I said, oh, that looks cool. I'll take it back to mom and dad.

[18:41] JOHN BYRD: And as soon as we saw it, we went, oh, that looks right. I think we, right away said, yeah, this is great.

[18:46] SUSANNAH BYRD: Wait, so Jose had. Had already assembled it into a book? I think so. I think. I want to say it was. I went to. It was the La Book festival.

[18:56] JOHN BYRD: But see, I don't think if Jose hadn't assembled it, we wouldn't have understood what he was doing.

[19:01] SUSANNAH BYRD: Yeah. So I think we saw the images with the poem.

[19:04] JOHN BYRD: Right.

[19:04] SUSANNAH BYRD: Because he had put them together and was talking. Yeah.

[19:08] JOHN BYRD: It was just a beautiful book. And Vicky Hill did such a beautiful job of laying it out. There's something about it that's just real.

[19:16] SUSANNAH BYRD: Yeah. Oh, it's really beautiful.

[19:18] JOHN BYRD: It's a beautiful book.

[19:20] SUSANNAH BYRD: Yeah, go ahead. No, you go. I was just gonna say. So the press is still in existence, although you no longer own it. It's owned by Lee and lowe books in New York. But you had 35. 36 years. 36 years as the publisher. When you started it, were you thinking that this was be your life's work, kind of the work that you're most associated with?

[19:48] JOHN BYRD: No, not at all. And in fact, in December of this past year, we got a lifetime achievement award from pub west. And Bobbie and I, as we were driving up to Denver, were saying, what did we do? What did we do? We didn't know what we were doing. We didn't understand really what we were doing at all. But.

[20:17] SUSANNAH BYRD: Yeah, but because you didn't. There was, like, no barriers. We didn't. Because you were just like, well, I don't know what I'm doing. So, like, it. You were not. You weren't captured by what was the. What would be the norms for the industry, or, we weren't in New York.

[20:32] JOHN BYRD: Or LA, where people were doing such hip and cool things that. That we would have said, well, we're not hip or cool. We just were. We just did what we saw in front of us or what appeared to us. And it turned out to be really rich and really rewarding. And, I mean, just to go to pass this lady's house yesterday, Patricia Armendaris, and have her. Have her say out of nowhere, well, what you did was you just opened up all these doors. I was like, what? I mean, I don't know. We spent a lot of time trying to promote ourselves and not realize that people did see us. I guess you remember that because having to promote books all the time, by.

[21:17] SUSANNAH BYRD: Promoting ourselves, you meant promoting the.

[21:20] JOHN BYRD: Promoting the press, trying to say, yeah, this work is important. And if you didn't live in. In the midwest, you might understand why this work is important, because here on the border, this has a real resonance. But in the midwest, of course, it.

[21:37] SUSANNAH BYRD: Didn'T mean anything unless you're latino.

[21:39] JOHN BYRD: Unless you're latino and have moved to the Midwest for work or whatever.

[21:43] SUSANNAH BYRD: Yeah, that was. I think the thing that was a constant surprise when we were selling books was or not a surprise to us. It was a surprise to the people who bought the books. That there were Latinos in their community that wanted books was always. It was. It was always sort of an eye opening conversation to have with people in other parts of the country.

[22:06] JOHN BYRD: Yeah, well, that was.

[22:08] SUSANNAH BYRD: They didn't understand.

[22:09] JOHN BYRD: That was what you. When you went to sales conference at one time, we. So we would go to sales conference twice a year. You. We've all been there. And susie went and you told the sales reps something about the 30 million Latinos in the United States.

[22:24] SUSANNAH BYRD: Yeah, yeah. Because they didn't understand that there was a market. They just. They didn't see the market. Nobody had tried to sell to that market in a really intentional way. That wasn't about just sort of co translating, you know, translating, you know, kind of anglo centric books to Spanish or so. I think that they were confused about it at the time. In publishing, it was really popular. I forget it was based on some study, but it was really popular to say that the market for books was constantly shrinking. There were more publishers chasing fewer readers. It seemed like the power of what Cinco Puntos did was that it recognized that there were more readers than publishers saw. Yeah, exactly.

