Spies, listening devices and the defiant revival of literary radicals in the hills above Fresno

Jefferson Beavers just filed the paperwork for his first LLC, but he knows it may never turn a profit, let alone break even. For him, that was never the point. 

The point, rather, was to take on the hardscrabble but valuable work of sharing Fresno poets’ and writers’ voices with the world.

That’s why he and two fellow writers, Ronald Dzerigian and Angela Chaidez Vincent, are reviving a small literary press called Scrub Jay, which was first launched by two married Fresno State professors back in 1996.

The recovered press is completely volunteer-run. From what they’ve already printed since restarting in 2024, Beavers has covered the expenses out of pocket. He hopes the cost of future projects can be offset by book sales and crowdfunding, but there’s no guarantee.

“Maybe that will get paid off over time,” he said, “or maybe it’s just a donation to poetry.”

Scrub Jay’s current project is its most ambitious yet: an anthology of 60 Fresno writers, which the team aims to release in February 2027. They envision the book as the follow-up to three major anthologies of Fresno poets — “Down at the Santa Fe Depot” from 1970, “Piecework” from 1987 and “How Much Earth: The Fresno Poets” from 2001.

Those previous volumes featured the poems of some of Fresno’s most famous writers — Philip Levine, Juan Felipe Herrera and William Saroyan — among others. But the new Scrub Jay team also wants the next anthology to better match the ever-growing diversity of both writers and genres represented in the city.

“For me personally, that was goal No. 1,” Beavers said. “This book would be majority women, and it would be majority writers of color because that’s what reflects Fresno.”

But the forthcoming anthology, the zines they’ve already put together since taking the reins in 2024 and even Scrub Jay itself wouldn’t be here if not for a dark day in Fresno State’s past, more than 50 years ago during a time of mounting civil unrest in the late ’60s and ’70s at the height of the Vietnam War and Civil Rights Movement. 

That was the day armed law enforcement officers surrounded the office of one of the co-founders of Scrub Jay Press who was also the then-English Department chair, Eugene Zumwalt, in one of many attempts to oust him over efforts perceived as “radical” at the time — including his work to boost Latino student enrollment and to protect faculty jobs in the pre-union days.

The university never succeeded in getting rid of Zumwalt, despite many efforts. Out of that trauma was born not only a troubled legacy for one of the Central Valley’s preeminent institutions of higher education, but the literary press that lives on today.

The origins of Scrub Jay Press

Zumwalt co-founded Scrub Jay Press with his wife, Chris Henson.

The couple, both Fresno State professors in the English Department, named the press after a bird common in the trees surrounding their home in the foothills about a 40-minute drive northeast of campus.

They started Scrub Jay after a traumatic period at the university for her husband, Henson said, following his forceful removal as chair of the English Department in 1970.

“The Fresno State administration at the time … came to see the English Department as the hotbed of radicalism. There was a kernel of truth to that,” Henson said. “Eugene was involved in the group of professors that really tried to bring a number of Chicano students onto campus. None of this sounds particularly radical now, but it was at the time.”

Henson said administrators suspected Zumwalt and his department associate chair, Roger Chittick, of being “the masterminds coordinating all of this,” which, Henson said, was false.

“Now,” she said, “they were taking action. There were faculty members that they were trying to help get legal representation, who were in danger of being fired, or were in fact fired. They were involved in that. And Eugene was eventually very much involved in actually getting the faculty union.”

In a 2011 segment recorded for KVPR, Zumwalt detailed his experiences from that time, including police surveillance and a spy posing as a student in his literature course.

Zumwalt and Chittick also long suspected their office was bugged.

“The (university) president at the time was a guy named Norman Baxter,” Henson said. “You’d have to know Roger to really appreciate this, but Roger would just, every once in a while, out of nowhere, shout, ‘Fuck you, Baxter!’” in hopes the bug would pick up the message.

These tensions came to a head in 1970 when Zumwalt went to his office and was met by armed police officers, a two-by-four bolted over the door to his office and a hand-delivered letter from the dean of the School of Humanities letting him know he was no longer chair of the English Department. 

The events surrounding that day are chronicled in the 1979 book “The Slow Death of Fresno State” by fellow faculty member Kenneth Seib.

Despite these experiences, Zumwalt never left Fresno State. Indeed, he outlasted many of the administrators that repeatedly failed to get rid of him. But that all took a toll, Henson said, and Scrub Jay became a welcome distraction.

“He basically was looking for things to focus on away from the university,” she said. “He got involved with the Audubon Society. He started the press. I mean, I think he’d always been interested in that, but he wanted other things to focus on.”

The couple published three books of poetry by local writers in the first 14 years of Scrub Jay, plus a few other volumes of nonfiction and photography by friends and acquaintances. They stopped the press in 2010, feeling burnt out. They talked about other projects over the years, Henson said, but never got to them before Zumwalt died in 2023.

