Janus Point Press’s first publication, The Funeral Singer, touches on an array of themes and layers of modern Greek history that are often overlooked–or skipped, because they are painful, damning and some still are living legacies of its chapters.
Today, and moreso because of recent news in the US that is an affront to women’s rights and lives, we’d like to highlight a press and the woman behind it that is important to The Funeral Singer and the plight and power of women: Thelphini Press and author Eleni Fourtouni. Greek Women in Resistance documents the female freedom fighters who resisted Nazi occupation and fascism during WWII. This act was in itself a form of gender emancipation, but also many of these women were also fighting for a better tomorrow for themselves beyond the German occupation. They were bitterly rewarded with prison, torture and exile after WWII after a civil war and right-wing coup. That’s a different spacetime from the Janus point in The Funeral Singer which stretches from 1922-1944. Enter Zoe, our andartissa. She is 1944.
Art is a powerful tool against oppression and also a natural balm of personal salvation. In Fourtouni’s publications you find poetry. Many of these women were poets, as she was. In testimonies, you find traveling theater groups bringing education and entertainment to remote villages as bullets and starvation ravaged the Greek population.
Finding Thelpini Press is a treasure of two worlds: one, the beautiful singularity of what a small press can do: be fiercely independent, niche, publish silenced voices while also be a platform for self. We hope Janus Point Press can be the same. Two, its a treasure of small independent bookstores with souls. Not the ones that don’t greet you, and who stock the same books as B&N. But the ones like once-ago Morningside Bookstore by the Columbia campus of NYC. They stocked Thelphini Press in the basement section that housed the owner’s dad’s lifetime of Greece. More to come on that, but the store was instrumental in a decade of Stephanie’s early writing.
You can learn more on Eleni Fourtouni’s life on her facebook page from 2012, which includes both a fabulous artist statement and interview of her work and life. Find remaining copies of her books online through a google search—unless of course you are fortunate to find them in a cozy gem of a used bookstore.
The Funeral Singer will be published by Janus Point Press September 2022.