[23:18] JOHN BYRD: Or that people who weren't considered readers were reading, like our story. We keep retelling the same stories, but when we would go to book fairs and the day before the conference, actually set up the men and women who had to set up the tables and the carpet and all that would be coming through, you know, dragging tables and stuff, and we would be setting up our table and you would probably. Maybe if you looked at them, say, well, these don't look like readers, but they would stop and look at our books and go, hey, leah, well, I know that story. My grandma told me that story. And then they'd kind of do a whole book talk about, oh, I don't think the way he's telling it is quite right. She died in an alley or whatever. So that was when we thought, well, we could just go home. Now we've done our work. We've seen somebody reading who we didn't think read. I mean, it was just always startling to us, the way people reacted to our books. I wanted to ask you, Johnny, what are your early memories of Cinco Puntos when you were in high school? Because we had started by then.

[24:33] SUSANNAH BYRD: Well, so in 1985, I was 1212 or 13, and I forget exactly why, but I ended up becoming the shipping clerk or. I've always had a fondness for grandiose titles, so I think I was the vice president of shipping and receiving or something. But I. So I did the invoicing and shipping. You know, back then, you had to do it with the ballpoint pen, pushing down through five sheets of paper to get. Make the different copies of the invoice. And we had a room in the back of your house that wasn't heated. The press must have. I must have started doing that job in the winter because I remember always being cold while I was.

[25:27] JOHN BYRD: And you turn on the radio real loud.

[25:29] SUSANNAH BYRD: I did. Like, it's something I still do when I work. I like to turn on the radio really loud. I don't know why. It helps me concentrate. And I don't. I mean, I think Susie and Andy were involved. I didn't do shipping to some extent then, but I don't think Andy. No, I graduated in 89.

[25:49] JOHN BYRD: Oh, okay.

[25:50] SUSANNAH BYRD: So I was there. There was one summer you left.

[25:53] JOHN BYRD: Oh, lord.

[25:54] SUSANNAH BYRD: And you got. And I was in charge of the house.

[25:57] JOHN BYRD: Oh. And you were supposed to answer the phone.

[26:00] SUSANNAH BYRD: You didn't think I did a good job of that?

[26:02] JOHN BYRD: Yeah, you were supposed to be redirecting traffic. We went away. I remember that.

[26:09] SUSANNAH BYRD: I remember. Is that when you went to the. It was the summer that dad had the Mexican. No, the Dh. Lawrence Grant in Taos.

[26:17] JOHN BYRD: Yeah.

[26:18] SUSANNAH BYRD: So he spent the summer in Taos.

[26:20] JOHN BYRD: And people wouldn't always call the house. I don't think we were distributed at that point. That was an important thing to notice, that things really changed for us when we signed on with consortium distribution, because otherwise we had no idea how to get our books out to people. So that was a big deal. And then to meet other publishers and hear them talk about their issues and the things that were hard for them and the authors that they struggled with or the authors they loved was really a big thing for Bobby and me, because we didn't know anything about the publishing world. We didn't have any connection with it. And so then to fall into this group of publishers that were just like us in so many ways, very small, very independent, just moving along, that is.

[27:13] SUSANNAH BYRD: One of my other early memories of the press is when we would travel, dad would always find bookstores to stop into and sell books. So, like, I remember, I think when I decided to go to UT Austin, dad stopped and sold books to. There was this great bookstore on the drag there. I can't remember the name of it right now, but Bill Verner was the bookstore manager. Oh, no way.

[27:40] JOHN BYRD: Yeah.

[27:41] SUSANNAH BYRD: And so dad sold him books, and somehow we ended up being friends with Bill for, like, 20 or 30 years later, until he sort of disappeared. Yeah. And then he was a sales rep for consortium. He was a sales rep. He was a great guy. He was awesome.

[27:55] JOHN BYRD: Oh, and that was the other thing about consortium was that the sales reps were book people. They weren't. They weren't. They didn't talk about product. They talked about books. The book they were reading and the book that interested them, and they were great. But. And that was the good side of them. The not so good side is they had no idea what we were doing, so we really had to tell them, yes, there's a big audience for what we're doing.