Henson never dreamed Scrub Jay would get a second life. But said she was delighted when Beavers and Dzerigian approached her — and believes her husband would be, too.

Expanding the universe of Fresno writers

The three major anthologies of Fresno poets that came before now contained some of the city’s most revered writers. But they also featured mostly men, mostly white writers and only poets.

That’s something that Fresno poet Roda Avelar is well aware of, and why she was pleased the Scrub Jay editors solicited submissions from her for the new anthology.

“Fresno has become a lot more varied, a lot more diverse. So many of the writers I know in Fresno are queer and trans and disabled,” she said. “I obviously have no idea who else is in this book, but I myself am a trans woman, and just the inclusion of that perspective, of that voice, and being able to submit that experience in the context of Fresno poetry is really important to me.”

Avelar is part of a new generation of Fresno writers, one that Scrub Jay editors want to celebrate with the anthology — people who may not have a book to their name yet, but probably will in the next five years, Beavers said. 

Even though the poetry community has gone through changes and lost towering figures like Zumwalt and others over the years, it’s still as special a place as ever for earlier-career writers like Avelar.

She has felt “taken aback” by its generosity at times, including when her poet friends covered the cost for her to attend a writing conference she couldn’t afford and told her she could pay it back on her own time. Avelar has also experienced its supportiveness in the earliest days of her poetry career at Fresno City College, when her work was published for the first time in a student literary journal.

Avelar has subsequently been featured in major literary publications like Poetry Magazine. But she credits those smaller journals with giving her the early validation to keep going, and hopes Scrub Jay can offer other Fresno writers the same.

“That kind of thing builds confidence, and I think for me at least, I really needed that,” she said. “I really needed that to hold me when I was unsure about whether or not I wanted to actually continue doing this.”

The Wild Blue

Fresno literary history is written all over the Scrub Jay revival, including the name of the zine it’s publishing a third volume of later in April.

That zine is called Wild Blue, which Fresno writer Marisa Mata put together and published solo from her bedroom during the height of the pandemic, before Scrub Jay relaunched and brought Wild Blue into its fold.

She named the zine after the storied Tower District nightclub called the Wild Blue Yonder. The venue closed in 1994, but she encountered old videos of poetry readings there while working with Beavers on Fresno Poets Archive Project as a Fresno State undergrad.

“I really liked the spirit that was in the videos,” she said, “and that sense of community that I already really felt pulled to and connected to.”

Dixie Salazar, who experienced firsthand what she calls Fresno’s “heyday of poetry” in the late 20th century, remembers Wild Blue fondly.

“It wasn’t just writers that hung out there. It was musicians, of course, artists, everybody in the art scene. And we were all pretty young in those days,” she said, “so it was a club, and we went there to dance and socialize.”

It left a “huge, huge hole” when it closed, Salazar said, and the places for poets to gather became more scattered.

“I was really lucky to be a part of the Fresno heyday of poetry, really. It was a magical, really memorable time. But those days are kind of gone now,” she said, “and … you know, hopefully poetry will carry on, and new poets will carry on.”

Both Salazar and Mata are among the dozens of writers that will be featured in the next Scrub Jay anthology.

Mata is also helping plan Scrub Jay’s release party for the third volume of Wild Blue. The second volume became Scrub Jay’s first publication post-revival.

Both volumes 1 and 2 of Wild Blue, which local bookstore Judging by the Cover has stocked, have sold better than either Mata or Beavers expected. That may be cause for some optimism with the anthology, he said.

“I don’t really feel like I’m going to make any money off of it. I’ll be lucky if I don’t lose a lot,” he said.“Maybe I’ll be surprised, who knows?” 

The keeper of the bolts

The good, the bad and the ugly of Fresno’s literary history live on today both figuratively and literally, in the English Department’s supply closet.

That’s where Beavers rediscovered the bolts that were used to bar Zumwalt and Chittick from their office more than 50 years ago now.

He found them one day more than a decade ago when he was tidying up the storage room. They were sitting on a high shelf in a display case that Zumwalt, a woodworker, built himself.

“I recognized it immediately,” he said. “I knew exactly what they were, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, these are just in the closet.’”

The bolts are about 5 inches in diameter and weigh about as much as a shot put ball, Beavers said. But the history they represent is much heavier.

Every so often, students reach out to Beavers asking about the bolts, asking to see them.

“Sometimes they’ll hear about it from faculty. Sometimes they’ll hear about it from something that they’ve read or researched in the library. That’s kind of how I know who the real ones are,” he said. “They hear about the bolts, and they just come and they ask to see them, and I clamber up on my little step ladder and pull them down off the top shelf and show it to them.

“I’m worried,” he said, “in some ways, that that institutional knowledge will go away. A lot of our elder faculty retire. Who will remember them?”

A release party for Wild Blue Zine Volume 3, the next publication from Scrub Jay Press, is scheduled for 2 p.m. on Saturday, April 25 at Judging by the Cover bookstore (1029 F St.).