Atalissa Wells
With the growing social media presence prevalent in society, it’s easy to believe that we hold previews of others’ lives in our hands. We think that the Instagram post, Facebook update, Twitter tweet, or TikTok video provides the full story. The truth is that social media doesn’t even come close to what happens in people’s lives. But what if there was a way to see the mundane moments of artists, athletes, writers and more? Their moments of yesterday.
Elizabeth de Cleyre, an Eau Claire resident who is the Prose Editor for Barstow & Grand and helped launch Dotters Books, has started a new quarterly interview series called Yesterday Quarterly, a print publication that can be purchased at the Read Write Books website. This publication is an accumulation of yesterdays, with four issues being released each year.
De Cleyre developed the idea following a writing workshop in which the instructor recommended she read Peter Hujar’s Day, an interview conducted between Linda Rosenkrantz and her friend, Peter Hujar, asking him to record everything he did for a day. “It was a lovely little snapshot in time and I loved reading it,” de Cleyre says. She had been wanting to do an interview series but had yet to find the thread that would tie the interviews together. “I’m more interested in the process, the mundane and day-to-day,” she says. “So when I read Peter Hujar’s Day, I was like this is such a cool idea for an interview series.”
Then came the process of figuring out how this idea would work. She started with an interview with Soren Staff, lead singer of Them Coulee Boys, a folk-rock band based in Eau Claire. Staff’s yesterday will be the first issue published. The second interview was with Bianca Valenti, a big wave surfer located in San Francisco who has advocated for and won equal pay for men and women in surfing. Valenti’s yesterday will be released as the second issue.
““There’s a certain level of excellence, but it’s the commitment to the process that I admire.””
De Cleyre hopes to capture the yesterdays from a broad range of people, not just artists or athletes like Soren Staff and Bianca Valenti, respectively. Regardless of whose yesterday the publication is about, each piece will follow the same format, picking a day and tracking it. Capturing their yesterday. Ultimately, the issues will be about “people who are passionate about what they do,” she says. “There’s a certain level of excellence, but it’s the commitment to the process that I admire.” De Cleyre hopes to capture the small moments that lead up to their successes.
When de Cleyre mentioned her idea to a friend in the early planning stages of this project, he commented that she needed to interview normal people too, not just those who stand in the spotlight. However, de Cleyre believes that this “undermines the idea that artists and athletes and writers are not normal people, and they don’t deal with things like time management or daily stressors with their job or family,” she says. “That’s also part of it, is demystifying what anyone does in a given day.”
This project of documenting what someone does in a day has been a year-long process, full of experimenting with publication format and interviews. Soren Staff’s issue will be published almost a year after his interview, with other interviews occurring closer to their release date. “It becomes a kind of time capsule,” de Cleyre says. “I love that idea of the conversations happening quickly and then coming out or conversations happening years before and then being released.”
“Yesterday is a measure of time that has already happened. And quarterly is a measure of time that continues to happen. So I liked that juxtaposition.””
This time capsule publication challenges not only what we think we know about people, but also our concept of time. With the ironic title of Yesterday Quarterly, de Cleyre places two contradictory measurements of time together. “Yesterday is a measure of time that has already happened,” she says. “And quarterly is a measure of time that continues to happen. So I liked that juxtaposition.” This print publication provides readers with a chance to peer into the yesterdays of other people, realizing that we are all “normal” people, with our own successes and failures, big moments and small ones.
Yesterday Quarterly was launched on April 22nd at Zine Fest in Milwaukee. The first issue can be purchased here as a one-time issue purchase or a yearly subscription, which includes an enamel pin. You can also follow their Instagram and keep updated on what Yesterday Quarterly is up to. There will be a launch party in Indianapolis, which is where Read Write Books, the publishing company that is releasing Yesterday Quarterly, is located. There will hopefully be another launch party in Eau Claire to celebrate life’s moments. Purchase your copy or subscription today, and enjoy a look back at yesterday.