[28:21] SUSANNAH BYRD: Yeah. So then when you joined, you started doing. You did marketing in public City, and then you started doing a lot more on the finances and budgeting and kind of business side of it. Yeah, I did. Which it wasn't what I had wanted to do originally. I really originally wanted to do. Be the editor, do editorial work, which I love, and I still love, but there was. There was always a need for somebody to do that work, and I ended up, after grumbling about it for a while, I realized I really loved doing the business side of things. It was fun in a different sort of way. Well, then you also, like, this is the part that always. Because you always leave it off your resume, which, like, you translated a whole book from English, from Spanish to English in that lovely Paco Tarbo book, right?

[29:26] JOHN BYRD: No, the Luis and Berto Crossway.

[29:28] SUSANNAH BYRD: Luis and Bertha Crosswith. Okay. I mean, like, who does that? Like, he.

[29:32] JOHN BYRD: Like, he even translated. Tell him how you translated the songs? It wasn't. It was a whole different ball of wax.

[29:40] SUSANNAH BYRD: So the. Well, the book is called out of their minds, or in English. In Spanish, it was called idos de lamente. And it was about. It was a fake story about a real band called los del norte. But in the story, there were also sort of the Beatles. And so. And they used the real songs to sort of illustrate the story. But when I tried translating the spanish language songs into English, they just sounded like nonsense. So with the author's blessing, I just came up with english songs that, like, had sort of the same feeling, and I used those lyrics instead of the spanish ones. Did you like, on that translation, did you do. Was he hands on about that? Like, did he. His English is spectacular. He mostly left me alone, although he did have some real strong preferences about things. Like, there was. In the first version of the translation, I left a lot of colloquially Spanish in it, but he thought it sounded like that mouse. What was that? Cartoon mouse?

[31:02] JOHN BYRD: Oh, cotton floss. No, not speedy Gonzalez.

[31:05] SUSANNAH BYRD: He said it sounded like speedy Gonzalez when there was. So he asked me just to take out all the. As much of the Spanish as possible, but other than that, he gave me a free hand, and I think he ended up being. Because that was the second book that we bought the rights to and translated from him. Right. Yeah, it was when I was. When I was. The first one was when I was there.

[31:29] JOHN BYRD: Well, that was Debbie. Was it Debbie Nathan?

[31:31] SUSANNAH BYRD: It was Debbie Nathan and Willie Valdo. And I remember having this hysterical conversation on, like, a speakerphone, you know, in the back office when we moved. Like, dad and I had that office in the back, in the zendo. And so it was Willie Valdo on the line, it was Debbie Nathan, and it was Louise Crosswait and me, like, mediating. Like, I don't. Like, not understanding all of it. And the funniest thing is, like, you know, Willie Valdo, the native spanish speaker, and Luis Crosswait, the author would be, say, like, this is what it is, and this is what it. And Debbie Nathan would go to, like, town and to war with them, like, no, no, no. And they, like, they would have these, like, over, like, two or three words. They would have these, like, long. I was like, oh, my God, this is more. This is a lot of work. It was very intense.

[32:19] JOHN BYRD: Oh, yeah. The translating. And. You took a long time on that book.

[32:24] SUSANNAH BYRD: I did. I never. I wasn't good at setting time for it. There was just. There was always so much to do as a publisher.

[32:35] JOHN BYRD: Oh, yeah. It was.

[32:37] SUSANNAH BYRD: And then. So, mom, Dad's role in the company.

[32:41] JOHN BYRD: Dad's role was. I always laughed at him. He was the big idea man. He had big ideas. He had big thoughts about stuff. Like, he really wanted to publish that book by Don Ford Contrabando, which, you know, was a great book, but, I mean, there are some books we should never have published, not because they were bad books, but because we didn't. We weren't the right press for them. Like, we published a New York pub, a New York author that we. We just weren't ready for that kind of stuff. So his role was mostly to daydream. He was really good at it. He was really good, and people loved that he. As far as they were concerned, he ran single punta's press. And so he daydreamed. And then the rest of us were down kind of in the trenches.

[33:38] SUSANNAH BYRD: But it seemed like that's what made you guys good work partners, is that you sort of. You together, you took care of everything.

[33:49] JOHN BYRD: We took care of everything.

