About

A blog for the off-center, Midwest-centric Maintenance Ends Press, featuring writings by a revolving cast.

Writers in situ

Chris King is managing editor of The St. Louis America, the largest weekly newspaper in Missouri, and creative director of Poetry Scores, an international arts organization that makes music, movies and visual art in response to long works of poetry. A widely published journalist, poet and producer of music, Chris also made the St. Louis ‘90s indie music scene with his bands Enormous Richard and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Rick Harsch hit the literary scene in 1997 with the cult classic The Driftless Zone, which was followed by Billy Verite and Sleep of the Aborigines to form The Driftless Trilogy. Following graduation from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he migrated to the Slovene coastal city of Izola in 2001. His other books include a memoir, Arjun and the Good Snake, Skulls of Istria and Eddie Vegas, the latter duo to be published this spring by Riverboat Press. Voices after Evelyn, a novel concerning the still-unsolved 1953 disappearance of La Crosse babysitter Evelyn Hartley, will be published by Maintenance Ends in the fall of 2018.

St. Louis poet Stefene Russell is the Culture Editor for St. Louis Magazine and a member of Poetry Scores, an international arts collective translating poetry into music, visual art and film. Her work appears in Playbill, The Curator, and Public Art Review, and her publications include Go South for Animal Index (2007, Poetry Scores), Inferna (2013, Intagliata Press), and The Possum Codex (2015, Otis Nebula). She lives in the St. Louis Place neighborhood on the shortest street in the city of St. Louis.

Todd Kimm has served as editor of several small town newspapers; Tractor, a state-wide arts magazine; Icon, Iowa City’s former alternative weekly, and Little Village magazine (which he co-founded). He’s been communications director for various Iowa non-profits, including Legion Arts and PFI, an Ames-based sustainable agriculture group. For a time, he even worked in the Iowa Legislature. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he lives in Cedar Rapids, where they still make Captain Crunch.