Our guest this week is Gioia Palmieri. Gioia was born in Boston in 1967. She is co-editor & publisher of Mineshaft, a small art, comics & literary mag that was started in 1999. Gioia lives in Durham, NC with her daughter Irena & Mineshaft partner Everett Rand. She is currently working on a novel. You can find Mineshaft on Facebook @mineshaftmagazine and on Instagram @mineshaftmag.

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Show notes:

Gamine, “Honest Work Wear for Women”
Gamine is workwear for women. About six years ago, my garden pants had just totally given out, and they weren’t making them anymore. So I looked around the internet, and I found this new company. It’s run by a woman who’s a gardener, and they make the most fantastic pants, shirts, coveralls, hats. They work with a hat company out of Portland, Oregon, that makes all their hats in Portland. They’re wonderful hats. They’re an intentionally small company that I really admire because they just want to do what they want to do, and they want to keep it super high quality, and I really like their philosophy. They use vintage fabric. And so my garden pants are made from vintage denim from North Carolina, printed at the old mills. And they use archival designs from Dickies. I have another garden pants that was based off an old design from women air flyers from World War II. They look good, and they hold up.

Rivendell Mountain Works
This is a company Everett discovered looking around, trying to find an old-timey — from the ’70s and ’80s — day pack, because the day packs have gotten so fancy and stiff. So he came upon this company, and we’ve been buying from them for probably 10 or 12 years. They’re also intentionally small… I think they call them a micro-cottage industry. They are made in Monroe, Washington. One or two people make each piece, and it’s made from extremely sturdy material, very affordable. I have two of their bags, plus I have their day pack, and I have a larger pack. They’re just super comfortable, incredibly sturdy. I think they’re just made to last a lifetime. I haven’t had any kind of rips or anything in them. They’re a really great company. And also, they have personal service. If you’ve got any questions — maybe take a color and switch it out with another color they have — they’ll do that for you.

Taiga
This is a favorite company of mine, Taiga. The stuff I buy, they make in Canada. They have a number of things. They’re into super outerwear and survival wear, different equipment, active wear. But what I really love about them is they’re 100% Merino wool shirts; they’re fleece. They’ve got all kinds of fleece things, like fleece blankets, fleece jackets, fleece vests. We’ve been buying from them probably for 12 years. My daughter can finally fit into the clothing, so she loves it. They’re soft and comfortable. And they’re a quirky company. They make you put sizes in, like your measurements, because they don’t like to send you the wrong thing because of shipping. So sometimes I get a call from the same woman who does the service. She’s really funny. She’ll call me from British Columbia. She’ll call me, and she’ll say, “Are you sure you want that size?” And I’ll be like, “Yes, I want it…” So we go back and forth, and it’s just really fun, and always the same person.

Eden Foods
I think a lot of people have heard of Eden organics. But I’m giving them a big shout-out because this company has been around a long time, and they’re one of the last remaining independently-owned grocery stores. They’re really into sourcing United States products, like soybeans and grains. They also import a lot of stuff from Japan. They’re into macrobiotics. And my peeve these days is that they’re getting cleared out of our co-ops because they are a little pricier than these kind of giant, suspicious, “organic companies” that are pushing in on the shelves. So during the pandemic, Eden wasn’t available anymore in my co-ops, and also I wasn’t even going to the store. So it occurred to me to go online, and they have this great website, so all of a sudden, I was like, “Oh!” I hadn’t seen such a great span of Eden products in years, because they’d just been wiped off the shelves. So they’re alive and well, I want to let everybody know, and their website is fantastic, and you can get really great deals on bulk. I think recently they got a big award from Denmark, saying how great their soy milk was because they didn’t use GMO soybeans, and they’re just a cut above the rest, because America is pretty slack with their food.

About the upcoming issue of Mineshaft #40:

We just love print material, and it’s so much fun to produce something that’s in print still. It’s offset press. It’s 5.5 by 8, so it’s like a half a page. It can be 48 to 60 pages. This issue coming up — #40 — is 60 pages, which we love because we have had a lot of features we want to put in there. The upcoming new issue of Mineshaft, #40, 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 and more…

 

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04/2/21