[33:50] SUSANNAH BYRD: But, like, you know, dad by himself.

[33:53] JOHN BYRD: Couldn'T have, nor I by myself, because honestly, when we went to New York, I kind of hid behind him because he had a lot of grace and a lot of charm, and he would. He knew how to talk to people and he knew how to make them comfortable, and I was just awkward and all that stuff.

[34:13] SUSANNAH BYRD: He was a great queen of England.

[34:15] JOHN BYRD: He was what?

[34:16] SUSANNAH BYRD: He was a great queen of England. Yeah, he was a good head of state.

[34:19] JOHN BYRD: He was a good head of state. He really was. Really smoothed the way, you know, for.

[34:26] SUSANNAH BYRD: And then you came to work full time. When we both.

[34:30] JOHN BYRD: After I got back from the Dobie, I had the Dobie in 2006 or something.

[34:37] SUSANNAH BYRD: The Dobie was a residential writing fellowship in Austin.

[34:41] JOHN BYRD: 2016. No, 2006.

[34:44] SUSANNAH BYRD: That was when it was Hannah was. It was 97. It was the year I graduated college.

[34:51] JOHN BYRD: Oh, really? Well, whatever. After that, we realized that we could live on what the business made us. And that was another important point, is we never expected the business to make us anything but a living. We never expected it, you know, that one of these questions that we were going to ask is, has your life turned out different than. Than you imagined? I don't know what I imagined, but sometimes we imagined that the press would be hugely successful, but the truth of, like, in a big money making way. And we always wish that would happen. Well, you know that, Johnny, but I think that it was successful in a different sort of way. And it was wonderful by the grace of God, that Lee and Lo bought it when they did buy it because. Because all the books are still in place. Our imprint is still in place. The authors are still being taken care of as best they can, and they're still publishing books. Our books are still in print. We couldn't have asked for better.

[36:01] SUSANNAH BYRD: Yeah. And mom, just because I know you were the editor, so you would take things, you would take disjointed pieces of promise and you would knit them together with the author, the willing author, into these most lovely talk about Ben Signs, the young adult novel.

[36:20] JOHN BYRD: Oh, Ben signs. Well, I have to acknowledge Jessica powers in there because she did say that we needed to get going on young adult books. We really needed to do young adult books because we were mostly doing bilingual kids books. So Ben sent us a book by an old man telling his life story. And we said, or Jessica said, one of us said, maybe you said, you know, it was such a collaboration, said, tell the story from the 16 year old point of view. And that was Sammy and Juliana. And that was our first Ya. And it was one of the top ten best books ya books in the US and the year it came out. And now Ben is doing. Ben Hamin Alire signs is doing gangbusters as a young adult author and doing very, very well.

[37:09] SUSANNAH BYRD: Yeah.

[37:10] JOHN BYRD: Yeah.

[37:10] SUSANNAH BYRD: I've always been amazed by your editing because I do think that. I don't think people understand that that process is as much part of the creative process as the writing, the needing to. But you need a willing editor, somebody that, or a willing writer, somebody who.

[37:30] JOHN BYRD: Well, it was always a real intimate process. You really knew who you could say, let's change this word. And they'd scream, or, let me just rewrite the whole back of this book. I mean, just every author had a certain style that they were sensitive. They didn't want changes, or they could change, but you just had to work with it. It was a lot of fun.

[37:54] SUSANNAH BYRD: So, mon, it's been about a year, a year and a half since you sold the press and stepped away from it. What's different about your life now? And do you miss some of that?

[38:10] JOHN BYRD: No, I don't. I'm so happy. We did it. We did it. We did a good job. I don't really want any more to worry about it, worry about somebody's book. I want to just enjoy books I read.

[38:29] SUSANNAH BYRD: You know, I have to admit that since. Since I've stopped working in publishing, I enjoy reading much more.

[38:36] JOHN BYRD: Yeah.

[38:37] SUSANNAH BYRD: Because I. When I was. I was always looking for an angle when I read anything, I was always like thinking, oh, could I compare this book to that book. There was never a moment where I just, like, sat down and enjoyed it.

[38:50] JOHN BYRD: Yep.

[38:51] SUSANNAH BYRD: But now I can.