We are made of stardust. The carbon in my body and the iron in my blood were forged in stars that burned out before the Earth had a name. I attended a retreat at Menla, in Phoenicia, New York, in September of 2023, and heard the phrase "souls having a human experience." After mourning the loss of my wife for almost two years, it gave me solace to think that the soul I loved was just passing through, and that she was now on to new adventures. Sitting in that circle of strangers, Joni Mitchell's old refrain came back to me, the one about our being stardust and golden, and the long way home to the garden. I had returned to writing daily when she became ill in 2018, and immersed myself in prose, poetry, and thought pieces after she died. So I built a website to have a place to keep what it means to be a soul experiencing a brief, conscious arrangement of old light, looking back at the sky that made it. The Stardust Journal was born, and the Press is a new extension of that desire, conceived on my seventy-fifth birthday, 6/26/2026.

I came to words early, and I came to them as things you could hold. Before I understood what a sentence could carry, I learned what a letter weighed. At Manhattan School of Printing, I learned to set both hot and cold type, one piece at a time, reversed and backward in the composing stick, until a line of thought became a line of lead. I learned that words are physical. That ink stains. That a page is designed in the mind and then composed, put together piece by piece. It is something you make, and the making is slow, with edits and revisions, and sometimes those wisps of imagination never see the light of day and sit under a pile of things one finds in a catch-all drawer. If you only had a place to put them!

The art and mechanics of printing were transformed in the 1980s. I took the leap of faith from presses made of gears and rollers to circuitry, modems, and dot-matrix printers that sounded like angry wasps. The transition opened up the world of technology, and I spent the rest of my working life using that knowledge to help nonprofits integrate it into the work they did to serve their missions.

The organizations I served were trying, imperfectly, to do some good, and they taught me how complicated the world is, how tangled good intentions become, how much is asked of anyone who wants to be of use. Writing was how I made sense of it. It still is. I do not write to record what I already know. I write to find out, to follow a sentence into the dark and see what it turns up.

And then there is the other country, the one inside. Norma died on 1/15/2022, after nearly fifty years together. I keep writing toward her absence, not to recover from her, which is neither possible nor the point, but to learn its shape, to let grief become a form of attention rather than only a wound. Much of what you will find here was written toward her. She is the gravity these pages turn around.

I write out of admiration as much as loss. These years have been spent in the company of people who saw further than I do. Rumi, whose love poems I have tried to turn homeward, toward one woman rather than upward toward God. The Buddha, whose oldest words I read slowly in the morning, the way some people pray. My father, a photographer, who died when I was fourteen and taught me, before he went, that to love a thing is first to look at it without flinching. I am still learning to look.

This is a journal in the oldest sense, a record of one person's looking. Poems, prose, photographs, the occasional argument with myself. It is offered freely. It carries no advertising and answers to no one but the reader and the people I have loved and lost. If it earns its keep, it will be because someone, somewhere, found in it a companion for their own search. That is the only thing a press like this is for.

I am the publisher, the author, the typesetter, and the only employee. My name is Danny Rutberg. Welcome to The Stardust Journal Press.